It was just the sort of place that made her want to run screaming for the nearest point of solitude, which was likely the church at the far southwest end of the square that Covent Garden comprised.
Things were marginally improved in the Courtyard Shops, most of which were moderately high end, so the ubiquitous bands of teenagers and tourists in trainers elsewhere were absent here. The quality of busking was elevated as well. In a lower-level courtyard that housed a restaurant with open-air seating, a middle-aged violinist played to the orchestral accompaniment of a boom box.
A sign reading SEGAR AND SNUFF PARLOUR hung above the tobacconist's multipaned front window, and near its door stood the traditional wooden figure of the Highlander in full kilted regalia, a flask of snuff in his hands. Printed chalkboards leaned against the door and beneath the window, and they advertised exclusive tobaccos and the shop's daily speciality, which today was the Larranaga Petit Corona.
Five people could not have fitted comfortably within the cigar shop, so tiny was it. Its air fragrant with the perfume of unsmoked tobacco, it comprised a single, old oak display case of pipe-and cigar-smoking paraphernalia, locked glass-fronted oak cabinets of cigars, and a small back room devoted to dozens of glass canisters filled with tobacco and labeled with various scents and flavours. The paraphernalia display case also served as the shop's main counter, with an electronic scale, a till, and another smaller locked cabinet of cigars standing atop it. Behind this counter, the shop assistant was completing a sale to a woman making a purchase of cigarillos. He called out, "Be with you presently, my dears," in the sort of singsong voice one might have expected from a fop of an earlier century. As it was, the voice was completely at odds with the age and appearance of the shop assistant. He looked no older than twenty-one and although he was dressed neatly in light-weight summer clothing, he had gauges in his ears and he'd apparently worn them long enough to have stretched his lobes to a skin-crawling size.
During the ensuing conversation he had with Isabelle and Lynley, he continually poked his little finger through the holes. Isabelle found the behaviour so repellent that it made her feel rather faint.
"Now. Yes, yes, yes?" he sang out happily once his customer went on her way with her cigarillos. "How may I help? Cigars? Cigarillos? Tobacco? Snuff? What will it be?"
"Conversation," Isabelle told him. "Police," she added and showed her ID. Lynley did likewise.
"I'm all agog," the young man said. He gave his name as J-a-y-s-o-n Druther. His father, he revealed, was the owner of the shop. As had been his grandfather and his grandfather's father before him. "What we don't know about tobacco isn't worth knowing." He himself was just beginning in the business, having insisted on taking a degree in marketing before he "joined the ranks of those who labour." He wished to expand, but his father disagreed. "Heaven forbid that we should invest in something not an absolute certainty," he added with a dramatic shudder.
"Now ..." He spread his hands - they were white and smooth, Isabelle noted, very likely the objects of weekly manicures - and he indicated he was ready for whatever they asked of him.
Lynley stood slightly behind her, which allowed her to do the honours. She liked this.
"Jemima Hastings," she began. "I expect you know her, don't you?"
"Rather." J-a-y-s-o-n extended the word into raw and thur, and he gave emphasis to the second syllable. He said he wouldn't mind having a word with dear Jemima, as she was the reason he was having to work "all sorts of mad hours just now. Where is the wretched minx, by the way?"
The wretched minx was dead, Isabelle told him.
His jaw dropped open. His jaw snapped shut. "Good God," he said. "Not a road accident?
She wasn't hit by a car? Heavens, there's not been another terrorist attack, has there?"
"She's been murdered, Mr. Druther," Lynley said quietly. Jayson clocked his highbrow accent and fingered an earlobe in response.
"In Abney Park Cemetery," Isabelle added. "The papers have indicated a murder there.
Do you read the papers, Mr. Druther?"
"God no," he said. "No tabloids, no broadsheets, and def initely no television or radio news. I vastly prefer to live in my own cloud cuckoo land. Anything else sends me into such depression that I can't get out of bed in the morning and the only thing that cheers me up is Mum's ginger