Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

“All right,” Lynley said. “Havers, all right.”

“Thank you, thank you,” she intoned. “This thing’s all a tangle, but I think we’re getting it sorted.”

He wasn’t so sure. For every time he made that his consideration, further facts seemed only to complicate matters.

He made good time over to Victoria Street by carving a route that took him ultimately through Belgrave Square. He parked in the underground car park at the Met and walked back over to Victoria Street, where he found the Barclay’s cash-point machine closest to Broadway, next to a Ryman’s stationery shop.

Havers’ snout was a case of by-his-clothes-shalt-thee-know-him. His shirt wasn’t pink. It was bright fuchsia, and his necktie featured ducklings. He clearly wasn’t cut out for a life of intrigue since he was pacing the pavement and pausing to peer into the window of Ryman’s as if studying which kind of filing tray he wished to purchase.

Lynley felt inordinately foolish, but he approached the man and said, “Norman?” When the other started, he said to him affably, “Barbara Havers thought I might interest you in a gin and tonic.”

Norman cast a look left and right. He said, “Christ, for a moment I thought you were one of them.”

“One of whom?”

“Look. We can’t talk here.” He looked at his watch, one of those multidial affairs useful for diving and, one presumed, going to the moon as well. He said as he did so, “Act like you’re asking me the time please. Reset your own watch or something…Christ, you carry a pocket watch? I’ve not seen one of those in-”

“Family heirloom.” Lynley looked at the time as Norman made much of showing him the face of his own piece. Lynley wasn’t sure which one of the dials he was meant to look at but he nodded cooperatively.

“We can’t talk here,” Norman said when they’d completed this part of the charade.

“Whyever-”

“CCTV,” Norman murmured. “We’ve got to go somewhere else. They’re going to pick us up on film and I’m dead if they do.”

This seemed wildly dramatic until Lynley realised Norman was talking about losing his job and not his life. He said, “I think that’s a bit of a problem, don’t you? There’re cameras everywhere.”

“Look, go up to the cash machine. Get some money. I’m going into Ryman’s to make a purchase. You do the same.”

“Norman, Ryman’s will likely have a camera.”

“Just bloody do it,” Norman said through his teeth.

It came to Lynley that the man was honestly afraid, not just playing at spies and spy masters. So he fished out his bank card and went to the cash-point machine cooperatively. He withdrew some money, ducked into Ryman’s, and found Norman looking at a display of sticky pads. He didn’t join him there, assuming that proximity would unnerve the man. Instead, he went to the greeting cards and studied them, picking up one then another then a third and fourth, a man intent upon finding something appropriate. When he saw Norman at last approach the till, he chose a card at random and did likewise. It was there they had their extremely brief tête-à-tête, spoken in a fashion that Norman seemed intent upon making look as casual as possible, if such was even conceivable, considering he spoke out of the side of his mouth.

He said, “There’s something of a scrum over there.”

“At the Home Office? What’s going on?”

“It’s definitely to do with Hampshire,” he said. “It’s something big, something serious, and they’re moving dead fast to deal with it before word gets out.”

ISABELLE ARDERY HAD spent a good number of years putting the details of her life into separate compartments. Thus, she had no difficulty doing just that on the day following Thomas Lynley’s call upon her. There was DI Lynley on her team, and there was Thomas Lynley in her bed. She had no intention of confusing the two. Besides, she was not stupid enough to consider their encounter as anything other than sex, mutually satisfying and potentially duplicable. Beyond that, her daytime dilemma at the Met did not allow for even a moment of recollection about anything, and especially about her previous night with Lynley. For this was Day One in the End of Days scenario that Assistant Commissioner Hillier had spelled out for her, and if she was going to be shown the door at New Scotland Yard, then it was her intention to go out of that door with a case sewn up behind her.

This was her thinking when Lynley arrived in her office. She felt a disagreeable jump of her heart at the sight of him, so she said briskly, “What is it, Thomas?” and she rose from her desk, brushed past him, and called into the corridor, “Dorothea? What’re we hearing from the Stoke Newington door-to-door? And where’s Winston got to with that CCTV footage?”

She got no reply and shouted, “Dorothea! Where the hell…!” and then said, “Damn it,” and returned to her desk where again she said, “What is it, Thomas?” but this time remained standing.

He started to close the door. She said, “Leave it open, please.”

He turned. “This isn’t personal,” he said. Nonetheless, he left the door as it was.

She felt herself flush. “All right. Go on. What’s happened?”

It was a mix of information from which she ultimately sorted that DS Havers-who seemed to have a bloody-minded bent for doing whatever the hell she felt like doing when it came to a murder investigation-had unearthed someone within the Home Office to do some digging on the topic of a policeman in Hampshire. He’d not got far-this snout of Havers’-when he was called into the office of a significantly placed higher-up civil servant whose proximity to the Home Secretary was rather more than disturbing. Why was Zachary Whiting on the mind of a Home Office underling? was the enquiry that was made of Norman.

“Norman did some fancy footwork to save his own skin,” Lynley said. “But he’s managed to come up with something we might find useful.”

“Which is what?”

“Whiting’s apparently been given the charge of protecting someone extremely important to the Home Office.”

“Someone in Hampshire?”

“Someone in Hampshire. It’s a high-level protection, the highest level. It’s the sort of level that causes bells and whistles to go off everywhere when anyone gets remotely close to it. The bells and whistles, Norman gave me to understand, go off directly within the Home Secretary’s office.”

Isabelle lowered herself into her chair. She nodded at a second chair, and Lynley sat. “What d’you expect we’re dealing with, Thomas?” She considered the options and saw the likeliest. “Someone who’s infiltrated a terrorist cell?”

“With the informer being protected now? That’s highly possible,” Lynley said.

“But there’re other possibilities as well, aren’t there?”

“Not as many as you’d think. Not at the highest level,” he said. “Not with the Home Secretary involved. There’s terrorism, as you’ve said, with an infiltrator going into hiding prior to a bust. There’s protection for a witness set to testify in a high-profile case coming to court. Like an organised crime case, a sensitive murder case where the repercussions-”

“A Stephen Lawrence thing.”

“Indeed. There’s also protection from hired killers-”

“A fatwa.”

“Or the Russian mafia. Or Albanian gangsters. But whatever it is, it’s something big, it’s something important-”

“And Whiting knows exactly what it is.”

“Right. Because whoever it is the Home Office is protecting, this person’s in Whiting’s patch.”

“In a safe house?”

“Perhaps. But he might also be living under a new identity.”

She looked at him. He looked at her. They were both silent, both evaluating the possibilities and comparing those possibilities to everything else they knew. “Gordon Jossie,” Isabelle said at last. “Protecting Jossie is the only explanation for Whiting’s behaviour. Those forged letters of recommendation from Winchester Technical College? Whiting’s knowledge of an apprenticeship for Jossie when Barbara showed those letters to him…?”