Deborah knew the value of having Dr. Weatherall’s work represented in the photo book, however. It was a beacon of hope for the thousands of women who’d been disfigured, either in the UK or before their arrival. She said, “I do understand, but I’m wondering if we can compromise. What about an interview accompanied by one or two photographs during the surgery? You’d be fully covered. And I wouldn’t use your name.”
Dr. Weatherall hoisted the scull again. She carried it to the water’s edge where she’d placed the oars. She said, “What’s the point of that?”
“Hope,” Deborah said. “Garnering support. Gaining the interest of other surgeons who could then train like you.”
The surgeon considered this, although she was beginning to seem impatient with Deborah’s tenacity. Still, after several moments of thought, she said, “No names? Not mine, not my anaesthetist’s, not the nurse’s, not the patient’s? And the patient might well not want to be photographed at all, so this conversation we’re having could be for nothing. Would you accept that?”
Deborah was hardly in the driver’s seat. But she’d got further than Narissa, at least. She said, “I’d be happy to accept that.”
STREATHAM
SOUTH LONDON
The building that housed Teo Bontempi’s flat was situated on Streatham High Road, on a section that featured broad pavements and leafy London planes with their distinctive peeling bark. These provided ample shade, although the lack of summer rainfall had made their leaves dusty and looking stressed.
Lynley parked the Healey Elliott in as large a space as he could find, directly in front of Maxwell Brothers Funeral Directors and a few doors down from Carpetright, a business apparently having a half-price sale on laminate flooring. The block of flats in question sat directly across the road, as architecturally uninspiring as grey concrete, nondescript shrubbery, and a few scattered balconies could make it. The structure was reminiscent of those in former Eastern Bloc countries, rectangular and unforgiving, with plain steps and plainer handrails leading up to plain front doors.
He crossed the street. Havers, he saw, had managed to reach Streatham before him. Her banged-up Mini was parked directly in front of the building and with her usual panache: three of its wheels on the pavement and a faded police placard propped up on the steering wheel, eating up sunlight.
Next to the front doors were plain mailboxes and a column of buzzers. Above these buzzers hung a CCTV camera, that ubiquitous feature of modern London.
When he pushed the buzzer next to the name Bontempi, Havers’s disembodied voice called out, “Yeah? C’n I help?”
“I earnestly hope so,” he replied.
“Right,” she said. “Second floor, sir. Lift’s a bit wonky, so I’d give it a pass. Stairs’re at the end of the corridor.”
She buzzed him in, and he saw that, like its exterior, nothing distinguished the building inside. Institutional yellow-speckled grey lino squares covered the corridor floor, and the doors to each flat bore black metal numbers, two locks, and one peephole each. The stairs—separated from the corridor by a hideous fire door of the sort one saw in every multi-unit residential building in the country—were concrete like the front steps of the building, the handrail some kind of metal once painted shiny black but now badly chipped. Lynley climbed to the second floor and found Havers waiting in the corridor in front of an open door midway down. She wore paper shoe covers and her latex gloves put him in mind of Minnie Mouse. He didn’t mention this.
“How long have you been here?” he asked her.
“？’Bout twenty minutes. I’ve just been through the kitchen. Nothing in there of interest ’nless rotting iceberg lettuce means something crucial. Mind the fingerprint dust when you go inside, sir. The crime scene blokes were dead liberal with the stuff as per usual.” She handed over a second pair of latex gloves along with shoe covers. He donned these and followed her into the flat.
He saw that it was quite a decent size. Midway down the corridor and to his right he found a door opened to a large bedroom with capacious clothes cupboards and en suite bathroom. To his left two large cupboards provided storage, and directly ahead was a sitting room with a balcony overlooking Streatham High Road. The balcony’s door stood open—in hope of a breeze, he reckoned—and a fan was running. This disturbed a stack of papers on a dining table that were weighed down by an African cookbook.
“Let’s have a look at all that,” Lynley told Havers. “I’ll see to the fan.”