With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Barbara followed Griffin Strong—“It’s Griff,” he said—to an office just the other side of reception. It displayed the same decorating sense as Ulrike’s: heavy on clutter and light on available space. Bookshelves, filing cabinets, one shared desk. The walls held posters intended to influence young people in a positive direction: illiterate football stars with curious hairdos, pretending to read Charles Dickens, and pop singers doing thirty seconds of public service in soup kitchens. Colossus posters joined these. On them, the familiar logo appeared, that giant allowing himself to be used by the smaller and the less fortunate.

  Strong went to one of the filing cabinets and fingered through a packed drawer to pull out two files. He consulted them and told her that Kimmo Thorne had come to Colossus via the magistrate’s court, Youth Offenders, and his predilection for selling stolen goods. Sean had come via Social Services and something about a hijacked mountain bike.

  Again, that demonstration of helpfulness. Strong returned the files and went to the desk, where he sat and rubbed his forehead.

  “You look tired,” Barbara noted.

  “I’ve a baby with colic,” he said, “and a wife with postnatal blues. I’m coping. But only just.”

  That at least partially explained whatever might be going on with Ulrike, Barbara decided. It fell into the poor-misunderstood-and-neglected-husband class of extramarital whatevers. “Tough times,” she said in acknowledgement.

  He flashed her a smile of—what else would it be?—perfect, white teeth. “It’s worth it. I’ll get through them.”

  Bet you will, Barbara thought. She asked him about Kimmo Thorne. What did Strong know about his time at Colossus? About his associates here? His friends, mentors, acquaintances, teachers, and the like. Having had him in the assessment course—which she was given to understand would provide the most intimate of the interactions that the kids would engage in at Colossus—he probably knew Kimmo better than anyone else did.

  Good kid, Strong told her. Oh, he’d been in trouble, but he wasn’t cut out for criminality. He just did it as a means to an end, not for kicks and not as an unconscious social statement. And he’d rejected that sort of life, anyway…. Well, at least that was how it had seemed so far. It had been too soon to tell which way Kimmo would actually go, which was generally the case during a young person’s first weeks at Colossus.

  What sort of boy was he? Barbara then asked.

  Well liked, Griff told her. Pleasant, affable. He was just the sort of boy who stood a good chance of actually making something of himself. He had real potential and real talent. It was a bloody shame some bastard out there had targeted him.

  Barbara took down all of this information, despite knowing most of it already, despite feeling it was all somehow rehearsed. Doing this gave her the opportunity not to look at the man who was passing the details along to her. She evaluated his voice while not distracted by his GQ looks. He sounded sincere enough. Very forthcoming and all that. But there was nothing in what he was telling her that indicated he knew Kimmo better than anyone else, and that didn’t make sense. He was supposed to know him well, or at least to be getting to know him well. Yet there was nothing here to indicate that, and she had to wonder why.

  “Any special friends here?” she asked.

  He said, “What?” And then, “Do you actually think someone from Colossus may have killed him?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Barbara said.

  “Ulrike’ll tell you everyone’s thoroughly vetted before they come to work here. The idea that somehow a serial killer—”

  “Had a good chat with Ulrike before you and I met, then?” Barbara looked up from her notes. He had a deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face.

  “Of course she told me you were here when she told me about Kimmo and Sean. But she said there were several other deaths you’re investigating, so it can’t have anything to do with Colossus. And no one knows if Sean’s just bunked off for the day anyway.”

  “True,” Barbara said. “Any special friends?”

  “Mine?”

  “We were talking about Kimmo.”

  “Kimmo. Right. Everyone liked him. And you’d think the opposite would be the case, considering how he got himself up and how most kids feel about their sexuality in adolescence.”

  “How’s that, then?”

