Something to hide, p.46
Something to Hide, page 46
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you laughing at me, Acting Detective Chief Superintendent?”
“I most certainly am not,” he replied.
She tapped her foot, a pensive expression on her face. “It’s only that I don’t want to put her in the position of having to tell me. I mean, she could tell me. I’d welcome knowing if she wants me to know. But I don’t want her to feel she must tell me if only to stop me banging on about GroupMeet.”
“Hmmm. Yes,” he said. “But you’ve forgotten that Barbara could easily meet a woman at GroupMeet, couldn’t she? I mean, if women are her interest. And if not, she could meet a man.” Or, he thought, she could meet a three-legged hedgehog, but that wasn’t likely. “I tend to think you’ve just not hit on the most appealing activity for her, Dee.”
“So you’re saying I should continue? I should look for opportunities on the GroupMeet site?”
He wasn’t at all saying that—he had a very difficult time seeing Barbara engaged in cemetery restoration—but he didn’t want to be the one to dash Dee’s hopes or her good intentions with regard to his long-time partner. He settled on saying, “You might want to gauge her level of interest in an activity first.”
“She hates them all.”
“Not entirely true. She’s still tap dancing, isn’t she?”
“Well. Yes. But I expect that’s due to the curry. I think she sees it as her reward.”
“There you are,” he said.
“There I am? Where?”
“You’ve hit on it. She needs rewards. We all do.”
“More curry?”
“Probably not.” The lift doors opened. He punched for the car park and, lest Dorothea jump inside to continue their discussion, “Dee, I am completely confident you can come up with something.”
Once in his car, he made for the river, windows open to catch whatever breeze might be coming off the water. He made good time to Chelsea, and although he was forced to park at the top of Bramerton Street, the walk to the St. Jameses’ house wasn’t far, and soon enough he was climbing the steps to their door and ringing the bell.
Barking ensued: Peach was causing her usual ruckus. A voice attempted to put an end to her canine greeting, but Peach had never been a dog to be disciplined. She was, after all, a dachshund.
A bolt was withdrawn, the door opened, and Peach dashed out to examine his ankles. Finding them passable, she trotted back inside.
“She’s got the devil in her, that dog,” Joseph Cotter said, opening wide the door to allow him entrance to the house.
“I daresay she’s better than a burglar alarm.” Lynley bent to let the dog have a whiff of his fingers, happy he’d thoroughly washed his hands after downing half of a day-old tuna salad sandwich before he left his office.
“Gone out, I’m ’fraid,” Cotter told him. “Said he had to speak with someone in Lambeth.”
“Ah. There’s a trial coming up?”
“Oh aye. Isn’t there always a trial coming up? Twenty-four/seven it seems like he’s at work. ’Course, Deb’s not much better.”
“Is she here, then? I’ve actually come to speak to her rather than to Simon.”
“To Deb? Oh. Right, she’s above. I c’n fetch her down to the study for you. She’s doing something with her photos. Don’t ask me what.”
Lynley said he would go to her, rather than having to interrupt her work. He went for the stairway and climbed to the top floor of the house. Here, under a huge skylight, both Deborah and Simon often worked, she dealing with her photography, he dealing with requests for his expertise in matters of evidence to be used—or for that matter, discounted—in upcoming trials.
He found Deborah at one of the worktables, a number of photographs spread out in front of her. Her heavy mass of hair was done in whimsical plaits—against the heat, no doubt—and she was wearing a large set of headphones. Her shoulders were moving to the beat of whatever music she was listening to. He didn’t wish to startle her, so he crossed the room and put himself on the other side of the table at which she worked. The movement appeared to catch her attention, but she didn’t look up. Instead, she lifted a hand in a just-a-moment gesture. She removed two of the photos she was inspecting, filing them in a large accordion folder. That done, she raised her head. She looked surprised and quickly gazed round, perhaps to see if Simon was with him. She removed her headphones—he could hear the dreadful teeth-grinding sound of a rock ’n’ roll guitar solo—and she thumbed a small switch to turn the music off.
