With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Fibre analysis corroborates this: same leather fibres on the arms and ankles in all four cases.

  Contents of stomach: a small amount of food eaten within an hour preceding death in all four cases.

  Gagging device: duct-tape residue over the mouth in all four cases.

  Blood analysis: nothing unusual.

  Postmortem mutilation: abdominal incision and removal of navel in victim four.

  Marking: forehead marked in blood in victim four.

  Trace evidence on the bodies: black residue (under analysis), hairs, an oil (under analysis) in all four cases.

  DNA evidence: nothing.

  Lynley went through it all once, then a second time. He picked up the phone and called SO7, the forensic lab on the south bank of the Thames. It had been ages since the first of the murders. Surely by now they had an analysis of both the oil and the residue they’d found on the first of the bodies, no matter how overwhelmed with work they were.

  Maddeningly, they had nothing yet on the residue, but “Whale” was the single answer he was given when he finally tracked down the responsible party in Lambeth Road. She was called Dr. Okerlund, and she was apparently given to monosyllables unless pressed for more information.

  “Whale?” Lynley asked. “Do you mean the fish?”

  “For God’s sake, mammal,” she corrected him. “Sperm whale, to be exact. Official name—the oil, not the whale—is ambergris.”

  “Ambergris? What’s it used for?”

  “Perfume. All you need from me, Superintendent?”

  “Perfume?”

  “Are we playing at echoes here? That’s what I said.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “What else d’you want me to say?”

  “I mean the oil, Dr. Okerlund. Is it used for anything besides perfume?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” she said. “That’s your job.”

  He thanked her for the reminder as pleasantly as he could manage. Then he rang off. He added the word ambergris in the section for trace evidence, and he returned to the incident room. He called out, “Anyone familiar with ambergris oil? It was found on the bodies. It’s from whales.”

  “Cardiff, I reckon,” a DC noted.

  “Not Wales,” Lynley said. “Whales. The ocean. Moby-Dick.”

  “Moby-who?”

  “Christ, Phil,” someone called out. “Try elevating your reading beyond page three.”

  Ribald remarks greeted this comment. Lynley let them feed off one another. To his way of thinking, the work they had to engage in was time consuming, wearisome, and gut wrenching, weighing on the shoulders of the officers involved and often causing trouble in their homes. If they needed to relieve the stress of it with humour, that was fine by him.

  Nonetheless, what happened next was more than welcome. Barbara Havers looked up from a phone call she had just completed.

  “We’ve got a positive ID on St. George’s Gardens,” she announced. “He’s a kid called Kimmo Thorne and he lived in Southwark.”

  BARBARA HAVERS INSISTED that they take her car, not Nkata’s. She saw Lynley’s assigning her to the interview of Kimmo Thorne’s relations as an opportunity for a celebratory cigarette, and she didn’t want to pollute the interior of Winston’s pristinely kept Escort with her ash or smoke. She lit up as soon as they hit the underground carpark, and she watched with some amusement as her colleague folded his six-feet, four-inch frame into her Mini. He was left grumbling, with his knees pressed into his chest and his head scraping the ceiling.

  Once she finally got the car started, they lurched in the direction of Broadway. From there, Parliament Square opened onto Westminster Bridge and their route across the river. This was more Winston’s territory than it was Barbara’s, and he acted the part of navigator once York Road loomed in front of them on the left. From that point, she found it short work to weave over to Southwark, where Kimmo Thorne’s aunt and grandmother lived in one of the many nondescript blocks of flats that had been thrown up south of the river after the Second World War. The building’s only distinction turned out to be its proximity to the Globe Theatre. But as Barbara sardonically pointed out to Nkata as they alighted into the cramped street, it wasn’t as if anyone who lived in the vicinity could actually afford a ticket.

  When they presented themselves at the Thorne establishment, they found Gran and Aunt Sal sitting dully before three framed photographs that had been placed on a coffee table in front of their sofa. They’d identified the body, Aunt Sal explained. “I di’n’t want Mum to go, but she wasn’t having any of that from me. It’s done her in proper, seeing our Kimmo laid out like that. He was a good boy. I hope they hang who did this to him.”

