Her visit to the Yard was supposed to take care of this, at the same time as it allowed her to see what there was to see about Ian Cresswell, Bernard Fairclough, and the woman from Argentina whom Lynley had also mentioned: Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. So she fired up her Mini and set off towards Westminster, holding to her heart the hope that she’d see as few of her colleagues as possible as she skulked round the corridors of New Scotland Yard.
She had fairly good luck in this department, at least at the start. The only people she saw were Winston Nkata and the departmental secretary Dorothea Harriman. Dorothea, long the picture of sartorial perfection and possessing an unmatchable degree of excellence in the area of all things related to personal grooming, took one look at Barbara, stopped dead in the tracks of her crippling five-inch stilettos, and said, “Brilliant, Detective Sergeant. Absolutely brilliant. Who did it?” She touched Barbara’s hair with her slender and speculative fingers. Without waiting for an answer, she went on. “And just look at the sheen. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery is going to be delighted. You wait and see.”
Waiting and seeing were the last things Barbara wanted to do. She said, “Ta, Dee. Bit different, eh?”
“Different does not do justice,” Dorothea said. “I want the name of the stylist. Will you share it with me?”
“Course,” Barbara said. “Why wouldn’t I share it?”
“Oh, some women won’t, you know. Battle of females on the prowl. That sort of thing.” She took a step away and sighed, her gaze fixed on Barbara’s hair. “I’m green with envy.”
The idea that Dorothea Harriman might be envious of her hairstyle made Barbara want to hoot with laughter, as did the notion that she herself was intent upon capturing a man with this makeover she’d been forced to endure. But she restrained herself and gave the other woman Dusty’s name as well as the name of the Knightsbridge salon. This would be right up Dee’s alley, Barbara reckoned, as she had little doubt that Dorothea spent vast amounts of time and most of her wages in Knightsbridge.
Winston Nkata’s reaction was less extreme, and Barbara thanked her stars for this. He said, “Looks good, Barb. Guv see you yet?” and that was it.
Barbara said, “I was hoping to avoid her. If you see her, I’m not here, okay? I mean I’m here but not here. I just need access to the PNC and some other stuff.”
“DI Lynley?”
“Mum’s the word.”
Nkata said he’d cover for Barbara as best he could but there was no telling when acting superintendent Isabelle Ardery was going to appear in their midst. “Best be prepared with some sort of story,” he advised. “She’s not happy ’bout the inspector going off without letting her know where he’ll be.”
Barbara gave Nkata a closer look when he said this. She wondered what he knew about Lynley and Isabelle Ardery. But Nkata’s expression betrayed nothing and while this was habitual for him, Barbara decided it was safe to conclude that he was merely remarking upon the obvious: Lynley was a member of Ardery’s team; the assistant commissioner had pulled him off to see to some matter unrelated to Ardery’s concerns; she was cheesed off about this.
Barbara found an inconspicuous spot where she could access the Yard’s computer with its myriad sources of information. She started first with Vivienne Tully and she began, with very little difficulty, to amass the pertinent details about her. They ranged from her birth in Wellington, New Zealand, to her education from primary school there to university in Auckland to an impressive, advanced degree at the London School of Economics. She was the managing director of a firm called Precision Gardening, which manufactured gardening tools— hardly a high-glamour job, Barbara thought— and she was also an executive director of the Fairclough Foundation. A bit of delving turned up a further connection with Bernard Fairclough, Barbara found. In her early twenties she’d been the executive assistant to Bernard Fairclough at Fairclough Industries in Barrow-in-Furness. Between her time at Fairclough Industries and Precision Gardening, she’d been an independent business consultant, which Barbara reckoned in the way of the modern world could indicate either an attempt at developing her own business or a period of unemployment that had lasted four years. As of now, she was thirty-three years old, and a photo of her showed a woman with spiky hair, quite a boyish dress sense, and a rather frighteningly intelligent face. Her eyes communicated the fact that Vivienne Tully didn’t suffer fools. In conjunction with her background and her general appearance, they also suggested ferocity of independence.
As far as Lord Fairclough was concerned, Barbara found nothing curious. There was plenty curious about his wayward son, though, as Nicholas Fairclough hadn’t exactly trod the straight and narrow in his teens and twenties and records showed car crashes, arrests for drink driving, bungled burglaries, shoplifting, and sale of stolen goods. He seemed a straight enough arrow now, though. He’d paid all of his debts to society and from the day of his marriage, not a hair of his head had even been ruffled.
That brought Barbara to Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, her of the mouthful name. Aside from that name, Barbara had in her crumpled notes the town from which she’d sprung, communicated to her as Santa Maria di something-or-other, which wasn’t exactly helpful as she quickly found out. Santa Maria di et cetera turned out to be to the towns and villages in a Latin American country what Jones and Smith were to surnames in her own. This, she reckoned, was not going to be like pinching candy from a five-year-old.
She was considering her approach when the acting superintendent found her. Dorothea Harriman had, alas, waxed eloquent on the subject of Barbara’s hair, failing to append to her waxing a convenient lie about having seen Barbara at a location that was not New Scotland Yard. Isabelle Ardery thus accosted her on the twelfth floor, where Barbara had hidden herself in the Met’s library, a convenient location from which she could access the Met’s databases in peace and in secrecy.
“Here you are, then.” The acting superintendent had come upon Barbara with the stealth of a hunting cat, and her satisfaction was feline as well. She looked like a cat, decapitated mouse in jaws.
Barbara said, “Guv,” with a nod. She added, “Still on holiday,” on the very slight chance that Isabelle Ardery was there to requisition her for work.
Ardery didn’t go in that direction, nor did she acknowledge Barbara’s status as being off rota for the moment. She said, “I’ll see the hair first, Sergeant.”
Barbara hardly wanted to know what second was going to be, considering the superintendent’s tone. She stood to give Ardery a better look.