them out always looked so earnest. But to save them…
She yawned. “It’s rather like a reverse trail of bread crumbs, isn’t it?”
He was flipping to the back of the telephone directory and running his finger down the page. “Six,” he said. “Thank God it wasn’t Smith.” He glanced at his pocket watch, which lay open on the table next to his side of the bed, and threw back the covers. The odd bits went flying like debris in the wind.
“Was it Hansel and Gretel who left a trail of crumbs or Little Red Riding Hood?” Helen asked.
He was rooting through his suitcase, which gaped open on the fl oor and spilled out clothing in a fashion that Denton would have found teeth-jarring. “What are you talking about, Helen?”
“These papers. They’re like a trail of crumbs. Except he didn’t drop them. He picked them up.”
Tying the belt of his dressing gown, Lynley rejoined her at the bed, sitting on her side of it and reading the handouts once again. She read them along with him: the first for a concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields; the second for a car dealership in Lambeth; the third for a meeting at Camden Town Hall; the fourth for a hairdresser in Clapham High Street.
“He came by train,” Lynley said thoughtfully and began to rearrange the handouts. He said, “Give me that underground map, Helen.”
With the map in one hand, he continued to rearrange the handouts until he had the Cam-den Town Hall meeting first, the concert second, the car dealership third, and the hairdresser fourth. “He would have picked up the first at Euston Station,” he noted.
“And if he was going to Lambeth, he’d have got on the Northern Line and changed at Charing Cross,” Helen said.
“Which is where he’d have got the second, for the concert. But where does that leave Clapham High Street?”
“Perhaps he went there last, after Lambeth. Does it say in his diary?”
“On his last day in London, it says only Yanapapoulis.”
“Yanapapoulis,” she said with a sigh. “Greek.” She felt a tugging of sadness with the saying of the name. “I spoiled this week for us. We could have been there. On Corfu. Right this moment.”
He put his arm round her and kissed the side of her head. “It doesn’t matter. We’d be doing the same thing there as we are right now.”
“Talking about Clapham High Street? I doubt it.”
He smiled and lay his spectacles on the table. He brushed her hair back and kissed her neck. “Not exactly,” he murmured. “We’ll talk about Clapham High Street in a while…”
Which is what they did, a little more than an hour later.
Lynley agreed to Helen’s making the coffee, but after her presentation of lunch yesterday, he wasn’t willing to endure whatever she might bring forth from cupboards and refrigerator to serve as their breakfast. He scrambled the six eggs he found in the refrigerator and threw in cream cheese, stoned black olives, and mushrooms for good measure. He opened a tin of grapefruit wedges, dished them out, topped them with a maraschino cherry, and set about making toast.
In the meantime, Helen manned the telephone. By the time he had the breakfast ready, she’d gone through five of the six entries for the name Yanapapoulis, made a list of four Greek restaurants she’d not yet tried, received one recipe for a poppy-seed cake soaked in ouzo—“Goodness, that sounds rather terrifyingly inflammable, my dear”—promised to pass along to her “superiors” a complaint about police mishandling of a burglary near Notting Hill Gate, and defended her honour against the accusations of a shrieking woman who assumed she was the mistress of her errant husband.
Lynley was setting their plates on the table and pouring coffee and orange juice when Helen struck gold with her final call. She had asked to speak to Mummy or Daddy. The reply went on at some length. Lynley was spooning orange marmalade onto his plate when Helen said,
“I
“Helen, what in God’s name—”
She held up a hand to stop him. “She’s where?…I see. Can you give me the name, dear?” Lynley saw her eyes widen, saw the smile begin to curve her lips. “Lovely,” she said. “That’s wonderful, Philip. You’ve been such a help. Thank you so much…Yes, dear, you give him the chicken soup.” She hung up the phone and left the kitchen.
“Helen, I’ve got breakfast—”
“Just a moment, darling.”
He grumbled and forked up a portion of eggs. They weren’t half-bad. It wasn’t a combination of flavours that Denton would have either served or approved of, but then Denton had always possessed tunnel vision when it came to food.
“Here. Look.” With her dressing gown fl ying round in a whirl of burgundy silk, Helen clattered back into the kitchen — she was the only woman Lynley knew who actually wore high-heeled slippers with snowball tufts dyed to match the rest of her nightly ensembles— and presented him with one of the handouts they’d been looking at earlier.
“What?”
“The Hair Apparent,” she said. “Clapham High Street. Lord, what a ghastly name for a hairdresser. I always hate these puns: Shear Ecstasy, The Mane Attraction. Who comes up with them?”
He spread some marmalade on a wedge of toast as Helen slid into her seat and spooned up three pieces of grapefruit with “Tommy, darling, you can actually cook. I might think about keeping you.”
“That warms my heart.” He squinted at the paper in his hand. “‘Unisex styling,’” he read. “‘Discount prices. Ask for Sheelah.’”
“Yanapapoulis,” Helen said. “What’ve you put in these eggs? They’re wonderful.”
“Sheelah Yanapapoulis?”
“The very same. And she must be the Yanapapoulis we’re looking for, Tommy. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise that Robin Sage would have gone to see one Yanapapoulis and just happened to have in his possession a handout with the place of employment of an entirely different Yanapapoulis printed upon it. Don’t you agree?” She didn’t wait, merely went on, saying, “That was her son I was speaking to on the phone, by the way. He said to ring her at work. He said to ask for Sheelah.”
Lynley smiled. “You’re a marvel.”
“And you’re a fine cook. If you’d only been here to do Daddy’s breakfast yesterday morning…”
He set the handout to one side and went back to his eggs. “That can always be remedied,” he said casually.
“I suppose.” She added milk to her coffee and spooned in sugar. “Do you vacuum carpets and wash windows, as well?”
“If put to the test.”
“Heavens, I might actually be getting the better part of the bargain.”
“Is it, then?”
“What?”
“A bargain.”
“Tommy, you’re absolutely ruthless.”
ALTHOUGH THE SON OF SHE elah yanapapoulis had recommended a telephone call to The Hair Apparent, Lynley decided upon a personal visit. He found the hairdresser’s on the ground floor of a narrow soot-stained Victorian building that was shoe-horned between an Indian take-away and an appliance repair shop on Clapham High Street. He’d driven across the river on Albert Bridge and skirted Clapham Common upon whose north side Samuel Pepys had come to be lovingly tended in his declining years. The area had been referred to as “Paradisian
