Something to hide, p.45
Something to Hide, page 45
“You wanted him to find a sexual partner? Is that what you mean? Someone he would hire, perhaps? Someone he would see occasionally and pay?”
“Not pay, not hire. But I thought there could be someone for him. Perhaps someone in a marriage gone bad or gone dead, someone who had a physical need that her partner couldn’t fulfil, a young widow who didn’t want to remarry. I didn’t care who the person was or how he found her or even if there were two or three or a dozen of them. I just didn’t want him to fall in love. With her, though, with Teo, I saw it happening and I didn’t know what to do.” She put her forehead on her left hand, which was resting on the wheelchair handles. She murmured, “I’m so sorry,” and “Nothing’s ever been the way it should be.”
Lynley thought about what she had said. He thought about her relationship with her husband. He thought about the secrets people keep behind the closed doors of their homes. He thought about the various destinations to which those secrets could lead.
He said, “Mrs. Phinney, I must ask you where you were on the thirty-first of July. This would be from midafternoon onward.”
She didn’t reply.
He said, “Mrs. Phinney?”
Still nothing.
Lynley waited. He couldn’t think he might have to arrest her, to take her into an interview room and thus compel her into speaking. She was broken in so many ways. It seemed inhuman to break her even further.
“I know this is difficult for you,” he told her quietly. “I also know that you see the reality: Everyone connected to Teo Bontempi’s death—even remotely—is suffering now, and my responsibility is to uncover what happened to her and through that means bring some wretched form of peace to her family and to those others who loved her.”
“Like Mark,” she cried.
“Like everyone whose life she touched.”
“I didn’t hate her.” She finally raised her head. Lilybet had coughed and the sound was startling, coming as it did from deep in her chest but strangled at the end with a gasp. Pietra was at once altered. She was on her feet, turning a dial on the canister that hung from the back of Lilybet’s wheelchair and fitting a nosepiece into place, holding it there, saying, “Breathe deeply, Lily. Breathe deeply for Mummy.”
A man came out of their flat near the entrance to The Mothers Square. He looked round. Lynley recognised him as Lilybet’s attendant. He began to walk along the crescent as if looking for Pietra, probably assuming she was having some sort of difficulty with the little girl’s chair. It would be only a moment before he saw them.
Lynley said to Pietra, “Whatever you intended towards Teo went in the wrong direction at some point. I believe it was a direction that you never intended. You’re frightened now, and rightfully so. But hoping to hide—”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t. I saw her once. That was the only time.”
“Were you here, then? At home? That late afternoon and early evening?”
In her silence, he had his answer.
“Were you with someone?” and when she didn’t reply, “Mrs. Phinney, if someone can verify—”
“There you are!” It was the attendant. He stepped off the pavement’s kerb and was coming in their direction. “I thought aliens might’ve taken the two of you.” His gaze went to Lynley, and he added, “Ah. Sh’ll I take our Lily off your hands, then, Pete?”
She stood. “No, no. We’re coming along, Robertson. I promised Lilybet Le Merlin and we’re about to set off. Will you come with us?”
“I’d do myself in if you went without me,” Robertson said affably. He reached them, nodded at Lynley, and squatted in front of Lilybet’s chair. “Le Merlin! What d’you think of that?” Then to Pietra, “We’ll set off, shall we? Me and the princess? If you need the time?”
“We’re finished here,” she said to him.
Robertson took up position behind the chair and began to push it along the pergola, chatting to the little girl about crêpes and nuts and chocolate. Pietra Phinney blotted her face. For a moment during which seconds ticked by like hours, she looked at her feet.
Lynley waited until she looked up again. He said, “Was it another man, Mrs. Phinney?”
“Have you ever known shame, Inspector Lynley?” she asked him.
“I have,” he told her.
“I don’t believe you.”
“The truth,” he said, “is often as inconvenient to one as it is unpalatable to another.”
“That,” she replied, “I do believe.” She began to follow Robertson and her daughter, and he watched her, which she seemed to feel. She turned again and said to him quietly, “Please don’t blame Mark for anything. None of this is his fault. It never was.”
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL LONDON
“So she’d gone there for an exam,” Barbara Havers said. “Hence ‘evaluation’ written in her appointment diary. She wanted to know if reconstruction was possible.” She had the last custard cream from the packet she’d bought on the Isle of Dogs, and she dug this out of her shoulder bag and delicately set it on her desk, a precious item she would see to momentarily.
“And was it possible?” Lynley had rolled a chair over to join her and Nkata. The four DCs on the team were sitting where they could or otherwise leaning against the nearest wall, notebooks in hand.
“Superficially, it seemed to be,” Barbara said. She gestured to the folder of patient information that Dr. Weatherall had printed for her. “She was in excellent health—no surprise there—so there wouldn’t have been any problems with the procedure. I mean, she was good for anaesthesia and all that. Good heart, good lungs, blah blah blah.” She handed the folder to Lynley, who brought his reading glasses from his jacket pocket.
