He made a gesture of get-on-with-it and scribbled some notes on the paper he was reading. Deborah put her metal case on one of the leather chairs and opened it.
Lynley saw it contained her digital camera and an additional lens. She turned the camera over to its screen and switched it on. She began going through its photos, so quickly that he didn’t have time to register them. But when she came to one in particular, she stopped and turned the camera so that he could see the screen: a haunted-looking woman in African dress, turbaned, with a substantial necklace carved from wood and large gold hoops in her ears.
“This is Adaku,” Deborah said.
“This is Teo Bontempi,” he told her.
7 AUGUST
EMPRESS STATE BUILDING
WEST BROMPTON
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
By phone Lynley had made certain that DS Jade Hopwood knew he would be coming to Empress State Building. He didn’t want to waste time through having her not expect him, but more than that he didn’t want to have to wait for her and thus inadvertently give himself any time during which he might be forced to think. If he did that, his thoughts would take him directly to Daidre, and if his thoughts took him directly to Daidre, one of the many subjects with which they would present him was the one that had him questioning why he hadn’t yet phoned her.
He asked himself if his reluctance had to do with owing her an apology. He wasn’t sure if this was one of those gentlemen-typically-do-not kinds of moments in his life, during which his conscience took up residence in his brain till he behaved by rote exactly as he’d been brought up to behave, or if this was one of those moments in which he merely needed to clarify all that had passed between them, particularly what had been said and which part of that was his responsibility.
Admittedly, he did seem to choose the most extraordinary women with whom to fall in love. They always turned out to be far more complicated than he reckoned they would be. He couldn’t work out why this was the case, unless it meant that he simply didn’t understand women at all, which seemed ever more a distinct possibility. He was, perhaps, expecting them to be Jane Bennet to his Mr. Bingley （because, after all, he knew he couldn’t possibly cope with an Elizabeth）， which meant his unspoken and unacknowledged wish was for a woman who blushed, made conversation when necessary, knew all the appropriate social niceties, was gentle and submissive, expressed her opinions in ways that he found both acceptable and supportive of his own opinions, and otherwise didn’t occupy his mind other than when she was playing the piano and even then she would exist merely as an object for him to own and admire. But surely that couldn’t be the case. Could it? No. It absolutely couldn’t. He wanted a life companion, a woman with her own mind who was more than merely a piece of set decoration with a vague talent for arranging flowers and embroidering handkerchiefs with his initials. So how the devil was he going to manage it? That was the conundrum he faced with Daidre, because the very last thing Daidre Trahair was, was a decorative object to be shown off to the world, and when it came to flowers, she’d probably be far happier feeding them to one of her zoo animals than placing them in vases. As for the handkerchiefs . . . one could only expect so much of another human being. There remained, however, the reality he was facing: while he could identify with a fair amount of precision what Daidre wasn’t, he still hadn’t been able to put many pieces together that would tell him what she was. And in those infrequent moments when he did discover something new about her, he was proving himself completely incapable of dealing with it.
Lynley headed for the entrance to Empress State Building, where he found DS Jade Hopwood waiting for him, a visitor’s badge in hand. He knew from doing preliminary legwork that she was fifty-five years old and a grandmother twice over, but she looked far younger, her dark skin unlined, not a strand of grey in her hair. She wore this in a multitude of braids that encircled her head. She was sporting three stud earrings on one side of her head and a large gold hoop on the other, and she was very smartly dressed. She was also unsmiling and all business. When he introduced himself, she offered a brusque nod and led him—much as Mark Phinney had done—towards the lifts that serviced the higher floors of the building. But unlike Phinney, she didn’t take him to the Orbit. Instead, they rode to the seventeenth floor, and when the lift doors slid silently open, she strode to her desk, snatching up a plastic chair on the way. This she plopped down at the side of her desk. She gestured Lynley to it and sat herself.
He saw that her desk had no bare surface. It was a mass of manila folders, internet printouts, newspapers and tabloids, books, brochures, and CDs. Two framed photos sat atop a set of overfull metal in-and-out trays. One held a picture of two small girls clutching between them a very large Winnie the Pooh and the other held a picture of these same girls with, he assumed, their parents. They were a handsome group.