With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  “You said you know Kilfoyle. I’m wondering how.”

  “You mean is he my boyfriend or something?” Nkata could see the colour deepen round the hollow of her throat. “No. He isn’t. I mean, we had a drink once, but it wasn’t a date. Is he in some sort of trouble?”

  Nkata didn’t reply to this. It had always been a long shot, anyway, that the owner of Crystal Moon would remember what someone had bought. But the fact that Kilfoyle had indeed made a purchase gave the investigation grist to move forward, which was what they needed. He told Gigi that he appreciated her help and he gave her his card and told her to phone should she remember anything particular about Kilfoyle that she thought he should know. He realised that chances were good she’d hand over the card to Kilfoyle himself the next time she saw him, but he didn’t see that as a problem. If Kilfoyle was their killer, the fact that the cops were on to him would surely slow him down. At this point, that was nearly as gratifying as nabbing him. They had enough victims on their hands already.

  He headed for the door, where he paused to ask another question of Gigi. “How’m I meant to use it, then?”

  “What?”

  “The agrimony.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You burn or anoint.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning: Burn the oil in her presence or anoint her body with it. I take it it’s a her we’re talking about?”

  Nkata thought about and then dismissed the likelihood of his being able to accomplish either task. But he also thought about the serial killer: burning and anointing. He was doing both. He thanked Gigi and left the shop. He went next door to Mr. Sandwich.

  The little eatery was closed for the day, and the sign said that its hours of business were from ten till three. He looked through the windows but could make nothing out in the semidarkness save the counter and, on the wall behind it, a list of sandwiches and their prices. There was nothing more to be gained in this spot, he decided. It was time to go.

  But he didn’t head homeward. Instead, he felt himself compelled to drive yet another time in the general direction of the Oval, weaving over to Kennington Park Road as soon as he was able to do so. He parked again in Braganza Street, but rather than wait for her or enter Doddington Grove Estate to see if she was already home, he walked up to the dispirited patch of green that was Surrey Gardens. From there, he headed into Manor Place, a spot still trying to make a choice between decrepitude and renaissance.

  He hadn’t been to her shop since November, but there was no way he could have forgotten where it was. He found her within, just as she’d been the last time he visited. She was at a desk at the back, her head bent over what looked like an accounts book. She had a pencil in her mouth, which made her look vulnerable, like a schoolgirl having trouble doing her sums. When she glanced up as he entered and the buzzer went off, though, she looked adult enough. And equally unfriendly. She set her pencil down and closed the book. She came to the counter and made sure, it seemed, that it stood like a bulwark between them.

  He said, “A black boy was killed this time. His body got dumped near London Bridge Station. We got an ID on an earlier boy ’s well. Mixed race, he was. From Furzedown. That’s two boys south of the river now, Yas. Where’s Daniel?”

  She said, “If you think—”

  He cut her off impatiently. “Yas, Daniel have anything to do with a group of kids meeting up at Elephant and Castle?”

  “Dan doesn’t do gangs,” she protested.

  “Isn’t a gang, this, Yas. This’s an outreach group. They offer kids activities, kids at…kids at risk.” He hurried on. “I know. I know you’ll say Dan i’n’t at risk, and I’m not here to argue that. The group’s called Colossus, though, and I need to know. You ever talk to them about seeing to Dan after school? While you’re still working? Giving him a place to go?”

  “I don’t let Dan up at Elephant and Castle.”

  “And he never said Colossus to you?”

  “He never…Why’re you doing this?” she demanded. “We don’t want you round us. You’ve done enough.”

  She was getting agitated. He could see as much from the rise and fall of her breasts beneath her jersey. It was cropped like all the jerseys he’d ever seen her wear, showing off her smooth stomach, which was flat like a palm. She’d had her navel pierced, he saw. A bit of gold glittered against her skin.