He said as he opened the folder, “And the phone calls from the surgeon to her?”
“They seem on the up and up. She phoned on the twenty-fifth to ask were there any questions that Teo had once she’d been told she was good for the surgery. She said she always does that with the women who come to her. She said Teo seemed troubled, though, right from the start. So she phoned later, on the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth. She wanted to reassure her, she said, in case Teo was afraid to go through with it. It’s not likely that things actually could’ve been made worse down there, she told me, but on the other hand, there was also the possibility that things wouldn’t’ve been improved much either.”
“Wha’s that mean, Barb?” Nkata asked. The faint sound of scribbling came from the DCs.
Barbara explained the situation much as Dr. Weatherall had explained it to her: nerve endings and physical sensation. The rebirth of the latter depended on the presence of the former, and that wasn’t guaranteed.
“You think that’d be ’nough to put her off?” Nkata asked.
“I s’pose it’s the difference between hanging on to hope and having hope dashed to bits, eh? On one hand, Teo could keep telling herself maybe. On the other, all the maybes could’ve been done for. Anyway, the real point is—according to Dr. Weatherall—that Teo finally did decide to have the surgery. All she needed to do was arrange for someone to be her driver to and from the Isle of Dogs and Bob’s your uncle. Or he would have been your uncle had things not gone south directly she made her decision.”
“Someone stopping her from having the surgery?” Lynley took off his specs and handed the medical folder back to Barbara.
“I wager her sister wouldn’t’ve been chuffed to know about Teo getting operated on,” Barbara said.
“ ’Xcept the sister never knew in the first place that Teo’d been cut,” Nkata pointed out. “Either that or she was putting on a bang-up performance when she got told by her mum.”
“That seems like a good possibility, considering what you’ve told us about her,” Barbara noted. “Can we look it that way?”
“How do you see it?” Lynley asked her.
“Ross Carver believes he drove Teo off because he couldn’t stop banging on about sex, surgery, sex, repairs, sex, sensation, and everything else related to the above, including sex, and she reached the point where she couldn’t cope. So . . .” Barbara had ticked items off on her fingers and she went on with, “Teo asks him to leave, and her sister sees the opening she’s been waiting for, and she makes her move.”
Nkata went on with, “She snares the bloke, she comes up pregnant—”
“And the rest is the rest is the rest,” Barbara concluded. “And then she discovers that her sister’s having surgery, which puts Ross into a picture that Rosie doesn’t much want to look at.”
“So she clubbed her own sister?” Lynley said.
“Worked for Cain and Abel,” Barbara pointed out.
“Yes. But, on the other hand, Rachel didn’t kill Leah, and one might say she had far greater cause.”
“Who?”
“Ah. Your biblical education didn’t stretch far, I see.”
“I lost interest with all the knowing and begetting. It was too bloody exhausting. I’m lucky to know who Cain and Abel are, guv.”
“Indeed.” Lynley looked round at the group. “So Rosie Bontempi remains a suspect. Pietra Phinney denies she was there at any point on the day or night Teo died, although she won’t say where she was. What else have we? Winston? Where are we with Monifa Bankole?”
Nkata laid it out for them: confirmation that Monifa Bankole had arranged to have her daughter cut at the clinic above the abandoned toy shop; that she had been going against her husband’s wishes in the matter as he had not wanted to spend the amount that the clinic charged; that on the day that the coppers arrived to close the place down, she’d been at the clinic to fetch back her deposit money upon the orders of her husband; that now both her daughter and her son were missing. “The boy—he’s called Tani—got beat up bad by Bankole,” Nkata finished. “Over a protection order, this was. Monifa whacked him with a steam iron—Bankole, this is—”
“Ouch,” Havers said.
“—and that gave the boy a chance to run off. According to Monifa, Bankole’s set on taking the girl—she’s called Simisola—to Nigeria and he’s going to leave the country with her if their passports aren’t grabbed.”
“Where did you leave things?” Lynley asked him.
Nkata told the rest quickly: how he’d found Monifa Bankole from information supplied by a neighbour, how he’d got her off the estate entirely, and how he’d taken her home to his mother for her own protection.
“She d’n’t want to leave. Th’ only way I could get her away was by lyin’, ’m ’fraid,” he concluded. “I said I was arresting her. Sorry, guv, but otherwise she was intent on finding her kids and she wouldn’t’ve come.”
“So she’s in Brixton now?” Lynley clarified.
“No way her husband’s about to think of lookin for her there.”
“You got her chained to the bed or something, Win?” Barbara asked. “Cos if she’s set on finding her kids, how’re you planning to keep her there?”
“Mum’s with her f’r now. She won’t let her go. Plus,” with a grin, “she’s bigger ’n Monifa, my mum is. An’ she’s used to beating on me and Stoney. We got some work to keep Monifa from her husband, though. An’ we need to put our mitts on his passport, which c’n only happen if there’s a protection order in place. He strikes me as a bloke who goes his own way no matter what. Which means, no protection order an’ he’s gone from the country the second he finds Simisola.”