  “You know, a bit ill at ease, unsure at first about their own proclivities and consequently unwilling to have anything to do with someone who might cast a questionable light upon them in the eyes of their peers. But no one seemed to shun Kimmo. He didn’t allow it. As to special friends, there was no one he singled out and no one who singled out him more than anyone else. But that’s not something that would happen in assessment anyway. The kids are supposed to bond as a group.”

  “What about Sean?” she asked him.

  “What about Sean?”

  “Friends?”

  Strong hesitated. Then, “He had a rougher time than Kimmo, as I recall,” he said reflectively. “He didn’t get close to the group he went through assessment with. But he seemed more standoffish in general. An introvert. Things on his mind.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Except he was angry, and he didn’t try to hide it.”

  “About what?”

  “Being here, I expect. In my experience, most kids are angry when they come to us through Social Services. They generally break down sometime during their assessment weeks, but Sean never did.”

  How long had Griffin Strong been an assessment leader at Colossus? Barbara asked.

  Unlike Kilfoyle and Greenham, who’d had to think about how long they’d been associated with the organisation, Griff said, “Fourteen months,” at once.

  “And before?” Barbara asked.

  “Social work. I’d started out in medicine—thought I’d be a pathologist till I found I couldn’t abide the sight of a dead body—then I switched over to psychology. And sociology. I’ve a first in each.”

  That was impressive enough, as well as easily checked out. “Where’d you work?” Barbara asked him.

  He didn’t respond at once, so again Barbara lifted her head from her notebook. She found him staring at her, and she knew that he’d intended her to raise her head and that he enjoyed the sensation of having forced her into doing so. Flatly, she repeated her question.

  He finally said, “Stockwell, for a time.”

  “Before that?”

  “Lewisham. Is this important?”

  “Just now, everything’s important.” Barbara took her time writing “Stockwell” and “Lewisham” into her notebook. She said, “What sort, anyway?” when she’d put a little flourish on the final letter.

  “What sort of what?”

  “Social work. Kids in care? Lags on the loose? Single mums? What?”

  He didn’t answer a second time. Barbara thought he might be playing the power game again, but she raised her head anyway. This time, though, he wasn’t looking at her but rather at the football player on the poster, ostensibly enraptured by his leather-bound copy of Bleak House. Barbara was about to repeat her question when Griff appeared to come to a decision about something.

  He said, “You might as well know. You’ll find out anyway. I was sacked from both jobs.”

  “For?”

  “I don’t always get on with supervisors, especially if they’re female. Sometimes…” He gave his attention fully back to her, two dark deep eyes compelling her to keep her gaze locked upon him. “There are always disagreements in this sort of work. There have to be. We’re dealing with human lives and each life is different from the last, isn’t it.”

  “You could say that,” Barbara said, curious about where he was going with all this. He showed her in short order.

  “Yes. Well. I have a tendency to express myself strongly, and women have a tendency not to take that well. I end up getting…let’s call it misunderstood for want of a better term.”

  Ah, there it was, Barbara thoug
ht, the misunderstood business. It just wasn’t being applied where she’d expected it to be. “But Ulrike doesn’t have that problem with you?”

  “Not so far,” he said. “But then, Ulrike likes discussion. She’s not afraid of a healthy debate among the team.”

  Or a healthy something else as well, Barbara thought. Especially that. She said, “You and Ulrike are close, then?”

  He wasn’t about to get into that. “She runs the organisation.”

  “What about when you’re not here at Colossus?”

  “What are you asking?”

  “If you’re bonking your boss. I guess I’m wondering how the other assessment leaders might feel about it if you and Ulrike happen to be making the beast with two backs after hours. Or how anyone else might feel about it, for that matter. Is that how you lost your other two jobs, by the way?”

  He said evenly, “You’re not very nice, are you?”

  “Not with five dead bodies to account for.”

  “Five…? You can’t possibly conclude…I was told…Ulrike said you’d come here—”

  “About Kimmo, yeah. But that’s just one of two dead bodies with names,” Barbara said.

