With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  “I didn’t exactly tell him where we’d be,” Barbara admitted.

  “Oh, that’s brilliant,” Hadiyyah said. “’Cause if he knew…I don’t much fancy being walloped, Barbara. Do you?”

  “D’you think he’d actually—”

  “Oh look, look,” Hadiyyah cried. “What’s this place called, then? And it smells so heavenly. Are they cooking somewhere? C’n we go in?”

  “This place” was Camden Lock Market, which they had come up to in their journey homeward. It stood on the edge of the Grand Union Canal, and the fragrance of the food stalls within it had reached them all the way on the pavement. Within, and mixing with the noise of rap music emanating from one of the shops, one could just discern the barking of food vendors hawking everything from stuffed jacket potatoes to chicken tikka masala.

  “Barbara, c’n we go inside this place?” Hadiyyah asked again. “Oh, it’s so special. And Dad’ll never know. We won’t be walloped. I promise, Barbara.”

  Barbara looked down at her shining face and knew she couldn’t deny her the simple pleasure of a wander through the market. How much trouble could it cause, indeed, if they were to take half an hour more and poke about among the candles, the incense, the T-shirts, and the scarves? She could distract Hadiyyah from the drug paraphernalia and the body-piercing stalls if they came upon them. As to the rest of what Camden Lock Market offered, it was all fairly innocent.

  Barbara smiled at her little companion. “What the hell,” she said with a shrug. “Let’s go.”

  They’d taken only two steps in their intended direction when Barbara’s mobile phone rang, however. Barbara said, “Hang on,” to Hadiyyah and read the incoming number. When she saw who it was, she knew the news was unlikely to be good.

  “THE GAME’S AFOOT.” It was Acting Superintendent Thomas Lynley’s voice, and it bore an underlying note of tension the source of which he made clear when he added, “Get over to Hillier’s office as quickly as you can.”

  “Hillier?” Barbara studied the mobile like an alien object while Hadiyyah waited patiently at her side, toeing a crack in the pavement and watching the mass of humanity part round them as it heaved its way towards one market or another. “AC Hillier can’t have asked for me.”

  “You’ve got an hour,” Lynley told her.

  “But, sir—”

  “He wanted thirty minutes, but we negotiated. Where are you?”

  “Camden Lock Market.”

  “Can you get here in an hour?”

  “I’ll do my best.” Barbara snapped the phone off and shoved it into her bag. She said, “Kiddo, we’ve got to save this for another day. Something’s up at the Yard.”

  “Something bad?” Hadiyyah asked.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  Barbara hoped for no. She hoped that what was up was an end to her period of punishment. She’d been suffering the mortification of demotion for months now, and she couldn’t help anticipating an end to what she considered her professional ostracism every time Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier’s name came up in conversation.

  And now she was wanted. Wanted in AC Hillier’s office. Wanted there by Hillier himself and by Lynley, who, Barbara knew, had been manoeuvring to get her back to her rank almost as soon as she’d had it stripped from her.

  She and Hadiyyah virtually trotted all the way back to Eton Villas. They parted where the flagstone path divided at the corner of the house. Hadiyyah gave a wave before she skipped over to the ground-floor flat, where Barbara could see that the sticky note she’d left for the little girl’s father had been removed from the door. She concluded that Azhar had returned with the surprise for his daughter, so she went to her bungalow for a hasty change of clothes.

  The first decision she had to make—and quickly, because the hour Lynley had spoken of on the mobile was now forty-five minutes after her dash from the markets on Chalk Farm Road—was what to wear. Her choice needed to be professional without being an obvious ploy to win Hillier’s approval. Trousers and a matching jacket would do the first without teetering too close to the second. So trousers and matching jacket it would be.

  She found them where she’d last left them, in a ball behind the television set. She couldn’t recall exactly how they’d got there, and she shook them out to survey the damage. Ah the beauty of polyester, she thought. One could be the victim of stampeding buffalo and still not bear a wrinkle to show it.

