“He got a passport? Simisola got one?” And when she nodded, he rose and said, “You come with me, then.”
“Please. No. I cannot. I must stop him.”
“Tha’s something you’re not going to be able to do.”
“I must.”
“I think you might be misun’erstanding wha’s happenin here,” Nkata said. “You c’n come with me cooperatively, Missus Bankole, or I c’n arrest you. The choice is yours.”
ISLE OF DOGS
EAST LONDON
Barbara Havers had rung Dr. Philippa Weatherall in advance as there was no sense in making the lengthy journey to the Isle of Dogs from Westminster if the surgeon would not be in. But she was there for the entire day, Dr. Weatherall had confirmed. She was happy to meet with DS Havers between patients. She had a rather full schedule so she couldn’t spare a lot of time. “If you could tell me what this is about . . . ?” she’d said.
A deceased woman called Teo Bontempi, Havers told her. “I c’n tell you more when we meet,” Barbara said.
After negotiating the drive across central London, she dropped down to the river in the vicinity of Limehouse and made her way from there to Westferry Road, the main route onto the west side of the Isle of Dogs. This was in no way even a remote part of Barbara’s regular stamping ground, so from Westferry Road she was forced to use her mobile’s GPS. This took her to Millwall Inner Dock, and from there it was a search for parking, followed by a hike to Inner Harbour Square where, she’d been told, she would find Dr. Weatherall’s surgery above a takeaway sandwich shop called Our Daily Bread.
That was fortuitous, she thought. She made a brief stop inside the takeaway to purchase a prawn and coleslaw sandwich on brown bread, a bag of salt and vinegar crisps, a snack-size packet of custard creams, and a blackcurrant Ribena. Out in the square she made short work of sandwich, crisps, and Ribena, managing in the midst of this repast to drip coleslaw down the front of her T-shirt. Seeing what she’d done to herself, she cursed and created from the coleslaw drip a very large and—she liked to think—rather artful stain by smearing the mess with a greasy paper napkin. She consoled herself with one of the custard creams and followed this with a deeply satisfying fag.
Thus fortified, she made her way to Dr. Weatherall’s surgery. She found the surgeon between patients, in the process of ushering one out while another worked on filling in what looked like a closely printed questionnaire fastened to a clipboard. Barbara would have assumed the woman doing the ushering was an assistant, but she said, “You must be DS Havers?” and when Barbara nodded, she continued with, “I’m Dr. Weatherall. Do come in.” She gestured back the way she’d come after saying to the woman with the clipboard, “Fawzia, just knock on the door when you’ve finished, please.”
Barbara waited for her to close the door to the narrow corridor. Three rooms opened off it, one of them the surgeon’s office, which was where Dr. Weatherall took her. It was as sparsely decorated as was the physician herself. Office and woman were no nonsense: the walls of the room were hung with her diplomas as well as a few inoffensive prints that one might find on an internet website, and the doctor herself was in a sleeveless black blouse and trousers of black linen—the material a bow to the heat, no doubt, a scarf folded into a headband to hold back her salt-and-pepper hair. Her arms were tanned. They were also toned in a depressingly spectacular fashion, Barbara noted, as were her shoulders. Clearly, she took regular and probably vigorous exercise. She probably watched her diet as well. With this in mind, Barbara nearly felt guilty for her crisps and her custard creams, but as it was only nearly, she reckoned she’d get over the feeling quickly enough. She usually did.
Dr. Weatherall sat in one of the chairs in front of her desk rather than behind it, and she indicated that Barbara should sit in the other. Barbara explained to her the death of Teo Bontempi, not how it came about but merely the coma and the hospitalisation, as well as the fact of the police looking into it and the fact of the investigating team’s having in their possession the victim’s appointment diary.
She said, “Teo wrote evaluation on July twenty-fourth, which wasn’t helpful. But when we finally got our hands on her mobile and got into its contents, we saw she’d put the address for this clinic into her GPS. She was an FGM victim, and her husband—well, her almost ex-husband—says he banged on a lot about possible reconstructive surgery. We’re wondering if that’s what you do here.”