It was the word fortunate and all it implied that allowed Barbara to see her neighbour in an entirely new light. Dirty fighter, she thought. But two could play at that game.
“No wonder she walked out, Azhar. How long did it actually take her to get a reading on you? Too long, I’d guess. But that’s not much of a surprise, is it? After all, she was an English girl, and none of us English girls play the game with all fifty-two cards in the deck, do we?”
That said, she turned and left him, enjoying the coward’s brief triumph at having had the last word. But it was the simple fact that she’d had that word that kept Barbara in raging and internal conversation, with an Azhar who wasn’t present, all the way into Central London. So when she pulled into a parking bay beneath New Scotland Yard, she was still in a state and hardly in the proper frame of mind for a day’s productive employment. She was also light-headed from nicotine.
She stopped in the ladies’ loo to splash some water on her face. She looked in the mirror and hated herself for stooping to examine her image for evidence of what she realized Taymullah Azhar had been seeing for all these months they’d been neighbours: Unfortunate female Homo sapiens, a perfect specimen of everything gone wrong. No chance for a normal life, Barbara. Whatever the hell that was.
“Sod him,” she whispered. Who was he, anyway? Who the bloody hell did he think he was?
She ran her fingers through her chopped-up hair, and she straightened the collar of her blouse, realising she should have ironed it…had she owned an iron. She looked three quarters of the journey towards a fright, but that couldn’t be helped and it didn’t matter. There was a job to do.
In the incident room, she found that the morning briefing was already going on. Superintendent Lynley glanced her way in the middle of listening to something being said by Winston Nkata, and he did not look particularly chuffed as his gaze traveled beyond her to the clock on the wall.
Winston was saying, “…works of wrath or vengeance, ’cording to what the lady at Crystal Moon told me. She looked it up in a book. She handed over a register of shop visitors wanting to be on their newsletter list, and she’s got credit card purchases and postal codes of customers as well.”
“Let’s match the postal codes with the body sites,” Lynley said to him. “Do the same with the register and the credit card purchases. We may get some joy there. What about Camden Lock Market?” Lynley looked towards Barbara. “What did you get from that stall, Constable? Did you stop there this morning?” Which was his way of saying, I trust that’s your reason for walking in here late.
Barbara thought, Holy hell. The run-in with Azhar had wiped every other consideration from her mind. She fumbled round her head for an excuse, but the course of wisdom brought her back from the brink at the last moment. She opted for the truth. “I dropped the ball on that,” she admitted. “Sorry, sir. When I was finished with Colossus yesterday, I…Never mind. I’ll get on to it directly.”
She saw the looks exchanged round her. She saw Lynley’s lips get thin for an instant, so she went on hastily in an attempt to smooth over the moment. “I think the direction we need to take is Colossus anyway, sir.”
“Do you.” Lynley’s voice was even, too even, but she chose to ignore that.
She said, “I do. We’ve got possibles and counting over there that need looking into. Aside from Jack Veness, who seems to know something about everyone, there’s a bloke called Neil Greenham who’s a bit overly helpful. He had a copy of the Standard that he was dead chuffed to show me, by the way. And that Robbie Kilfoyle-he was in reception yesterday, playing cards with that kid?-he volunteers in the kit room. He does lunch deliveries as a second job-”
“Van?” Lynley asked.
“Bike. Sorry,” Barbara said regretfully. “But he admitted he’s aiming for a real job at Colossus if it expands across the river, which gives him a motive to make someone else look-”
“Killing off the customers is hardly going to get him that, is it, Havers?” John Stewart cut in acerbically.
Barbara ignored the dig, going on to say, “His competition could be a bloke called Griff Strong, who’s lost his last two jobs in Stockwell and Lewisham because, according to him, he didn’t get along with female coworkers. That’s four possibles, and they’re all in the age range of the profile, sir.”
“We’ll look into them,” Lynley agreed. And just as Barbara thought she’d redeemed herself, Lynley asked John Stewart to hand out that assignment and he went on to tell Nkata to dig round in the background of Reverend Bram Savidge and to deal with the goings-on at Square Four Gym in Swiss Cottage, and a car repair shop in North Kensington, while he was at it. Then he made additional assignments involving the taxi driver who’d called 999 about the body in the Shand Street tunnel and the abandoned car where that body had been deposited. He took in a report about the cookery schools in London-no Jared Salvatore enrolled in any of them-before he turned to Barbara and said, “I’ll see you in my office, Constable.” He strode out of the incident room with a “Get on with it, then” to the rest of the team, leaving Barbara to follow. She noted that no one looked at her as she trailed after Lynley.
She found herself scurrying to keep up with him, and she didn’t like the dog-and-master feeling this evoked. She knew she’d muffed it by forgetting to check the stall in Camden Lock Market and she supposed she deserved a dressing-down for that, but on the other hand, she’d given them a new direction with Strong, Greenham, Veness, and Kilfoyle, hadn’t she, so that had to count for something.
Once in the superintendent’s office, however, it seemed that Lynley didn’t see things this way. He said, “Shut the door, Havers,” and when she had done so, he went to his desk. Instead of sitting, however, he merely leaned his hips against it and faced her. He gestured her to a chair, and he loomed above her.
She absolutely loathed the way this made her feel, but she was determined that loathing would not rule her. She said, “Your picture was on the front page of the Standard, sir. Yesterday afternoon. So was mine. So was Hamish Robson’s. We were standing just outside of the Shand Street tunnel. You were named. That’s not good.”
“It happens.”
“But with a serial killer-”
Lynley broke in. “Constable, tell me this: Are you deliberately attempting to shoot yourself in the foot or is all of this part of your unconscious?”
“All of this…? What?”
“You were given the assignment. Camden Lock Market. On your route home, for the love of God. Or, for that matter, on your route here. Do you realise how you appear to the others when-as you put it-you ‘drop the ball’? If you want your rank back, which I assume you do and which I also assume you know depends upon your being able to function as part of a team, how do you expect to achieve that if you’re going to make your own decisions about what’s important in this investigation and what is not?”
“Sir, that’s not fair,” Barbara protested.
“And this isn’t the first time you’ve operated on your own,” Lynley said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “If ever an officer had a professional death wish…What the hell were you thinking? Don’t you see I can’t keep running interference for you? Just when I begin to think I’ve got you sorted, you begin it all again.”
“All what?”
“Your infernal bloody-mindedness. Your taking the reins in your hands instead of the bit in your mouth. Your constant insubordination. Your unwillingness even to make a pretence of being part of a larger team. We’ve been through this before. Time and again. I’m doing my best to protect you, but I swear to you if this doesn’t stop…” He threw up his hands. “Get over to Camden Lock Market, Havers. To Wendy’s Rainbow or whatever the hell it was called.”