  She set about changing into an ensemble of sorts. This was less about making a fashion statement and more about throwing on the trousers and rooting for a blouse without too many obvious creases in it. She decided on the least offensive shoes she owned—a pair of scuffed brogues that she donned in place of the red high-top trainers she preferred—and within five minutes she was able to grab two Chocotastic Pop-Tarts. She shoved them into her shoulder bag on her way out of the door.

  Outside, there remained the question of transport: car, bus, or underground. All of them were risky: A bus would have to lumber through the clogged artery of Chalk Farm Road, a car meant engaging in creative rat running, and as for the underground…the underground line serving Chalk Farm was the notoriously unreliable Northern line. On the best of days, the wait alone could be twenty minutes.

  Barbara opted for the car. She fashioned herself a route that would have done justice to Daedalus, and she managed to get herself down to Westminster only eleven and a half minutes behind schedule. Still, she knew that Hillier was not going to be chuffed with anything other than punctuality, so she blasted round the corner when she got to Victoria Street, and once she’d parked, she headed for the lifts at a run.

  She stopped on the floor where Lynley had his temporary office, in the hope that he might have held off Hillier for the extra eleven and a half minutes it had taken her to get there. He hadn’t done, or so his empty office suggested. Dorothea Harriman, the departmental secretary, confirmed Barbara’s conclusion.

  “He’s up with the assistant commissioner, Detective Constable,” she said. “He said you’re to go up and join them. D’you know the hem’s coming out of your trousers?”

  “Is it? Damn,” Barbara said.

  “I’ve a needle if you want it.”

  “No time, Dee. D’you have a safety pin?”

  Dorothea went to her desk. Barbara knew how unlikely it was that the other woman would have a pin. Indeed, Dee was always turned out so perfectly that it was tough to imagine her even in possession of a needle. She said, “No pin, Detective Constable. Sorry. But there’s always this.” She held up a stapler.

  Barbara said, “Go for it. But be quick. I’m late.”

  “I know. You’re missing a button from your cuff as well,” Dorothea noted. “And there’s…Detective Constable, you’ve got…Is this slut’s wool on your backside?”

  “Oh damn, damn,” Barbara said. “Never mind. He’ll have to take me as I am.”

  Which wasn’t likely to be with open arms, she thought as she crossed over to Tower Block and took the lift up to Hillier’s office. He’d been wanting to sack her for at least four years, and only the intervention of others had kept him from it.

  Hillier’s secretary—who always referred to herself as Judi-with-an-i-MacIntosh—told Barbara to go straight in. Sir David, she said, was waiting for her. Had been waiting with Acting Superintendent Lynley for a good many minutes, she added. She smiled insincerely and pointed to the door.

  Inside, Barbara found Hillier and Lynley concluding a conference call with someone who was on Hillier’s speakerphone talking about “preparing to engage in damage limitation.”

  “I expect we’ll want a press conference, then,” Hillier said. “And soon, so we don’t end up seeming as if we’re doing it just to appease Fleet Street. When can you manage it?”

  “We’ll be sorting that out directly. How closely do you want to be involved?”

  “Very. And with an appropriate companion at hand.”

  “Fine. I’ll be in touch then, David.”

>   David and damage limitation, Barbara thought. The speaker was obviously a muckety-muck from the DPA.

  Hillier ended the conversation. He looked at Lynley, said, “Well?” and then noticed Barbara, just inside the door. He said, “Where the hell have you been, Constable?”

  So much, Barbara thought, for having a chance to polish anyone’s apples. She said, “Sorry, sir,” as Lynley turned in his chair. “Traffic was deadly.”

  “Life is deadly,” Hillier said. “But that doesn’t stop any of us from living it.”

