With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Hadiyyah bounced from foot to foot. “I got a good mark in my maths exam,” she confided. “Dad said he was proud when he saw it.”

  Barbara looked at Azhar. His dark face was sombre. “School is very important,” he said to his daughter, although he looked at Barbara as he spoke. “Hadiyyah, please go back to your breakfast.”

  “But can’t Barbara come—”

  “Hadiyyah.” The voice was sharp. “Have I not just spoken to you? And has Barbara herself not told you that she must go to work? Do you listen to others or merely desire and hear nothing that precludes desire’s fulfillment?”

  This seemed a little harsh, even by Azhar’s standards. Hadiyyah’s face, which had been glowing, altered in an instant. Her eyes widened, but not with surprise. Barbara could see she did it to contain her tears. She backed away with a gulp and scooted in the direction of the kitchen.

  Azhar and Barbara were left together eyeball to eyeball, he looking like a disinterested witness to a car crash, she feeling the warning sign of heat seeping into her gut. That was the moment when she should have said, “Well. Right. That’s that, then. P’rhaps I’ll see you both later. Ta-ta,” and gone on her way, knowing she was wading out of her depth and mindlessly swimming into someone else’s business. But instead she’d held her neighbour’s gaze and allowed herself to feel the heat and its progression from her stomach to her chest, where it formed a burning knot. When it got there, she spoke.

  “That was a bit out of order, don’t you think? She’s just a kid. When’re you planning to give her a break?”

  “Hadiyyah knows what she is meant to do,” Azhar replied. “She also knows there are consequences when she goes her own way in defiance.”

  “Okay. All right. Got it. Written in stone. Tattooed on my forehead. Whatever you want. But how about punishments fitting the crime? And while we’re at it, how about not humiliating her in front of me?”

  “She is not—”

  “She is,” Barbara hissed. “You didn’t see her face. And let me tell you this for a lark, all right? Life’s hard enough, especially for little girls. What they don’t need is parents making it harder.”

  “She needs to—”

  “You want her brought down a peg or two? Want her sorted? Want her to know she’s not numero uno in anyone’s life and she never will be? Just let her out in society, Azhar, and she’ll get the message. She bloody well doesn’t need to hear it from her father.”

  Barbara could see she’d gone too far with that. Azhar’s face—always composed—shuttered completely. “You have no children,” he replied. “If one day you find yourself fortunate enough to be a mother, Barbara, you will think otherwise about how and when your child should be disciplined.”

  It was the word fortunate and all it implied that allowed Barbara to see her neighbour in an entirely new light. Dirty fighter, she thought. But two could play at that game.

  “No wonder she walked out, Azhar. How long did it actually take her to get a reading on you? Too long, I’d guess. But that’s not much of a surprise, is it? After all, she was an English girl, and none of us English girls play the game with all fifty-two cards in the deck, do we?”

  That said, she turned and left him, enjoying the coward’s brief triumph at having had the last word. But it was the simple fact that she’d had that word that kept Barbara in raging and internal conversation, with an Azhar who wasn’t present, all the way into Central London. So when she pulled into a parking bay beneath New Scotland Yard, she was still in a state and hardly in the proper frame of mind for a day’s productive employment. She was also light-headed from nicotine.

  She stopped in the ladies’ loo to splash some water on her face. She looked in the mirror and hated herself for stooping to examine her image for evidence of what she realized Taymullah Azhar had been seeing for all these months they’d been neighbours: Unfortunate female Homo sapiens, a perfect specimen of everything gone wrong. No chance for a normal life, Barbara. Whatever the hell that was.

  “Sod him,” she whispered. Who was he, anyway? Who the bloody hell did he think he was?

  She ran her fingers through her chopped-up hair, and she straightened the collar of her blouse, realising she should have ironed it…had she owned an iron. She looked three quarters of the journey towards a fright, but that couldn’t be helped and it didn’t matter. There was a job to do.

