“So how’d she work it out?” he asked Rosie when she returned to lean against the window with him.
She rubbed a nonexistent spot on the arm of her blouse. This was the colour of cream, and it looked like silk. She said, “Who?”
“Your sister. How’d she work it out that your parents took her only because otherwise they wouldn’t get you?”
“I don’t know. P’rhaps one of them told her. Or Ross. He might’ve known from his own parents.”
“This’s your brother-in-law, right?”
“More or less. We all grew up together. His parents and mine were extremely close.”
“？‘More or less’ meaning what?” Nkata asked her.
“They were divorcing, Ross and Teo. We did mention that when you came to speak to us. He was on his way out of being my brother-in-law.”
“Way I hear it, he wasn’t ’xactly on board with that.”
“With the divorce?” She dropped her gaze to her stilettos. There was very little to them, he saw, just a few pieces of leather and a heel that looked like a rapier. He couldn’t imagine what her feet felt like at the end of the day.
“Look. It’s like this,” Rosie said. “Teo threw Ross away. He wasn’t African, and, like I said, she’d gone completely African. He’s white and she can’t—she couldn’t—abide anyone white once she learned why she’d been adopted. It was a dreadful blow for her. What else can I say?”
She could say that she was the one to tell her sister the adoption story, Nkata thought. He reckoned sharing that sort of news would be right up her alley.
TRINITY GREEN
WHITECHAPEL
EAST LONDON
Barbara Havers thought it was a good bet that she was going to have two big problems with paying a call on anyone at Orchid House. The first was that she was a cop and, as such, a life force sure to freeze her out of everyone’s heart once she stepped foot in the place. The second was that she was white, and although Lynley had explained to her that Deborah St. James had already made an inroad in the white woman department, Deborah St. James had not been there to ask questions but merely to take pictures. So her first reaction to the activity Lynley had assigned her once his meeting with DS Hopwood had finished was, “Shouldn’t Winston do this, sir?”
“According to Deborah, men aren’t welcome inside,” Lynley said. “Rein in your tendency to say the first thing that pops into your mind, and you’ll be fine.”
“And when I tell them that one Adaku Obitami—”
“Obiaka, Barbara.”
“Obiaka, right. How d’you expect they’re going to greet the news that Adaku Obiaka was a cop?”
“I doubt that’s where you’ll begin,” Lynley said. “By the time you reveal the information—if you must reveal the information—I feel certain you will have won them over with your abundant charms.”
So she crisscrossed the City to get to London Wall and from there to Mile End Road. What she knew about the location of Orchid House was limited to “You’ll find it inside the chapel in Trinity Green,” from Deborah St. James via mobile phone. “It’s two rows of almshouses—Trinity Green—behind a brick wall. If you find you’ve come to the statues of the Booths—which is what I did—you’ll have gone too far.” She’d added the completely unhelpful information that the Booths—a mister and a missus—had founded the Salvation Army and there appeared to be some sort of Salvation Army building in the vicinity, which, if she came across it instead of seeing the Booths, would also tell her she’d driven too far.
With that in mind, once Barbara managed to get herself and her Mini to Mile End Road, she began to keep her eyes open for brick walls and almshouses or, if it came to that, the statues of the Booths. It was, she thought, not the sort of area one would expect to find almshouses, behind brick walls or not. This part of Whitechapel appeared to be a commercial area exclusively. Lorries by the dozens barrelled through it, trundling goods to and from their destinations as they belched diesel fumes into the day’s growing hot air. The traffic noise was teeth grinding, and it wasn’t the sort of steady motorised roar that one might become used to, at long last fading into the background in such a way as to become unnoticeable should one live nearby. It was certainly ceaseless enough to qualify as white noise, but it was also accompanied by the grinding of gears, the squeaking of brakes, and the occasional blaring of a horn, and all of this at a volume just shy of deafening.