Nkata added, “Had the phone’s code, Phinney?”
“He claims not,” Lynley said.
“Why not toss it, then? Why not leave it where it was?”
“Those are the obvious questions, aren’t they? But he would have known the mobile would be short work for a cyber kiosk if there was one available and if an officer wanted to download everything.”
“Phinney wouldn’t want that, eh?” Nkata noted.
“Could be he wanted to hang on to sweet memories of whatever?” Barbara said. “Love in bloom et cetera?”
“There’s that, isn’t there. Love does make people rather . . .” Lynley paused. “I find myself at a loss for words. Blind isn’t right for this situation.”
“Stupid fits,” Barbara said.
Lynley stood. “Let me get this down to Marjorie Lee. We’ll know soon enough if there are other reasons he took the phone.”
As Lynley left to see to this, one of the DCs stepped aside from where she had been lingering nearby.
Nkata said to her, “Got summat?”
“I’m not sure,” the DC said. “There’s a name I’ve come across that looks familiar. Monifa Bankole. It’s in the appointment book I’ve been going through from the clinic and I remembered seeing it in one of the activity reports.”
“Would be there, yeah,” Nkata said. “She’s who got arrested ’long with the woman claiming she was Easter Lange. Said she’d gone to collect money she’d given the clinic as a deposit for a procedure she was meant to have.”
“Right. There’s more. It’s to do with the appointment book, if I can tell you.”
“Tell away,” Barbara said.
“Well, we saw that every name in the diary has another name in brackets beside it and so has Monifa Bankole’s. But ’cording to the police report, like you said, she claimed she was there to cancel her own appointment and get her money back. It was for a female thing, is how she put it, yes? Was she lying?”
“Since the rozzers arrived to raid the place while she was there, I reckon we can work that out easy enough,” Barbara said.
“I s’pose it’s time I had another word,” Nkata said. And to the DC, “C’n you make a copy of the page has her appointment listed?”
The DC nodded and went off to oblige him, passing Lynley in the corridor. Barbara said to him, “Any joy from you, Inspector?”
“They’ll download everything and send it up. If there’s as much as I suspect on the mobile, we’ll be up to our necks. I’m glad of the extra DCs you’ve managed to get from Hillier, Winston. We’re going to need them. In the meantime . . . ?” He looked from one of them to the other.
“Monifa Bankole,” Nkata noted. “She’s got a bigger connection than what she said. She wants talking to.”
“Aside from Mark Phinney’s, have you come up with any other interesting vehicles in the area round the time of the attack, before it, after it?” And when both Barbara and Nkata shook their heads, Lynley directed them to get a decent photo of Mark Phinney and check it against the CCTV on Teo Bontempi’s building. They were to use the same dates as those on which his car was in the neighbourhood. Lynley ended with, “We need more movement on this than we’re making. But I expect you know that, eh?”
TRINITY GREEN
WHITECHAPEL
EAST LONDON
“What is this place?” Tani asked. “Doesn’ look like a safe house for anyone.”
“It’s here somewhere,” Sophie replied. “Trinity Green, the website said. An’ this is Trinity Green.”
They’d taken forever to get to the place as part of the journey had to be made by National Rail, part by underground, and the rest by foot. Arriving at this walled compound, Tani had noted that nothing identified it as Orchid House, and he felt dizzy at the thought that they’d come to the wrong place. But Sophie pointed out that Orchid House would hardly have a sign on either the brick wall on the pavement’s edge or on the wrought-iron gates that separated Trinity Green from Mile End Road. She shepherded him and Simi through the pedestrian gate, where all three paused at the edge of a central summer-brown lawn （the “green,” he reckoned） and tried to work out where to go.
Sophie said Orchid House had to be housed inside the distinguished-looking building at the far end of the green. It was the largest, was her reason. It looked like a chapel to Tani, with its arched windows and wide steps leading up to a fancy front door.