  In the incident room, she found that the morning briefing was already going on. Superintendent Lynley glanced her way in the middle of listening to something being said by Winston Nkata, and he did not look particularly chuffed as his gaze traveled beyond her to the clock on the wall.

  Winston was saying, “…works of wrath or vengeance, ’cording to what the lady at Crystal Moon told me. She looked it up in a book. She handed over a register of shop visitors wanting to be on their newsletter list, and she’s got credit card purchases and postal codes of customers as well.”

  “Let’s match the postal codes with the body sites,” Lynley said to him. “Do the same with the register and the credit card purchases. We may get some joy there. What about Camden Lock Market?” Lynley looked towards Barbara. “What did you get from that stall, Constable? Did you stop there this morning?” Which was his way of saying, I trust that’s your reason for walking in here late.

  Barbara thought, Holy hell. The run-in with Azhar had wiped every other consideration from her mind. She fumbled round her head for an excuse, but the course of wisdom brought her back from the brink at the last moment. She opted for the truth. “I dropped the ball on that,” she admitted. “Sorry, sir. When I was finished with Colossus yesterday, I…Never mind. I’ll get on to it directly.”

  She saw the looks exchanged round her. She saw Lynley’s lips get thin for an instant, so she went on hastily in an attempt to smooth over the moment. “I think the direction we need to take is Colossus anyway, sir.”

  “Do you.” Lynley’s voice was even, too even, but she chose to ignore that.

  She said, “I do. We’ve got possibles and counting over there that need looking into. Aside from Jack Veness, who seems to know something about everyone, there’s a bloke called Neil Greenham who’s a bit overly helpful. He had a copy of the Standard that he was dead chuffed to show me, by the way. And that Robbie Kilfoyle—he was in reception yesterday, playing cards with that kid?—he volunteers in the kit room. He does lunch deliveries as a second job—”

  “Van?” Lynley asked.

  “Bike. Sorry,” Barbara said regretfully. “But he admitted he’s aiming for a real job at Colossus if it expands across the river, which gives him a motive to make someone else look—”

  “Killing off the customers is hardly going to get him that, is it, Havers?” John Stewart cut in acerbically.

  Barbara ignored the dig, going on to say, “His competition could be a bloke called Griff Strong, who’s lost his last two jobs in Stockwell and Lewisham because, according to him, he didn’t get along with female coworkers. That’s four possibles, and they’re all in the age range of the profile, sir.”

  “We’ll look into them,” Lynley agreed. And just as Barbara thought she’d redeemed herself, Lynley asked John Stewart to hand out that assignment and he went on to tell Nkata to dig round in the background of Reverend Bram Savidge and to deal with the goings-on at Square Four Gym in Swiss Cottage, and a car repair shop in North Kensington, while he was at it. Then he made additional assignments involving the taxi driver who’d called 999 about the body in the Shand Street tunnel and the abandoned car where that body had been deposited. He took in a report about the cookery schools in London—no Jared Salvatore enrolled in any of them—before he turned to Barbara and said, “I’ll see you in my office, Constable.” He strode out of the incident room with a “Get on with it, then” to the rest of the team, leaving Barbara to follow. She noted that no one looked at her as she trailed after Lynley.

  She found herself scurrying to keep up with him, and she didn’t like the dog-and-master feeli
ng this evoked. She knew she’d muffed it by forgetting to check the stall in Camden Lock Market and she supposed she deserved a dressing-down for that, but on the other hand, she’d given them a new direction with Strong, Greenham, Veness, and Kilfoyle, hadn’t she, so that had to count for something.

  Once in the superintendent’s office, however, it seemed that Lynley didn’t see things this way. He said, “Shut the door, Havers,” and when she had done so, he went to his desk. Instead of sitting, however, he merely leaned his hips against it and faced her. He gestured her to a chair, and he loomed above her.

  She absolutely loathed the way this made her feel, but she was determined that loathing would not rule her. She said, “Your picture was on the front page of the Standard, sir. Yesterday afternoon. So was mine. So was Hamish Robson’s. We were standing just outside of the Shand Street tunnel. You were named. That’s not good.”