  “But you said that Sean…Sean’s only missing, isn’t he? He’s not dead…You don’t know…”

  “We’ve a body this morning that could be Sean, and I’m sure Ulrike clued you in on that. Beyond that, we’ve got a kid called Jared Salvatore identified and three others in line to be claimed by someone. Five in all.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he seemed to be holding his breath for some reason, and Barbara wondered what that meant. He finally murmured, “Jesus.”

  “What’s happened to the rest of your assessment kids, Mr. Strong?” Barbara asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How closely do you follow them when they’re done with their first two weeks at this place?”

  “I don’t. I haven’t. I mean, they go on to their instructors next. If they want to go on, that is. The instructors keep tabs on how they’re doing, and they report in to Ulrike. The whole team meets every two weeks and we talk, and Ulrike herself counsels the kids having trouble.” He frowned. He tapped his knuckles on his desk. “If these other kids turn out to be ours…Someone’s trying to discredit Colossus,” he told her. “Or one of us. Someone’s trying to get at one of us.”

  “You think that’s the case?” Barbara asked.

  “If even one other of the bodies comes from here, what else is there to think?”

  “That kids are in danger all over London,” Barbara said, “but that they’re really up against it if they end up here.”

  “Like we’re setting out to kill them, you mean?” Strong’s question was outraged.

  Barbara smiled and flipped her notebook closed. “Your words, not mine, Mr. Strong,” she said.

  REVEREND BRAM SAVIDGE and his wife lived in a West Hampstead neighbourhood that belied the church leader’s we-are-of-the-people demeanour. It was a small house, true. But it was far more than anyone whom Lynley had seen either dishing out the food or eating it at Plugged Inn to the Lord could afford. And Savidge led the way there in a late-model Saab. As DC Havers would have happily pointed out: Someone round here wasn’t hurting for lolly.

  Savidge waited for Lynley to find a place for the Bentley on the tree-lined street. He stood on the front step of his house, looking vaguely biblical with his caftan blowing in the winter breeze, coatless despite the frigid winter weather. When Lynley finally joined him, he sorted out three locks on the front door and opened it. He called, “Oni? I’ve brought a visitor, darling.”

  He didn’t call out about Sean, Lynley noted. Not “Has the boy phoned?” Not “Any word from Sean?” Just “I’ve brought a visitor, darling,” and in a tentative manner that sounded somehow like a warning and was completely out of character for the man Lynley had been speaking with so far.

  There was no immediate reply to Savidge’s call. He said to Lynley, “Wait here,” and directed him to the sitting room. He himself went to a staircase and climbed quickly to the first floor. Lynley heard him moving along a corridor.

  He took a moment to gaze round the sitting room, which was simply fitted out with well-made furniture and a brightly patterned rug. The walls held old documents, framed and mounted, and as above him doors opened and closed in rapid succession, Lynley went to examine these. One was an antique bill of lading, apparently from a ship called the Valiant Sheba whose cargo had been twenty males, thirty-two females—eighteen of whom were documented as “breeding”—and thirteen children. Another was a letter written in copperplate on stationery that bore “Ash Grove, nr Kingston” as its letterhead. Faded with time, this proved difficult to read, but Lynley made out “excellent stud potential” and “if you can control the brute.”

  “My thrice-great-grandfather, Superintendent. He didn’t quite take to slavery.”

  Lynley turned. In the doorway, Savidge stood with a girl at his side. “Oni, my wife,” he said. “She’s asked to be introduced.”

  It was hard for Lynley to believe he was looking at Savidge’s wife, for Oni appeared no older than sixteen, if that. She was thin, long necked, and African to the core. Like her husband, her manner of dress was ethnic, and she carried an unusual musical instrument in her arms, its belly not unlike a banjo, but with a tall bridge that lifted more than a dozen strings high up.

