With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  The present situation was trying Lynley’s determination to remain a disinterested party in his every interaction with Hillier. There’d been a moment early on when the AC could have easily told him about Winston Nkata’s promotion: the very same moment when the man had refused to restore Barbara Havers to her rank.

  What Hillier had said with little enough grace was, “I want you heading up this investigation, Lynley. Acting superintendent…I can hardly give it to anyone else. Malcolm would have wanted you on it anyway, so put together the team you need.”

  Lynley had mistakenly put the AC’s laconism down to distress. Superintendent Malcolm Webberly was Hillier’s brother-in-law, after all, and the victim of an attempted homicide. Hillier doubtless worried about his recovery from the hit-and-run that had nearly killed him. So he said, “How’s the superintendent’s progress, sir?”

  “This isn’t the time to talk about the superintendent’s progress,” was Hillier’s reply. “Are you heading this investigation or am I handing it over to one of your colleagues?”

  “I’d like to have Barbara Havers back as sergeant to be part of the team.”

  “Would you. Well, this isn’t a bargaining session. It’s a Yes, I’ll get to work directly, sir, or a Sorry, I’m going on an extended holiday.”

  So Lynley had been left with the Yes, I’ll get to work directly, and no room to manoeuvre for Havers. He made a quick plan, though, which involved assigning his colleague to certain aspects of the investigation that would be guaranteed to highlight her strengths. Certainly, within the next few months he’d be able to right the wrongs that had been done to Barbara since the previous June.

  Then, of course, he’d been blindsided by Hillier. Winston Nkata arrived, newly minted as sergeant, blocking Havers from promotion in the near future, and unaware of what his role was likely to be in the ensuing drama.

  Lynley burned at all this, but he kept his features neutral. He was curious to see how Hillier was going to dance round the obvious when he assigned Nkata to be his right-hand man. Because there was no doubt in Lynley’s mind that this was what AC Hillier intended to do. With one parent from Jamaica and the other from the Ivory Coast, Nkata was decidedly, handsomely, and suitably black. And once the news broke of a string of racial killings that had not been connected to one another when they damn well should have been, the black community was going to ignite. Not one Stephen Lawrence but three. With no excuse to be had but the most obvious, which Barbara Havers herself had stated in her usual, politically unastute manner: institutionalised racism that resulted in the police not actively pursuing the killers of young mixed-race boys and blacks. Just because.

  Hillier was carefully oiling the skids in preparation. He seated Nkata at the conference table and brought him into the picture. He made no mention of the race of the first three victims, but Winston Nkata was nobody’s fool.

  “So you got trouble,” was his cool observation at the end of Hillier’s comments.

  Hillier replied with studied calm. “The situation being what it is, we’re trying to avoid trouble.”

  “Which’s where I come in, right?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What manner of speaking is that?” Nkata inquired. “How’re you planning to keep this under the carpet? Not the fact of the killings, mind you, but the fact of nothing being done ’bout the killings.”

  Lynley controlled his need to smile. Ah, Winston, he thought. No one’s dancing, blue-eyed boy.

  “Investigations have been mounted on all the relevant patches,” was Hillier’s reply. “Admittedly, connections should have been made between the murders, and they weren’t. Because of that, we at the Yard have taken over. I’ve instructed Acting Superintendent Lynley to put together a team. I want you playing a prominent role on it.”

  “You mean a token role,” Nkata said.

  “I mean a highly responsible, crucial—”

  “—visible,” Nkata cut in.

  “—yes, all right. A visible role.” Hillier’s generally florid face was becoming quite ruddy. It was clear that the meeting wasn’t following his preconceived scenario. Had he asked in advance, Lynley would have been happy to tell him that, having once done a stint as chief battle counsel for the Brixton Warriors and bearing the scars to show it, Winston Nkata was the last person one ought to fail to take seriously when devising one’s political machinations. As it was, Lynley found himself enjoying the spectacle of the assistant commissioner floundering. He’d clearly expected the black man to snap joyfully at the chance to play a significant role in what was going to become a high-profile investigation. Since he wasn’t doing that, Hillier was left walking a tightrope between the displeasure of an authority being questioned by such an underling and the political correctness of an ostensibly moderate English white man who, at heart, truly believed that rivers of blood were imminently due to flow in the streets of London.