“What on earth was that?” he asked her.
She laughed. “The Scorpions. ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane.’ That’s just the opening. You’re a heavy metal philistine, Tommy.”
“And long do I wish to remain. That was indescribable. Aren’t you damaging your hearing?”
“With the volume?” She looked at the headphones rather too fondly, in his opinion. “I generally don’t listen to anything that loud. But every once in a very long while, only true, metallic rock ’n’ roll at maximum volume will do.”
“What does it do? Remove tartar from your teeth?”
She laughed again. “I suspect Barbara would approve of my choice.”
“Not unless Buddy Holly has left his grave and joined the band.”
She waved him off. “Simon’s not here, you know. Dad must have told you.”
“Is this a bad time?” He gestured to the photos. They appeared to be portraits, all of the same woman, taken inside a home. She was Black, and she had a shy cast to her look. She was seated, and behind her off to one side, a wall was hung with a collection of African art. Mostly masks, he saw. They were deliberately out of focus, but still identifiable as masks. “Who is it?” he asked her.
“She’s called Leylo. I’d delivered an earlier portrait to her, but she looked very different when I’d taken it. Seeing her again, I wanted another as contrast. But I’m having trouble deciding which is most effective.”
“As what?”
“As a comparison. She was healed from her surgery in these. In the others, the earlier portraits, she was preparing for surgery.”
“Surgery?”
“Hmmm. She’d had genital mutilation done to her when she was a child, and she was about to undergo reconstruction.”
“That’s an extraordinary coincidence.” Lynley looked at the photos, one after the other.
“Why ‘an extraordinary coincidence’?”
“It appears that Teo Bontempi may have been getting ready for reconstruction surgery as well.” He tapped his fingers on the edge of one of the photos, “For what it’s worth to your decision making, I like this one.”
“Do you not find the background distracting?”
“A bit.”
She sighed. “Damn. I thought I’d handled it by moving one of the larger pieces to one side.”
“Who did her surgery? Did Leylo tell you?”
“She didn’t need to tell me. I was there when she had it. The surgeon didn’t want to have her own portrait done, but she’d agreed that I could photograph her during the surgery when she was gowned and masked and all the rest. Unfortunately, that particular group of pictures is . . . well . . . terrible, actually. I should have tried harder to talk her into posing in another location.”
“It’s a woman, then. The surgeon.”
“It is. She’s called Philippa Weatherall.”
Lynley took this on board with some stirring of the hairs on the back of his neck.
Deborah said, “You look a bit startled, Tommy.”
“Her name has come up quite recently,” he told her. “Philippa Weatherall.”
“Having to do with your case? Is she involved?”
“She seems to be, tangentially. Then she seems not to be.” Absently, as he spoke, he picked up a small brass figure that was weighing down a pile of typescript on the edge of the table. He played it back and forth in his hands. He saw it was in the shape of a crocodile.
Deborah saw this and said, “It’s a goldweight, that. Leylo wanted me to have it as a thank-you when I gave her a copy of her portrait. I’d never seen one before, and she has a collection of them.”
“A goldweight?” he said.
“It was used exactly as the name suggests: to weigh gold dust,” she said. “They’re from the days before African countries had paper notes. Leylo has all sorts of them.”
He set it back upon the papers. He said to her, “How did you manage to locate Philippa Weatherall, Deb?”
“Narissa Cameron told me about her.” Deborah reminded him of the documentary Narissa was creating and the booklet Deborah herself was assembling for the Department for Education. Narissa had wished to make Dr. Weatherall part of her documentary through an interview in any form an interview with her would take. She added, “Are you thinking she had something to do with Teo Bontempi’s death?”
“Only in that having to decide to move forward with surgery, Teo may have given someone a motive to kill her.”
Deborah set the photos to one side. She said, “I do know Dr. Weatherall had her own fears about being a target.”