  Gran said nothing. She looked shell-shocked. In her hand she clutched a white handkerchief that was embroidered round the edges with lavender bunnies. She gazed on one of the pictures of her grandson—in it he appeared curiously attired as if for a fancy dress party, wearing an odd combination of lipstick, a Mohawk, green tights, and a Robin Hood tunic with Doc Marten boots—and she pressed the handkerchief beneath her eyes when tears welled up in them during the course of their interview.

  The police, Barbara told Kimmo Thorne’s gran and aunt, were doing everything they could to find the young man’s killer. It would help enormously if Miss and Mrs. Thorne would tell them everything they could about the last day of Kimmo’s life.

  After she said all this, Barbara realised that she’d automatically assumed the role that had once been hers, the very role that now belonged to Nkata. She gave a tiny grimace of chagrin and looked in his direction. He lifted a hand, telegraphing “It’s okay” in a gesture that was unnervingly like one Lynley might have made in the same circumstances. She dug out her notebook.

  Aunt Sal took the request seriously. She started with Kimmo’s rising in the morning. He dressed in his usual—

  “Leggings, boots, an outsize sweater, that nice Brazilian scarf knotted round his waist…the one his mum and dad sent over at Christmas, do you remember it, Mum?”

  —and put on his makeup. He had his breakfast of cornflakes and tea, and he went to school.

  Barbara exchanged a glance with Nkata. Considering the description of the boy, along with the pictures on the coffee table and their proximity to the Globe, the next question rose naturally. Nkata asked it. Was Kimmo taking courses at the theatre? Acting classes or the like?

  Oh, their Kimmo was made for drama and make no mistake about that, Aunt Sal replied. But no, he wasn’t doing a course at the Globe or anywhere else. As things turned out, this was his regular getup when he left the flat. Or when he stayed in the flat, if it came down to that.

  Setting aside the issue of his clothing, Barbara said, “He wore makeup regularly, then?” When the two women nodded, she did a mental cross off on one of their working theories: that the killer might have bought cosmetics somewhere and smeared them across the most recent victim’s face. Yet it was hardly likely that Kimmo was attempting to attend school thus arrayed. Certainly, his aunt and gran would have heard from the head teacher if that had been the case. Still, she asked them if Kimmo had returned home from school—or wherever he’d been, she added mentally—at the usual time on the day of his death.

  They said he’d been back by six o’clock as usual, and they’d had dinner together as usual as well. Gran did a fry-up, which Kimmo didn’t much like because he was watching his figure, and afterwards Aunt Sal did the washing up while Kimmo applied the tea towel to the cutlery and crockery.

  “He was the same as always,” Aunt Sal said. “Chatting, telling stories, making me laugh till my insides hurt. He had a real way with words. Wasn’t a thing in life he couldn’t make a drama of and act it out. And sing and dance…the boy could do them like magic.”

  “‘Do them’?” Nkata asked.

  “Judy Garland. Liza. Barbra. Dietrich. Even Carol Channing when he put on the wig.” He’d been working hard lately at Sarah Brightman, Aunt Sal said, only the high notes were a trial
for him and he’d not got the hands quite right. But he would’ve, he would’ve, God love the boy, only now…

  Finally, Aunt Sal broke down. She began to sob when she tried to speak, and Barbara glanced Nkata’s way to see if he was making the same assessment of this little family: It was clear that as odd as Kimmo Thorne had looked and might have been, he’d also been night and day to his aunt and his gran.

  Gran took her daughter’s hand and pressed the bunny-edged handkerchief into it. She took up the story.

  He did Marlene Dietrich for them after supper: “Falling in Love Again.” The tails, the mesh stockings, the heels, the hat…Even the platinum hair, with its little scoop of a wave. He had it all down perfect, had Kimmo. And then after the show, he went out.

  “What time was this?” Barbara asked.

  Gran looked at an electric clock that sat atop the television set. She said, “Half ten? Sally?”

  Aunt Sal dabbed her eyes. “Somewhere round there.”

  “Where was he going?”

  They didn’t know. But he said he’d be messing about with Blinker.

  “Blinker?” Barbara and Nkata said together.

