Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

take up business again. Those witness statements needed going over. The detective sergeant remembered, surely?
    Barbara nodded because, of course, she did. The Crown Prosecutor was a Silk with chambers in Middle Temple. She would, she told Harriman, make the call and get on to this business without delay.
    “Sorry.” Harriman tilted her head towards Isabelle’s office. “She’s not altogether herself today. Don’t know why, exactly.”
    Barbara did. God only knew how many times a week Isabelle Ardery and Thomas Lynley had been doing their mutual knicker-trawling. But with that at an end, she wagered things round the Yard were going to get tense.
    She went to her desk and plopped into its chair. She looked at the phone number Dee Harriman had handed to her. She picked up the handset of the phone and was about to punch in the number when she heard her name spoken—a simple “Barb”—and she looked up to see her fellow detective sergeant Winston Nkata towering over her. He was fingering the long scar on his cheek, the one that marked his formative years spent ganging on the streets of Brixton. He was, as always, impeccably groomed, a man who looked like someone who did his shopping with Harriman hovering at his side. Barbara wondered if he removed his shirt every half hour or so for a spot of pressing in a back room somewhere. Not an inch was wrinkled, not a seam was rucked.
    “I had to ask.” His voice was soft, his accent a blend of his background, with its Caribbean and its African history.
    “What?”
    “DI Lynley. He told me . . . your . . . the difference. I ’spect you know what I mean. No big deal to me, ’course, but I reckoned something happened, so I asked him. Plus”—with a tilt of his head towards Isabelle’s office—“there was that.”
    “Oh. Right.” He was talking about her hair. Well, everyone was going to be doing that, either to her face or behind her back. At least Winston, as always, was courteous enough to talk to her directly.
    “Inspector told me what’s going on,” he said. “’Bout Hadiyyah and her mum. Look, I know she’s . . . how you feel about her and all that, Barb. I reckoned the guv wasn’t going to go for your wanting more time off, so . . .” He slipped a torn bit of a daily calendar towards her. It was one of those desk calendars that had upon it an inspirational saying. This one was “To make God laugh, tell Her your plans,” which, Barbara decided, fitted the situation quite well. On this slip of calendar Winston’s copperplate handwriting had unfurled a name, Dwayne Doughty, along with an address on the Roman Road in Bow and a telephone number. Barbara read this and looked up. “Private detective,” Winston told her.
    “Where’d you find a private detective so quick?”
    “Where everything gets found: the Internet, Barb. Section on his site from satisfied customers and all the rest. He may’ve put ’em there himself, but he’s worth looking into.”
    “You knew she’d lock me to my desk, didn’t you?” Barbara said shrewdly.
    “Figgered, is all,” he told her. Kindly, once again, he made no exact mention of what Barbara had done to her appearance.

19 November
    BOW
    LONDON
    B arbara Havers laboured at the job of metaphorically keeping her nose clean at work for the next two days. This meant several meetings with the clerk at the CPS, during which the only pleasurable moment came from once being taken by the Crown Prosecutor for lunch in the impressive dining hall of Middle Temple. The lunch might have been nicer had the Silk not wished to discuss the case in minute detail, but in a situation in which beggars couldn’t be et cetera, Barbara did her best to add sparkle and wit to a conversation that actually made her want to bury her head in her mash and commit suicide by carbohydrate inhalation. It was the kind of employment she particularly despised, and she reckoned that Superintendent Ardery was forcing her into it because this was her only way of taking revenge upon Barbara for what she had done to herself.
    She’d had to shave the rest of her head. There was nothing else for it, as the hairstyle could not have been saved. What remained was stubble that left her looking vaguely like a cross between a neo-Nazi and a female boxer. She kept it covered with a selection of knitted caps, on which she’d stocked up at the Berwick Street market.
    There were actually two cases ongoing to which she could have been assigned, had Ardery