  “It happens.”

  “But with a serial killer—”

  Lynley broke in. “Constable, tell me this: Are you deliberately attempting to shoot yourself in the foot or is all of this part of your unconscious?”

  “All of this…? What?”

  “You were given the assignment. Camden Lock Market. On your route home, for the love of God. Or, for that matter, on your route here. Do you realise how you appear to the others when—as you put it—you ‘drop the ball’? If you want your rank back, which I assume you do and which I also assume you know depends upon your being able to function as part of a team, how do you expect to achieve that if you’re going to make your own decisions about what’s important in this investigation and what is not?”

  “Sir, that’s not fair,” Barbara protested.

  “And this isn’t the first time you’ve operated on your own,” Lynley said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “If ever an officer had a professional death wish…What the hell were you thinking? Don’t you see I can’t keep running interference for you? Just when I begin to think I’ve got you sorted, you begin it all again.”

  “All what?”

  “Your infernal bloody-mindedness. Your taking the reins in your hands instead of the bit in your mouth. Your constant insubordination. Your unwillingness even to make a pretence of being part of a larger team. We’ve been through this before. Time and again. I’m doing my best to protect you, but I swear to you if this doesn’t stop…” He threw up his hands. “Get over to Camden Lock Market, Havers. To Wendy’s Rainbow or whatever the hell it was called.”

  “Wendy’s Cloud,” Barbara said numbly. “But she may not be open because—”

  “Then you can bloody well track her down! And until you do, I don’t want to see your face, hear your voice, or know you exist on the planet. Is that clear?”

  Barbara stared at him. Her stare turned into an observation. She’d worked with Lynley for long enough to know how wildly out of character his outburst was, no matter how richly she deserved being sorted. She did a mental riffling through the reasons he was on the edge: another murder, a row with Helen, a run-in with Hillier, trouble with his younger brother, flat tyre on the way to work, too much caffeine, not enough sleep…But then it came to her, as easily as knowing who Lynley was.

  She said, “He’s got in touch with you, hasn’t he? He saw your name in the paper and he bloody got in touch.”

  Lynley observed her for a moment before making his decision. He moved round his desk. There he took a paper out of a manila folder. He handed it to her, and Barbara saw it was a copy of an original, which, she presumed, was already on its way to forensics.

  THERE IS NO DENIAL, ONLY SALVATION was printed neatly in block letters on a single line across the page. Beneath this was not a signature but rather a marking that looked not unlike two squared-off but separated sections of a maze.

  “How’d it get here?” Barbara asked, returning it to Lynley.

  “By post,” Lynley said. “Plain envelope. Same printing.”

  “What d’you make of the marking? A signature?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “Could be some bugger just wanting to play games, couldn’t it? I mean, he doesn’t actually tell us anything to show he knows something only the killer would know.”

  “Except the salvation bit,” Lynley said. “It suggests he knows that the boys—at least the ones we’ve identified—have been in trouble with the law one way or another. Only the killer knows that.”

  “Plus everyone at Colossus,” Barbara pointed out. “Sir, that bloke Neil Greenham had a copy of the Standard.”

  “Neil Greenham and everyone else in London.”

  “But you were named in the Standard, and that’s the edition he showed me. Let me dig around his—”

  “Barbara.” Lynley’s voice was patient.

  “What?”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “‘It’?”

  “Handle Camden Lock Market. I’ll deal with the rest.”

  She was about to protest—better judgement be damned—when the phone rang and Lynley picked it up. He said, “Yes, Dee?,” to the departmental secretary. He listened for a moment, then said, “Bring him up here, if you will,” before ringing off.

  “Robson?” Barbara asked.

  “Simon St. James,” Lynley replied. “He’s got something for us.”

