Something to Hide（Inspector Lynley #21）
Elizabeth George
For those who suffer,
Those who endure,
And those who fight.
For the human soul is virtually indestructible,
And its ability to rise from the ashes
Remains as long as the body draws breath.
ALICE MILLER
For Your Own Good
PART I
21 JULY
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL LONDON
Deborah St. James came at Sanctuary Buildings by way of Parliament Square on one of the hottest days of what had so far been a blazingly hot summer. She’d been asked to meet with one of the secretaries at the Department for Education as well as the head of the NHS. “We’d like to talk to you about a project,” she’d been told. “Are you available to take something on?”
She was. She’d been casting round for a project since the publication of London Voices four months earlier, an undertaking that she’d spent the last several years putting together. So she was happy to attend a meeting that might turn into a new project, although she couldn’t imagine what sort of photography the Department for Education in conjunction with the NHS might have in mind.
She approached a guard at the door with her identification in hand. However, he wasn’t so much interested in that as was he interested in the contents of her capacious bag. He told her that her mobile phone was fine, but she was going to have to prove that her digital camera actually was a camera. Deborah obliged by taking his picture. She showed it to him. He waved her towards the door. He said just as she was about to enter, “Delete that, though. I look like crap.”
At the reception desk, she asked for Dominique Shaw. Deborah St. James here to speak with the undersecretary for the school system, she added.
After a discreetly murmured phone call, she was handed a lanyard with visitor printed on the card that hung from it. Meeting Room 4, she was told. Floor 2. Turn to the right if she chose the lift. Turn to the left if she chose the stairs. She went for the stairs.
When she arrived at Meeting Room 4, though, she assumed she’d been given the wrong number. Five people sat round a polished conference table, not the two she’d been led to believe wished to meet her. Three floor fans were trying heroically to mitigate the temperature in the room. They were only creating something of a scirocco.
A woman rose from the end of the table and came towards her, hand extended. She was smartly dressed in a manner that shouted “government official,” and she was decorated with overlarge rimless spectacles and gold earrings the size of golf balls. She was Dominique Shaw, she said, parliamentary under secretary of state for the school system. She introduced the others so quickly that for the most part, Deborah only caught their positions: the head of the NHS, a representative from Barnardo’s, the founder of something called Orchid House, and a woman with the name Narissa, whose surname Deborah didn’t catch. They were a diverse group: one was Black, one looked Korean, Dominique Shaw was white, and the woman called Narissa appeared to be mixed race.
“Please.” Dominique Shaw indicated an empty chair next to the representative from Barnardo’s.
Deborah sat. She was surprised to see a copy of London Voices in front of each of the people who were there. Her first thought was that the book was causing difficulties somehow, that she had created a volume that had turned out to be politically, socially, or culturally incorrect, although she couldn’t imagine how any of that would involve the Department for Education. For the book comprised portraits of Londoners taken over a period of three years. Each portrait was accompanied by some of the subject’s words, recorded by Deborah during the photographic session. Included among the portraits were depicted at least two dozen of the increasingly large homeless population, people of all ages and races and nationalities who ended up sleeping in doorways along the Strand, stretched out in the subways beneath Park Lane, curled next to wheelie bins—and sometimes inside of them—and behind hotels like the Savoy and the Dorchester. These parts of the book didn’t deliver London as the glamorous global city it made itself out to be.
She demurred on the offer of coffee or tea, but happily accepted tepid water from a glass jug on the table. She waited for someone to bring up the subject of the meeting—preferably clarification on the topic of what on earth she was doing there—and once Deborah had her water, as well as her own completely unnecessary copy of London Voices, which Dominique Shaw passed to her, the undersecretary for schools began to elucidate.
She said, “It was Mr. Oh who brought your book to my attention,” with a nod at the man from Barnardo’s. “It’s impressive. I’ve been wondering, though . . .” She seemed to cull through various options of what she was wondering while outside and below the window what sounded like a lorry with a very bad transmission screeched in the street. Shaw glanced at the window, frowned, then went on. “How did you manage it?”