With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  The reliquary, Fu realised. That was what he wanted. For only through the reliquary would it be possible for the maggot to speak once more. And what he would say…

  Don’t tell me you’ve not bought brown sauce, cow. What else have you got to think about all day?

  Dear, please. The boy—

  Are you trying to tell me …? Get your arse down to the shops for that sauce. And leave the boy. I said leave him. Something wrong with your ears as well as your brain?

  Now, dearest…

  As if the tone and the words could somehow make a difference to the walking lightly and the loose-boweled fear. Both of which would return if He lost possession of the reliquary or its contents.

  Yet He could see that the reliquary stood where He had left it, in its hiding place that was no place of hiding at all. And when He carefully removed the top, He found that the contents seemed to be undisturbed. Even the contents within the contents—carefully buried, preserved, and treasured—were as He’d left them. Or so they appeared.

  He went to the pile of crisscrossed papers. He loomed above them, but they spoke only what He could see: a man in African garb. A headline declared the man “Foster Dad in Anguish,” and the story that accompanied the headline told the rest: all the deaths round London and they’d finally sussed out that there was a serial killer at work.

  Fu felt Himself relax. He felt His hands warm, and the sickness within Him began to recede as He fingered fondly through the stack of tabloids. Perhaps, He thought, they would suffice.

  He sat. He drew the entire stack closer, like Father Christmas embracing a child. How odd it was, He thought, that only with the last boy—the lying, denying, and accusing Sean who had forfeited redemption and release because he’d stubbornly refused to admit his guilt—had the police realised they were dealing with something superior to and larger than what they were used to. He had been giving them clues all along, but they’d refused to see. Now, though, they knew. Not His purpose, of course, but the fact of Him as a single and singular force of justice. Always a step ahead of those who sought Him. Supreme and supreme.

  He lifted the most recent copy of the Evening Standard and set it aside. He went down the stack till He found the Mirror, which featured a photo of the tunnel in which He’d left the last body. He laid His hands on the photograph of the scene, and He dropped His gaze to encompass the other pictures on the page: cops because who else could they be? And one of them named so that now He knew who wished to thwart Him, who fruitlessly directed everyone else to turn Him from the course He followed. Lynley, detective superintendent. The name would be easy enough to remember.

  Fu closed His eyes and conjured up the image of Himself and this Lynley in confrontation. But not the sort in which He faced him alone. Instead, the image displayed a moment of redemption in which the detective watched, helpless to do anything to stop the cycle of punishment and salvation as it played out before his eyes. That would indeed be something, Fu thought. That would be a statement that no one—no Brady, no Sutcliffe, no West, no anyone else—had ever been able to make.

  Fu took in the pleasure of the thought, in the hope it would bring Him close to the heady sensation—what He called the very yesness—of those final moments of the act of redemption. Wanting the swelling of success to possess Him, wanting the knowledge of fully being to fill Him, wanting wanting wanting to feel the emotional and sensual explosion that occurred at the impact of desire and accomplishment…Please.

  But nothing happened.

  He opened His eyes, every nerve alive. The maggot had been here, defiling this place, and that was why He could not recapture any of the moments in which He’d been most fully alive.

  He could not afford the despair that threatened, so He turned it to anger, and the anger itself He lasered on the maggot. Keep out of here, wanker. Keep out. Keep away.

  But His nerves still tingled, telling a tale that revealed He would never have peace in this way. Peace could now be generated only by the act that brought another soul to its redemption.

  The boy and the act itself, He thought.

  What was needed was what would be.

  RAIN FELL for the next five days, a heavy midwinter rain of the sort that generally made one despair of ever seeing the sun again. By the sixth morning, the worst of the storm had passed, but the glowering sky heralded the arrival of yet another as the day wore on.

  Lynley didn’t go directly into the Yard as he normally would have done. Instead, he drove in the opposite direction, working his way over to the A4, heading out of Central London. Helen had suggested this journey to him. She’d gazed at him over a glass of breakfast orange juice and said, “Tommy, have you considered going out to Osterley? I think it’s what you need.”