  Lynley decided to let them go at it alone. He got to his feet, saying, “I’ll leave you to explain all the finer points of the case to Sergeant Nkata, sir. There’re going to be countless details to organise: men to bring off rota and the like. I’d like to get Dee Harriman on all that straightaway.” He gathered up the relevant documents and photographs and said to Nkata, “I’ll be in my office when you’re through here, Winnie.”

  “Sure,” Nkata said. “Soon’s we got the fine print read.”

  Lynley left the office and managed to keep himself from chuckling till he was some distance down the corridor. Havers, he knew, would have been difficult for Hillier to stomach as a detective sergeant once again. But Nkata was going to be a real challenge: proud, intelligent, clever, and quick. He was a man first, a black man second, and a cop only a distant third. Hillier, Lynley thought, had got every part of him in the wrong order.

  He decided to use the stairs to descend to his office once he crossed to Victoria Block, and that was where he found Barbara Havers. She was sitting on the top step, one flight down, smoking and picking at a loose thread on the cuff of her jacket.

  Lynley said, “You’re out of order, doing that here. You know that, don’t you?” He joined her on the step.

  She studied the glowing tip of the tobacco, then returned the cigarette to her mouth. She inhaled with showy satisfaction. “Maybe they’ll sack me.”

  “Havers—”

  “Did you know?” she asked abruptly.

  He gave her the courtesy of not pretending to misunderstand. “Of course I didn’t know. I would have told you. Got a message to you before you arrived. Something. He took me by surprise as well. As he doubtless intended.”

  She shrugged. “What the hell. It’s not as if Winnie doesn’t deserve it. He’s good. Clever. Works well with everyone.”

  “He’s putting Hillier through the paces, though. At least, he was when I left them.”

  “Has he twigged that he’s to be window dressing? Black face at press conferences front and centre? No colour problems here, and look at this, everyone: We’ve got the proof in person? Hillier’s so bloody obvious.”

  “Winston’s five or six steps ahead of Hillier, I’d say.”

  “I should’ve stayed to see it.”

  “You should have done, Barbara. If nothing else, it would have been wise.”

  She tossed her cigarette to the landing below them. It rolled, stopped against the wall, and sent a lazy plume of smoke upwards. “When have I ever been that?”

  Lynley looked her up and down. “With the ensemble today, as a matter of fact. Except…” He leaned forward to look towards her feet. “Are you actually holding the trousers together with staples, Barbara?”

  “Quick, easy, and temporary. I’m a bird who hates commitment. I’d’ve used Sellotape but Dee recommended this. I shouldn’t’ve bothered one way or the other.”

  Lynley rose from the step and extended his hand to help her up as well. “Apart from the staples, you’ve done yourself proud.”

  “Right. That’s me. Today the
Yard, tomorrow the catwalk,” Havers said.

  They descended to his temporary office. Dorothea Harriman came to the door once he and Havers were spreading the case materials out on the conference table. She said, “Sh’ll I start phoning them in, Acting Superintendent Lynley?”

  “The secretarial grapevine round here is, as ever, a model of efficiency,” Lynley noted. “Bring Stewart off rota to run the incident room. Hale’s in Scotland and MacPherson’s involved with that forged-documents situation, so leave them be. And send Winston through when he gets down from Hillier.”

  “Detective Sergeant Nkata, right.” Harriman was making her usual competent notes on a sticky pad.

  “You know about Winnie as well?” Havers asked, impressed. “Already? Have you got a snout up there or something, Dee?”

  “The cultivation of resources should be the aim of every dutiful police employee,” Harriman said piously.