  His throat felt dry, but he knew there were things that he had to say to her, no matter how she was likely to receive them. He said, “Yas”—and he thought, What is it about the sound of her name?—“Yas, would you’ve rather not known what was going on? She was cheating on you, had been from the first, and you got to admit that no matter what you think of me.”

  “You di’n’t have the right—”

  “Would you rather’ve been kept in the dark about her? What good’s that supposed to do, then, Yas? And you and I know you’re not bent like that anyways.”

  She pushed away from the counter. “That all? Cos if it is, I got work needs finishing before I go home.”

  “No,” he returned. “Not all. There’s this. What I did was right and you know it somewhere.”

  “You—”

  “But,” he continued, “how I did it was wrong. And—” He’d come to the hard part now, the tell-the-truth part, when he didn’t want to admit that truth even to himself. But he plunged forward. “And why I did it, Yasmin. That was wrong ’s well. And it was wrong that I lied to myself about why I did it too. And I’m sorry for all of it. I’m dead sorry. I want to make things right.”

  She was silent. There was nothing that could be called kind in her stare. A car pulled up to the kerb outside and her eyes flicked to it, then back to him. “Then stop using Daniel,” she said.

  “Using…? Yas, I’m—”

  “Stop using Daniel to get to me.”

  “Tha’s what you think?”

  “I don’t want you. I had a man. I married him, an’ every time I look in the mirror I get to see what he did to me an’ I get to think what I did back to him an’ I’m never going to that place again.”

  She’d begun to tremble. Nkata wanted to reach across the counter that separated them and offer her comfort and the assurance that not all men…But he knew she would not believe him and he wasn’t sure if he believed himself. And as he tried to think what to say to her, the door opened, the buzzer went off, and another black man came into the shop. His gaze lit upon Yasmin, made a quick assessment, and flicked to Nkata.

  “Yasmin,” he said, and he pronounced it differently. Yasmeen, he said in a soft foreign voice. “Is there trouble here, Yasmin? Are you here alone?”

  It was the way he talked to her. It was the tone and the look that went with it. Nkata felt every which way a fool.

  He said to the other man, “She is now,” and he left the two of them together.

  BARBARA HAVERS decided a fag was in order. She considered it a little reward, the carrot she’d held out in front of herself during her long slog on the computer, followed by her further slogs on the phone. She’d managed this spate of unwelcome work with what she liked to think of as extreme good grace, when all the time what she really wanted to do was have a real slog over to Elephant and Castle so that she might engage the decidedly more pleasant slog of shaking things up at Colossus. During all this time, she’d done her best to ignore her feelings: her outrage at DI Stewart’s remarks, her impatience with the grunt work she was being assigned, her schoolgirl envy—bloody hell, was that what it really was?—seeing Winston Nkata chosen by Lynley to accompany him to duel with the assistant commissioner. So, as far as she was concerned, at this late hour of the day she was owed the metaphorical rosette-on-her-lapel, which she decided a fag would represent.

  On the other hand, she had to admit, however much she disliked doing so, that the computer and telephone slog had actually produced more ammunition for her to use when she made her next appearance across the river. So she gave grudging acknowledgement to the wisdom of completing a
ctivities assigned to her, and she even considered writing up her report in a timely manner as a way of admitting her earlier error in judgement. But she discarded that notion in favour of a fag. She told herself that, if she had her smoke surreptitiously in the stairwell, she’d be that much closer to the incident room and thus that much closer to a location in which she could fill out the appropriate paperwork…once she had the shot-in-the-eyeball of nicotine for which her body was crying out.

  So she decamped to the stairwell, plopped down, lit up, and inhaled. Bliss. Not the plate of lasagne and chips she would have preferred at this hour. But a decent second.

  “Havers, exactly what are you doing?”

  Bloody hell. Barbara scrambled to her feet. Lynley had just come through the doorway, preparatory to climbing or descending the stairs. He had his overcoat slung over one shoulder, so she assumed descending was the order of the day. It was something of a journey down to the carpark, but the stairwell always gave one time to think, which was probably what he’d planned unless his intention had been to escape without detection, which was also an option that the stairwell afforded.

