Nkata clocked them first, saying, “You got to look ’t this, guv. I had it off Monifa Bankole before I left Brixton.”
Lynley joined them, as did Havers. “What is it?” He put on his reading spectacles and took the photograph that one of the DCs was extending in his direction. In it, a good-looking Black teenager was caught half in shadow, half in light. He wore a white T-shirt with a small hole in the neck. His arms were crossed but the light struck him in a way that defined his muscles. Lynley knew who had taken the picture before he turned it over and saw the small gold seal with Deborah’s name upon it.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Tani Bankole. Tha’s Monifa’s son. He’s with Simisola in Chelsea.”
Lynley looked at the picture again and said, “This wasn’t taken in Chelsea, was it.” He handed it to Havers and removed his glasses. “It’s significant somehow?” he asked Nkata.
“Bloody hell,” Havers muttered. “Bloody bleeding hell.” She raised her head and went on with, “Winnie, I’d ravish you on the spot but I don’t think either of us would live through it.”
“Thought you’d say that,” Nkata said. “Well, not that ’xactly. But I figgered you’d wan’ to see it.”
Lynley drew his eyebrows together. Obviously, he’d overlooked a significant detail that the picture displayed.
Havers tapped the picture, a tap not on the boy but on the background. Lynley returned his glasses to his nose. He saw that Deborah had adjusted the depth of field so that the background was little more than a series of shapes, rendering it more like a cubist painting than whatever it actually was. He could tell it was a wall behind the boy and he assumed the wall held objects of some sort, none of which were particularly definable. But because of its position—which was closer to the camera and not on the wall but instead upon a table close behind Deborah’s subject—one of these objects was more defined, albeit not perfectly. From what Lynley saw, the object looked tall. It looked angular. It also looked bronze. But more than that and above it all, the object looked like Standing Warrior.
Lynley understood then why the excitement in the room was muted. There were, after all, thirteen copies of Standing Warrior in various collections of African art located by Havers, with one of them gone missing from Teo Bontempi’s own collection. This sculpture in the photo could be the missing sculpture they sought. But even if it was Standing Warrior, it just as easily could be one of the series sold by Padma, a piece belonging to an individual on the list Barbara Havers had produced from that gallery in Peckham.
“This could be pay dirt,” Havers said. “We need to know where Deborah St. James took this picture.”
“We need to be certain this is Standing Warrior as well,” Lynley told her.
“Sir, you can see—”
“We can see the shape, and yes, I agree, it looks very much like Standing Warrior. But let’s begin with the owner and go from there. I’ll ring Deborah. The rest of you, soldier on.”
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL LONDON
Deborah laid out the photographs she thought would be best suited to the booklet that Dominique Shaw had in mind for the Department for Education. The undersecretary had brought along a mock-up of the final project, so together they were able to see which of the photographs seemed to fit best on those pages that were going to require pictures.
Narissa Cameron and Zawadi were there as well. Narissa had presented the undersecretary with a rough cut of the twenty-minute film that, when completed, would be shown to schoolgirls. The longer film—the actual documentary, she’d told Deborah—was at least a year away from completion. But the good news was that Zawadi had agreed to be the narrator in both.
By phone late the previous evening, Narissa had confided to Deborah that, with her reputation trashed by the tabloids in the wake of “the Akin affair,” as she called it, Zawadi understood that only a defiant stance and a head-held-high presence in the fight against female abuse was going to prove to the public that she was undaunted by mistakes she might have made with regard to the Akin family. “She came to understand that fading from view would be unwise,” Narissa had said to Deborah. “Personally, I intend to suggest she also get a publicist to do whatever it is they do when people want a better public image. But it’s early days for that, and in the meantime, I don’t want anything to put her off narrating the films.”
“I’m glad to know you’re going to narrate,” Deborah said to Zawadi when she joined them. “You’re a good choice.”