She made a grab for the passports, but he stepped back. She came towards him. He stepped to the side. She snatched at his arm and her nails dug in. He shook her off. She blocked his route out of the kitchen and began to scream: for help, for the police, for his father. She was being brutalised. Intruder! Intruder! Burglar! Rapist! Murderer! Thief!
The only way out of the flat was the way he’d come in and she was blocking him. He had to move her out of his way. She was rock solid and screaming bloody murder into his face. He did what he had to do. He shoved her to one side. She crashed to the floor.
He didn’t stop to see how she landed or where she landed or if she needed help. He had to get out of there. That was what he did.
EMPRESS STATE BUILDING
WEST BROMPTON
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
His Met identification had been enough to get him through security and to the lifts this time round. When Lynley finally arrived from north London and rode up to the seventeenth floor, he found Mark Phinney seated at DS Jade Hopwood’s desk. As Lynley entered, DS Hopwood was shaking her head and saying, “Look, if you want my opinion, guv . . .”
“I do,” Phinney declared.
“Then here it is. No amount of enforced education is going to work for women if the men don’t start speaking up. You ask me, they’re the key, not the women. I’m talking about Nigerian men, not just Black blokes off the street. Until they begin stepping forward to declare they’re willing, happy, and eager to marry a woman who hasn’t been cut, there i’n’t going to be a change.”
“An entire paradigm shift,” was Mark Phinney’s response.
“Whatever you want to call it. And, if I can suggest . . . ?”
“Go ahead.”
“You need Black officers to take the messaging and sermonising where they need to go because these white blokes you’ve got now? It’s ludicrous, it is, to have them preaching anything about how Black men—Nigerian or not—need to start viewing Black women.” The detective sergeant saw Lynley then and said, “I expect DCS Lynley’ll take my side.”
“It makes sense,” Lynley said. “But I only heard the last minute of your conversation. I’m clueless about what went before.” And then to Mark, “I need a word, if you will.”
The DCS told DS Hopwood to carry on and took Lynley to his office. There, Lynley asked him about his brother’s car. He was in luck when it came to this, he discovered. Because Phinney had been meeting with Jade Hopwood, he hadn’t checked his phone. He did so at the mention of the car, however. But first he shut his office door.
“I did borrow it.” Phinney moved behind his desk but he didn’t sit. Instead, he went to the window, where the time of day allowed him to be backlit, his face made much more difficult to read. “I didn’t see that I had a choice. I was afraid she intended to confront Teo again, and there wasn’t a point to her doing that. It would upset her. It would upset Teo. I’d reassured Pete more than once. I’d said it was over, and it was over. I told her I would never leave her and Lilybet, and I wouldn’t have done. How could I and still live with myself? So in my mind, there was nothing left to say. About Teo, I mean. About myself and Teo. I could repeat myself again and again into eternity, but what was the point?”
His office window was large and he leaned against its sill. Behind him the blue of the sky was washed by smog and bore a growing yellow hue, another declaration that London—indeed, the entire country—was desperate for rain.
Phinney said, “For a few years, she’s been going out weekly to meet a friend of hers. It’s the only thing she’s willing to do, socially. She’s called Greer, the friend. She was to be the midwife when Lilybet was born. That wasn’t how things turned out, but she and Pete became quite close. Sometimes they have a two-person book discussion group, sometimes they go out for a drink or a meal or a film. This time, Pete said, they were meeting at a wine bar.”
“The meeting didn’t occur, I take it?”
“What occurred was a knock on the door and Greer on the front step. Coming along to say hello, she told me. She’d been in the area. First, I thought she’d mixed up their meeting place or p’rhaps Pete had. But it turns out they’d stopped meeting altogether. Pete had called a halt to it some three months ago. I wondered at this. Who wouldn’t? It seemed to me that if she’d stopped meeting with Greer but was still going out weekly, there were only two other possibilities as to where she was and where she’d been on those nights when she’d gone out. She either had a lover or she was . . . I don’t know . . . stalking Teo? Watching Teo? Waiting to see if I would turn up somehow?”