  HE RECOGNISED that his wife, at this point, was his anchor. His wife and the separate reality that she represented. It was, to Lynley, nothing short of miraculous that he could go home and—for the few hours he was there—become, if not consumed, then at least diverted by something as ridiculous as the drama of trying to keep peace between their families over the idiotic question of christening clothes.

  “Tommy,” Helen had said from the bed as she’d watched him dressing for the day, an early morning cup of tea balanced on her growing bump, “did I mention your mother phoned yesterday? She wanted to report that she’d finally found the christening booties after spending days rooting round the apparently spider-and-poisonous-snake-infested attics in Cornwall. She’s sending them along—the booties, not the spiders and the snakes—so be prepared to find them in the post, she said. A little yellowed with age, I’m afraid, she said. But certainly nothing that a good launderer couldn’t sort out. Of course, I didn’t know what to tell her. I mean, if we don’t use your family’s christening clothes, will Jasper Felix even be a proper Lynley?” She yawned. “Lord, not that tie, darling. How old is it? You look like an Etonian on the loose. First free weekend across the bridge to Windsor and trying to look like one of the lads. Wherever did you get it?”

  Lynley unlooped it and replaced it in the wardrobe, saying, “The astonishing thing is that, as bachelors, men actually dress themselves for years not knowing they’re completely incompetent without a woman at their sides.” He took out another two ties and held them up for her approval.

  “The green,” she said. “You know I love the green for work. It makes you look so Sherlockian.”

  “I wore the green yesterday, Helen.”

  “Pooh,” she said. “No one will notice. Believe me. No one ever notices men’s ties.”

  He didn’t point out to Helen that she was contradicting herself. He merely smiled. He went across to the bed and sat on the edge of it. “What’ve you got on for today?” he asked her.

  “I’ve promised Simon to work a few hours. He’s overextended himself again—”

  “When has he not?”

  “Well, he’s begging for help preparing a paper on a chemical whatsit applied to whosit to produce thisorthat. It’s all beyond me. I just go where he points and attempt to look decorative. Although”—and here she gazed fondly at her bump—“that’s soon going to be impossible.”

  He kissed her forehead and then her mouth. “You’ll always look decorative to me,” he told her. “Even when you’re eighty-five and toothless.”

  “I plan to keep my teeth right to the grave,” she informed him. “They’ll be perfectly white, completely straight, and my gums will not have receded so m
uch as a millimeter.”

  “I’m impressed,” he told her.

  “A woman,” she replied, “should always have some kind of ambition.”

  He laughed, then. She could always make him laugh. It was why she was a necessity to him. Indeed, he could have done with her this morning, diverting his thoughts from what was clearly Barbara Havers’ death wish.

  If Helen was a miracle to him, Barbara was a puzzle. Every time he thought he’d got her on the road to professional redemption at last, she did something to disabuse him of that notion. A team player she was not. Assign her to any action like any other member of an investigation and she was likely to go one of two ways: embellish upon the activity until it was unrecognisable or drift her own way and ignore it altogether. But right now, with five murders demanding action before there was a sixth, there was too much at stake for Barbara to do anything but what she was told to do when she was told to do it.

  Still, for all her maddening ways, Lynley had learned the wisdom of valuing Barbara’s opinion. Quite simply, she’d never been anyone’s fool. So he allowed her to remain in his office as Dee Harriman went to fetch St. James up from the lobby.

  When the three of them were together and St. James’s demurral to Dee’s offer of coffee had sent her on her way, Lynley indicated the round conference table, and they sat there as they’d done so often in the past in other locations. Lynley’s first words were the same, as well.

  “What do we have?”

  St. James took a sheaf of papers from the manila envelope he’d carried with him. He made two piles of them. One held autopsy reports. The other consisted of an enlargement of the marking that had been made in blood on the forehead of Kimmo Thorne, a photocopy of a similar symbol, and a neatly typed, albeit brief, report.

  “It took a while,” St. James said. “There’re an inordinate number of symbols out there. Everything from universal road signs to hieroglyphics. But on the whole, I’d say it’s a fairly straightforward business.”