following the progress of the investigation. She said they were meant to sit there while she fetched what they wanted, and when Barbara pointed out that what they wanted was a word with Frazer Chaplin if he was at home, she said, "Oh, don't be such a ninny. He's a man but he isn't a fool, Sergeant. And have you done anything about that psychic? I rang the police about her as well. Hanging about outside my property again.
There she was, large as life."
"We've had a word with Yolanda," Barbara said.
"Thank God for small mercies." Bella seemed about to relent on the matter of Frazer Chaplin but then her face altered as she made the mental leap from what Barbara had just said to what Barbara and Winston Nkata wanted, a word with Frazer. She said, "Why, that mad bloody cow. She's said something about Frazer, hasn't she? She's told you something that's brought you here on the run and you mean to arrest him. Well, I'm not having that. Not with Paolo and his five engagements and his bringing Jemima here as a lodger and that argument of theirs. Just a friend, he tells me and she agrees and then look what happens."
"Let me clarify that Yolanda said nothing about Frazer Chaplin," Barbara said. "We're coming at him from another angle. So if you'd fetch him ... ? Because if he isn't here - "
"What other angle? There is no other angle. Oh, you wait right there and I'll prove it to you."
She marched out of the dining room. They heard her go up the stairs. When she was gone, Winston looked at Barbara. "Felt like I ought to salute or summick."
"She's quite the character," Barbara admitted. Then, "Do you hear water running? Could Frazer be having a shower? His room's below us. The basement flat. She doesn't seem to want us to see him, does she?"
"Protecting him? Think she fancies him?"
"It fits with what Abbott Langer said about Frazer and the ladies, eh?"
Bella returned to them, a white envelope in her hand. With the triumphant air of a woman who'd out-Sherlocked the best of them, she told them to have a look at that. That turned out to be a thin spatulate finger of plastic with a slip of paper emerging from one end of it and a ridged area at the other. In the middle were two small windows, one round and one square. The centre of each of these was coloured with a thin blue line, one horizontal and one vertical. Barbara had never seen one before - she'd hardly been in a position of need when it came to such things - but she knew what she was looking at and so, apparently, did Winston.
"A pregnancy test," Bella announced. "And it wasn't among Jemima's belongings, was it? It was in Paolo's clobber. Paolo's. Well, I daresay Paolo's not testing himself, is he?"
"Not likely," Barbara agreed. "But how do you reckon this's Jemima's? I assume that's what you're thinking, eh?"
"It's obvious. They shared the bathroom and the toilet's in the bathroom. She either gave this to him" - with a jerk of her head towards the slip of paper - "or, what's more likely, he saw it in the rubbish and fished it out, and that explains their quarrel. Oh, he said it was due to a misunderstanding about Jemima's hanging her smalls in the bath and she said it had to do with that male/female nonsense about leaving the toilet seat up, but let me tell you I had a feeling about them from the first. They were butter wouldn't melt and all the rest of it, friends from the workplace in Covent Garden. I happened to have a vacant room and he happened to know of someone who was looking and could he bring her, Mrs. McHaggis? She seems a nice enough sort of girl, he says. And there I was, ready to believe the two of them while all the time they're sneaking round on the floor below me, going at it like monkeys behind my back. Well, let me tell you right now, if she wasn't dead, she'd be gone. Out. Finished. On her ear. On the pavement."
Right where Yolanda wanted her, Barbara concluded. All well and good, but Yolanda would hardly have sneaked into the house and planted a pregnancy test in the bathroom on the slight chance that Bella McHaggis would find it, jump to conclusions, and evict the one