Something to Hide, page 61
His mother said, “There’s something important in the picture, Jewel?”
“Maybe something, maybe nothing,” he told her. “But either way, I got to check it out.”
EEL PIE ISLAND
TWICKENHAM
GREATER LONDON
They arrived quite early in Twickenham and parked directly across the river from Eel Pie Island. An arched footbridge led them to a glassed-in noticeboard at its end, standing at a point where two paved footpaths met. On the noticeboard was pinned a map of the island’s cottages, with the name and the location of each noted. Unfortunately, Mahonia Cottage wasn’t listed.
“Damn and blast,” was Lynley’s reaction to this.
Barbara’s was, “I dunno, guv. How hard can it be? We just need to find the cottage with no name on it, right?”
“Presupposing there’s only one without a name on it, which I doubt.”
They quickly walked the shorter path, which shot off to the right, with cottages strung along the water. All save one of them showed a name, and the nameless one had its windows boarded and a broken-down ramp leading to its door. These suggested there had been no habitant for quite some time, so they returned to the noticeboard and set off along the longer path that curved and disappeared beneath the poplars and willows creating pools of shadow.
They hadn’t got far along when they encountered a cyclist walking his bicycle in the direction of the footbridge. When they asked him if he knew which of the cottages on the island was Mahonia, his response was an unhelpful, “They have names?”
“This one belongs to Philippa Weatherall,” Barbara said.
“Oh! Pips!” He used his thumb to gesture over his back, in the direction from which he’d come. “It’s along the way. It’s got a blue roof. You’ll see it on the right.”
They thanked him and began to set off, pausing when he said, “But she’s not there. She’s on the river. I came off . . . p’rhaps ten minutes ago? She was heading towards the boathouse, but it takes a bit of time to replace everything, so she’s probably still there.” He turned now, using his arm to point in the direction he’d just indicated with his thumb. He said, “Go along and you’ll see it on the left. Can’t miss it. It’s the only one on the island.”
That said, he mounted his bicycle and went on his way, leaving them to sort out which of the buildings they came across served as a boathouse. But it turned out that his description was accurate. They couldn’t miss it, especially since it bore a sign that identified it as the island’s rowing club. Unfortunately, it was also fenced and gated, and the gate bore a lock of the sort that demanded a code. There was nothing for it but to leave and track the surgeon down later in the day or to wait for her to come out of the gate. They chose waiting.
The twenty minutes before the gate opened seemed much longer. And then, it was a young man who came through it.
“ ’S Dr. Weatherall still on the river?” Barbara asked him.
“Philippa?”
“We need to speak with her,” Lynley said.
“She’s sorting her gear. Should be finished up in—”
Lynley showed him his warrant card. “We need a word now,” he clarified.
The young man’s eyes widened. He held the gate open for them. “Hope no one’s in trouble,” he said as the gate swung shut behind them.
When they found her, Dr. Weatherall was replacing the scull she’d been using. She was wearing black: a neoprene one-piece with reflective stripes following the seams. She whirled round when Lynley said her name. “Good Lord, you startled me,” was her greeting. And then to Havers, “Another meeting? I’ve nothing else to offer, I’m afraid.”
“It’s not for me,” Barbara told her. “This is my guv, DCS Lynley.”
Dr. Weatherall looked from Barbara to Lynley and back again to Barbara. “Why at this time of day?” she asked.
“Early birds and worms . . . ?” Barbara said with a shrug. “You’re something of an early bird yourself.”
“I am. But I don’t show up to speak with people at ungodly hours, as it happens.”
Lynley said, “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“And we reckoned you’d be more comfortable answering them at home than at the clinic,” Barbara told her.
Dr. Weatherall shoved the scull’s oars onto a metal bar with a line of others. They clipped nicely into a vacant holder. “I can only spare a few minutes,” she said. Her tone was brusque. She glanced at her watch. “I’ve a patient at half past eight.”
“A few minutes is all we need,” Barbara said affably. “Are you finished up here or can we help you?”
“I’m finished. I do need to shower before I head to work, though. So if you intend to take more than five or ten minutes, we’ll need to schedule this for another time.”
“Ten minutes should be adequate,” Lynley told her. He extended his hand to indicate the way they had entered, adding, “If you will.”
The surgeon seemed to Barbara more like someone to whom if you won’t applied, but she cooperated. They walked in silence back along the path to her cottage, where a cat was crouched in anticipation of breakfast, near one empty bowl and another filled with water.
“Looks like you’re expected,” Barbara said in note of him.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Weatherall said. “He knows a soft touch when he encounters one, that cat.” She let them inside the cottage, where she flipped on overhead lights. She handed a bag of dried cat food to Barbara, saying, “If you’ll give him some, we can get going on the purpose of your visit here. I’m having a coffee. Either of you . . . ?”