“Do we know where she is?”
“Only the brother knows. An’ I don’t ’spect him to be sharing that information anytime soon.”
Lynley directed his next questions to the DCs, saying, “Any joy on finding Mercy Hart?”
“I’ve got an address,” one of them said, a lanky twenty-something who had not yet outgrown spots on his face. He had an impressive patch of them fanning out from the corner of his mouth. “She got herself stopped for speeding in January, this was. She had to give her address and it wasn’t the address she’d given to the lads at the Stoke Newington station. I checked to make certain it was still good. It is.”
“What do we know about her?” Lynley asked. “Aside from her being associated with a putative women’s clinic.”
“Not much. Single mum. Three kids. All girls.”
“Where does she live?” Lynley asked the DC.
“Stratford,” he said. “Rokeby Street.”
“Are you certain? That’s quite a distance from where she was arrested.”
“Could be she’s moved house, sir. That’s the last known address.”
“We’ll need to question her, but let’s ask the Stratford station to send someone round first. We’ll need a photo of her as well. Compare it to the CCTV footage and take it round the flats in Streatham. Even if she’s no longer in Stratford, we’ll have a leg up if someone recognises her. Check her car’s number plates against the CCTV film.”
“As to number plates,” another of the DCs said, this one a young woman with plaits who looked to Barbara like a twelve-year-old. “Sorry it’s been such a time, but there were countless cars on Streatham High Road on the day Teo Bontempi was attacked.”
“You’ve got someone of interest?”
“I’m not altogether certain, guv. Could be it’s just a similar name. One of the cars is registered to”—she checked her notes—“a Paul Phinney.”
Barbara looked at Lynley and Nkata. Then she shifted her gaze to the young DC. “You’re certain?” she asked.
“About who the car is registered to? Yes. ’Course anyone could have been driving it.”
CHELSEA
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
He was on his way to the lift that would take him to his car when Lynley was accosted by Dorothea Harriman, whose first words were “Acting Detective Chief Superintendent Lynley? May I ask you something?” When he turned, she went on without waiting for him to reply. “This is . . . Well. Right. I rather need you to clarify something. I can’t think who else to ask and since you’ve worked with her for so long . . .”
“DS Havers, I take it?”
“Yes, yes. Barbara. I thought GroupMeet would be just the ticket, you see. We’d find something beyond our tap dancing. Tap dancing is fine and well—I’ve lost over a stone and would probably lose more if we didn’t go for a curry after almost every lesson—but the thing is it’s mostly women. I mean, our instructor’s a man. He’s quite good, by the way. But the students . . . ? Of course, there is a fourteen-year-old boy just joined, but he’s not going to do, is he, although I must admit he’s an extremely talented dancer. So while we’ll continue the lessons—we’ve learned so much it’s pointless to stop—I did feel that another venue would be, as I’ve said, just the ticket.”
“GroupMeet being the venue?” he asked.
“No, no. GroupMeet is merely the means to find the venue, although venue probably isn’t the best word in this case. I thought sketching would appeal, but . . . well, it became quite clear Barbara wasn’t on board with that. So I thought: badminton, croquet, tennis—not that I play and I seriously doubt Barbara plays either except we wouldn’t be there to play, exactly, would we—allotment gardening, cemetery restoration—”
He raised an eyebrow at that.
“I mean, really, anything. GroupMeet has it all. We could even learn to judge wine.”
“A useful talent,” he acknowledged gravely.
“Oh, I know you think it’s all foolishness, but have you any idea how difficult it is for a woman to meet someone even vaguely suitable in London?”
“Joining a church choir no longer being of help?” he noted.
“If anyone even went to church other than for weddings and funerals, and at Easter and Christmas. And anyway, that’s not the point. That’s not what I wanted to get clarity on.”
She’d been walking alongside him, and she lowered her voice as they reached the lift. “It’s this.” She looked round to make certain there were no eavesdroppers. “It’s occurred to me that perhaps Detective Sergeant Havers—Barbara—might not . . . well . . . you know what I mean . . . men?”
“I’m afraid I’m now the one seeking clarity,” he told her.
She sighed. “Do I have to spell it out?”
“Apparently.”
“What I mean is p’rhaps Barbara doesn’t actually like men. I mean p’rhaps she doesn’t like men as in liking men in the way that, well, women generally like men.”
“I see,” he said. “At least I think I do. You’re asking me if Barbara Havers is a lesbian.”
“My God! Shhhh!” Dorothea looked round once again. Then she said to him, “Please! I don’t at all want her to think . . . you know what I mean, don’t you?”
Lynley didn’t, actually, but to put them both out of her misery, he said, “I’ve never had the first inkling of anything regarding Barbara’s sexual proclivity, Dee. Not that I’m altogether sure what I should be looking for if I did have an urge to develop such an inkling.”