  Blinker, they confirmed. They didn’t know the boy’s last name—apparently Blinker was male and of the human species—but what they did know was that he was definitely the cause of any trouble their Kimmo ever got into.

  The word trouble struck Barbara, but she let Nkata do the honours. “What sort of trouble?”

  No real trouble, Aunt Sal assured them. And nothing he’d ever started on his own. It was just that that bloody Blinker—“Sorry, Mum,” she said hastily—had passed along something of some kind to their Kimmo, which Kimmo had flogged somewhere, only to be caught out selling stolen property. “But it was that Blinker responsible,” Aunt Sal said. “Our Kimmo’d never been in trouble before.”

  That certainly remained to be seen, Barbara thought. She asked if the Thornes could direct them to Blinker.

  They had no phone number for him, but they knew where he lived. They said it shouldn’t be hard to find him on any morning because the one thing they knew about him was that he was up all night hanging about Leicester Square and he slept till one in the afternoon. He kipped on his sister’s sofa, and she lived with her husband on Kipling Estate, near Bermondsey Square. Aunt Sal didn’t know the sister’s name—nor did she have the first idea of Blinker’s Christian name, but she expected if the police went round asking where a bloke called Blinker might be, someone would know for certain. Blinker was someone who always managed to get known.

  Barbara asked if they might have a look through Kimmo’s belongings, then. Aunt Sal took them to his room. This was crowded with bed, dressing table, wardrobe, chest of drawers, television, and music system. The dressing table held a display of makeup that would have done Boy George proud. The top of the chest of drawers served as a location for wig stands, of which there were five. And the walls held dozens of professional head shots of Kimmo’s sources of apparent inspiration: from Edith Piaf to Madonna. The boy was nothing if not eclectic in his taste.

  “Where’d he get the dosh for all this?” Barbara asked once Aunt Sal had left them to look through the dead boy’s lumber. “She didn’t mention anything about employment, did she?”

  “Makes you think about what Blinker was really giving him to sell,” Nkata replied.

  “Drugs?”

  He waggled his hand: maybe yes, maybe no. “A lot of something,” he said.

  “We need to find that bloke, Winnie.”

  “Shouldn’t be tough. Someone’ll know him on the estate, ask round enough. Someone always does.”

  Ultimately, they got little joy from their efforts in Kimmo’s room. A small stack of cards—birthday, Christmas, and the odd Easter thrown in, all signed “Lovekins, darling, from Mummy and Dad”—were hidden away in a drawer along with a photo of a well-tanned thirtysomething couple on a sunny, foreign balcony. A yellowed newspaper article about a transgender professional model who’d been outed by the tabloids in the distant past surfaced beneath a knot of costume jewellery on the dressing table. A hair-styling magazine—at least in other circumstances—could have indicated a future career.

  Otherwise, much of it was what one would expect in the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old boy. Malodorous shoes, underpants screwed up beneath the bed, stray socks. It would have been ordinary, except for the presence of all the items that made it into a hermaphroditic curiosity.

  When they’d seen it all, Barbara stood back and said to Nkata, “Winnie, what d’you reckon he was really into?”

  Nkata joined her in assessing the room. “I got a feeling this Blinker can tell us.”

  They both knew there was no point in looking up Blinker at the moment. They’d be better off trying in the morning just about the time those who had jobs would be setting off for work from the housing estate where Blinker lived. They returned to Aunt Sal and Gran, then, and Barbara asked about Kimmo’s parents. It was the small and pathetic hoard of postcards in the boy’s room that prompted her question, rather than a need to know for purposes of their investigation. It was also what that hoard of postcards said about people’s priorities in life.

  Oh, they were in South America, Gran said. They’d been there since just before Kimmo’s eighth birthday. His dad was in the hotel business, you see, and they’d gone there to manage a luxury spa. They intended to send for Kimmo when they got settled in. But Mum wanted to learn the language first, and it was taking her longer than she’d thought it would.

  Had they been informed of Kimmo’s death? Barbara asked. Because—

  Gran and Aunt Sal had exchanged a look.

  —surely there were arrangements they’d want to be making to come home straightaway.