Lynley demurred. Barbara said coffee sounded like the very thing. The surgeon set about the job with an electric kettle and a coffee press. Barbara poured food into the cat’s bowl on the front step and returned inside. Lynley was looking at a group of framed pictures that sat on a shelving unit along with a flat-screen television. They were older photos, Barbara saw when she joined him, and most of them looked as if they’d come from Dr. Weatherall’s childhood. They generally depicted a family in various happy locations at different seasons of the year. Although there were half a score of childhood pictures, the adolescent Philippa Weatherall was in only one of them, skeletally thin with cadaverous cheekbones and eyes so sunken they might have been marks made by a felt-tip pen. Anorexia, Barbara thought. Considering how she looked in the photo, she was lucky she was still alive.
“It took ten years of my life.” The surgeon was still in the kitchen, but the cottage was quite small and she could easily see what they were studying. “It’s why my mum died young.”
Barbara said, “How’s that?” as Lynley replaced the picture.
“Ovarian cancer. She ignored the signs because she was taking care of me. I was in and out of hospital for a decade, and I think she blamed herself. No reason, but she couldn’t see that.” She was quiet a moment before she cleared her throat and went on with, “I’ve found mothers take on blame whether there’s cause or not.”
“That’s certainly been my experience,” Lynley said. The surgeon glanced in his direction as if to gauge his sincerity.
The kettle clicked off. She saw to the coffee, asked Barbara if she wanted milk and sugar, and then joined them. She handed a mug to Barbara, and with her own, she indicated a photo of two men in formal dress—perhaps ten years her junior—with their arms slung round each other. She said, “My brother and his partner. Well, his husband now. And this”—she gestured with her mug to a shot of a beret-wearing soldier—“is their older son Elek.”
“Unusual name,” Lynley noted.
“Greek, like one of his fathers. It means ‘defender of mankind.’ It was apt. He died in Afghanistan.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lynley said.
“Yes. Well,” Dr. Weatherall replied. “Please do sit. There’s no reason for us to stand for this conversation, is there?”
She went to a modern-looking armchair: two cushions and slim arms and legs of chrome. Lynley and Barbara took the sofa, which was nearly buried in brightly coloured decorative pillows. Barbara brought out her notebook and pencil. The surgeon saw this but said nothing.
Lynley said, “We’d like to learn about your relationship to the women’s clinic in Kingsland High Street.”
“Women’s Health of Hackney? It’s been closed,” the surgeon said. “So I have no current relationship to it.”
“But you did have.”
“Yes, indeed. I volunteered there when I was free.”
“You volunteered as a surgeon?”
“No. Your sergeant has probably told you already that I perform my surgeries in a clinic on the Isle of Dogs. In Kingsland High Street, I did exams, mostly screening for cancers: breast, uterine, and ovarian. I did some counselling as well, about birth control, prenatal care, postpartum issues, and the like. Why?”
“Couldn’t women get all that from their GP?” Barbara asked her. “Or from their midwives?”
“They could do, yes. But some of these women are here illegally. Others—too many others, in fact—have male GPs and no wish to be examined intimately by a man. These things cause difficulties, and I try to ease those where I can.”
“None of that seems to apply to Teo Bontempi,” Lynley said.
Dr. Weatherall frowned. “Sorry? What does Teo Bontempi have to do with my volunteering at the clinic?”
Barbara told her. “She’s the reason the place was raided. Only . . . I think you know that. We both think you know that.”
Dr. Weatherall looked from one of them to the other before she said, “How on earth would I know that? She’d come to see me on the Isle of Dogs, but—”
“She confronted you in Kingsland High Street, the very day the place was raided, within thirty minutes of the raid, in fact. It’s on film, by the way. CCTV. You’re speaking to her.”
“Is that why you’ve come to see me at this hour? Because I spoke to her in Kingsland High Street? But why on earth wouldn’t I speak to her? I knew her. She’d come to see me about reconstructive surgery. I did tell you about this, Sergeant Havers.”
“That’s one way to interpret what we saw on the film,” Lynley said. “Two acquaintances happen to come across each other in a part of town entirely unrelated to where they’d met.”
“Is there another way to interpret it?” the surgeon asked. “If, as you say, you have our encounter on film, I daresay you can tell from my expression that I was astonished to see her. At first I didn’t know who she was, by the way. She was dressed ethnically, but when she and I met on the Isle of Dogs, she’d worn . . . what would I call it? Ordinary clothing? British clothing? Western clothing? So suddenly there she was in front of me dressed as an African, saying my name, and it took me a moment to recognise her.”
“Did she ask what you were doing there?”
“I don’t recall. Probably. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?”
“And you?” Lynley asked. “Did you ask her?”
“I hadn’t memorised her home address. For all I knew she lived in the area and wore ethnic clothing whenever she wasn’t on duty.” She stood then, although Barbara and Lynley remained seated. She said, “Now. If there’s nothing else, I’ve patients to see on the Isle of Dogs and not a lot of time to get there.”
“That’s quite a jaunt from here,” Lynley said. “Wouldn’t Twickenham have been more convenient for your clinic?”
“I go by motorboat. I don’t own a car. And no, Twickenham wouldn’t have been more convenient, certainly not for the women I see. But they can get to the Isle of Dogs by the docklands railway. I expect you know this.”
“Kingsland High Street would have been more convenient for them, wouldn’t it? As there’s a clinic in the high street and as that clinic has—or at least had—a small room for surgery, why wouldn’t you do your reconstructive work there?”
