“She’s called Leylo. I’d delivered an earlier portrait to her, but she looked very different when I’d taken it. Seeing her again, I wanted another as contrast. But I’m having trouble deciding which is most effective.”
“As what?”
“As a comparison. She was healed from her surgery in these. In the others, the earlier portraits, she was preparing for surgery.”
“Surgery?”
“Hmmm. She’d had genital mutilation done to her when she was a child, and she was about to undergo reconstruction.”
“That’s an extraordinary coincidence.” Lynley looked at the photos, one after the other.
“Why ‘an extraordinary coincidence’？”
“It appears that Teo Bontempi may have been getting ready for reconstruction surgery as well.” He tapped his fingers on the edge of one of the photos, “For what it’s worth to your decision making, I like this one.”
“Do you not find the background distracting?”
“A bit.”
She sighed. “Damn. I thought I’d handled it by moving one of the larger pieces to one side.”
“Who did her surgery? Did Leylo tell you?”
“She didn’t need to tell me. I was there when she had it. The surgeon didn’t want to have her own portrait done, but she’d agreed that I could photograph her during the surgery when she was gowned and masked and all the rest. Unfortunately, that particular group of pictures is . . . well . . . terrible, actually. I should have tried harder to talk her into posing in another location.”
“It’s a woman, then. The surgeon.”
“It is. She’s called Philippa Weatherall.”
Lynley took this on board with some stirring of the hairs on the back of his neck.
Deborah said, “You look a bit startled, Tommy.”
“Her name has come up quite recently,” he told her. “Philippa Weatherall.”
“Having to do with your case? Is she involved?”
“She seems to be, tangentially. Then she seems not to be.” Absently, as he spoke, he picked up a small brass figure that was weighing down a pile of typescript on the edge of the table. He played it back and forth in his hands. He saw it was in the shape of a crocodile.
Deborah saw this and said, “It’s a goldweight, that. Leylo wanted me to have it as a thank-you when I gave her a copy of her portrait. I’d never seen one before, and she has a collection of them.”
“A goldweight?” he said.
“It was used exactly as the name suggests: to weigh gold dust,” she said. “They’re from the days before African countries had paper notes. Leylo has all sorts of them.”
He set it back upon the papers. He said to her, “How did you manage to locate Philippa Weatherall, Deb?”
“Narissa Cameron told me about her.” Deborah reminded him of the documentary Narissa was creating and the booklet Deborah herself was assembling for the Department for Education. Narissa had wished to make Dr. Weatherall part of her documentary through an interview in any form an interview with her would take. She added, “Are you thinking she had something to do with Teo Bontempi’s death?”
“Only in that having to decide to move forward with surgery, Teo may have given someone a motive to kill her.”
Deborah set the photos to one side. She said, “I do know Dr. Weatherall had her own fears about being a target.”
“Did she explain?”
“She’s worried about reprisals, she said. Husbands, fathers, boyfriends, family. Some people don’t want to see FGM’s banishment in any form, including attempting to help a woman who’s had it.” Deborah shifted away from the worktable and turned off a fan that had been moving the hot air round in the room. She said, “Shall we go below? It’ll be slightly cooler in Simon’s study. And knowing Dad, he’s making tea for you.”
She led the way. A window was gaping in the study, and since his last visit, someone had placed a fan in the opening. Deborah switched it on, but that didn’t offer much respite from the heat. She sat on one of the old leather chairs near the fireplace and he took the other.
She looked at him long. He found he suddenly had the half-mad desire to touch her hair—plaited though it was—as he once had done, years in the past, both prelude and promise. It was animal instinct and human desire. One never walked easily away from the passion that goes with love, he thought.
She seemed to feel something as well because she said quickly, “Tell me about Daidre. Have you managed to throw a spanner in the works?”