“Of course,” Deborah said. “Shall I write the directions down for you? So she’ll know how to get here, I mean?”
“Just th’ address,” he said. “She’ll do the rest.”
And he hoped against hope she would do it soon.
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL LONDON
Lynley’s second interview with Mercy Hart had not gone well. In fact, it had not gone anywhere. In his experience, most people who proclaimed their innocence of any wrongdoing were only too willing to speak with the police wherever and whenever the police thought it necessary, in order to clear their names. They generally were also happy to do this clearing of their names without the presence of a legal representative since they often believed that the request for a solicitor would make them look guilty, which, admittedly, it sometimes did. Thus, because they had no one present to intervene, the police could veer in any unpleasant or unrelated direction they wished to go. Mercy Hart, however, was not such a person. For their second meeting in an interview room, he found she had—in the American vernacular—lawyered up.
She had not requested the duty solicitor. Instead, she had arranged for someone from a private firm. This person was called Astolat Abbott—one of her parents obviously having been a fan of T. H. White, Thomas Mallory, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson—and she handed over her card for him to study, saying with a meaningful glance at her wristwatch, “We’re within two hours of the twenty-four you can hold my client without charging her, Inspector, unless you’ve come up with something new. I’m fairly certain you would have charged her had you anything additional to use as evidence of a crime in which Mrs. Hart is involved. From what I’ve gathered, however, the only possible charge in this situation is one of using her aunt’s identity at her place of employment and in the purchase of a mobile phone. Would you like to charge her for that so I might arrange for bail, or is there something else my client may do to assist you in your enquiries?”
As Barbara Havers might have said, there was a bloody wheelbarrow of something new, but none of it could so far be supported by anything. Mercy Hart had a motive, certainly. Teo Bontempi had put paid to her source of income, and as members of the team had discussed, she would probably have continued to do so should a clinic be set up in another location. But they could hardly charge Mercy Hart with murder without something to back up that charge, so they were left with either charging her for the crime of FGM or—should that not hold water—practising medicine without a licence. But even there, they had very little to present to the Crown Prosecution Service unless someone was willing to produce a signed statement. Again, as Havers might have put it, they were spitting into a very strong headwind.
So when he arrived at New Scotland Yard, he was the bearer of no good news. There had been nothing for it but to release her once he’d got the word from Winston Nkata that Monifa Bankole was maintaining her silence about the Kingsland High Street clinic.
Everyone was beavering away at their assignments from the previous evening’s meeting of the team. It was the sort of work that took hours of slogging. Phone calls were being made to every charity shop and consignment shop in Greater London in an effort to find the missing sculpture; Winston had sent one of the team’s DCs to speak to the removals men in order to learn the exact location to which they’d transported the clinic’s equipment and furniture so that they could alert the owner to ring the police should those items be removed; he’d also charged another DC with locating the paperwork on the lease agreement for the clinic in Kingsland High Street. Since Lynley had phoned Winston post his extremely brief conversation with Mercy Hart and given him the word, he was now—with the last DC—collecting all CCTV footage in the vicinity of the clinic in an effort to give the lie to Mercy Hart’s declaration that she’d never once spoken to Teo Bontempi: as Adaku Obiaka, as Teo Bontempi, or as anyone else.
He’d just finished speaking with Winston when Dorothea Harriman entered the room. She was carrying an embarrassingly large arrangement of seasonal flowers, which she placed with what appeared to be triumph upon Barbara Havers’s desk. She looked about, saw Lynley, and said slyly, “There’s a card! Shall I . . . ,” with a surreptitious glance for eavesdroppers or spies. “D’you think she’d mind if we sneaked a peek at the card?”
Lynley said, “I daresay we can label that as a less than profound idea, Dee.”
“But I so want to know . . .”