With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley smiled. “What am I to do?”

  “Come with me.” She led him to the dining room, where an old bronze chandelier was lit over a table spread with wrapping materials. A large package there was already brightly wrapped, and Deborah seemed to have been caught in the midst of designing a complicated bow for it.

  “This,” Lynley said, “is not going to be my métier.”

  “Oh, the plans are laid,” Deborah told him. “You’re only going to need to hand over the Sellotape and press where indicated. It shouldn’t defeat you. I’ve started with the yellow, but there’s green and white to add.”

  “Those are the colours Helen’s chosen…” Lynley stopped. “Is this for her? For us? By any chance?”

  “How vulgar, Tommy,” Deborah said. “I never saw you as someone who’d hint round for a present. Here, take this ribbon. I’m going to need three lengths of forty inches each. How’s work, by the way? Is that why you’ve come? I expect you’re wanting Simon.”

  “Peach will do. Where is she?”

  “Walkies,” Deborah said. “Rather reluctant walkies because of the weather. Dad’s taken her, but I expect they’re battling it out somewhere to see who’s going to walk and who’s going to get carried. You didn’t see them?”

  “Not a sign.”

  “Peach has probably won, then. I expect they’ve gone into the pub.”

  Lynley watched as Deborah coiled the lengths of ribbon together. She was concentrating on her design, which gave him a chance to concentrate on her, his onetime lover, the woman who’d been meant to be his wife. She’d found herself face-to-face with a killer recently, and she still hadn’t healed completely from the stitches that had patched up her face. A scar from the sutures ran along her jaw and, typical of Deborah—who’d always been a woman almost completely devoid of ordinary vanity—she was doing nothing to hide it.

  She looked up and caught him observing her. “What?” she said.

  “I love you,” he told her frankly. “Differently from before. But there it is.”

  Her features softened. “And I love you, Tommy. We’ve crossed over, haven’t we? New territory but still somehow familiar.”

  “That’s exactly how it is.”

  They heard footsteps then, coming along the corridor, and the uneven nature of them identified Deborah’s husband. He came to the door of the dining room with a stack of large photographs in his hands. He said, “Tommy. Hullo. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “No Peach,” Deborah and Lynley said together, then laughed companionably.

  “I knew that dog was good for something.” Simon St. James came to the table and laid the photographs down. “It wasn’t an easy choice,” he told his wife.

  St. James was referring to the photographs which, as far as Lynley could see, were all of the same subject: a windmill in a landscape comprising field, trees, background hillsides, and foreground cottage tumbling to ruins. He said, “May I…,” and when Deborah nodded, he looked at the pictures more closely. The exposure, he saw, was slightly different in each, but what was remarkable about them all was the manner in which the photographer had managed to catch all the variations of light and dark while at the same time not losing the definition of a single subject.

  “I’ve gone for the one where you’ve enhanced the moonlight on the windmill’s sails,” St. James told his wife.

  “I thought that was the best one as well. Thank you, love. Always my best critic.” She completed her task with the bow and had Lynley assist with the Sellotape. When she was done, she stood back to admire her work, after which she took a sealed envelope from the sideboard and slipped it into place on the package. She handed it over to Lynley. “With our fondest wishes, Tommy,” she said. “Truly and completely.”

  Lynley knew the journey Deborah had traveled in order to be able to say those words. Having a child of her own was something denied her.

  “Thank you.” He found that his voice was rougher than usual. “Both of you.”

  There was a moment of silence among them, which St. James broke by saying lightly, “A drink is in order, I think.”

  Deborah said she would join them as soon as she’d sorted out the mess she’d made in the dining room. St. James led Lynley from there to his study, just along the corridor and overlooking the street. Lynley fetched his briefcase from the entry then, leaving the wrapped package in its place. When he joined his old friend, St. James was at the drinks cart beneath the window, a decanter in his hand.

  “Sherry?” he said. “Whisky?”

  “Have you gone through all the Lagavullin yet?”

  “Too hard to come by. I’m pacing myself.”

  “I’ll assist you.”

  St. James poured them both a whisky and added a sherry for Deborah, which he left on the cart. He joined Lynley by the fireplace and eased himself into one of the two old leather chairs to one side of it, something of an awkward business for him, owing to the brace he’d worn for years on his left leg.

  He said, “I picked up an Evening Standard this afternoon. It looks like a messy business, Tommy, if my reading between the lines is any good.”

  “So you know why I’ve come.”

  “Who’s working on the case with you?”

  “The usual suspects. I’m after clearance to add to the team. Hillier will give it, reluctantly, but what choice has he? We’re going to need fifty officers, but we’ll be lucky to end up with thirty. Will you help?”

  “You expect Hillier to give clearance for me?”

  “I’ve a feeling he’ll greet you with open arms. We need your expertise, Simon. And the Press Bureau will be only too happy to have Hillier announcing to the media the inclusion of independent forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James, formerly of the Metropolitan police, now an expert witness, university lecturer, public speaker, et cetera. Just the sort of thing to restore public confidence. But don’t let that pressure you.”

