BETHNAL GREEN
EAST LONDON
Mercy Hart had been taken to a custody suite in Bethnal Green, certainly closer than the station nearest to her home but inconvenient nonetheless. There, she’d been placed under arrest. There, she’d been waiting in a cell pending the arrival of her solicitor as well as the detectives on their way from Central London to interview her. She’d been in the hands of the police for more than three hours by the time everyone was assembled.
In Lynley’s experience, only career criminals or repeat offenders were unbothered by the quite particular sound of a cell door slamming shut upon them. As Mercy Hart was neither of these, she’d become a bundle of nerves by the time Lynley and Havers entered the interview room where she and her solicitor were waiting.
She had a great deal to be nervous about. The first bit of CCTV footage that Lynley and Havers viewed had come from Taste of Tennessee’s security camera. Teo Bontempi in the native dress of Adaku Obiaka had passed directly beneath this camera in close conversation with Mercy Hart. Mercy had been the one talking, Teo Bontempi listening intently with her hand through Mercy Hart’s arm. They might have been two friends having a chat as they strolled along had the woman in native garb only been someone else. That she was a detective on a team bent upon eliminating FGM in London and beyond gave the conversation a different colour than it might otherwise have had.
The second bit of footage was more damning still. It had come from one of the Met’s surveillance cameras in the high street, this one perched on the edge of Rio Cinema’s roof, with its wide-angle lens taking in the street for a good thirty yards in either direction. The CCTV was state of the art, so the picture was clear. It also could be enlarged. So Mercy Hart was quite identifiable when she opened the ground-floor door and admitted Teo Bontempi into the building where the clinic was located.
Mercy had been charged with lying to the police, practicing medicine without a licence, and performing female genital mutilation. She was now teetering on the edge of being charged with homicide as well. To Astolat Abbott’s demand for evidence, Lynley assured her that evidence regarding FGM was well in hand in the form of a full statement made by a woman who’d arranged to have her daughter cut at the Kingsland High Street clinic. This procedure would be performed by one Easter Lange, an identity adopted by Mercy Hart, who was the niece of the owner of that name. This same “Easter Lange” had placed her signature upon the lease for the clinic, as well as upon the paperwork attached to hiring a lock-up in a storage facility where the clinic’s contents had been taken after the local police had raided it. A picture of Mercy Hart was being taken to the storage facility, and the lessor of the lock-up would be looking at her photograph as well. As far as performing FGM went, Ms. Abbott’s client was finished and soon to be imprisoned.
“Do you have any comment you’d like to make?” Lynley asked Mercy.
Mercy looked at her solicitor. Astolat Abbott communicated with her digitally, in the true sense: she raised the fingers of her left hand slightly and then lowered them.
Mercy looked back at Lynley and said, “I do what I’m told.”
“What’s that meant to tell us?” Havers asked.
“It tells you that you’re wasting your time with my client,” Astolat Abbott said. “Whatever you think has gone on in that clinic, it has nothing to do with her. She was only employed there to book clients and to pass out paperwork for them to complete.”
“That doesn’t quite explain her conversations with Adaku Obiaka,” Lynley noted.
“I told you,” Mercy said sharply. “I don’t know that person. I’ve never met that person.”
“So that’s not you on Taste of Tennessee’s CCTV footage?” Havers asked. “You and Adaku having a natter while you shimmy down the street together?”
“You admitted her into the clinic,” Lynley added. “The Met’s CCTV has a very good record of that.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “None of that. Nothing.”
“How do you explain the films, then?” Havers asked.
“These things . . . ? Everyone knows they can be altered. If you have a laptop, you can do that.”
“Got it,” Havers said. “Any clue why Taste of Tennessee would be interested in altering their video?”
“The films would’ve been altered after,” Mercy said.
“After what, exactly?”
“Once you got your hands on the films, then they would have been altered.”