“Did she explain?”
“She’s worried about reprisals, she said. Husbands, fathers, boyfriends, family. Some people don’t want to see FGM’s banishment in any form, including attempting to help a woman who’s had it.” Deborah shifted away from the worktable and turned off a fan that had been moving the hot air round in the room. She said, “Shall we go below? It’ll be slightly cooler in Simon’s study. And knowing Dad, he’s making tea for you.”
She led the way. A window was gaping in the study, and since his last visit, someone had placed a fan in the opening. Deborah switched it on, but that didn’t offer much respite from the heat. She sat on one of the old leather chairs near the fireplace and he took the other.
She looked at him long. He found he suddenly had the half-mad desire to touch her hair—plaited though it was—as he once had done, years in the past, both prelude and promise. It was animal instinct and human desire. One never walked easily away from the passion that goes with love, he thought.
She seemed to feel something as well because she said quickly, “Tell me about Daidre. Have you managed to throw a spanner in the works?”
“You know me too well,” he replied with a smile.
“Oh, Tommy. What have you done?”
“Ardent to a fault. That was always my weakness.”
“How can that be a weakness? Ardency leads to honesty, doesn’t it? What I mean is: It’s difficult to be ardent without making ardency known.”
“As I said,” he replied.
“Oh. I see. Ardency has prompted too much honesty? Hmmm. Still, having ardency as a weakness is far better than a weakness for . . . I don’t know . . . chocolate sponge?”
“Not if one’s true love is a baker, I daresay. However, having revealed what plagues my relationship with Daidre, I must say that I appear to have smoothed things over. For now. I’m sure I shall once again bollix things up in another few days.”
Footsteps came along the corridor in their direction. They heard Cotter’s voice, saying, “Mind she doesn’t get in your way, luv. She will do, when there’s food involved.”
Deborah glanced at Lynley as she rose from her chair, saying, “We have a guest . . . ,” and fell silent as Cotter appeared in the doorway. He was accompanied, Lynley saw, by a small Black girl who was holding a tray of cups and saucers. Cotter himself had a tray that bore the various accoutrements of afternoon tea.
Lynley looked at the girl, then at Cotter, then at Deborah. For the second time that afternoon and this time unaccountably, he felt hairs stirring on the back of his neck.
Deborah said, “Tommy, this is Simi Bankole.”
“Bankole,” he repeated.
“Yes. She’s only just arrived today. She’s stopping with us for a bit.”
12 AUGUST
BRIXTON
SOUTH LONDON
Monifa had slept only fitfully. Indeed, it could hardly be called a night’s sleep at all. Anxiety had pursued her. Pain had done the same: from her ribs to her bruises, she was a body that throbbed with hurt. As to the anxiety she was experiencing, her children were its centre.
She had more concern for Tani than she had for Simi. She knew very well that Tani would never return to the flat with Simi as long as the situation they were in went unresolved. But Monifa was afraid he would return there alone, either to see to her own well-being or to bring another protection order for her to fill out. If he did this and if Abeo was there, another fight would occur.
There was no way for her to reach Tani, either. He’d long ago programmed her mobile phone with his own mobile’s number, but that number was unknown to her. She rang him merely by touching his name on her phone screen, the same phone that was in the flat, left behind when she fled to Hamilah after slamming the iron into Abeo’s head.
Monifa sat up slowly, each movement describing a cry for help. It was time for her to be out of bed—on her way to find her children as well—but when she looked at the chair where she’d left her clothing, it wasn’t there. Next to the bed, however, was a cup of tea. It wasn’t even warm, telling her several hours must have passed since someone—most likely Alice Nkata—had placed it there. She wondered what she was meant to do: remain in the room till someone came for her or call out for assistance?
She saw, then, that a summery yellow dressing gown had been draped over the foot of the bed, a partner to the nightgown that Alice Nkata had lent her. Like the nightgown, Monifa found the dressing gown overly long, but she slowly struggled into it.
