With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  He said, “What’s going on?”

  “Battle lines are being drawn. I hate to tell you, but I’m afraid that soon we’ll have to choose a side.”

  “Ah. Right. I take it that these…?” Lynley indicated the set of garments most recently unpacked.

  “Yes. Daphne sent them along. With a rather sweet note, by the way, but there’s no mistaking the meaningful subtext. She knows that your sister must have sent us the ancestral Lynley baptismal regalia, being so far the only reproductive Lynley of the current generation. But Daph seems to think that five Clyde sisters procreating like bunnies is reason enough why the Clyde apparel should be sufficient unto the christening day. No, that’s not right. Not sufficient unto the day at all. More like de rigueur for the day. It’s all ridiculous—believe me, I know—but it’s one of those family situations that ends up being blown out of proportion if one doesn’t handle it correctly.” She looked at him and offered a quirky smile. “It’s utterly stupid, isn’t it? Hardly comparable to what you’re dealing with. What time did you actually get home last night? Did you find your dinner in the fridge?”

  “I thought I’d eat it for breakfast, actually.”

  “Take-away garlic chicken?”

  “Well. Perhaps not.”

  “Any suggestions you care to make about the christening clothes, then? And don’t suggest we forego the christening altogether, because I don’t want to be responsible for my father’s having a stroke.”

  Lynley thought about the situation. On the one hand, the christening garments from his own family had been used for at least five—if not six—generations of infant Lynleys as they were ushered into Christendom, so there was a tradition established in using them. On the other hand, if the truth were told, the clothes were beginning to look as if five or six generations of infant Lynleys had worn them. On the other, other hand—presuming three hands were possible in this matter—every child of every one of the five Clyde sisters had worn the more recently vintaged Clyde family raiment, and thus a tradition was being started there, and it would be pleasant to uphold it. So…what to do?

  Helen was right. It was just the sort of idiotic situation that bent everyone out of shape. Some sort of diplomatic resolution was called for.

  “We can claim both sets were lost in the post,” he offered.

  “I had no idea you were such a moral coward. Your sister already knows hers arrived, and in any case, I’m a dreadful liar.”

  “Then I must leave you to work out a Solomon-like solution.”

  “A distinct possibility, now that you mention it,” Helen remarked. “A careful application of the scissors first, right up the middle of each. Then needle, thread, and everyone’s happy.”

  “And a new tradition’s begun into the bargain.”

  They both gazed at the two christening ensembles and then at each other. Helen looked mischievous. Lynley laughed. “We don’t dare,” he said. “You’ll work it out in your inimitable fashion.”

  “Two christenings, then?”

  “You’re on the path to solution already.”

  “And what path are you on? You’re up early. Our Jasper Felix awakened me doing gymnastics in my stomach. What’s your excuse?”

  “I’d like to head off Hillier if I can. The Press Bureau are setting up a meeting with the media, and Hillier wants Winston there, right at his side. I’m not going to be able to talk him out of that, but I’m hoping to get him to keep it low key.”

  He maintained that hope all the way to New Scotland Yard. There, however, he soon enough saw that forces superior even to AC Hillier were at work, making Big Plans in the person of Stephenson Deacon, head of the Press Bureau and intent upon justifying his present job and possibly his entire career. He was doing this by means of orchestrating the assistant commissioner’s first meeting with the press, which apparently involved not only the presence of Winston Nkata at Hillier’s side but also a dais set up before a curtained background with the Union Jack draped artfully nearby, as well as detailed press kits manufactured to present a dizzying amount of noninformation. At the rear of the conference room, someone had also arranged a table that looked suspiciously intended for refreshments.

  Lynley evaluated all of this bleakly. Whatever hopes he’d had of talking Hillier into a subtler approach were thoroughly dashed. The Directorate of Public Affairs were involved now, and that division of the Met reported not to AC Hillier but to his superior, the deputy comissioner. The lower downs—Lynley among them—were obviously being transformed into cogs in the vast machinery of public relations. Lynley realised that the best he could do was to protect Nkata from the exposure as much as possible.

  The new detective sergeant had already been there. He’d been told where to sit when the press conference took place and what to say should he be asked any questions. Lynley found him steaming in the corridor. The Caribbean in his voice, child of his West Indian mother, always came out in moments of stress. Th became either d or t. Man—pronounced mon—worked its way forward as interjection of choice.

  “I di’n’t get into this to be some dancing monkey,” Nkata said. “My job i’n’t meant to be all about my mum turning on the telly and seeing my mug on the screen. He thinks I’m dim, that’s what he thinks. I’m here to tell him I’m not.”

  “This goes beyond Hillier,” Lynley said, with a nod of greeting to one of the sound technicians, who was ducking into the conference room. “Stay calm and put up with it for the moment, Winnie. It’ll be to your advantage in the long run, depending on what you want to do with your career.”

  “But you know why I’m here. You bloody know why.”

  “Put it down to Deacon,” Lynley said. “The Press Bureau are cynical enough to think the public will leap to a preordained conclusion when they see you on the dais elbow to elbow with the assistant commissioner of the Met. Just now Deacon’s arrogant enough to think your appearance there will quiet speculation in the press. But none of that is a reflection on you, either personally or professionally. You’ve got to remember that in order to get through this.”

