The detective sergeant saw him looking at the photos and said, “Three more on the way. My daughter’s due next month and my son’s wife—not that son in the picture, mind you—is having twins in December. If she lasts that long. To hear her, you’d think she’s been carrying septuplets for a year. Now. DCS Phinney wants you brought up to speed. ’Tween you and me, I think he’d be the better one to do it since I’m still getting up to speed myself, although he’s been good at helping out when he can. But this”—she pointed a slender finger to the surface of the desk—“is mostly how I’m having to do it. Reading every file and report I can put my hands on. So I’m not sure how much I can help you, but I’ll give it a go.”
“Is all of this from DS Bontempi?”
“She left everything behind. Only took personal items from her desk. The way DCS Phinney tells me, she wasn’t exactly over the moon to be transferred. I expect she left in a huff and reckoned she’d let someone else deal with her mess. I don’t blame her. She’d been working on this team for years.”
“Did you speak to her once you took her place?”
“Oh yeah. By phone, this was. I asked her first what she wanted to keep from what she’d left. She said nothing. I could have it all and do with it whatever I would. I could bin it if I wanted. I rang her with questions a couple more times after that and she rang me once as well.”
“Did she help bring you on board?”
“She was good about that, she was, especially with all my questions. You ask me, she did a good job entire time she was here.”
“Anything you can tell me about her and about her activities is enormously helpful. Just now, we don’t know much.”
The detective settled back into her chair and folded her hands in her lap. She said, “Way I understand it, she was involved in a big way with individual communities, mostly through community centres. She also talked to assemblies in schools and she made contact with various support groups for girls across town. And she’d managed to get fairly close to the Nigerian community: knowing people by name, developing relationships with them, and the like. She’s Nigerian herself—but I expect you know that—so she made a good fit. Th’ way the guv tells it—the DCs as well—she was that good with people.”
“Is there anything in all this that’s caught your eye?” Lynley put his hand on a pile of manila folders. “Any names, dates, places, reports that might give someone a bad shock if it came out that DS Bontempi had some sort of relevant information or that she was also a cop? Did people know that, by the way, when she was at work in the community?”
“Not sure ’bout that. But she didn’t hide it, far as I know. She was going to schools and to groups, like I said. Can’t think she would’ve been allowed to do that without telling head teachers that she was a cop.”
Lynley nodded. It made sense. “Anything else?” he asked.
Hopwood looked as if she was considering the question, her gaze on the mass of material in front of her. She said, “Y’know, there was this one thing . . . ,” and she reached into the lower of the in-and-out trays and grabbed a sheaf of papers held together by a large black clip. She unfastened this and fingered through the information till she came to what she wanted. This was a card the size of a business card, but blank on both sides save for a line of numbers printed across it. It was stapled to a piece of white paper. There was no indication what it was aside from what it appeared to be: a mobile phone number.
“Have you rung it?” Lynley asked.
“Twice,” she replied. “All I get is one of those computer voices telling me to leave a message. Which I’ve also done. No joy, though.”
“Did you ask DS Bontempi what it was, this number?”
“Didn’t get a chance. I hadn’t even got to it yet. I only found it last afternoon when I was pulling out all her reports and the like for you.”
“You’ve not started a trace?”
“Like I said, no chance.”
“And that’s the only thing that leapt out at you?”
“Even that di’n’t exactly leap. More like it slithered.” She chuckled. Then something seemed to strike her because she went on. “Oh. Wait. Right. There’d been two arrests not long before she left us, so that could be something.”
“What sort of arrests?”
“Let me see . . .” She stood as this made it easier for her to shift things around and find what she was looking for. She said, “Two women got hauled to the local nick for questions. A DC there wrote th’ initial report. It’s here somewhere—” She pulled out a folder from the stack and opened it, saying, “Here. Happened in north London. Stoke Newington Station dealt with it, but DS Bontempi got the paperwork on it. Like I said, she went to community centres and the like, and I expect she developed some decent informants. Anyway, what she says in an attachment to the report is that there’s community cutters in north London who’re being paid by families when they can’t go to Africa to have it done. These cutters’re African women, who did the same back there and support themselves now by doing it here.”