which the spaciousness of the floors below gave way to crow-stepped gables and a mansard roof. As much accommodation as possible had been crammed into the space, and these rooms opened off a narrow corridor where the air was so close it had probably gone unrefreshed since the first Gulf War.
Inside Yukio Matsumoto's bed-sit, the atmosphere was oppressively hot, and the place was quite disturbingly fitted out with floor-to-ceiling figures that had been drawn on the walls with marker pens. They loomed everywhere, dozens of them. A scrutiny indicated they depicted angels.
"What in God's name ... ," Isabelle murmured as next to her Lynley fished out his reading glasses to give the scrawled figures closer scrutiny. Behind her, she heard Hiro Matsumoto sigh tremulously. She glanced his way. He looked infinitely sad.
"What is it?" she asked.
The cellist's gaze went from one drawing to the next to the next. "He thinks they speak to him. The celestial host."
"The what?"
"All the different kinds of angels," Lynley put in.
"There's more than one kind?"
"There are nine different kinds."
And he could no doubt list them, Isabelle thought grimly. Well, she didn't want to know - nor did she need to know - the categories of celestial whatever-they-were. What she needed to know was what, if anything, they had to do with Jemima Hastings' death. She reckoned nothing. But Hiro said, "They battle for him. In his head, of course, but he hears them and he sometimes thinks he sees them. What he sees are people, but angels have come in human guise in the past. And of course they are always depicted in a human form in art and in books and because of this, he thinks he's one with them. He believes they're waiting for him to declare his intention. It's the very heart of his illness. Yet it proves, doesn't it, that he harmed no one?"
Isabelle took in the drawings as Lynley moved along them slowly. There were angels descending into pools of water where humans lay crumpled with arms extended in supplication; there were angels driving demons before them to work on a temple in the distance; there were angels with trumpets, angels holding books, angels with weapons, and one enormous wing-spread creature leading an army, while nearby another cast destruction upon a biblical-looking town. And one entire section appeared to be given to a struggle between two types of angels: one armed with weapons and one with wings spread to cover cowering humans below.
"He believes he must choose," Hiro Matsumoto said.
"Choose what?" Isabelle asked. Lynley, she saw, had moved to a narrow single bed, where a bedside table held a lamp, a book, and a filmy-looking glass of water. The book he picked up and opened. A card fell out and he bent to take it up from the floor as Hiro Matsumoto answered.
"Between guardian angel and warrior angel," he said. "To protect or to ..." He hesitated, so Isabelle finished the thought.
"To punish," she said. "Well, it seems he made his choice, doesn't it?"
"Please, he did not - "
"Guv." Lynley was looking at the card. She crossed the room to him. It was, she saw, yet another of the National Portrait Gallery postcards featuring the photograph of Jemima Hastings.
It also bore "Have You Seen This Woman?" upon it but over the image of the sleeping lion had been scrawled an angel like those in the room. It had its wings spread out to create a shield but no weapons were in its hands. "It looks as if he was leaning towards guarding, not punishing,"
Lynley said.
Isabelle was about to tell him it didn't look like anything of the sort when Yukio's brother cried out. She swung round. She saw that he'd approached the room's basin and he was staring at something lying on its edge. She said sharply, "Keep away from it!" and she strode across the room to see what he'd stumbled upon.
Whatever it was, it was crusted with blood. Indeed it was crusted with so much blood that other than its shape, it was indefinable.
"Ah," Isabelle said. "Yes indeed. Don't touch that thing, Mr. Matsumoto."
THE TIME OF day limited his options for parking in Chelsea. Lynley had to make do with a hike over from Carlyle Square. He crossed the King's Road and walked towards the river via Old Church Street. As he did so, he considered the various ways in which he might avoid AC
Hillier over the next few days and the other various ways in which he