  He’d said in reply, “Is my self-doubt becoming that obvious?”

  “I wouldn’t call it self-doubt. And I think you’re being too hard on yourself if that’s what you’re calling it, by the way.”

  “What would you call it, then?”

  Helen thought about this, head cocked to one side as she observed him. She hadn’t yet dressed for the day, hadn’t even bothered to comb her hair, and Lynley found he liked her tousled like this. She looked…She looked wifely, he thought, that was the word, although he’d have cut out his tongue before telling her that. She said, “I’d call it a ripple on the surface of your peace of mind, courtesy of the tabloids and the assistant commissioner of police. David Hillier wants you to fail, Tommy. You ought to know that by now. Even as he blusters on about bringing in a result, you’re the last person on earth he wants to do that.”

  Lynley knew she was right. He said, “Which makes me wonder why he put me in this position in the first place.”

  “Acting superintendent or heading this investigation?”

  “Both.”

  “It’s all to do with Malcolm Webberly, of course. Hillier told you himself that he knows what Malcolm would have wanted him to do, so he’s doing it. It’s his…his homage to him, for want of a better word. It’s his way of doing his part to ensure Malcolm’s recovery. But his own will—Hillier’s, I mean—gets in the way of his intention of helping Malcolm. So while you have the elevation to acting superintendent and you have the assignment to head this investigation, you also have Hillier’s bad wishes to go along with both.”

  Lynley considered this. There was good sense to it. But that was Helen. Scratch the surface of her habitual insouciance and she was both sensible and intuitive to her core. “I’d no idea you’d become so adept at instant psychoanalysis,” he told her.

  “Oh.” Lightly, she saluted him with her teacup. “It all comes of watching chat shows, darling.”

  “Really? I’d never have thought of you as a covert chat-show viewer.”

  “You flatter me. I’m becoming quite fond of the American ones. You know the sort: Someone sits on a sofa, pouring out his heart to the host and half a billion viewers, after which he’s given advice and sent off to slay dragons. It’s confession, catharsis, resolution, and renewal all in a tidy fifty-minute package. I adore the way they solve life’s problems on American television, Tommy. It’s rather the way Americans do most things, isn’t it? That gunslinger approach: Draw the gun, blast away, and the difficulty’s gone. Supposedly.”

  “You aren’t recommending I shoot Hillier, are you?”

  “Only as a last resort. In the meantime, I suggest a trip to Osterley.”

  So he took up her suggestion. It was an ungodly hour for visiting a convalescent hospital, but he reckoned his police identification would be enough to get him inside.

  It was. Most of the patients were still at their breakfasts, but Malcolm Webberly’s bed was empty. However, a helpful orderly directed him to the physiotherapy room. There, Lynley found Detective Superintendent Webberly working his way between two parallel bars.

  Lynley watched him from the doorway. The fact that the superintendent was alive was miraculous. He’d survived a laundry list of injuries, all of them
brought about by a hit-and-run driver. He’d endured the removal of his spleen and a good portion of his liver, a fractured skull and the removal of a blood clot on his brain, nearly six weeks of drug-induced coma, a broken hip, a broken arm, five broken ribs, and a heart attack in the midst of his slow recovery from everything else. He was nothing if not a warrior in the battle to regain his strength. He was also the one man at New Scotland Yard with whom Lynley had long felt he could be unguarded.

  Webberly inched along the bars, encouraged by the therapist, who insisted upon calling him luv despite the scowls Webberly sent in her direction. She was approximately the size of a canary, and Lynley wondered how she would approach supporting the burly superintendent should he begin to topple. But it appeared that Webberly had no intention of doing anything other than making his way to the end of the apparatus. When he’d managed that, he said without looking in Lynley’s direction, “You’d think they’d let me have a bloody cigar on occasion, wouldn’t you, Tommy? Their idea of a celebration round here is an enema administered to the sound of Mozart.”