  She said, “Composing my thoughts. I did the Griffin Strong stuff, and I was sorting through how best to present the information.” She offered him the notes she’d taken from both the computer and the telephone calls. She’d begun scribbling them in her spiral book but unfortunately had run out of paper. She’d been reduced to using whatever lay at hand, which had turned out to be two used envelopes from the wastepaper basket and a paper napkin she’d rummaged out of her bag.

  Lynley looked from all this to her.

  She said, “Hey. Before you give me aggro—”

  “I’m beyond it,” he said. “What have you got?”

  Barbara happily settled in for a natter, fag dangling from her lips as she spoke. “First of all, according to his wife, Griffin Strong’s doing the mattress polka with Ulrike Ellis. Arabella—that’s the wife—puts him with Ulrike for every killing no matter when it was. Without a second to think it over, mind you. I don’t know about you, but that tells me she’s dead desperate to keep him bringing home the dosh while she cares for the baby and does jumping jacks in front of the telly all day. Fine. That’s understandable, I suppose. But it turns out our Griff has a history of taking up with the ladies at all his places of employment, getting in too deep—if you’ll pardon the pun—then losing his way and letting the ball drop with reference to his responsibilities.”

  Lynley leaned against the stair rail, listening tolerantly to her metaphor mixing. He had his eyes fixed on hers, so she entertained the idea that she might actually be on the way to resurrecting something of her reputation, not to mention something of her career. She waxed enthusiastic on her topic.

  “Turns out he was sacked from Social Services in Lewisham for falsifying his reports.”

  “That’s an interesting twist.”

  “He was supposedly checking up on kids in care but in reality only managing to get to one in ten.”

  “Why?”

  “The obvious. He was too busy bonking his cubicle mate. He got warned off once and written up twice before the axe finally fell, and it seems the only reason he got taken on over in Stockwell was that none of the kids on his roster at Lewisham actually suffered from his neglect.”

  “In this day and age, though…There were no repercussions?”

  “Not a whisper. I talked to his Lewisham supervisor, who’d got convinced by someone—and for that I wager you can read Griffin Strong—that Griff was far more pursued than pursuer. Beating this bird off with a nail-studded stick for months on end, to hear the way Strong’s guv told the tale. ‘Anyone would have succumbed to her eventually,’ was how he put it.”

  “His supervisor being male, I take it?”

  “Naturally. And you should’ve heard him talk about this bird. Like she was the sexual equivalent of the bubonic plague.”

  “What about at Stockwell?” Lynley said.

  “The kid that died under Strong’s care was attacked.”

  “By whom?”

  “A gang with an initiation rite involving chasing down twelve-year-olds and cutting them up with broken bottles. They caught him crossing Angell Park, and what was s’posed to be a cut on the thigh hit an artery and he bled to death before he could get home.”

  “Christ,” Lynley said. “But that was hardly Strong’s fault, was it?”

  “When you consider the kid who cut him up was his own foster brother…?”

  Lynley raised his head heavenward. He looked done in. “How old was the foster brother, then?”

  Barbara glanced at her notes. “Eleven,” she said.

  “What happened to him?”

  She continued to read. “Psychiatric lockup till he’s eighteen. For all the good it’ll do.” She knocked the growing tube of ash from her fag. “It all made me think…”

  “About?”

  “The killer. Seems to me that he sees himself ridding the flock of black sheep. Like it’s sort of a religion to him. When you think of all the aspects of ritual that’re part of the killings…” She let him finish the thought for himself.

  Lynley rubbed his forehead and leaned against the handrail of the stairs. He said, “Barbara, I don’t care what he’s thinking. These are children we’re talking about, not genetic mutations. Children need guidance when they go wrong, and they need protection the rest of the time. Full stop. End of story.”

