A Face in the Crowd by Lynda La Plante Page A

to get on with it, then beckoned Oswalde over. “DS Haskons here is the office manager. He’ll fill you in.”
    “Hello Bob.”
    Oswalde returned the nod. “Richard.”
    “You two know each other?” Kernan said.
    “I used to be at West End Lane,” Haskons said.
    “Of course you were. Good.” Job done, Kernan departed.
    Haskons was as puzzled as some of the others. He said, “Tennison didn’t mention that you were joining us.”
    Oswalde turned from sizing up the situation, seeing if there was anyone else he recognized. He looked down on Haskons’s mere six feet from his six-feet-four. “She doesn’t know,” he said.

5

    A hospital porter pointed the way to the medical artist’s studio. Tennison walked along the echoing, white-tiled corridor and found the door with a piece of white card taped to it, “STUDIO” scrawled on the card in green felt-tip. It looked to her like a shoestring operation; this guy had better be good for the money they were shelling out.
    Upon entering, Tennison saw that it wasn’t a studio at all, but more a medical science laboratory. There were human organs immersed in fluid in giant test tubes, which she didn’t examine too closely in case they turned out to be real. A tall young man in a black polo-necked sweater and a gray apron was working on the far side of the room, next to a wide-slanting window to gain the maximum natural daylight. Tennison threaded through the exhibits, keeping her eyes to the front. She’d seen real human beings in gruesome conditions, and the sight of blood didn’t bother her, but these mummified floating bits of internal plumbing gave her the creeps.
    “I’m DCI Tennison. I think you’re making a clay head for us?”
    It was the clay head he was actually working on. He stood back, wiping brown clay onto his apron, allowing her to get a good look.
    “It may not look like much at the moment, but I have high hopes.” He had a drawling, dreamlike voice, as if he spent much of his time on another plane of existence. Probably did, Tennison thought.
    She moved closer. A plaster cast had been taken of Nadine’s skull into which he had hammered dozens of steel pins. These formed the scaffolding for the features he was building up in clay. At the moment the underlying structure could be seen, exposed muscles and ligatures, and the effect was macabre, a face stripped down to its component parts.
    “She had the most beautiful skull I’ve ever seen,” the young man said.
    “Really?”
    “Yes. See this . . .” He used a stainless steel scalpel as a pointer. “The orbicularis oris. The muscle originates on the maxilla and mandible, near the midline, on the eminences due to the incisor and canine teeth. Its fibers surround the oral aperture. Function—closing of the mouth and pursing of lips. You see, I’m a scientist,” he added, giving her his shy, dreamy smile. “Otherwise I’d have said it’s the muscle that allows you to kiss someone.”
    “When will she be ready?”
    “By the end of the week.”
    As office manager, Haskons was doing a bit of reorganizing—much to Ken Lillie’s displeasure, because he was the one being reorganized.
    “But why?” Lillie asked, his arms piled up with document files.
    “I’m moving you.”
    “Why me?”
    “Bob needs a desk.”
    “No, no, that’s not an answer . . . why me?”
    Haskons plunked a cardboard box of miscellaneous stuff on top of the pile, so that Lillie had to raise his head to peer over it.
    “Because you’re only ever at your desk to drink coffee.”
    “Yeah,” Lillie agreed vehemently. “Normally I’m out there making sure the streets are safe to walk.”
    Hoots of derision from all corners of the room. Catcalls and shouts of “SuperLillie Strikes Again,” and “Batman and Lillie.”
    Oswalde was studying the photographs of Nadine on the big bulletin board, keeping well out of it. He was edgy enough as it was, nervously watching the door for Tennison’s arrival. Kernan had