  “Cultivate someone across the river, then,” Lynley said. “I want all the forensic material SO7 has on the older cases. Then phone each police borough where a body was found and get every scrap of every report and every statement they have on these crimes. Havers, in the meantime, you’ll need to get on to the PNC—grab at least two DCs from Stewart to help you—and pull out every missing-persons report filed in the last three months for adolescent boys ages…” He looked at the photos. “I think twelve to sixteen should do it.” He tapped the picture of the most recent victim, the boy with makeup smeared across his face. “And I think we’ll want to check with Vice on this one. It’s a route to go with all of them, in fact.”

  Havers picked up on the direction his thoughts were taking. “If they’re rent boys, sir—runaways who happened to fall into the game, say—then it may be there’s no missing-person report filed for any one of them. At least not in the same month they were killed.”

  “Indeed,” Lynley said. “So we’ll work backwards in time if we have to. But we’ve got to start somewhere, so let’s keep it at three months for now.”

  Havers and Harriman left to see to their respective assignments. Lynley sat at the table and felt in his jacket pocket for his reading spectacles. He took another look at the photographs, spending the most time on those pictures of the final killing. They could not, he knew, accurately portray the understated enormity of the crime itself as he’d seen it earlier that day.

  When he had arrived at St. George’s Gardens, the scythe-shaped area held a full complement of detectives, uniformed constables, and scenes-of-crime officers. The forensic pathologist was still on the scene, bundled against the grey-day cold in a mustard anorak, and the police photographer and videographer had just completed their work. Outside the tall wrought-iron gates of the gardens, the public had begun to gather, and from the windows of the buildings just beyond the garden’s brick wall and the mews behind it, more spectators were observing the activity taking place: the careful fingertip search for evidence, the minute examination of a discarded bicycle that sprawled near a statue of Minerva, the collection of silver objects that were scattered on the ground round a tomb.

  Lynley hadn’t known what to expect when he showed his ID at the gate and followed the path to the professionals. The phone call he’d received had used the phrase “possible serial killing” and because of this, as he walked, he steeled himself to see something terrible: a disembowelment in the manner of Jack the Ripper, perhaps, a decapitation or dismemberment. He’d assumed it would be the horrific that he would be gazing upon when he worked his way to look at the top of the tomb in question. What he hadn’t assumed was that it would be the sinister.

  Yet that was what the body represented to him: the sinister, left hand of evil. Ritualistic killings always struck him that way. And that this murder had been a ritual was something that he did not doubt.

  The effigylike arrangement of the body served to encourage that deduction, but so did the mark in blood on the forehead: a crude circle crisscrossed by two lines that each bore cruciforms at the top and the bottom. Additionally, the element of a loincloth added support to this conclusion: an odd, lace-edged piece of fabric, which had been tucked, as if lovingly, round the genitals.

  As Lynley donned the latex gloves and stepped to the side of the tomb to gaze more closely upon the body, he saw and learned of the rest of the signs that pointed to some sort of arcane rite having been carried out upon it. “What’ve we got?” he murmured to the forensic pathologist, who’d been snapping off his gloves and shoving them into his pocket.

  “Two A.M. or thereabouts,” was the succinct reply. “Strangulation, obviously. Incised wounds all inflicted after death. One cut for the primary incision down the torso, with no hesitation. Then…see the separation here? Just at the area of the sternum? It looks like our knife man dipped his hands inside and forced a bigger opening, like a quack surgeon. We won’t know if anything’s missing inside him till we cut him open ourselves. Looks doubtful, though.”

  Lynley noticed the inflection the pathologist had given to the word inside. He glanced quickly at the victim’s folded hands and his feet. All digits accounted for. He said, “As to outside the body? Is something missing?”

  “The navel. It’s been chopped right off. Have a look.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yes. Ope’s got a dodgy one on her hands.”