  She said this in part because she wanted them to have to acknowledge what she assumed: Kimmo’s parents were parents only because of an egg, a sperm, and an accidental inception. They had more important concerns than what had come of that flesh-rubbing moment between them.

  Which led her to think of the other victims. And of what it was that might tie all of them together.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BY THE NEXT DAY, TWO PIECES OF NEWS FROM SO7 GAVE cause for what went for good cheer. The two tyre prints at the scene of the St. George’s Gardens body had been identified by manufacturer. They’d also been characterised by a peculiar wearing pattern on one of them that was going to please the Crown prosecutors, when and if the Met made an arrest of someone in possession of those tyres and a vehicle to which they might be attached. The other piece of news had to do with the residue on the pedals and the gears of the bicycle in St. George’s Gardens as well as the residue on all four of the bodies they were dealing with: It was all identical. From this, the murder squad concluded that Kimmo Thorne had been picked up somewhere—bike and all—and murdered somewhere else, after which his killer dumped the body, the bike, and probably the silver photo frames in St. George’s Gardens. All of this constituted meagre progress, but progress all the same. So when Hamish Robson returned to them with his report, Lynley was inclined to forgive him for showing up three and a half hours later than the promised twenty-four hours he’d thought it would take him to assemble some usable information.

  Dee Harriman fetched him from reception and returned him to Lynley’s office. He said no to the offer of an afternoon cup of tea and instead he nodded towards the conference table rather than taking one of the two chairs in front of the desk. It seemed a subtle way of telegraphing equality to Lynley. Despite his apparent reticence, Robson didn’t appear to be a man who was going to be easily cowed by anyone.

  He carried with him a legal pad, a manila folder, and the paperwork Lynley had given him on the previous day. He folded his hands neatly across the top of it all and asked Lynley what he knew about profiling. Lynley told him he’d never yet had an occasion to use a profiler, although he was aware of what profilers did. He didn’t add any comments about his reluctance to use one or about his belief
that, in truth, Robson had only been called in in the first place to give Hillier something to hand to that ravenous dog the media.

  “Would you like some background on profiling, then?” Robson asked.

  “Not particularly, to tell you the truth.”

  Robson observed him evenly. His eyes behind his spectacles looked shrewd, but he made no remark other than to say obscurely, “Right. We’ll see about it, won’t we.” He took up his legal pad without further ado.

  They were looking, he told Lynley, for a white male between twenty-five and thirty-five. He would be neat in his appearance: close shaven, short haired, in good physical condition, which was possibly the result of weight training. He would be known to the victims, but not well known. He would be of high intelligence but low achievement, a man with a decent school record but with disciplinary problems stemming from a chronic failure to obey. He would likely possess a history of job losses, and while he would probably be working at this time, it would be in employment below his capabilities. They would find criminal behaviour in his childhood and adolescence: possibly petty arson or cruelty to animals. He would be at this time unmarried and living either alone or with a dominant parent.

  Despite what he already knew about profiling, Lynley felt doubtful about the number of details Robson had provided. He said, “How can you know all this, Dr. Robson?”

  Robson’s lips moved in a smile that tried—and failed—not to look satisfied. He said, “I do assume you know what profilers do, Superintendent, but do you know how and why profiling actually works? It’s rarely inaccurate, and it’s nothing to do with crystal balls, tarot cards, or the entrails of sacrificed animals.”

  At this, smacking of the gentle correction a parent gives to a wayward child, Lynley considered half a dozen ways to regain dominance. They were all a waste of time, he concluded. So he said, “Should we begin again with each other?”

  Robson smiled, genuinely this time. “Thank you,” he said. He went on to tell Lynley that to know a killer, one merely had to look at the crime committed, which was what the Americans had begun doing when the FBI had developed their Behavioural Science Unit. By gathering information over the decades of pursuing serial killers and by actually interviewing incarcerated serial killers by the dozens, they’d discovered there were certain commonalities that could be depended upon to be present in the profile of the perpetrator of a certain kind of crime. In this particular crime, for example, they could rely upon the fact that the killings were bids for power although their killer would tell himself that the killings had another reason entirely.