There was a built-in clothes cupboard next to the room’s door, and she opened this. Inside, there was little enough: one suit, one pair of highly polished shoes, a rack of seven ties, four white dress shirts, two pairs of neatly ironed jeans. Everything was spotlessly clean. Everything could have been hanging in a department store.
She closed the cupboard and went to the door, hearing Alice Nkata’s voice as she opened it. Alice was saying, “You ask me, caff’s the best alternative, Benj.”
“Win says main thing is we’re to keep her safe.”
“She’d be safe. She’d be with me.”
“No doubt she would do,” he replied. “But di’ you have a word with our Win? Bes’ do that before you make any decision. He knows more ’bout this than we do, luv.”
It was Benjamin Nkata speaking, whom Monifa had met last night upon his return from his shift driving one of London’s double-decker buses. He did the Number 11 route, he told her in an affable fashion. Gen’rally he loved it, he said, but not this summer. This summer it’d been like sitting at the gates of Hades, so hot had it been inside and so foul the humour of even his long-suffering regular passengers. As for the tourists . . . They were worse. And there were crowds of them because the Number 11 bus passed nearly every famous monument and tourist attraction in Central London. He’d heard it all from them, he had. Everything from “This is England! It’s supposed to rain every day!” to “Haven’t you people ever heard of air-conditioning?”
Monifa had liked him at once, Benjamin Nkata. She liked the way he interacted with his wife and his son. She liked how they laughed together. She especially liked that he’d asked his wife if she’d had time to see to his dinner. When Alice said she had done and it was jerk chicken with rice and pineapple slices (“tinned, I’m ’fraid”), Monifa liked that he’d declared jerk chicken was his favourite dish and that into his wife’s laughter, his son had explained with, “Tha’s what he says ev’ry night, no matter what she cooks.”
Benjamin’s reply had been, “But each time, she goes one better than the last time, so soon ’s I taste what she’s cooked, it’s my new fav’rite.”
“You keep talking,” had been Alice’s response to this, and then to her son, “You takin’ notes, Jewel? ’F anyone knows how to beguile a woman, it’s your dad.”
Monifa eased into the family bathroom, did her business, then looked at herself in the mirror above the basin. Her black eye was only partially open, her eyelid and the space above it were swollen, and her split lip bore an ugly scab. She did the best she could with soap and water, joining the Nkatas in the kitchen when she was finished.
Alice said, “Here she is, then.”
“How’d you sleep, Missus Bankole?” Benjamin asked. “That paracetamol help at all?”
“A bit.” Monifa told the lie easily in answer to his kindness. “Thank you for being so good to me. I must thank your son as well.”
“He went off to work, he did,” Alice said. “We’ve got our orders to take good care of you.”
Benjamin added, “Told us to tell you not to worry ’s well. If you can, he said. I ’spect that’s an impossibility, but you do your best because the one thing I know ’bout Win is he won’t let a thing happen to those kids of yours.”
Monifa nodded when she heard this, but she wasn’t relieved of either anxiety or fear. Tani would return to the flat, if she knew him. And, also knowing Abeo as she did, her husband would return as well because he’d have no intention of leaving the flat till he put his hands on Simi.
“I expect you’d like your clothes, eh?” Alice was saying. “They’re just over there on the piano bench. I gave them a wash last night and a good ironing this morning.”
Monifa was at a loss for what to say. She’d never come across people like this, the sort who would treat a stranger foisted upon them as an honoured guest. “I find I have no way to thank you.”
“Tha’s not going to be a problem, innit,” Benjamin said. “Cos Alice here tells me you’re quite a cook.”
Alice said before Monifa could reply, “We’d be that happy if you’d do us an African meal, Monifa. And that’ll be thanks enough, that will. So if you make up a list of what you need, Benjamin here will fetch the food b’fore he has to be at work. I got someone handling the caff today b’cause I want to watch you cook and I’m taking notes.”
