her, that cow over Putney. She actually rang you, didn't she? She's got her nerve."
They were all still standing in the anteroom, and Barbara asked was there a place they could sit for a proper conversation? To this Yolanda waved them through the beaded curtain, where she had a setup that walked a tightrope between analyst's office with a fainting sofa along one wall and a seance locale with a round table in the middle and a thronelike chair at twelve o'clock, obviously meant for the medium. Yolanda went for this and indicated Havers and Nkata were meant to sit at three and seven o'clock respectively. This had to do with Nkata's aura, evidently, and with Barbara's lack of one.
"Bit anxious about you, I am," Yolanda said to her.
"You and everyone else." Barbara cast a glance at Nkata. He gave her a look of deep and utterly spurious concern over her apparent lack of aura. "I'll see to you later," she muttered under her breath, to which he stifled a smile.
"Oh, I can see you're unbelievers," Yolanda said in her strange man's voice. She reached beneath the table then, whereupon Barbara expected it to levitate. But instead the psychic brought forth the ostensible reason for her ruined vocal cords: a packet of Dunhills. She lit up and shoved the cigarettes towards Barbara, with the full knowledge, it seemed, that Barbara was a fellow in this matter. "You're dying to," she said. "Go ahead," and "Sorry, luv," to Winston.
"But not to worry. Passive smoking isn't how you're meant to go. More than that, however, and you'll have to pay me five quid."
"Reckon I'd like to be surprised," he responded.
"Suit yourself, dearie." She inhaled with great pleasure and settled back into her throne for a proper natter. She said, "I don't want her living in Putney. Well, not so much in Putney itself as with her and by her; I s'pose I mean in her house."
"You didn't want Jemima living in Mrs. McHaggis's house?" Barbara said.
"Right." Yolanda flicked ash onto the floor. This was covered by a Persian carpet, but she didn't seem concerned. She said, "Houses of death need to be decontaminated. Sage burning in every room and believe you me it doesn't do just to wave it about as one runs through the place.
And I'm not talking of the sage you get in the market, mind you. One doesn't buy a packet in Sainsbury's from the dried herb shelf and put a teaspoonful in an ashtray and light it and there you have it. Not by a bloody long chalk. One gets the real thing, bound up properly and meant to be burnt. One lights it and appropriate prayers are said. Spirits needing to be released are then released and the place is cleansed of death and only then is it wholesome enough for someone to resume a life within it."
Winston, Barbara saw, was noting all this down as if with the intention of stopping off somewhere for the appropriate decontaminants. She said, "Sorry, Mrs. Price, but - "
"Yolanda, for God's sake."
"Right. Yolanda. Are you referring to what's happened to Jemima Hastings?"
Yolanda looked confused. "I'm referring," she said, "to the fact that she lives in a House of Death. Mc Hag gis - was ever a woman more appropriately named, I ask you - is a widow. Her husband died in the house."
"Suspicious circumstances?"
Yolanda hmmphed. "You'll have to ask McHaggis that. I can see contagion oozing out of the windows every time I go past. I've told Jemima she's meant to clear out of there. And all right, I admit it, I might have been rather insistent about it."
"Which would be why the cops were phoned?" Barbara asked. "Who phoned them? I ask because what we know is that you were warned off stalking Jemima at one point. Is our information - "
"That's an interpretation, isn't it?" Yolanda said. "I've expressed my concern. It's grown, so I've expressed it again. P'rhaps I've been a bit ...Oh, p'rhaps I took things to extremes, p'rhaps I did a bit of lurking outside, but what am I meant to do? Just let her languish?
Every time I see her, it's shrunken more, and am I meant to stand by and let that happen? Say nothing about it?"
"„It's shrunken more,'" Barbara repeated. "„It' being ... ?"
"Her aura," Nkata supplied helpfully, obviously on top of the situation.
"Yes," Yolanda confirmed. "When I first met Jemima, she glowed. Well, not like you, luv" - this to Nkata -