  “What would you have me do? My crime-scene days are far and away gone. And God willing, you won’t have further crime scenes anyway.”

  “You’d consult. I won’t lie to you and say it wouldn’t impinge on everything else you have on your plate. But I’d try to keep the requests to a minimum.”

  “Let me see what you have, then. You’ve brought copies of everything?”

  Lynley opened his briefcase and handed over what he’d gathered before leaving Scotland Yard. St. James set the paperwork to one side and went through the photographs. He whistled silently. When he looked up at last, he said to Lynley, “They didn’t jump to serial killing at once?”

  “So you see the problem.”

  “But these have all the hallmarks of a ritual. The burnt hands alone…”

  “Just on the final three.”

  “Still, with the similarities all along in the positioning of the bodies, they’re as good as advertising themselves as serial killings.”

  “For the latest one—the body in St. George’s Gardens?—the DCI on scene marked it as a serial killing at once.”

  “As to the others?”

  “Each body was left on the patch of a different station. In every case, they appear to have gone through the motions of an investigation, but it seems it was easy to call each of them a one-off crime. Gang related because of the race of the victims. Gang related because of the condition of the bodies. Marked in some way with the signature of a gang. As a warning to others.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “I’m not excusing it.”

  “It’s a PR nightmare for the Met, I daresay.”

  “Yes. Will you help?”

  “Can you fetch my glass from the desk? It’s in the top drawer.”

  Lynley did so. A chamois pouch held the magnifying glass, and he brought this to his friend and watched while St. James studied the photographs of the corpses more closely. He spent the most time over the recent crime, and he gazed long upon the face of the victim before he spoke. Even then it seemed he spoke more to himse
lf than to Lynley.

  “The abdominal incision on the final body is obviously postmortem,” he said. “But the burning of the hands…?”

  “Before death,” Lynley agreed.

  “That makes it very interesting, doesn’t it?” St. James looked up for a moment, thoughtfully, his gaze on the window, before he examined victim four another time. “He’s not particularly good with the knife. No indecision about where to cut, but surprised to discover it wasn’t easy.”

  “Not a medical student or a doctor, then.”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “What sort of implement?”

  “A very sharp knife will have worked just fine. A kitchen knife, perhaps. That and a certain amount of strength because of all the abdominal muscles involved. And to create this aperture…That can’t have been easy. He’s quite strong.”

  “He’s taken the navel, Simon. On the final body.”

  “Gruesome,” St. James acknowledged. “One would think he’s made the incision just to get enough blood to make the mark on the forehead, but taking the navel discounts that theory, doesn’t it? What d’you make of the forehead mark, by the way?”

  “A symbol, obviously.”

  “The killer’s signature?”

  “In part, I’d say so. But more than that. If the entire crime is part of a ritual—”

  “And it looks like that, doesn’t it?”

  “Then I’d say this is the final part of the ceremony. A full stop after the victim dies.”

  “It’s saying something, then.”

  “Definitely.”

  “But to whom? To the police who’ve failed to grasp that a serial killer’s at work in the community? To the victim who’s just completed a real trial by fire? To someone else?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  St. James nodded. He laid the pictures to one side and took up his whisky. “Then that’s where I’ll begin,” he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN SHE TURNED OFF THE IGNITION THAT EVENING, Barbara Havers remained inside the Mini, once again listening disconsolately to its sputtering engine. She rested her head on the steering wheel. She was knackered. Odd to think that spending hours upon hours on computers and telephones was more exhausting than hoofing round London to track down witnesses, suspects, reports, and background information, but that was the case. There was something about staring at a computer terminal, reading and highlighting printouts, and running through the same monologue on the phone with one desperate set of parents after another that made her long for baked beans on toast—bring on a tin of Heinz, that ultimate comfort food—followed by a horizontal position on the daybed with the television remote tucked in her hand. Simply put, she hadn’t had an easy time for one moment during the first two endless days.

  First there was the subject of Winston Nkata. Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata. It was one thing to know why Hillier had promoted her colleague at this particular point in time. It was quite another to realise that, victim of political machination or not, Winston actually did deserve the rank. What made it all worse was having to work with him in spite of this knowledge, realising that he was just as uneasy with the whole situation as she was.

  Had Winston been smug, she would have known how to cope. Had he been arrogant, she would have had a bloody good time taking the piss. Had he been ostentatiously humble, she could have dealt with that in a satisfyingly biting fashion. But he was none of that, just a quieter version of regular Winston, a version that affirmed what Lynley had indicated: Winnie was nobody’s fool; he knew perfectly well what Hillier and the DPA were trying to do.

  So ultimately, Barbara felt sympathy for her colleague, and that sympathy had inspired her to fetch him a cup of tea when she fetched one for herself, saying, “Well done on the promotion, Winnie,” as she placed it next to him.

  Along with the constables assigned by DI Stewart, Barbara had spent two days and two evenings coping with the overwhelming number of missing-persons reports that she had pulled from SO5. Ultimately Nkata had joined the project. They had managed to cross off the list a good number of names in that time: kids who had returned to their homes or had contacted their families in some way, making their whereabouts known. A few of them—as expected—had turned up incarcerated. Others had been tracked down in care. But there were hundreds upon hundreds unaccounted for, which took the detectives to the job of comparing descriptions of missing adolescents with descriptions of the unidentified corpses. Part of this could be done by computer. Part of it had to be done by hand.