  “Sir, we’re on the same page,” Barbara said. “Start to finish.” She dropped the nub of her cigarette on the stairs and crushed it out. To cover the trace of her malefaction, she picked up the dog end and placed it, along with her notes, in her shoulder bag. She said, “Trouble upstairs?,” with reference to Lynley’s meeting with Hillier.

  “No more than usual,” Lynley said. “Winston isn’t turning out to be the blue-eyed boy the AC thought he’d be, though.”

  “Now that’s gratifying,” Barbara said.

  “To an extent, yes.” He studied her. A little silence lingered between them during which Barbara looked away, picking at a fuzz ball that needed removing from the arm of her baggy pullover…along with all the other fuzz balls that adorned the garment. “Barbara,” Lynley finally said, “I wouldn’t have it this way.”

  She looked up. “What?”

  “I think you know. Have you ever considered you’d make better progress towards reinstatement if you worked with someone less…less objectionable to people in power?”

  “Like who, for example? John Stewart? Now that would be chummy.”

  “MacPherson, possibly. Or Philip Hale. Even out of here altogether, in one of the borough stations. Because as long as you’re in my sphere—not to mention in Hillier’s—with Webberly no longer here to be a buffer for either one of us…” He made a gesture. It said, Finish the thought in a logical manner.

  She didn’t need to. She heaved her bag higher on her shoulder and began to head back up to the incident room. She said, “That’s not how this is going to play out. At the end of the day, I know what’s important and what isn’t.”

  “Which means?”

  She paused at the door to the corridor. She offered him the response he’d given her. “I think you know, sir. Have a good night. I’ve got work to do before I can go home.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IN HIS MIND, HE PUT A BODY BEFORE HIM: LYING ON THE floor, crucified by restraints and the board. It was a soundless but not a lifeless body and when its senses returned, what it knew was that it was in the presence of a power it could not hope to escape. So fear descended in the guise of anger, and in the presence of that fear, Fu’s heart grew large. Blood engorged His muscles, and He rose above Himself. It was the kind of ecstasy that only came from being a god.

  Having had it that way, He wanted it again. Once He had experienced the sensation of who He actually was, bursting from the chrysalis of who He only appeared to be, it could not be laid aside. It was forever.

  He had att
empted to hold on to the feeling for as long as possible once the first boy died. Time and again, He had put Himself into darkness and there He slowly relived each moment that had taken Him from selection to judgement, and from there to admission, onward to punishment, and then to release. But still the sheer exultation of the experience had faded, as all things do. To recapture it, He had no choice but to make another selection, to perform once again.

  He told Himself that He was not like the others who had gone before Him: swine like Brady, Sutcliffe, and West. They had all been cheap thrill seekers, cold-blooded killers who preyed on the vulnerable for no other reason than to shore themselves up. They shouted their insignificance to the world through acts the world was not likely to forget.

  But for Fu things were different. Not for Him were innocent children at play, streetwalkers chosen at random off the pavement, female hitchhikers taking a fatal decision to climb into a car with a man and his wife…

  In the sphere of those killers, the possession, the terror, and the slaughter were all. But Fu trod a different path to theirs, and that was what made His current state far more difficult to cope with. Had He been willing to join the swine, He knew that He would be resting easier now: He’d have only to scour the streets and within hours…ecstasy once again. Because that wasn’t who He was, Fu sought the darkness as an aid to relief.

  Once He was there, though, He discerned intrusion. He drew a breath and held it, His senses alert. He listened. He thought of impossibility. But there was no mistaking what His body told Him.

  He dispelled the gloom. He looked for the evidence. The light was dim as He preferred it, but enough to show Him that there were no obvious signs of intrusion into this place. Yet still He knew. He had learned to trust the nerve endings at the nape of His neck, and they were murmuring caution.

  A book lay discarded on the floor near a chair. A magazine had its cover wrinkled. A stack of newspapers crisscrossed one on top of the other. Words. Words. Words upon words. All of them chattered, all accused. A maggot, they chorused. Here, here.