  One glance at her explained a great deal to Lynley. Oni was exquisite: like midnight unblemished, with hundreds of years of blood untarnished by miscegenation. She was what Savidge himself could never be because of the Valiant Sheba. She was also the last thing a rational man would want to leave alone with a group of teenage boys.

  Lynley said, “Mrs. Savidge.”

  The girl smiled and nodded. She looked to her husband as if for guidance. She said, “You might wanting?,” and halted, as if sorting through a catalogue of words that she knew and grammar whose rules she barely understood.

  He said, “This is about Sean, darling. We don’t mean to disturb your practice with the kora. Why don’t you go on with it down here while I take the policeman up to Sean’s room?”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I will be playing, then.” She went to the sofa and placed the kora carefully on the floor. As they were about to leave her, she said, “It is very sunless today, no? Another month passes. Bram, I…discover…No, not discover isn’t…I learn this morning…”

  Savidge hesitated. Lynley discerned a change in him, like tension released. He said, “We’ll talk later, then, Oni.”

  She said, “Yes. And the other as well? Again?”

  “Perhaps. The other.” Quickly, he directed Lynley to the stairs. He led the way to a room at the back of the house. When they were within it, he seemed to feel the need to explain. He shut the door and said, “We’re trying for a baby. No luck so far. That’s what she meant.”

  “That’s rough,” Lynley said.

  “She’s worried about it. Worried that I might…I don’t know…discard her or something? But she’s perfectly healthy. She’s perfectly formed. She’s—” Savidge stopped, as if he realised how close he was to describing someone’s breeding potential himself. He settled on changing course altogether, and he said, “Anyway. This is Sean’s room.”

  “Did you ask your wife if he’s turned up? Phoned? Sent a message?”

  “She doesn’t answer the phone,” Savidge said. “Her English isn’t good enough. She lacks confidence.”

  “Anything else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean did you ask her about Sean?”

  “I didn’t need to. She would have told me. She knows I’m worried.”

  “What’s her relationship with the boy?”

  “What’s that got to do with—”

  “Mr. Savidge, I’ve got to ask,” Lynley said, his gaze steady. “She’s obviously much younger than you.”

  “She’s nineteen years old.”

  “Much closer in age
to the boys you’ve sheltered than to yourself, am I right?”

  “This isn’t about my marriage, my wife, or my situation, Superintendent.”

  Oh, but it is, Lynley thought. He said, “You’re what? Twenty years older than she? Twenty-five years older? And the boys were what age?”

  Savidge seemed to grow larger, indignation colouring his reply. “This is about a missing boy. In a circumstance in which other boys of a similar age have gone missing, if the newspapers are anything to go by. So if you think I’m going to let you misdirect my concerns because you lot have botched an investigation, you’d better change course.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he went to a bookcase that held a small CD player and a rank of paperback books that looked untouched. From the top of this, he took up a photograph in a plain wooden frame. He thrust it at Lynley.

  In the picture, Savidge himself in his African garb stood with his arm round the shoulders of a solemn-looking boy wearing an overlarge tracksuit. The boy had a head of germinant dreadlocks and a wary expression, like a dog’s too often returned to his cage at the Battersea shelter after a walk. He was very dark, only a little lighter than Savidge’s wife. He was also, unmistakably, the boy whose body they’d found that morning.

  Lynley looked up. Beyond Savidge’s shoulder, he saw that the walls of Sean’s room had posters on them: Louis Farrakhan in passionate exhortation, Elijah Mohammed backed by neat-suited members of the Nation. A young Muhammad Ali, perhaps the most famous of the converted. He said, “Mr. Savidge…” And then, for a moment, he found himself in the position of not knowing exactly how to go on. A body in a tunnel became all too human the moment you placed it in a home. At that point, a body altered from a body to a person whose death could not go unmarked by a desire for revenge or a need for justice or the duty to express the simplest form of regret. He said, “I’m sorry. We’ve got a body you’re going to have to look at. It was found this morning, south of the river.”