"Barbara's clothing. The makeup. I expect to see her with her teeth repaired and sporting a designer hairdo next."
"It doesn't hurt a woman to look her best. I'd advise a man on my team to do something about his appearance if he came to work looking like Barbara Havers. As it happens, she's the only one who comes to work looking like she's slept rough the night before. Hasn't anyone ever spoken to her before? Didn't Superintendent Webberly? Didn't you?"
"She is who she is," Lynley said. "Good mind and big heart."
"You like her."
"I can't work with people I don't like, guv."
"In private conversation, it's Isabelle," she said.
His eyes met hers. He saw hers were brown, as his were, but not uniformly so. They were richly speckled with hazel and he reckoned that if she wore different colours to what she had on at present - a cream-coloured blouse beneath a well-tailored russet jacket - they might even appear green. He shifted his gaze and took in their surroundings. He said, "This is hardly private, is it?"
"I think you know what I mean." She glanced at her watch. She still had half a glass of wine left and before she stood, she tossed the rest of it down. "Let's find Paolo di Fazio," she told him. "He should be back at his stall by now."
HE WAS. THEY found him in the midst of attempting to persuade a middle-aged couple to have masks made as souvenirs of their silver wedding anniversary trip to London. He'd brought forth his artistic instruments and laid them on the counter, and he'd set up a collection of sample masks as well. These were mounted on rods that were fixed onto small plinths of finished wood. Fashioned from plaster of Paris, the masks were startlingly lifelike, similar to the death masks that had once been created from the corpses of people of significance.
"The perfect way for you to remember this visit to London," di Fazio told the couple. "So much more meaningful than a coffee mug with a Royal's face on it, eh?"
The couple hesitated. They said to each other, "Should we ... ?" and di Fazio waited for their decision. His expression was polite, and it didn't alter when they said they would have to think about it.
When they moved off, di Fazio gave his attention to Lynley and Ardery. "Another fine-looking couple," he said. "Each of you has a face made for sculpture. Your children are, I expect, as handsome as you."
Lynley heard Ardery snort with amusement. She showed her warrant card and said,
"Superintendent Isabelle Ardery. New Scotland Yard. This is DI Lynley."
Unlike Jayson Druther, di Fazio knew at once why they were there. He took off the wire-framed spectacles he wore, began to polish them on the front of his shirt, and said,
"Jemima?"
"You know about what's happened to her, then."
He returned the glasses to his face and ran a hand over longish dark hair. He was a good-looking man, Lynley saw, short and compact but with shoulders and chest suggesting that he worked with weights. Di Fazio said abruptly, "Of course I know what's happened to Jemima.
All of us know."
"All? Jayson Druther had no idea what's happened to her."
"He wouldn't," di Fazio said. "He's an idiot."
"Did Jemima feel that way about him?"
"Jemima was good to people. She would never have said."
"How did you learn of her death?" Lynley asked.
"Bella told me." He added what Barbara's report had indicated: that he was one of the lodgers at the home of Bella McHaggis in Putney. In fact, he was the reason, he said, that Jemima had established a lodging place with Mrs. McHaggis. He'd told her about a vacant room there not long after he'd met her.
"When was this?" Lynley asked.
"A week or two after she got to London. Sometime last November."
"And how did you meet her?" Isabelle asked.
"At the shop." He went on to say that he rolled his own, and he bought both his tobacco and his papers from the cigar shop. "Usually from that idiot, Jayson," he added. "Pazzo uomo.
But one day Jemima was there instead."
"Italian, are you, Mr. di Fazio?" Lynley asked.
Di Fazio took a rollie from the pocket of his shirt - he wore a crisp white shirt and a very clean pair of jeans - and he put it behind his ear. He said, "With a name like di Fazio, that's an excellent deduction."
"I think the inspector meant a native of Italy," Isabelle said. "Your English is perfect."