“Too right they are. But I was talking about the appalling part of it.”
He chuckled. “As to Easter Lange?”
“Oh. Right. My point is that Easter Lange is English, which means Mercy Hart is English as well, I expect. So what’s she doing working in a women’s clinic that only African women come to? Especially since, like I said, there are all sorts of non-African women in this part of town. But only Africans come here?”
“English Black women. African Black women. This obviously suggests something to you.”
“Did you notice there’s no clinic’s name on the door? Not this door and not on the door that got us into the building. What kind of clinic doesn’t want to advertise itself as a clinic?”
“One run by a fraudulent physician?”
“Or one doing something illegal. Let’s look at what we’ve got. Teo Bontempi was part of a team working on the abuse of women. Somehow she ended up with the arrest reports on two women connected with this particular place. How did she know about it?”
“The clinic? She could easily have had an informant inside one of the African communities.”
“Okay. An informant. It’s possible. I see that. But while an informant might have told her that this place was here, there’s no way the clinic is going to be raided by the locals or anyone else without someone checking on it first.”
Lynley thought about the timeline involved. Then he said, “She was in the midst of working on an action just before her transfer, Barbara. DS Hopwood mentioned it.”
“I’ll put down a fiver, sir. This was it. She learns about this place but then she gets transferred before she knows whatever she needs to know and then what? She does some research with her free time? Then she puts the locals into the picture? They show up and make arrests.”
“All right. I see how that’s possible. And she did ask for a few days before she was intended to show up at her new posting.”
“But then her part in it gets sussed out. She dies soon after, which is to say she’s murdered soon after. I don’t know what that tells you, but it tells me that, setting everything else aside—Ross Carver, her sister, and anything else in her personal life—there’s a connection between what Teo Bontempi was working on and how she died. And that connection runs directly through this clinic.”
“Are you suggesting that FGM was being performed here by Mercy Hart, an Englishwoman?”
“Sounds spot on to me. Plus, according to Easter, she’s some kind of nurse.”
“Which hardly qualifies her for—”
“That’s just the point, sir. She’s a far sight better qualified than some old lady with a razor blade. Look, FGM doesn’t end where the UK begins. If it did, we wouldn’t need a team established by the Met to work on the problem. Like I said, this so-called clinic for women’s health doesn’t have a sign on the building and it doesn’t even announce itself on the door. I reckon there’s a reason for that, and someone in here”—she lifted the large appointment diary—“or somewhere in one of those”—she indicated the manila folders, which he’d been examining—“is going to be able to tell us.”
MAYVILLE ESTATE
DALSTON
NORTH-EAST LONDON
After hour upon hour closely watching CCTV films, Winston Nkata was more than ready for a change of scenery. So far on his own, he’d managed to isolate, enlarge, and send on to tech fairly decent images of three people who’d entered the apartment block in Streatham on the evening and night of the attack on Teo Bontempi. He’d been concentrating on those who entered or left on their own. With the help of DI Hale’s DCs, they could now move more quickly through the recordings. If none of the resulting images bore fruit, he and the DCs would go back and work on those who had companions when they entered. The Met couldn’t afford to ignore anyone in the footage captured by the cameras since, as far as he knew, nothing at the scene indicated that Teo Bontempi had met her end at the hands of a single person. Additionally, current residents of the building could not be ruled out. In short, it seemed to Nkata that there was no possibility that could be left without exploration.
When he reached north London, Nkata left his car near a sign that identified the buildings on the grounds of Mayville Estate. He knew he was looking for Bronte House, and after perusing the posted map of the estate, he was gratified to see that the route was simple. As he approached Bronte House, he was equally gratified to see that most of the flats offered open doors because of the weather, and included among these was the flat whose number Monifa Bankole had given to the police upon her arrest.