Getting to Streatham turned out to be relatively easy since no Victorian water main had burst in the night, no one had hit a cyclist before dawn, and most of the traffic was headed into town anyway, and not out towards the suburbs. So once she made it over the river, she arrived with no difficulty other than the coffee spill, and she parked across Streatham High Road from the building that housed Teo Bontempi’s—soon to be Ross Carver’s—flat.
She crossed the street and let herself in to the block of flats. The lift was still not reliably lifting anything, so once again she clomped up the stairs, managing to slosh coffee only once en route to the flat. She let herself in, opened the balcony door to allow the relatively cooler morning air to relieve the stifling conditions inside the place, and set her coffee on the kitchen worktop. She did a small recce round the room on the chance that she and Nkata had missed something. She was just completing the removal of everything hanging on every wall—preparatory to checking each article for signs its backing had been tampered with—when she heard a key scraping in the lock. The door opened and Ross Carver stood there.
Seen before, he’d been rather piratical in appearance. Now he was dressed more formally, although he managed to demonstrate that three-piece suits, bowler hats, and rolled-up brollies weren’t going to reappear in London anytime soon. He was khaki and cotton with a casually knotted necktie. No earrings or manbun, just an elastic band gathering his curls at the base of his neck. Three cardboard boxes formed a neat stack next to him. He gave Barbara a nod of hello, picked them up, and carried them inside.
He was even wearing designer sunglasses, which he removed once he’d shut the door.
“You’re working early hours, then,” she said to him.
“It helps. I’m not one hundred percent present every moment, but it’s a distraction to be back, which I bloody well need just now. What’ve you lot found?” He slid his sunglasses into the pocket of his shirt.
“Adaku Obiaka.”
“Teo’s birth name. It wasn’t a secret.”
“At times she was operating under it. African togs head to toe. The full Monty this was. The team she was part of out of Empress State Building didn’t know about any of this, so she wasn’t working undercover for them. She was on her own. Any idea why?”
He walked into the living room and sat at the dining table. Barbara joined him. He looked away from her in the direction of the balcony, with its shelf of neatly arranged bonsai trees. “Was she taking back her birth name officially?” he asked, and his tone—which tried and failed to sound indifferent—made it seem to Barbara as if her reply would have a deeper meaning to him than merely a factoid about his estranged wife.
“We haven’t checked. Could be that she was using it only when she went to Orchid House as a way of being undercover. But her sister’s claimed to one of our lot that she’d ‘gone African.’ So, I reckon, the name she was using could have something to do with that.”
“What’s Orchid House? I don’t know it.”
“A group sheltering girls who’re at risk of FGM. Teo—as Adaku—was a volunteer there. It doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with her regular job, but that can’t be ruled out.”
He was silent for a moment, as if tossing this information round in his head. Finally, he said, “That makes sense, that she’d volunteer there.” And then with a look that seemed to interpret Barbara’s facial expression, he went on with, “I expect you know by now she’d been cut.”
“From the autopsy.”
“Right. Of course. There would have been an autopsy.” He was quiet for a moment. He’d begun to perspire but so had Barbara. She got up, switched on the fan for the little good it would do, and returned to the table. He said, “She told me years and years ago, when I wanted sex. We were teenagers with all the hormones doing their thing, you know. I pressed her for sex without knowing what was wrong. I kept pressing her till she told me.”
“And when she told you . . . ?”
He sighed. “Are you asking how I felt, what I did, what went next? I was nineteen, Sergeant. I was randy as the devil, and I wanted her. I didn’t even know what she meant about the cut. I was more, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll sort it but, look, I’m dying for you and I want us to start doing it.’ Then, of course, I learned exactly what she meant when she said she’d been cut.”
“How’d you react?”