“Not worried about their arteries, I see,” Havers groused.
“At the very least, I do need to know someone’s name, Sergeant, before I consider their vascular system and the imminence of their shedding their mortal coil, et cetera.” Lynley gestured to the open doorway. “After you,” he said.
The entry smelled musty with disuse, and there was a scattering of post lying on the floor. Lynley picked this up and riffled through it. Nothing of interest and nothing directed to a clinic.
“Stairs back here, sir,” Havers called. “Look decrepit, but I expect they still do the job.”
He joined her and saw that the stairway was indeed old if its condition was anything to go by. Banister badly scratched and dented here and there, balusters occasionally detached from the railing above them and the steps below, carpet on the treads worn through. All of this served as a very strange welcome for anyone coming to this place.
The only door inside the building that stood open was on the top floor, and as its furniture was in disarray, Lynley reckoned they were at the clinic, which was in the process of being dismantled. Aside from the names of the two women who’d been inside the premises when the police showed up, what they knew of the clinic was limited to what the local police had been able to wrest in the form of information from those same two women: that it served ladies in the surrounding communities and that it dealt with women’s health.
Women’s health, Lynley thought, casts a very wide net. He reckoned it included everything from reproduction to hormonal imbalances to various types of cancers. He indicated two four-drawer filing cabinets that stood against one of the walls. They had apparently been separated from the waiting area by the previously departed desk, the drawers of which now sat upon the floor. Wordlessly, Lynley went for the filing cabinets. Havers took the drawers: two standard size, one for filing and one that would have fitted just above the kneehole.
Lynley quickly saw that one of the two filing cabinets contained supplies: both office and medical. They were neatly ordered with the medical materials in the upper two drawers and those for the office in the lower two. What files still remained in the office were contained within manila folders in the drawers of the second cabinet. These were marked with patients’ names. None of them were anywhere close to bulging with the kind of physician’s notes one would assume were kept to be held in a medical surgery. He chose ten of them at random and carried them to a corner chair that had not yet been removed for transport. He sat, opened the first of them, and began to scan the documents it held. There were few: a medical history, a release form, a perfectly unreadable scrawl of notes that seemed to be concerned with three different appointments. The next folder was much the same, as was the third. All in all, the files asked for the conclusion that, whatever women’s health issue was being addressed, the clinic had solved it quickly.
“Here’s something, sir.” Havers was crouched on the floor where the desk drawers had been stacked after their removal from the desk. She held up a black spiral book, and he saw it was a desk-size appointment diary. Havers began to go through it.
“Just names, sir,” she said. He watched as she read the appointments for one day, then another, then a third and a fourth. She looked up, and he saw that her expression was puzzled. Her gaze was fixed and focused on nothing.
“Barbara?” he said.
She looked at him. “I don’t know, sir, but it seems odd.”
“Something in the appointment diary?”
“This area’s mixed race, right? I mean, everywhere in London is mixed race. Well . . . not Belgravia and Mayfair and wherever there’s big money—no offence, sir—”
“Go on.”
“But you know what I’m saying, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Then here’s what’s strange, you ask me. This’s a clinic for women. It features women’s health from A to Z. But there’s not a name in here that isn’t African. What d’you make of that? I mean, Easter Lange wasn’t African, sir. She’s as English as me. P’rhaps not as English as you with . . . what is it? . . . six hundred years of family history barking at your heels.”
“That would be the Percys,” he told her. “They’ve been around forever. The Lynley roots are appallingly shallow by comparison.”
“Not compared to those of us whose roots are planted in a Saxon hut somewhere.”
“Those are very deep roots, Barbara.”