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t believe it, man. And if there’s speculation out there, then it’s deserved. How many more dead is’t going to take? Black-on-black crime is still that: crime. With next to no one looking into it. An’ if this partic’lar situation happens to be white-on-black crime and it’s gone ignored, having me acting like Hillier’s right-hand man when you and he both know he wouldn’t’ve even promoted me if the circumstances’d been different…” Here Nkata paused, drawing breath as he seemed to search for just the right peroration to his remarks.

  “Murder as politics,” Lynley said. “Yes. That’s it. Is that nasty? Undoubtedly. Is it cynical? Yes. Unpleasant? Yes. Machiavellian? Yes. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t mean you need to be—or are—anything less than a decent officer.”

  Hillier came out of the room then. He looked pleased with whatever Stephenson Deacon had set up for the coming press briefing. “We’ll be buying at least forty-eight hours once we’ve met with them,” he said to Lynley and Nkata. “Winston, mind you remember your part.”

  Lynley waited to see how Nkata would react. To his credit, Winston did nothing but nod neutrally. But when Hillier walked off in the direction of the lifts, he said to Lynley, “These’re kids we’re talking about. Dead kids, man.”

  “Winston,” Lynley said, “I know.”

  “What’s he doing, then?”

  “I believe he’s positioning the press to take a fall.”

  Nkata looked in the direction Hillier had taken. “How’s he going to manage that?”

  “By waiting long enough for them to expose their bias before he talks to them. He knows the papers will get on to the fact that the earlier victims were black and mixed race, and when they do, they’ll start baying for our blood. What were we doing, asleep at the wheel, et cetera, et cetera. At that point, he’ll counter with piously wondering why it’s taken them so long to glean what the cops knew—and tol
d the press—from the first. This last death makes page one of every paper. It runs near the front of the evening news. But what about the others? he’ll ask. Why weren’t they considered top stories?”

  “Hillier’s taking the offensive, then,” Nkata said.

  “It’s why he’s good at what he does, most of the time.”

  Nkata looked disgusted. “Four white boys killed in different parts of town and the coppers’d be liaising themselves like the bloody dickens from the first.”

  “They probably would.”

  “Then—”

  “We can’t correct their failures, Winston. We can loathe them and try to change them for the future. But we can’t go back and make them different.”

  “We c’n keep them from being swept under the rug.”

  “We could champion that cause. Yes. I agree.” And as Nkata started to say more, Lynley plunged on with, “But while we do that, a killer goes on killing. So what have we gained? Have we unburied the dead? Brought anyone to justice? Believe me, Winston, the press will recover from Hillier’s allegations about the pot and the kettle shortly after he makes them, and when they do, they’ll be all over him, like gnats on fruit. In the meantime, we’ve got four killings to deal with properly, and we won’t be able to do that if we don’t have the cooperation of those very same murder squads you’re hot to expose as bigoted and corrupt. Does that make sense to you?”

  Nkata thought about this. He finally said, “I want a real role in all this. I got no plans to be Hillier’s lad at press conferences, man.”

  “Understood and agreed,” Lynley said. “You’re a DS now. No one’s likely to forget that. Let’s get to work.”

  The incident room had been set up a short distance from Lynley’s office, where uniformed PCs were already at the computer terminals, logging information that was coming in per Lynley’s request to the police boroughs where the earlier bodies had been found. China boards held crime-scene photographs along with a large schedule containing team members’ names and the identifying numbers of the actions assigned to them. Technicians had set up three video machines so that someone could review all relevant CCTV tapes—where and if they existed—from every area where the bodies had been dumped, and their flexes and cords snaked along the floor. The telephones were already ringing. Manning them at the moment were Lynley’s longtime colleague, DI John Stewart and two DCs. The former was seated at a desk already compulsively organised.

  Barbara Havers was in the midst of highlighting data sheets with a yellow marker when Lynley and Nkata walked in. At her elbow sat an opened package of Mr. Kipling strawberry jam tarts and a cup of coffee, which she drained with a grimace, and a “Bloody hell. Cold,” after which she looked longingly at a packet of Players half-buried beneath a pile of printouts.

  “Don’t even think of it,” Lynley told her. “What’ve you got from SO5?”

  She set down her marker pen and worked the muscles of her shoulders. “You’re going to want to keep this one away from the press.”

  “Now that’s a fine beginning,” Lynley commented. “Let’s have it, then.”

  “Going back three months, Juvenile Index and Missing Persons together coughed up fifteen hundred and seventy-four names.”

  “Damn.” Lynley took the data sheets from her and flipped through them impatiently. Across the room, DI Stewart rang off and finished his notes.

  “You ask me,” Havers said, “it looks like things haven’t changed much since the last time SO5 faced the press about not keeping their systems up to date. You’d think they wouldn’t want egg on their neckties again.”