  Absolute monarch of the flaming non sequitur, Barbara thought. She glanced at Lynley, who raised a warning index finger approximately half an inch. She said, “Yes, sir,” and she joined the two officers at the conference table where Lynley was sitting and where Hillier had moved when he’d ended his phone call. She eased a chair out and slid onto it as unobtrusively as possible.

  The table, she saw with a glance, held four sets of photographs. In them, four bodies lay. From where she sat, they appeared to be young adolescent boys, arranged on their backs, with their hands folded high on their chests in the manner of effigies on tombs. They would have looked like boys asleep had they not been cyanotic of face and necklaced with the mark of ligatures.

  Barbara pursed her lips. “Holy hell,” she said. “When did they…?”

  “Over the past three months,” Hillier said.

  “Three months? But why hasn’t anyone…?” Barbara looked from Hillier to Lynley. Lynley, she saw, looked deeply concerned; Hillier, always the most political of animals, looked wary. “I haven’t heard a whisper about this. Or read a word in the papers. Or seen any reports on the telly. Four deaths. The same MO. All victims young. All victims male.”

  “Please try to sound a little less like an hysterical newsreader on cable television,” Hillier said.

  Lynley shifted position in his chair. He cast a look Barbara’s way. His brown eyes were telling her to hold back from saying what they all were thinking until the two of them managed to get alone somewhere.

  All right, Barbara thought. She would play it that way. She said in a careful, professional voice, “Who are they, then?”

  “A, B, C, and D. We haven’t any names.”

  “No one reported them missing? In three months?”

  “That’s evidently part of the problem,” Lynley said.

  “What d’you mean? Where were they found?”

  Hillier indicated one of the photographs as he spoke. “The first…in Gunnersbury Park. September tenth. Found at eight-fifteen in the morning by a jogger needing to have a piss. There’s an old garden inside the park, partially walled, not far off Gunnersbury Avenue. That looks to be the means of access. There’re two boarded-up entrances there, right on the street.”

  “But he didn’t die in the park,” Barbara noted, with a nod at the photo in which the boy had been positioned supine on a mattress of weeds that grew at the juncture of two brick walls. There was nothing that suggested a struggle had taken place in the vicinity. There was also, in the entire stack of pictures from that crime scene, no photograph of the sort of evidence one expected to find where a murder occurs.

  “No. He didn’t die there. Nor did this one.” Hillier picked up another batch of photographs. In it, the body of another slender boy was draped across the bonnet of a car, positioned as neatly as the first in Gunnersbury Park. “This one was found in an NCP car park at the top of Queensway. Just over five weeks later.”

  “What’s the murder squad over there saying? Anything from CCTV?”

  “The car park doesn’t have closed-circuit cameras.” Lynley answered Barbara’s question. “There’s a sign posted that there ‘may’ be cameras on the premises. But that’s it. That’s supposed to do the job of security.”

  “This one was in Quaker Street,” Hillier went on, indicating a third set of photos. “An abandoned warehouse not far from Brick Lane. November twenty-fifth. And this—” he picked up the final batch and handed them over to Barbara—“is the latest. He was found in St. George’s Gardens. Today.”

  Barbara glanced at the final set of pictures. In them, the body of an adolescent boy lay naked on the top of a lichen-covered tomb. The tomb itself sat on a lawn not far from a serpentine path. Beyond this, a brick wall fenced off not a cemetery—as one would expect from the tomb’s presence—but a garden. Beyond the wall appeared to be a mews of garages and a block of flats behind them.

  “St. George’s Gardens?” Barbara asked. “Where is this place?”

  “Not far from Russell Square.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “The warden who opens the park every day. Our killer got access from the gates on Handel Street. They were chained up properly, but bolt cutters did the trick. He opened up, drove a vehicle inside, made his deposit on the tomb, and took off. Stopped to wrap the chain back round the gate so anyone passing wouldn’t notice.”

  “Tyre prints in the garden?”

  “Two decent ones. Casts are being made.”

  “Witnesses?” Barbara indicated the flats that lined the garden just beyond the mews.

