With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Hillier then introduced the “two leading officers” in the investigation. Acting Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley would be heading it and coordinating all previous investigations done by the local stations, he said. He would be assisted by Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata. No mention was made of DI John Stewart or anyone else.

  There followed more questions, these about the composition, size, and strength of the squad, which Lynley answered. After that, Hillier deftly resumed control. He said, as if it had just crossed his mind, “While we’re on the subject of the constitution of the squad…,” and he went on to tell the journalists that he’d personally brought aboard forensic specialist Simon Allcourt-St. James, and to enhance his work and the work of the officers from the Met, a forensic psychologist—otherwise more commonly known as a profiler—would be contributing his services as well. For professional reasons, the profiler preferred to remain in the background, but suffice it to say that he had trained in the U.S. at Quantico, Virginia, home of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s profiling unit.

  Hillier then drew the meeting to a practised close, telling the journalists that the Press Bureau would be offering them daily briefings. He switched off his mike and led Lynley and Nkata out of the room, leaving the reporters with Deacon, who signaled a minion to pass out the sheaves of additional information that had previously been determined suitable for media consumption.

  In the corridor, Hillier gave a satisfied smile. “Time bought,” he said. “See that you use it well.” His attention then went to a man who was waiting nearby in the company of Hillier’s secretary, a visitor’s badge pinned to his baggy green cardigan. Hillier said to him, “Ah. Excellent. You’ve arrived already,” and he set about making the introductions. This was Hamish Robson, he told Lynley and Nkata, the clinical and forensic psychologist he’d just been speaking about to the journalists. Otherwise employed at the Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Dagenham, Dr. Robson had kindly agreed to be of assistance by joining Lynley’s murder squad.

  Lynley felt his spine stiffen. He realised he’d been blindsided yet again, having erroneously assumed during the press conference that Hillier had been lying through his teeth about an unnamed forensic psychologist. He went through the motions of shaking Dr. Robson’s hand, however, while he said to Hillier, “If we could have a word, sir,” in as agreeable a voice as he could manage.

  Hillier made much of glancing at his watch. He made even more of telling Lynley that the deputy commissioner was waiting for a report on the conference they’d only just concluded.

  Lynley said, “This will take less than five minutes and I consider it essential,” adding the word sir as a deliberate afterthought whose tone and meaning Hillier could not avoid comprehending.

  “Very well,” Hillier said. “Hamish, if you’ll excuse us…? DS Nkata will show you where the incident room—”

  “I’ll need Winston for the moment,” Lynley said, not because this was strictly the truth but because somewhere along the line he knew he was going to have to drive home to Hillier the point that the assistant commissioner of police was not running the investigation.

  There was a tight little silence during which Hillier appeared to be evaluating Lynley for his level of insubordination. He finally said, “Hamish, if you’ll wait here for a moment,” and he ushered Lynley and Nkata not to an office, not to the stairs, not to the lift to take them above to his own quarters, but into the men’s toilet where he told a uniformed constable in the act of emptying his bladder to vacate the premises and stand before the door, allowing no one to enter.

  Before Lynley could speak, Hillier said pleasantly, “Don’t do that again, please. If you do, you’ll find yourself back in uniform so fast that you’ll wonder who zipped your trousers.”

  Seeing what the temperature of this conversation was likely to become despite Hillier’s momentarily affable tone, Lynley said to Nkata, “Winston, would you leave us, please? Sir David and I need to have some words I’d prefer you not hear. Go back to the incident room and see where Havers has got to with Missing Persons, particularly with the one that looks like a possibility.”

  Nkata nodded. He didn’t ask if he was meant to take Hamish Robson with him as previously ordered by Hillier. Instead, he looked glad of the command that gave him the opportunity to demonstrate where his loyalties lay.

  When he was gone, Hillier was the one to speak. “You’re out of order.”

  “With due respect,” Lynley returned, although he felt little enough of it, “I believe you are.”

  “How dare you—”

  “Sir, I’ll bring you up to the minute daily,” Lynley said patiently. “I’ll face the television cameras if you like and sit at your side and force DS Nkata to do the same. But I’m not going to hand over the direction of this investigation to you. You need to stay out of it. That’s the only way this is going to work.”

  “Do you want to be up for review? Believe me, that can be arranged.”

  “If you need to do it, you’ll have to do it,” Lynley replied. “But, sir, you’ve got to see that at the end of the day, there has to be only one of us heading this inquiry. If you want to be that person, then be him and have done with pretending I’m in charge. But if you want me to be that person, you’re going to have to back off. You’ve blindsided me twice now, and I don’t want a third surprise.”

  Hillier’s face went the red of sunset. But he said nothing as he evidently registered the lengths Lynley had gone to to remain calm as he simultaneously evaluated the ramifications of Lynley’s words. He finally said, “I want daily briefings.”

  “You’ve been getting them. You’ll continue to get them.”