  They had the photographs and the autopsy reports from the first three victims to work from, and both parents and guardians of the missing kids were almost universally cooperative. Eventually, they even had one possible identity established, but the likelihood was remote that the missing boy in question was truly one of the bodies they had.

  Thirteen years old, mixed race, black and Filipino, shaved head, nose flattened on the end and broken at the bridge…. He was called Jared Salvatore, and he’d been gone nearly two months, reported missing by his older brother who—so it was noted in the paperwork—had made the call to the cops from Pentonville Prison where he himself was banged up for armed robbery. How the older brother had come to know young Jared was missing was not documented in the report.

  But that was it. Sorting out identities for each corpse from the vast number of missing kids they had was thus going to be like picking fly poo out of pepper if they couldn’t come up with some kind of connection between the murder victims. And considering how widespread the body sites were, a connection seemed unlikely.

  When she’d had enough—or at least as much as she could handle for the day—Barbara had said to Nkata, “I’m out of here, Winnie. You staying or what?”

  Nkata had pushed back his chair, rubbed his neck, and said, “I’ll stay for a while.”

  She nodded but didn’t leave at once. It seemed to her that they both needed to say something, although she wasn’t sure what. Nkata was the one who took the plunge.

  “What d’we do with all this, Barb?” He set his biro on a legal pad. “Question is, how do we be? We can’t ’xactly ignore the situation.”

  Barbara sat back down. There was a magnetic paper-clip holder on the desk, and she picked this up and played with it. “I think we just do what needs doing. I expect the rest will sort itself out.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t sit easy with this. I know why I’m here. I want you to unnerstan that.”

  “Got it,” Barbara said. “But don’t be rough on yourself. You deserve—”

  “Hillier wouldn’t know sod all ’bout what I deserve,” Nkata cut in. “Not to mention DPA. Not before this, not now, and not later.”

  Barbara was silent. She couldn’t dispute what they both knew to be the truth. She finally said, “You know, Winnie, we’re sort of in the same position.”

  “How d’you mean? Woman cop, black cop?”

  “Not that. It’s more about vision. Hillier doesn’t really see either one of us. Fact is, you can apply that to everyone on this team. He doesn’t see any of us, just how we can either help him or hurt him.”

  Nkata considered this. “I s’pose you’re right.”

  “So none of what he says and does matters because we have the same job at the end of the day. Question is: Are we up for that? ’Cause it means letting go of how much we loathe him and just getting on with what we do best.”

  “I’m on for that,” Nkata said. “But, Barb, you still deserve—”

  “Hey,” she interrupted, “so do you.”

  Now, she yawned widely and shoved her shoulder against the recalcitrant door of the Mini. She’d found a parking space along Steeles Road, round the corner from Eton Villas. She plodded back to the yellow house, hunched into a cold wind that had come up in the late afternoon, and went along the path to her bungalow.

  Inside, she flipped on the lights, tossed her shoulder bag on the table, and dug the desired tin
of Heinz from a cupboard. She dumped its contents unceremoniously into a pan. Under other circumstances, she’d have eaten the beans cold. But tonight, she decided she deserved the full treatment. She popped bread into the toaster and from the fridge took a Stella Artois. It wasn’t her night to drink, but she’d had a tough day.

  As her meal was preparing itself, she went for the television remote, which, as usual, she couldn’t find. She was searching the wrinkled linens of the unmade daybed when someone rapped at her door. She glanced over her shoulder and saw through the open blinds on the window two shadowy forms on her front step: one quite small, the other taller, both of them slender. Hadiyyah and her father had come calling.

  Barbara gave up her search for the remote and opened the door to her neighbours. She said, “Just in time for a Barbara Special. I’ve two pieces of toast, but if you behave yourselves, we can divide them three ways.” She held the door wider to admit them, giving a glance over her shoulder to check that she’d tossed her dirty knickers in the laundry basket sometime during the last forty-eight hours.

  Taymullah Azhar smiled with his usual grave courtesy. He said, “We cannot stay, Barbara. This will only take a moment, if you do not mind.”

  He sounded so sombre that Barbara glanced warily from him to his daughter. Hadiyyah was hanging her head, her hands clasped behind her back. A few wisps of hair escaped from her plaits, brushing against her cheeks, and her cheeks themselves were flushed. She looked as if she’d been crying.

  “What’s wrong? Is something…?” Barbara felt dread from a dozen different sources, none of which she particularly cared to name. “What’s going on, Azhar?”

  Azhar said, “Hadiyyah?” His daughter looked up at him imploringly. His face was implacable. “We have come for a reason. You know what it is.”

  Hadiyyah gulped so loudly that Barbara could hear it. She brought her hands from round her back and extended them to Barbara. In them, she held the Buddy Holly CD. She said, “Dad says I’m to give this back to you, Barbara.”