  “How are you, sir?” Lynley asked, coming farther into the room. “Have you lost a few stone?”

  “Are you saying I needed to?” Webberly looked shrewdly in his direction. He was pale and unshaven and he looked quite tentative about the titanium acting the part of his new hip. He wore a tracksuit instead of hospital garb. The words “Top Cop” decorated its jacket.

  “Just a casual observation,” Lynley said. “To me you were always a picture needing no revision.”

  “What cock.” Webberly grunted as he reached the end of the bars and made the turn that was necessary for his descent to the wheelchair, which the therapist brought to him. “Wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you.”

  “Cup of tea, luv?” Webberly’s therapist asked him once he’d lowered himself to his chair. “Nice ginger biscuit? You did very well.”

  “She thinks I’m a performing dog,” Webberly informed Lynley. He said to the woman, “Bring the whole damn tin of biscuits, thank you.”

  She smiled serenely and patted his shoulder. “Cup of tea and a biscuit it is. And for you?” This last was directed to Lynley, who told her he’d do nicely with nothing. She disappeared into an adjoining room.

  Webberly wheeled himself over to a window, where he raised the blinds and looked out at the day. “Bloody weather,” he growled. “I’m that ready for Spain, Tommy. The thought of it…That’s what’s keeping me going.”

  “Taking your pension, then?” Lynley tried to make the question light, not a reflection of what he felt at the thought of the superintendent’s permanent removal from the force.

  He didn’t fool Webberly with his tone, however. The superintendent gave him a look, cast over his shoulder from his perusal of the day. “David behaving badly, is he? You’ve got to come up with a strategy for coping with him. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Lynley joined him at the window. There, they both looked morosely out at the grey day and what the window offered of it, which was a distant view of bare branches, the supplicant winter arms of trees in Osterley Park. Closer in, they had the carpark to gaze upon.

  “For myself, I can do it,” Lynley said.

  “That’s all anyone asks of you.”

  “It’s the others I’m worried about. Barbara and Winston mostly. I’ve not done either of them any favours, taking on your position. It was madness to think I could.”

  Webberly was silent. Lynley knew that the other man would see his point. Havers’ boat of dreams at the Yard would doubtless continue to take on water as long as she maintained her association with him. As for Nkata…Lynley knew that any other officer elevated to the rank of acting superintendent would have done a better job of keeping Winston out of Hillier’s clutches. Instead, Havers was looking more professionally doomed every day, while Nkata knew he was being used as a token and might end up carrying round a load of bitterness that could blight his career for years. No matter how he looked at the matter, Lynley felt it was all down to him that Nkata and Havers were in the positions they were in at the moment.

  “Tommy,” Webberly said, as if Lynley had spoken all this, “you don’t have that power.”

  “Don’t I? You did. You do. I ought to be able—”

  “Stop. I’m not talking about the power to be a buffer between David and his targets. I’m talking about the power to change him, to un-David him. Which is what you’d like to do, if you’ll admit it. But he has his own set of demons, just like you. And there’s not a thing in the world that you can do to remove them from him.”

  “So how do you cope with him?”

  Webberly rested his arms on the windowsill. He was looking, Lynley saw, much older these days. His thin hair—once the faded sand of the redhead going grey—had now reached that destination, while the flesh under his eyes was baggy and the skin beneath his chin was wattled. Seeing this, Lynley was reminded of Ulysses’ rumination, faced with knowledge of his mortality: “Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.” He wanted to recite it to Webberly. Anything, he thought, to postpone the inevitable.

  “It’s down to the knighthood, I reckon,” Webberly said. “You think David wears it comfortably. I believe he wears it like a suit of armour, which as we both know, has comfort as the least of its purposes. He wanted it, and he didn’t want it. He schemed to get it, and now he has to live with that.”

  “The scheming? But that’s what he does best.”

  “Too right. So think about having that on your gravestone. Tommy, you know all this. And if you can let the knowledge just get past that nasty temper of yours, you’ll be able to deal with him.”

