Despite the words from the Black detective on the previous evening—that the clinic was closed and, having dodged a bullet when the police showed up, Easter Lange/Mercy Hart probably wasn’t going to reopen it in the same location—Monifa was determined to forge ahead because she could not afford to believe that the Black detective was telling the truth. Learning from Tani about the cutter and her presence in their home made everything far more urgent.
When she’d returned to the flat after her conversation with the detective, she’d found Abeo and Tani in the sitting room. Abeo confronted her at once, blocking her way and saying, “You bring even more trouble to this family. What did he want?”
Tani said, “Leave her alone, Pa.”
Abeo replied with, “This between us is of no concern to you.”
Tani gave a sharp laugh. “Yeah? That’s what you think? I was here. You didn’t know, did you?”
“You were here. You were there. What is this meant to tell me?”
“I was here when you brought that bloody witch doctor into the flat. You thought you were alone. You thought you could make all your plans for Simi to be cut and no one would know till it was finished. But it didn’t work out that way because I heard it all, and there is no way in hell I’m letting that cow put her hands on Simi.” He turned to Monifa, saying, “You tol’ the cop, right? About her. The cutter.”
Monifa moved her gaze away from her son. He cried out, “You had a bloody cop here to talk to you and you di’n’t tell him what’s going on? What’s wrong with you? Why’d you not say—”
Abeo cut in. “Because she knows what must be done.”
“Nothing must be done,” Tani said. “An’ if I see that cutter out and about, I handle her myself.”
“You will do nothing.”
“Don’t even bet fifty p on that.”
Now, in Kingsland High Street with Simisola, Monifa rang the clinic’s bell. She prayed for someone to open the door. Three hundred pounds at this point would serve her well.
“Madam? Madam?”
Monifa swung round. At the doorway of Taste of Tennessee stood a man in a stained, white apron. He gestured to the building in front of which she was standing. “They’ve bunked off,” he said. “Once the coppers came th’other day, that was it. No one’s been back but the removals men. Couple more coppers ’s well, but tha’s the lot of it. You all right? You don’t look good. Want me to ring someone?”
Monifa shook her head. She said, “It is fine. We are fine,” voicing the lie she’d been telling herself for years. She thought about what she could next do, but she was without a single idea. All she had was two telephone numbers. One belonged to Easter Lange or whoever she was and it didn’t matter as she wasn’t taking any of Monifa’s calls. The other belonged to the Black detective.
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL LONDON
When Barbara Havers returned to New Scotland Yard, she found a large shopping bag on her desk. She frowned at the sight of it, and although a note was attached, she didn’t open it. Instead, she lifted out the contents from the bag and saw that she’d been gifted with a collection of sketching pencils, a fist-size rubber, a small sketchbook, a medium sketchbook, and a ruler. Gazing at this, she knew she didn’t have to open the attached note to clue her in as to the giver, but she did anyway. I reckoned you wouldn’t have the time was written on a sheet torn from a desk calendar featuring Thoughts for the Day. Beneath the thought—“Let your eyes mirror your soul”—was the expected initial: D, created with a proud flourish.
Barbara sighed. Saturday was fast upon them. While Dee was not expecting great things from her in the sketching department, she was expecting her attendance at the sketching session, where, lurking rather suspiciously round the statue of Peter Pan, both of them would ostensibly meet several prospective men-of-their-dreams.
“Oh bloody hell,” Barbara muttered. She replaced the items into the bag and shoved the bag into her desk’s kneehole, determined to forget all about it, which, she knew, was going to require her to spend the next few days dodging Dorothea.
She found Lynley at the round table in the corner of his temporary office. He and Nkata were poring over a dozen photographs that formed two neat rows. To one side of these stood a thin stack of more pictures.
She said, “Carver admits it, more or less.”
Nkata looked from a photo. He said, “You tell him ’bout Rosie?”