  “We’ve constables from the Theobald’s Road station doing the door-to-door.”

  Barbara pulled all of the photographs towards her and laid the four victims in a row. She immediately took note of the differences—all of them major ones—between the final dead boy and the first three. All of them were young teenagers who’d died in an identical fashion, but unlike the first three boys, the latest victim was not only naked but also had a copious amount of makeup on: lipstick, eye shadow, liner, and mascara smeared across his face. Additionally, the killer had marked his body by slicing it open from sternum to waist and by drawing with blood an odd circular symbol on his forehead. The most potentially explosive political detail, however, had to do with race: Only the final victim was white. Of the earlier three, one was black and the two others were clearly mixed race: black and Asian, perhaps, black and Filipino, black and a blend of God only knew what.

  Seeing this last feature, Barbara understood: why there had been no front-page newspaper coverage, why no television, and worst of all, why no whispers round New Scotland Yard. She raised her head. “Institutionalised racism. That’s what they’re going to claim, isn’t it? No one across London—in any of the stations involved, right?—even twigged there’s a serial killer at work. No one got round to comparing notes. This kid—” here she raised the photograph of the black youth—“might’ve been reported missing in Peckham. Maybe in Kilburn. Or Lewisham. Or anywhere. But his body wasn’t dumped where he lived and disappeared from, was it, so the rozzers on his home patch called him a runaway, left it at that, and never matched him up to a murder that got reported in another station’s patch. Is that what happened?”

  “You can see the need for both delicacy and immediate action,” Hillier said.

  “Cheap murders, hardly worth investigating, all because of their race. That’s what they’re going to call the first three when the story gets out. The tabloids, television and radio news, the whole flaming lot.”

  “We intend to get the jump on what they call anything. If the truth be told, the tabloids, the broadsheets, the radio, and the television news—had they been attuned to what’s going on and not intent on pursuing scandals among celebrities, the government, and the bloody royal family—might have broken this story themselves and crucified us on their front pages. As it is, they can hardly claim institutionalised racism for our failure to see what they themselves could have seen and did not. Rest assured that when each station’s press officer released the news of a body being found, the story was judged a nonstarter by the media because of the victim: just another dead black boy. Cheap news. Not worth reporting. Ho-hum.”

  “With respect, sir,” Barbara pointed out, “that’s hardly going to stop them braying now.”

  “We’ll see about that. Ah.” Hillier smiled expansively as his office door swung open again. “Here’s the gentleman we’ve been waiting
for. Have they sorted out your paperwork, Winston? May we call you Sergeant Nkata officially?”

  Barbara felt the question come at her like an unexpected blow. She looked at Lynley, but he was standing to greet Winston Nkata, who’d paused just inside the door. Unlike her, Nkata was dressed with the care he habitually employed: Everything about him was crisp and clean. In his presence—in the presence of all of them, come to that—Barbara felt like Cinderella in advance of the fairy godmother’s visit.

  She got to her feet. She was about to do the very worst thing for her career, but she didn’t see any other way out…except the way out, which she decided to take. She said to her colleague, “Winnie. Brilliant. Cheers. I didn’t know.” And then to the other two ranking officers, “I’ve just remembered a phone call I’m meant to return.”

  Then she left the room.

  ACTING SUPERINTENDENT Thomas Lynley felt the distinct need to follow Havers. At the same time, he recognised the wisdom of staying put. Ultimately, he knew, he’d probably be better able to do her service if at least one of them managed to remain in AC Hillier’s good graces.

  That, unfortunately, was never easy. The assistant commissioner’s style of command generally existed on the border between Machiavellian and despotic, and rational individuals gave the man a very wide berth if they could. Lynley’s own immediate superior—Malcolm Webberly, who’d been on medical leave for some time—had been running interference for both Lynley and Havers since the day he’d assigned them to their first case together. Without Webberly at New Scotland Yard, it fell to Lynley to recognise which side of the bread bore the butter.