  There it was, Lynley thought. The dominant truth of his life. He could hear his father comment upon it, though the man had been dead nearly twenty years: Temper, Tommy. You’re allowing passion not only to blind you but to rule you, son.

  What had it been at the time? A football match and a wild disagreement with a referee? A call in rugby he hadn’t liked? A row with his sister over a board game? What? And what did it matter now?

  But that had been his father’s point. That, full stop. The black passion of the moment did not matter once the moment passed. He merely failed to see that fact, over and over again, resulting in everyone else having to pay for his fatal flaw. He was Othello without the excuse of Iago; he was Hamlet sans ghost. Helen was right. Hillier set traps and he walked right into them.

  It was all he could do not to groan aloud. Webberly looked at him. “There’s a learning curve involved with the job,” the superintendent said kindly. “Why don’t you let yourself travel it?”

  “Easier said than done when at the other end of the curve is someone waiting with a battle-axe.”

  Webberly shrugged. “You can’t stop David from arming himself. Who you have to become is the person who can dodge the blows.”

  The canary therapist came back into the room, tea in one hand and paper napkin in the other. On this rested a lone ginger biscuit, the superintendent’s reward for managing the parallel bars. “Here you go, luvvie,” she said to Webberly. “Nice hot cuppa with milk and sugar…I’ve made it just the way you like it.”

  “I hate tea,” Webberly informed her as he took the cup and the biscuit.

  “Oh, go on with you,” she replied. “You’re being quite naughty this morning. Is that because of your visitor?” She patted his shoulder. “Well, it’s good to see you showing some life. But stop pulling my leg, luv, or I’ll give you what for.”

  “You’re the reason I’m trying to get the hell out of here, woman,” Webberly told her.

  “That,” she said placidly, “is my whole objective.” She wagged her fingers and headed out of the room, scooping up a medical chart on her way.

  “You’ve got Hillier, I’ve got her,” Webberly groused as he bit into his biscuit.

  “But at least she offers refreshments,” Lynley said.

  Nothing was resolved in the visit to Osterley, but Helen’s p
rescription did work as she’d thought it would. When Lynley left the superintendent back in his room, he felt ready for another round of his professional life.

  What that round brought was information from a number of sources. He met the squad in the incident room, where phones were ringing and constables were typing information into the computers. Stewart was compiling action reports from one of his teams, and—mirabile dictu, as things turned out—Barbara Havers had, in his absence, apparently managed to take direction from the DI without episode. When Lynley called the group together, the first thing he learned was that, upon Stewart’s orders, Havers had traveled across the river to Colossus for another set-to with Ulrike Ellis.

  “It’s amazing how quickly she was able to locate information on Jared Salvatore once she twigged we had the book from reception with his name blazed all over it,” Havers reported, “and she’s managed to unearth all sorts of useful details on Anton Reid. She’s onboard now, sir, cooperation incarnate. She’s provided the name of every kid who’s dropped out of Colossus for the last twelve months, and I’ve been seeing if we can match any of them with the rest of the bodies.”

  “What about the other two boys’ personal connections to anyone at Colossus?”

  “Jared and Anton? Griffin Strong was their assessment leader, surprise, surprise. Anton Reid also did some time on Greenham’s computer course.”

  “What about Kilfoyle and Veness? Any relationship between the boys and them?”

  Havers consulted her report which—perhaps as evidence of her dubious intention of being a model cop from this moment forward—appeared to be typed for once. “Both of them knew Jared Salvatore. Evidently, he was quite the whiz at creating recipes. He couldn’t read, so he couldn’t follow cookbooks, but he’d manage to whip up something without instructions and serve it round, with the staff at Colossus doing the guinea-pig thing. Everyone knew him, as things turn out. My mistake earlier”—she shot a look round the room as if anticipating a reaction from someone to her admission—“was asking only Ulrike Ellis and Griff Strong about Jared. When they said he wasn’t one of theirs, I believed them because they’d admitted to Kimmo Thorne right up front. Sorry.”