Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

But Hadiyyah was having none of that. “Topshop,” she said. “We got to go to Topshop, Barbara. Or Jigsaw. Or maybe H and M but just maybe.”

“I don’t want to look trendy,” Barbara told her. “It’s got to be professional. Nothing with ruffles. Or spikes sprouting from it. Nothing with chains.”

Hadiyyah rolled her eyes. “Barbara,” she said. “Really. Do you think I’d wear spikes and chains?”

Her father would have had something to say about that, Barbara thought. Taymullah Azhar kept his daughter on what had to be called a very short lead. Even now in her summer holidays she wasn’t allowed to run about with other children her age. Instead, she was studying Urdu and cookery and when she wasn’t studying Urdu or cookery, she was being minded by Sheila Silver, an elderly pensioner whose brief period of glory-endlessly recounted-had occurred singing backup for a Cliff Richard wannabe on the Isle of Wight. Mrs. Silver lived in a flat in the Big House, as they called it, an elaborate yellow Edwardian structure in Eton Villas; Barbara lived behind this building on the same property in a hobbit-size bungalow. Hadiyyah and her father were neighbours, domiciled in the ground-floor flat of the Big House with an area in front of it that served as its terrace. This was where Barbara and Hadiyyah were conferring, each with a Ribena in front of her, both of them bent over a wrinkled section of the Daily Mail, which Hadiyyah had apparently been saving for an occasion precisely like this one.

She’d fetched the newspaper from her bedroom once Barbara had explained her wardrobe quest. “I have just the thing,” she’d announced happily and, her long plaits flying, she’d disappeared into the flat and returned with the article in question. She laid this open on the wicker table to reveal a story about clothing and body types. Spread across two pages were models who supposedly demonstrated all possibilities of build, excluding anorexia and obesity, of course, as the Daily Mail did not wish to encourage extremes.

Hadiyyah had informed Barbara that they had to begin with body type and they couldn’t exactly work out Barbara’s body type if she didn’t change into something…well, something that would allow them to see what they were working with? She dismissed Barbara back to her bungalow to change her clothes-“It’s awfully hot for corduroy and wool jumpers anyway,” she noted helpfully-and she bent over the paper to scrutinize the models. Barbara did her bidding and returned, although Hadiyyah sighed when she saw the drawstring trousers and T-shirt.

“What?” Barbara said.

“Oh, well. Never mind,” Hadiyyah told her airily. “We’ll do our best.”

Their best consisted of Barbara standing on a chair-feeling like a perfect fool-while Hadiyyah crossed the grass “to get a bit of distance so I c’n compare you to the ladies in the pictures.” This she did by holding up the newspaper and crinkling her nose as she switched her gaze from it to Barbara to it to Barbara before announcing, “Pear, I think. Short waisted as well. C’n you lift your trousers?…Barbara, you have lovely ankles! Whyever don’t you show them? Girls should always emphasise their best features, you know.”

“And I’d do that by…?”

Hadiyyah considered this. “High heels. You have to wear high heels. Do you have high heels, Barbara?”

“Oh yeah,” Barbara said. “I find them just the thing for my line of work, crime scenes being otherwise rather grim.”

“You’re making fun. You can’t make fun if we’re to do this properly.” Hadiyyah bounced across the lawn back to her, trailing the Daily Mail article from her fingers. She spread this out on the wicker table once again and perused it for a moment, after which she announced, “A-line skirt. The staple of all wardrobes. Your jacket has to be a length that doesn’t draw attention to your hips and as your face is roundish-”

“Still working to lose the baby fat,” Barbara said.

“-the neckline of your blouse should be soft, not angular. Blouse necklines, you see, should mirror the face. Well, the chin, really. I mean the whole line from the ears to the chin, which includes the jaw.”

“Ah. Got it.”

“We want the skirt midknee and the shoes to have straps. That’s because of your lovely ankles.”

“Straps?”

“Hmm. It says so right here. And we must accessorise as well. The mistake so many women make is failure to accessorise appropriately or-what’s worse-failure to accessorise at all.”

“Bloody hell. We don’t want that,” Barbara said fervently. “What’s it mean, exactly?”

Hadiyyah folded up the newspaper neatly, running her fingers lovingly along each crease. “Oh, scarves and hats and belts and lapel pins and necklaces and bracelets and earrings and handbags. Gloves as well, but that would be only in winter.”

“God,” Barbara said. “Won’t I be a bit overdone with all that?”

“You don’t use it all at once.” Hadiyyah sounded like patience itself. “Honestly, Barbara, it’s not really that difficult. Well, maybe it’s a bit difficult, but I’ll help you with it. It’ll be such fun.”

Barbara doubted this, but off they went. They phoned her father first at the university, where they managed to catch him between a lecture and a meeting with a postgraduate student. Early in her relationship with Taymullah Azhar and his daughter, Barbara had learned that one did not make off with Hadiyyah without bringing her father fully into the picture. She hated having to admit why she wanted to take Hadiyyah with her on a shopping excursion, so she made do with, “Got to buy some bits and bobs for work and I thought Hadiyyah might like to come along. Give her something of an outing and all that. Thought we’d stop for an ice somewhere when we’re finished.”

“Has she completed her studies for the day?” Azhar asked.

“Her studies?” Barbara gave Hadiyyah the eye. The little girl nodded vigorously although Barbara had her doubts about the cookery end of things. Hadiyyah had not been enthusiastic about standing in someone’s kitchen in the summer heat. “Thumb’s-up on that,” she told Azhar.

“Very well,” Azhar said. “But not in Camden Market, Barbara.”

“Last place on earth, I guarantee,” Barbara told him.

The nearest Topshop turned out to be in Oxford Street, a fact that delighted Hadiyyah and horrified Barbara. The shopping mecca of London, it was always an undulating mass of humanity on any day save Christmas; in high summer, with schools on holiday and the capital city packed with visitors from around the globe, it was an undulating mass of humanity squared. Cubed. To the tenth. Whatever. Once they arrived, it took them forty minutes to find a car park with space for Barbara’s Mini and another thirty to work their way to Topshop, elbowing through the crowds on the pavement like salmon going home. When they finally arrived at the shop, Barbara glanced inside and wanted to run away at once. It was crammed with adolescent girls, their mothers, their aunts, their grans, their neighbours…They were shoulder to shoulder, they were in queues at the tills, they were jostling from racks to counters to displays, they were shouting into mobiles over the pounding music, they were trying on jewellery: earrings to ears, necklaces to necks, bracelets on wrists. It was Barbara’s worst nightmare come to life.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Hadiyyah enthused. “I always want Dad to bring me here, but he says Oxford Street’s mad. He says nothing would drag him to Oxford Street. He says wild horses couldn’t bring him here. He says Oxford Street’s London’s version of…I can’t remember, but it’s not good.”

Dante’s Inferno, no doubt, Barbara thought. Some circle of hell into which women like herself-loathing fashion trends, indifferent about apparel in general, and looking dreadful no matter what she wore-were thrust for their fashion sins.