She looked at him impatiently. “Obviously because it wasn’t my clinic, Superintendent. And I require a larger operating theatre.”
“Mercy Hart claims the clinic’s not hers, either.”
“Who?”
“Mercy Hart. As you volunteer there, surely you know Mercy Hart, Dr. Weatherall.”
“I do not,” she said. “I’ve never heard of her. And now I’m going to shower and change as this conversation has gone on quite long enough.”
“You probably know her as Easter Lange,” Barbara said.
“Easter? Yes, I do know Easter. It’s Easter’s clinic. She’s how I came to be there in the first place. She read about my work—and don’t ask me where or how because I don’t know—and she rang me about volunteering a bit of time if I could. She called herself Easter. But you’re saying she’s who?”
“Mercy Hart. Easter Lange is her aunt.”
“So between the two of them—Mercy Hart and Easter Lange—is where the answers to your questions lie. Either Mercy Hart is using the name Easter Lange or Easter Lange is behind whatever is going on in that place that got it shut down.”
“FGM got it shut down,” Barbara said.
The surgeon’s mouth opened then shut. She seemed to take a few moments to put herself back together before she said, “That has to be nonsense.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not,” Lynley told her. “We’ve a statement from the mother of a prospective patient confirming it.”
“And you’re thinking that I’m involved with cutting? I’ve been working for years repairing the damage done to these women through FGM.” She raised her hands as if to ward off anything else they might want to say. “Please leave now,” she said. “As I told you, I want to shower and get to the Isle of Dogs. You’ve kept me from both of those objectives quite long enough.”
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL LONDON
“Seems like they were on the same side, guv,” Havers said as they walked to their cars. They’d come separately, each of them from their homes to Twickenham. “Seems they were going after FGM each in her own way. And what she said makes sense. She didn’t know Teo Bontempi was a detective working on a special team. Seeing her out of place like that—in her African togs as well—she would’ve been surprised, wouldn’t she? By the coincidence if by nothing else.” She lit up a Player’s. He gave her a look. She said, “We’re outdoors.”
“You might have waited till you were in your car,” Lynley pointed out.
Havers said to the sky, “Reformed smokers are the worst, aren’t they?” No answer came from above, so she went on with, “If she’s also counselling women in the Kingsland clinic, she’s in a position to talk down FGM ’s well. I can see her doing that, especially on the sly when Mercy’s busy with something else.”
“And yet she claims to know nothing about it at the same time as Mercy claims she was merely an employee of the place, and that someone else was cutting girls.”
“D’you believe her? Mercy, I mean. Not Dr. Weatherall.”
“She’s willing to be inside Bronzefield Prison rather than open up further. What does that tell us?”
“Tells me she’s worried about being banged up for a bucket of offences, after which she goes back to Bronzefield to while away a few years perfecting her macramé. What’s it tell you?”
“Perhaps she’s afraid.”
“Right. She’s afraid of ending up in the dock. She has motive, guv. In spades. In diamonds. In what you will. No wonder she doesn’t want to talk to us or to anyone else within reach of the silver bracelets.”
They separated then and headed in the direction of central London. It was still fairly early, so the traffic had not yet begun its sluggish crawl. They made good time, but only till they reached the Great West Road, where the battle with buses, taxis, and cars daily tested one’s patience, endurance, and driving skills.
Lynley lost sight of Barbara’s Mini in Chiswick. But however she had managed it, she pulled into a parking bay beneath New Scotland Yard moments after he emerged from the Healey Elliott, its copper paint job still pleasingly unscathed.
They went up in the lift together, Havers reeking of cigarette smoke and completely unapologetic about it when he cast an unappreciative look at her. There was no point to commenting upon the possibility of spraying herself with air freshener, so he said nothing save good morning to Dorothea Harriman as he followed Havers to join the others.
They were gathered round Winston Nkata’s desk, passing among themselves what appeared to be a photograph. There was a decided air of something in the room. Under other circumstances it might have been an air of excitement had there actually been something about which one could get excited at this point.
Nkata clocked them first, saying, “You got to look ’t this, guv. I had it off Monifa Bankole before I left Brixton.”
Lynley joined them, as did Havers. “What is it?” He put on his reading spectacles and took the photograph that one of the DCs was extending in his direction. In it, a good-looking Black teenager was caught half in shadow, half in light. He wore a white T-shirt with a small hole in the neck. His arms were crossed but the light struck him in a way that defined his muscles. Lynley knew who had taken the picture before he turned it over and saw the small gold seal with Deborah’s name upon it.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Tani Bankole. Tha’s Monifa’s son. He’s with Simisola in Chelsea.”
Lynley looked at the picture again and said, “This wasn’t taken in Chelsea, was it.” He handed it to Havers and removed his glasses. “It’s significant somehow?” he asked Nkata.
“Bloody hell,” Havers muttered. “Bloody bleeding hell.” She raised her head and went on with, “Winnie, I’d ravish you on the spot but I don’t think either of us would live through it.”
“Thought you’d say that,” Nkata said. “Well, not that ’xactly. But I figgered you’d wan’ to see it.”
