attended an admirable number of courses in Bramshill. He had twenty-three years of service under his belt, all of them spent in Hampshire. If he was involved in anything untoward, Lynley hadn't sorted what it was. He can be a bit of a bully on occasion had been the nastiest comment anyone cared to make about the bloke, although He's been sometimes too enthusiastic about the job in hand could, Lynley knew, have several interpretations.
As for Ringo Heath, there was nothing. Especially there was no connection of record between Heath and Chief Superintendent Whiting. As to a connection between Whiting and Gordon Jossie, whatever it was, it was going to have to come out of Jossie's background because it certainly wasn't coming out of Whiting's.
"So it's sod bloody all on a biscuit, eh?" was how Havers received the information. "I s'pose her order to come home makes sense."
"You're on your way, aren't you?" Lynley asked her.
"With Winston at the wheel? What d' you think?"
Which meant that Nkata who, unlike Havers, had a history of taking orders seriously, was returning them to London. Had she been given her way in matters, Barbara would have probably dallied until she was satisfied by what she was able to gather about everyone in Hampshire even remotely connected to Jemima Hastings' death.
He concluded his call as Isabelle Ardery returned from her meeting with Hillier and Stephenson Deacon. She looked no more harried than usual, so he concluded the meeting had gone marginally well. Then John Stewart fielded a phone call from SO7 that put a full stop to the case as far as Ardery was concerned. They had the analysis of the two hairs found on the body of Jemima Hastings, he told them.
"Well, thank God for that," Ardery declared. "What've we got?"
"Oriental," he told her.
"Hallelujah."
It would have been a moment for packing everything in then, and Lynley could see that Ardery was inclined to do so. But Dorothea Harriman came into the room in the very next moment and, with her words, burst everything wide open.
One Bella McHaggis was downstairs in reception, Harriman told them, and she wanted to speak to Barbara Havers.
"She was told the detective sergeant is in Hampshire, so she's asked to see whoever's in charge of the case," Harriman said. "She's got evidence, she says, and she doesn't mean to hand it over to just anyone."
BELLA WAS NO longer suspicious of Paolo di Fazio. That was finished the moment she'd seen the error in her thinking. She didn't regret setting the coppers after him since she watched enough police dramas on the telly to know that everyone had to be eliminated as suspects in order to find the guilty party and, like it or not, he was a suspect. So was she, she supposed. Anyway, she reckoned he'd get over whatever offence he might be feeling because of her suspicions and if he didn't, he'd find other lodgings, but in any case she couldn't be bothered because Jemima's handbag had to be turned over to the officers investigating the case.
As she didn't intend waiting at home for them finally to show their faces this time round, she didn't bother with the phone. Instead, she'd dropped Jemima's handbag into the canvas carryall that she used for her grocery shopping, and she'd carted it off to New Scotland Yard because that was where that Sergeant Havers person had come from.
When she learned that Sergeant Havers wasn't in, she'd demanded someone else. The head, the chief, the whoever's-in-charge, she said to the uniform in reception. And she wasn't leaving till she talked to that person. In person, by the way. Not on the phone. She parked herself near the eternal flame and there she determined to remain.
And damn, if she didn't have to wait exactly forty-three minutes for a responsible party finally to appear. Even when this happened, she didn't think she was looking at the responsible party at all. A tall, nice-looking man approached her and, when he spoke from beneath his head of beautifully groomed blond hair, he didn't sound like anyone she'd ever heard yapping away on The Bill. He was Inspector Lynley, he said in the plummy tone that had always proclaimed Public School in One's Past. Did she have something related to the investigation?
"Are you in charge?" she demanded, and when he admitted that he was not, she told him to fetch whoever was and that, she said, was how it was going to be. She was in