Grousing, Barbara fished them out, but she handed them to him, saying, “Have them. I definitely see a holiday camp for singles in your future, mate.”
“Where are we aside from holiday camps?” Lynley said. And gesturing with the printout Barbara had given him, “What are we to make of this?”
“This is called Standing Warrior,” Barbara said once again. “Ross Carver says he got it from a gallery called Padma, in Peckham. I rang them. They’re closed for the day, but you can see the statue’s details on the sheet. You ask me, sir, it’s the cosh. And the fact that it wasn’t with the group that went to forensics suggests the killer took it once Teo Bontempi had been brained with it. And there’s a very tasty detail Mr. Carver didn’t mention the first time we had a natter, him and me. Teo Bontempi said something to him on the night he found her, but he didn’t want us to know what it was. ‘She hit me, Ross.’ So we’ve got our confirmation that the killer’s a woman.”
“？’Nless more ’n one person’s involved,” Nkata pointed out. “I mean, I don’t see Teo Bontempi standing round thinking of Jesus while someone goes for a piece of bronze and bashes her with it.”
“Could be our skull basher got her when she was walking away from . . .” Barbara thought about this and added, “。 . . an argument? a threat? This woman shows up. Teo knows her, so she lets her in.”
“Sounds like Rosie,” Nkata murmured.
Barbara went on. “They talk, but Teo doesn’t agree to whatever she was meant to agree to, so she heads to open the door to give her the boot. She assumes her visitor is following, which she is. Only she’s made a detour, and she’s picked up the sculpture. She uses it. She knows enough about police work—and who doesn’t these days when every other programme on the telly is some police drama or another?—so she takes the cosh with her after the deed is done. She knows that there’s evidence on it and that evidence is going to tie her to an assault on Teo and now to Teo’s death.”
“If she took it with her, it’s going to be on CCTV, isn’t it?” one of the DCs pointed out.
“Unless she left the building via the fire door,” another said.
“Or chucked it from a window—the bedroom?—and went round the building to get it afterwards,” another pointed out.
“Or it’s just a feint,” Lynley said.
“Sorry?” This from a DC who looked disturbingly like Charlie Chaplin as the tramp.
“We’re to think a sculpture was used to cosh her,” Barbara said, “so we waste time rushing round to find it.”
“Meaning she went there to bash her all along?” Charlie Chaplin asked. “But took something else with her?”
“Not necessarily,” Lynley said. “It well could be that she went there only for conversation. It could be that the conversation went badly, and it somehow made Teo Bontempi into a threat.”
“That puts Mercy Hart back in the spotlight,” Nkata pointed out.
“Rosie Bontempi as well,” Barbara noted.
“Also Pietra Phinney,” Lynley said. “We have only Mark Phinney’s side of the story that his affair with Teo was finished.”
All of them took a moment to ponder what they had and what they knew. At last, Lynley listed the next day’s assignments:
Barbara would go to the gallery in Peckham for information on Standing Warrior; the DCs would split themselves up to continue seeking the location of the lock-up where everything from Women’s Health of Hackney had been taken, digging up the paperwork relating to the clinic’s location, determining who had let the place initially, ringing every charity shop in London to enquire about a bronze sculpture being donated for sale, and for the same reason, ringing every consignment shop that resold art. Meantime, Nkata would once again try to get a statement from Monifa Bankole about the actual purpose of the Kingsland High Street clinic. Lynley himself would have another go at Mercy Hart before the twenty-four hours during which they could hold her were used up. Barbara would assist with that.
Assignments given, then, Lynley told them all to go home for the night. He wanted everyone back at half-past six the next morning. It was going to be another long day.
BELGRAVIA
CENTRAL LONDON
Lynley took his whiskey into the back garden. From the terrace where he sat, he observed the rosebushes and briefly meditated upon the fact that most roses now had little or no scent. In a central bed that was edged in tumbled granite, they weren’t far from him and yet they smelled of nothing. This, he recalled, had been Helen’s only complaint about the garden. Darling, roses should at the very least be roses, after all. How on earth has scent been bred from them? Or . . . have I used the wrong word? Are flowers bred? That cannot be right. She loved the garden otherwise. Her thumb was unfortunately more black than green, but she persisted mucking about in the beds. When the weather was fine, they dined out here. When it was inclement, he often found her looking down upon the garden from the landing window. I’d love to have been a garden designer, she’d said to him once. He’d pointed out that she could be that still, that surely there was nothing preventing her from becoming another Gertrude Jekyll, to which she’d replied that her general lack of talent might do the job quite well, Tommy. But thank you, darling, for displaying such profound confidence in me. She had learned from the internet how to create sumptuous displays of plants in pots. But this, she told him, wasn’t more than child’s play. Only three elements besides the soil and asking at the gardening centre which plants actually can be potted together. Now, if I can manage to keep them watered, only the annuals will need replacing. And they stood, still, the pots she’d created. After she’d died, he’d let them all follow her. It had simply been too much for him to care for them in her place.