  Ope turned out to be a grey-haired woman in scarlet earmuffs and matching mittens who came striding towards Lynley from a group of uniformed constables who’d been in some sort of discussion when he’d arrived on the scene. She introduced herself as DCI Opal Towers, from Theobald’s Road police station, in whose patch they were currently standing. She’d taken just one look at the body and concluded they had a killer who “could definitely go serial,” she’d explained. She’d mistakenly thought that the boy on the tomb was the unfortunate initial victim of someone they could identify quickly and stop before he struck again. “But then DC Hartell over there”—with a nod towards a baby-faced detective constable who chewed gum compulsively and watched them with the nervous eyes of someone expecting a dressing down—“said he’d seen a killing something like this in Tower Hamlets when he worked out of the Brick Lane station a while back. I phoned his former guv and we had a few words. We think we’re looking at the same killer in both cases.”

  At the time, Lynley hadn’t asked why she’d then phoned the Met. He hadn’t known till he met with Hillier that there were additional victims. He hadn’t known that three of the victims were racial minorities. And he hadn’t known that not a single one of them had yet been identified by the police. All that was later spelled out to him by Hillier. In St. George’s Gardens, he merely reached the conclusion that reinforcements were called for and that someone was needed to coordinate an investigation that was going to involve turf in two radically different parts of town: Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets was the centre of the Bangladeshi community, containing remnants of the West Indian population who had once been its majority, while the area of St. Pancras, where St. George’s Gardens formed a green oasis among distinguished Georgian conversions, was decidedly monochromatic, the colour in question being white.

  He said to DCI Towers, “How far has Brick Lane got in their investigation?”

  She shook her head and looked towards the wrought-iron gates through which Lynley had come. He followed her gaze and saw that members of the press and television news—distinguished by their notebooks, their handheld tape recorders, and the vans from which video cameras were being unloaded—had begun to gather. A press officer was directing them to one side. She said, “According to Hartell, Brick Lane did sod all, which is why he wanted out of the place. He says it’s an endemic problem. Now, could be he just has an axe he’s grinding on the reputation of his ex-guv over there, or could be those blokes’ve been sleeping at the wheel. But in either case, we’ve got some sorting to do.” She hunched her shoulders and drove her mittened hands into the pockets of her down jacket. She nodded at the news people. “To say they’re going to ha
ve a field day if they twig all that…Between you, me, and the footpath, I thought it best we look like we’ve got coppers from bottom to top crawling all over this.”

  Lynley eyed her with some interest. She certainly didn’t look like a political animal, but it was clear that she was quick on her feet. Nonetheless he felt it wise to ask, “You’re sure about what Constable Hartell is claiming, then?”

  “Wasn’t at first,” she admitted. “But he convinced me quick enough.”

  “How?”

  “He didn’t get as close a look at the body as I did, but he took me aside and asked about the hands.”

  “The hands? What about the hands?”

  She gave him a glance. “You didn’t see them? You best come with me, Superintendent.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  DESPITE THE EARLY HOUR AT WHICH HE ROSE THE NEXT morning, Lynley found that his wife was already up. He found her in what was going to be their baby’s nursery, where yellow, white, and green were the colours of choice, a cot and changing table comprised the furniture delivered so far, and photographs clipped from magazines and catalogues indicated the placement of everything else: a toy chest here, a rocking chair there, and a chest of drawers moved daily from point A to point B. In her first trimester, Helen was nothing if not changeable when it came to the appearance of their son’s nursery.

  She was standing before the changing table, her hands massaging the small of her back. Lynley joined her, brushing her hair away from her neck, making a bare spot for his kiss. She leaned back against him. She said, “You know, Tommy, I never expected impending parenthood to be so political an event.”

  “Is it? How?”

  She gestured to the surface of the changing table. There, Lynley saw, the remains of a package lay. It had obviously come by post on the previous day, and Helen had opened it and spread its contents upon the table. These consisted of an infant’s snowy christening garments: gown, shawl, cap, and shoes. Next to them lay yet another set of christening garments: another gown, shawl, and cap. Lynley picked up the postal wrapping that had covered the box. He saw the name and the return address. “Daphne Amalfini,” he read. She lived in Italy, one of Helen’s four sisters.