  “And the profiler stays.”

  “Sir, we don’t need psychic mumbo jumbo at this point.”

  “We need all the help we can get!” Hillier’s voice grew loud. “The papers are twenty-four hours away from starting the hue and cry. You damn well know that.”

  “I do. But we also both know that’s going to happen eventually, now that the other murders have been mentioned.”

  “Are you accusing me—”

  “No. No. You said what had to be said in there. But once they start digging, they’ll go after us, and there’s plenty of truth in what they’re going to allege about the Met.”

  “Where the hell are your loyalties?” Hillier demanded. “Those buggers are going to go back and look up the other murders and then they’ll put it down to us—not to themselves—that not one of them ever made the front page. At which point they’ll wave the racism flag, and when they do, the whole community’s going to blow. Like it or not, we have to stay one step ahead of them. The profiler’s one way to do it. And that, as you might say, is that.”

  Lynley considered this. He hated the idea of having a profiler onboard, but he had to admit that his presence did serve the purpose of buoying up the investigation in the eyes of the journalists who were covering it. And while he ordinarily had no use for either newspapers or television—seeing the collection and dissemination of information as something that was yearly becoming more opprobrious—he could understand the necessity of keeping their focus on the progress of the current investigation. If they started to rave about the Met’s failure to see the relationships among three prior killings, they would put the police in the position of having to waste time attempting to excuse the lapse. This served no one and nothing but the coffers of the newspapers, who might be able to increase their sales by fanning the flames of a public indignation that always lay like a dragon in repose.

  “All right,” Lynley said. “The profiler stays. But I determine what he sees and what he doesn’t.”

  “Agreed,” Hillier said.

  They returned to the corridor, where Hamish Robson waited for them unaccompanied. The profiler had taken himself down to a notice board some distance from the toilets. Lynley had to admire the man for that.

  He said, “Dr. Robson?,” to which Robson replied,
“Hamish. Please.”

  Hillier said, “The superintendent will take you in hand at this point, Hamish. Good luck. We’re relying on you.”

  Robson glanced from Hillier to Lynley. Behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes looked wary. The rest of his expression was muted by his greying goatee, and as he nodded, a lock of thinning hair flopped onto his forehead. He brushed it off. The glint of a gold signet ring caught the light. “I’m happy to do what I can,” he said. “I’ll need the police reports, the crime-scene photos…”

  “The superintendent will give you what you need,” Hillier said. And to Lynley, “Keep me up to speed.” He nodded to Robson and strode off in the direction of the lifts.

  As Robson observed Hillier walking off, Lynley observed Robson and decided he looked harmless enough. There was, indeed, something vaguely comforting about his dark green cardigan and his pale yellow shirt. He wore a conservative, solid-brown tie with this, the same colour as his trousers, which were worn and lived in. He was podgy of body and looked like everyone’s favourite uncle.

  “You work with the criminally insane,” Lynley said as he led the other man to the stairwell.

  “I work with minds whose only outlet for torment is the commission of a crime.”

  “Isn’t the one the same as the other?” Lynley asked.

  Robson smiled sadly. “If that were only the case.”

  LYNLEY BRIEFLY INTRODUCED Robson to the team before he took him from the incident room to his office. There he gave the psychologist copies of the crime-scene photographs, the police reports, and the preliminary postmortem information from the forensic pathologists who’d examined the bodies at the scene of each crime. He held back the autopsy reports. Robson took a cursory look through the material, then explained that it would take him at least twenty-four hours to evaluate it.

  That was no problem, Lynley told him. There was plenty for the team to do while they were waiting for his…Lynley wanted to say performance, as if the man were a psychic come to bend spoons in their presence. He settled on information instead. Report gave Robson too much legitimacy.

  “The investigators seemed…” Robson appeared to look for a word. “Rather wary to have me among them.”

  “They’re used to the old-fashioned way of doing things,” Lynley told him.

  “I believe they’ll find what I have to say useful, Superintendent.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Lynley said, and he called Dee Harriman to see Dr. Robson on his way.

  When the profiler had departed, Lynley returned to the incident room and the work at hand. What did they have? he wanted to know.

  DI Stewart was, as ever, ready with his report, which he stood to present like a schoolboy hoping for high marks from the teacher. He announced he’d subdivided his officers into teams, the better to deploy them in different areas. At this, a few eyes rolled heavenward in the incident room. Stewart did most things like a frustrated Wellington.

  They were inching forward, engaging in the tedious plodwork of a complicated investigation. Stewart had two officers from team one—“They’ll be doing background,” he reported—covering the mental hospitals and the prisons. They had unearthed a number of potential leads that they were following up: paedophiles having finished their time in open conditions within the last six months, paroled murderers of adolescents, gang members in remand awaiting trial—

  “And from youth offenders?” Lynley asked.

  Stewart shook his head. Sod all appeared useful from that end of things. All the youth offenders recently released were accounted for.

