“Me?”
“That's right. You may have lost track of him over the years, but it seems he hasn't lost track of you.” Webberly plugged his cigar into his mouth, clamping it into the corner and referring to his notes. “A Home Office pathologist is on his way up there for a formal by-the-books with scalpel and recorder. He's set to do the post-mortem sometime today. You'll be on the patch of a bloke called Peter Han-ken. He's been told that Andy's one of us, but that's all he knows.” He removed the cigar from his mouth again and looked at it instead of at Lynley as he concluded, “Tommy, I'll make no pretence about this. It could turn dicey. The fact that Maiden's asked for you by name …” Webberly hesitated before finishing with, “Just keep your eyes open and move with caution.”
Lynley nodded. The situation was irregular. He couldn't remember another time when a relative of a victim of a crime had been allowed to name the officer who would investigate it. That Andy Maiden had been allowed to do so suggested spheres of influence that could easily encroach upon Lynley's efforts to manage a smooth investigation.
He couldn't handle the case alone, and Lynley knew that Webberly wouldn't expect him to do so. But he had a fairly good idea of what officer the superintendent, given half the chance, would assign as his partner. He spoke to circumvent that assignment. She wasn't ready yet. Neither—if it came down to it—was he.
“I'd like to see who's on rota to take with me,” he told Webberly. “Since Andy's a former SO 10 officer, we're going to want someone with a fair amount of finesse.”
The superintendent regarded him directly. Fifteen seconds ticked by before he spoke. “You know best who you can work with, Tommy,” he finally said.
“Thank you, sir. I do.”
? ? ?
Barbara Havers made her way to the fourth floor canteen, where she bought a bowl of vegetable soup which she took to a table and tried to eat while all the time imagining that the word pariah hung from her shoulders on a sandwich board. She ate alone. Every nod of recognition she received from other officers seemed imbued with a silent message of contempt. And while she tried to bolster herself with an interior monologue informing her shrinking ego that no one could possibly yet know of her demotion, her disgrace, and the dissolution of her partnership, every conversation going on round her—particularly those flavoured by light-hearted laughter—was a conversation mocking her.
She gave up on the soup. She gave up on the Yard. She signed herself out—“going home ill” would doubtless be welcomed by those who clearly saw her as a form of contagion anyway—and made her way to her Mini. One half of her was ascribing her actions to a mixture of paranoia and stupidity. The other half was trapped in an endless repetition of her final encounter with Lynley, playing the game of what-I-could-have-would-have-and-should-have-said after learning the outcome of his meeting with Webberly.
In this frame of mind, she found herself driving along Millbank before she knew what she was doing, not heading for home at all. Her body on automatic pilot, she came up to Grosvenor Road and the Battersea Power Station with her brain engaged in a mental castigation of DI Lynley. She felt like a shattered mirror, useless but dangerous with broken edges. How easy it had been for him to cut her loose, she thought bitterly. And what an idiot she had been, believing for weeks that he was on her side.
Obviously, it hadn't been enough for Lynley that she'd been demoted and humiliated by a man whom both of them had loathed for years. It seemed now that he'd also needed an opportunity to do some disciplining on his own. As far as she was concerned, he was wrong wrong wrong taking the direction he'd chosen. And she needed an ally straightaway who would agree with her point of view.
Spinning along the River Thames in the light midday traffic, she had a fairly good idea where to find just such a confederate. He lived in Chelsea, little more than a mile from where she was driving.