need of police protection from the killer of Jemima Hastings, she said, and she had a feeling he wasn't going to be able to provide that on his own. "I know who did it," she told him and she lifted the carryall to her chest, "and what I've got in here proves it."
"Ah," he said politely. "And what have you got in there?"
"I'm not a nutter," she told him sharply because she could tell what he was thinking about her. "You fetch who needs to be fetched, my good man."
He went to make a phone call. He regarded her from across the lobby as he spoke to whoever was at the other end of the line. Whatever he said proved fruitful, though. In another three minutes, a woman came out of the elevator and through the turnstile that kept the general public away from the mysterious workings of New Scotland Yard. This individual strode over to join them. She was, Inspector Lynley told Bella, Detective Superintendent Ardery.
"And are you the person in charge?" Bella said.
"I am," the superintendent replied. Her facial expression added the comment, And this better be worth my time, madam.
Right, Bella thought, it bloody well will be.
THE HANDBAG WAS so hopelessly compromised for purposes of evidence that Isabelle wanted to shake the woman silly. The fact that she did not was, she decided, a testimony to her self-control.
"It's Jemima's," Bella McHaggis announced as she produced it with a flourish. This flourish included adding fingerprints to what were doubtless dozens more of her own, in the process smearing everyone else's and, in particular, smearing the killer's. "I found it with the Oxfam goods."
"A discarded bag or one that she carried daily?" Lynley asked, not unreasonably.
"It's her regular bag. And it wasn't discarded because it's got all her clobber in it."
"You went through it?" Isabelle gritted her teeth in preparation for the inevitable answer, which was, naturally, that the woman had pawed through everything, depositing more fingerprints, creating more compromised evidence.
"Well, of course I went through it," Bella asserted. "How else was I to know it's Jemima's?"
"How else indeed," Isabelle said.
Bella McHaggis gave her a narrow-eyed look that told Isabelle she was being evaluated.
The woman seemed to reach a conclusion that no offence was intended by Isabelle's tone, and before she could be stopped from doing so, she opened the handbag, said, "See here, then," and dumped its contents onto the seat where she'd been awaiting them.
"Please don't - ," Isabelle began as Lynley said, "This all must go to - " and Bella picked up a mobile phone and waved it at them, declaring, "This is hers. And this is her purse and her wallet" and on and on as she pawed through everything. There was nothing for it but to grab her hands in the unlikely hope that something had gone untouched on Bella's first time through the handbag and that it could remain so. "Yes, yes. Thank you," Isabelle said. She nodded at Lynley to replace the handbag's contents and to put the bag itself into the carryall. When he'd accomplished this, Isabelle asked the woman to take her through everything that had led to her finding the handbag. This, Bella McHaggis was pleased to do. She gave them chapter and verse on recycling and saving the planet, and from this Isabelle concluded that the handbag had come from a bin that was not only situated in front of Bella McHag gis's house but was also accessible to anyone who happened to pass by and see it. This, apparently, was a point that Bella herself wished to make because the conclusion of her recitation contained a fact she declared "the most important bit of all."
"And that is?" Isabelle enquired.
"Yolanda."
It seemed that the psychic had been lurking round Bella's front garden again, and she'd been there this time moments before Bella had made the discovery of Jemima's handbag. She'd been ostensibly having "some sort of bloody psychic experience," Bella scoffed, which had been characterised by muttering, moaning, praying, and waving round a stick of burning whatever that was supposed to do something magical or "rubbish like that." Bella had given her a few choice words, and the psychic had scurried off. Moments later, checking the Oxfam bin, Bella had uncovered the handbag.
"Why were you checking the bin?" Lynley asked.
"To see how soon it would need emptying, obviously," was her withering reply. It seemed, not unreasonably, that the other bins collected recycling matter far more quickly than did