This was an enlargement: The stone was reddish and square and it had the look of an amulet.
"...in the victim's pocket," Ardery was saying in apparent reference to this photograph.
"It looks like something from a man's ring, considering the size and the shape of it, and you can see it's been carved although the carving itself is quite worn. It's with forensics just now. As to the weapon, SO7 are telling us the wound suggests something capable of piercing to a depth of eight or nine inches. That's all they know. There was rust left in the wound as well."
"Plenty of that on the site," Winston Nkata pointed out. "Old chapel, locked off with iron bars ...Has to be a mountain of clobber round that place could be used for a weapon."
"Which takes us to the possibility that this was a crime of opportunity," Ardery said.
"No handbag with her," Philip Hale said. "No identification on her. And she'd've had to have something to get up to Stoke Newington. Money, travel card, something. Could've started with bag snatching."
"Indeed ...So we need to put our hands on that bag of hers, if she had one," Ardery said.
"In the meantime, we've got two very good leads from the porn magazine left near the body."
Called Girlicious, it was the type of magazine that was delivered to the point of sale encased in opaque black plastic, due to the sensitive - and here Ardery rolled her eyes - nature of its contents. This plastic served the purpose of preventing innocent children from pawing through it to have a look at the various pudenda on display. It also served the less obvious purpose of preventing the fingerprints of anyone other than the purchaser to be placed upon it.
Now, they had a very good set of dabs to use in the investigation, but better than that, they had a shop receipt tucked within the pages, as if used as a marker. If this shop receipt was the point of purchase of the magazine - and it likely was - then there was a very good chance they were on the trail of whatever sod had bought it.
"He might or might not be our killer. He might or might not be this person - " She indicated the e-fit. "But the magazine was fresh. It hadn't been there long. And we want to talk to whoever took it into that chapel's annex. So ..."
She began the assignments. They knew the drill: TIE first. The known associates of Jemima Hastings had to be interviewed: at Covent Garden where she was employed, at her lodgings in Putney, at any other place she frequented, at the Portrait Gallery where she had been present for the opening of the exhibition in which her picture hung. All of them would need alibis that would want checking out. Her belongings had to be gone through as well, and there were boxes upon boxes of them from her lodgings. An ever-widening search of the area near the cemetery had to be made to attempt to locate her bag, the weapon, or anything related to her journey across London to Stoke Newington.
Ardery finished making the assignments. She concluded these with the fact that Detective Sergeant Havers would track down a woman called Yolanda the Psychic.
"Yolanda the what?" was Havers' response.
Ardery ignored her. They'd had a phone call from Bella McHaggis, she said, Jemima Hastings' landlady in Putney. A Yolanda the Psychic needed to be looked into. It seemed she'd been stalking Jemima - "Bella's word, not mine" - so they needed to find her and give her a grilling. "I trust you have no difficulty with that, Sergeant?"
Havers shrugged. She glanced at Lynley. He knew what her expectation was. So, apparently, did Isabelle Ardery because she announced to everyone, "Inspector Lynley will work with me for the time being. DS Nkata, you'll be partnered with Barbara."
ISABELLE ARDERY HANDED Lynley the keys to her car. She told him where it was, said she'd meet him down below after she popped into the ladies', and then she popped into the ladies'. She peed and downed her vodka simultaneously, but the vodka went down a bit too fast for her liking, and she was glad she'd brought the other bottle. So as she flushed the toilet she downed the second one. She tucked both bottles back into her bag. She made sure they kept their distance from each other, each one nicely wrapped in a tissue, for it wouldn't