  “What are we getting from the door-to-doors at the body sites?” Lynley asked.

  Little enough. Stewart had constables reinterviewing everyone in those areas, seeking witnesses to anything at all. They knew the drill: It wasn’t so much the unusual that they were looking for, but the ordinary that, upon reflection, made one stop and think. Since serial killers by their very nature faded into the woodwork, the woodwork itself had to be examined, inch by tedious inch.

  He’d directed enquiries to hauling companies as well, Stewart explained, and he’d so far come up with fifty-seven lorry drivers who would have been on Gunnersbury Road on the night when the first victim had been left in Gunnersbury Park. A DC was in the process of contacting them, to see if she could jump-start their memories about any kind of vehicle that might have been parked alongside the brick wall of the park, on the road into London. In the meantime, another DC was in touch with every taxi and minicab service, looking for much the same result. As to the door-to-door, a line of houses stood directly across the road from the park, albeit separated from it by four lanes of traffic and a central reservation. There were hopes of getting something from one of them. One never knew who might have been suffering insomnia and gazing out of the window on the night in question. The same went for Quaker Street, by the way, where a block of flats stood opposite the abandoned warehouse in which the third body had been found.

  On the other hand, the multi-story carpark location—site of the second body—was going to be more difficult. The only person who might have seen anything inside it was the attendant on duty that night, but he swore he’d seen nothing between one in the morning and six-twenty, when the body was discovered by a nurse heading to an early shift at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. That didn’t, of course, mean he hadn’t slept right through the entire circumstance. The carpark in question had no central kiosk at which an attendant sat day and night, but rather an office tucked away deep in the interior of the structure and furnished with a reclining chair and a television set to make the long hours of the night shift seem moderately less so.

  “And St. George’s Gardens?” Lynley asked.

  That was somewhat more hopeful, Stewart reported. According to Theobald’s Road’s DC who’d canvassed the vicinity, a woman living on the third floor of the building at the junction of Henrietta Mews and Handel Street heard what she thought was the sound of the garden’s gate being opened sometime round three in the morning. She’d thought it was the park warden at first, but upon reflection she’d realised it was far too early for him to be unlocking the gates. By the time she got herself out of bed, swathed in her dressing gown, and in place at her window, she was just in time to see a van driving off. It passed beneath a streetlamp as she watched. It was “large-ish,” as she described it. She thought the colour of the van was red.

  “That’s taken it down to a few hundred thousand vans across the city, however,” Stewart added regretfully. He flipped his notebook closed, his report complete.

  “We need to get someone on to Swansea, pulling vehicle records anyway,” Barbara Havers said to Lynley.

  “That, Constable, is a complete nonstarter, and you ought to know it,” Stewart informed her.

  Havers bristled and began to respond.

  Lynley cut her off. “John.” He said the DI’s name in a minatory tone. Stewart subsided, but he didn’t look happy to have Havers—lowly DC that she was—offering her opinion.

  Stewart said, “Fine. I’ll see to it. I’ll put someone on to the old bat in Handel Street as well. We may be able to jog something else from her memory about what she saw from that window.”

  “What about the piece of lace on body four?” Lynley asked.

  Nkata was the one to reply. “Looks like tatting, you ask me.”

  “What?”

  “Tatting. That’s what it’s called. My mum does it. Knotting up string along the edges of a mat. For putting on antique furniture or under a piece of porcelain or something.”

  “Are you talking about an antimacassar?” John Stewart asked.

  “Anti-what?” one of the DCs asked.

  “It’s antique lacework,” Lynley explained. “The sort of thing ladies used to do for their bottom drawers.”

  “Bloody hell,” Barbara Havers said. “Our killer’s an Antiques Roadshow freak?”

  Guffaws all round greeted this remark.

  Lynley said, “What about t
he bicycle left in St. George’s Gardens?”

  “Prints on it are the kid’s. There’s some sort of residue on the pedals and the gear shift, but SO7’s not done with it yet.”

  “The silver at the scene?”

  Aside from the fact that the silver comprised only photo frames, no one knew anything else about it. Someone made reference to the Antiques Roadshow once again, but the comment was less humorous the second time round.

  Lynley told them all to carry on. He directed Nkata to continue trying to make contact with the family of the one missing boy who looked like a possible match, he told Havers to continue with the missing-persons reports—an order she did not embrace with a full heart, if her expression was any indication—and he himself returned to his office and sat down with the autopsies. He put on his reading spectacles and went over the reports with eyes that he tried to make fresh. He also created a crib sheet for himself. On this, he wrote:

  Means of death: strangulation by ligature in all four cases; ligature missing.

  Torture prior to death: palms of both hands burnt in three of four cases.

  Marks of restraints: across the forearms and at ankles in all four cases, suggesting victim tied to an armchair of some kind or possibly supine and restrained another way.