  “You’d think so,” Lynley agreed. As a matter of course, the names of children reported missing went into the system at once. But often, when the child was found, the name was not then removed from the system. Nor was it necessarily removed when children who might have started out missing ended up either incarcerated as youth offenders or placed in the care of Social Services. It was a case of the left and right hands not knowing, and more than once this sort of inefficiency on the part of Missing Persons had created a logjam in an investigation.

  “I’m reading the news on your face,” Havers said, “but no way can I do this alone, sir. More than fifteen hundred names? By the time I get through them all, this bloke”—with a jerk of her head towards the photographs posted on the china board—“he’ll have his next seven victims dispatched.”

  “We’ll get you some help,” Lynley said. To Stewart, “John? Get some additional manpower for this. Put half on the phones checking to see if these kids have turned up since they went missing and have the other half go for a match: our four bodies to descriptions in the paperwork. Anything remotely possible that could allow us to tie a name to a corpse, run with it. And what’ve we heard from Vice on the most recent body? Has Theobald’s Road given us anything on the boy in St. George’s Gardens? Has King’s Cross? What about Tolpuddle Street?”

  DI Stewart took up a notebook. “According to Vice, the description doesn’t fit any boy recently on the job anywhere. Among the regulars, no one’s missing. So far.”

  “Get on to Vice where the other bodies were found as well,” Lynley said to Havers. “See if you can make a match with anyone reported missing there.” He went to the china board, where he gazed at the photos of the most recent victim. John Stewart joined him. As usual, the DI was nervous energy combined with an obsession for detail. The notebook he carried was open to an outline, which he’d done in various colours significant only to himself. Lynley said to him, “What’ve we got from across the river?”

  “No reports yet,” Stewart said. “I checked with Dee Harriman not ten minutes ago.”

  “We’ll want them to test the makeup this boy’s wearing, John. See if we can track down the manufacturer. Could be our victim didn’t put it on himself. If that’s the case and if the makeup’s not something available at every Boots in town, the point of sale could move us in the right direction. In the meantime, run a check on recent releases from prison and from mental hospitals. Recent releases from every youth facility within one hundred miles as well. And this works in both directions, so keep that in mind.”

  “Both directions?” Stewart looked up from his furious writing.

  “Our killer could come from one of them. But so could our victims. And until we have a positive identification on all four of these boys, we don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with, except the most obvious.”

  “One sick bastard.”

  “There’s enough evidence on the last body to attest to that,” Lynley agreed. His gaze went to that evidence even as he spoke, as if drawn there without his intention: the long postmortem incision on the torso, the blood-drawn symbol on the forehead, the missing navel, and what hadn’t been noted or photographed until the body was moved for the very first time: the palms of the hands burned so thoroughly that the flesh was black.

  He shifted his gaze to the list of actions he’d already assigned on the previous long night of setting up the team: There were men and women knocking on doors in the vicinity where every one of the first three bodies had been found; additional officers were studying prior arrests to see if any lesser crimes had been documented that bore the hallmark of escalating behaviour which might lead to such murders as they now had on their hands. This was well and good, but they also needed to get someone on to the loincloth that had dressed the final body, someone to deal with the bicycle and the pieces of silver that had been left at the scene, someone to triangulate and analyse all of the crime scenes, someone to run down all sex offenders and their alibis, and someone to check throughout the rest of the country to see if there were similar unsolved murders elsewhere. They knew they had four, but there was every possibility that they had fourteen. Or forty.

  Eighteen police detectives and six police constables were working the case at this moment, but Lynley knew without a doubt they were going to need more. There was only one way to get them.

  Sir David Hillier, Lynley t
hought sardonically, was going to love and hate that fact simultaneously. He’d be pleased as punch to announce to the press that thirty-plus officers were working the case. But he’d hate like the dickens having to authorise the overtime for them all.

  Such, however, was Hillier’s lot in life. Such were the disadvantages of ambition.

  BY THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Lynley had in hand from SO7 the complete autopsies of the first three victims and the preliminary postmortem information from the most recent killing. He combined this with an extra set of photographs from all four of the murder scenes. He packed this material into his briefcase, went for his car, and set out from Victoria Street in a light mist that was blowing in from the river. Traffic was stop and start, but when he finally got over to Millbank, he had the river to contemplate…or what he could see of it, which was mostly the wall built along the pavement and the old iron street lamps that cast a glow against the gloom.

  He veered to the right when he came to Cheyne Walk, where he found a place to park that was being vacated by someone leaving the King’s Head and Eight Bells at the bottom of Cheyne Row. It was a short distance from there to the house at the corner of this street and Lordship Place. Less than five minutes found him ringing the bell.

  He anticipated the barking of one very protective long-haired dachshund, but that didn’t happen. Instead the door was opened by a tallish red-haired woman with a pair of scissors in one hand and a roll of yellow ribbon in the other. Her face brightened when she saw him.

  “Tommy!” Deborah St. James said. “Perfect timing. I need help and here you are.”

  Lynley entered the house, shedding his overcoat and setting his briefcase by the umbrella stand. “What sort of help? Where’s Simon?”

  “I’ve already roped him into something else. And one can only ask husbands for so much assistance before they run off with the local floozy from the pub.”