With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Unlike the others, Lynley concluded, this one boy had not gone gentle, which told him the killer had made his first error in his choice of victim. Lynley could only hope that the miscalculation left behind him a pile of evidence.

  “He put up a fight,” Lynley murmured.

  “No stun gun this time?” Havers asked.

  They checked the body for the signature of that weapon as well. Lynley said, “It doesn’t appear so.”

  “What d’you reckon that means? Would it be out of juice? Do they run out of it? They must, no?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps there wasn’t the chance to use it. It looks like things might not have gone according to plan.” He stood, nodded to those who stood waiting to bag the body, and returned to Widdison. “Anything in the area?” he asked.

  “Two footprints beneath the boy’s head,” he said. “Protected from the rain. Could have been there earlier, but we’re taking casts anyway. We’re doing a perimeter search, but I reckon our real evidence is going to come from the body.”

  Lynley left the DI with the instruction to get every statement from every house on Wood Lane over to him at New Scotland Yard as soon as possible. “That block of flats especially,” he said. “I agree with you. Someone has to have seen something. Or heard something. And have constables in place the rest of the day on either end of the street to grill commuters who come down from the underground station to fetch their cars.”

  “Don’t expect to get much joy from that,” Widdison warned.

  “Anything goes for joy at this point,” Lynley told him. He added the information about the van they were looking for. “Someone may have seen it,” he said.

  Then he and Havers set off up the slope. Back on Wood Lane, they could see that the house-to-house was well in progress. Uniformed police were knocking on doors; others were standing in the shelter of porches, talking to inhabitants. Otherwise, no one else was on the pavement or in any front garden. The persistent rain was keeping everyone inside.

  That was not the case at the barricade, however. More gawkers had gathered. Lynley waited while the sawhorse was moved once more, and he was thinking about what they’d seen in Queen’s Wood when Havers muttered, “Bloody hell, sir. He did it again,” and roused him from his thoughts.

  He quickly saw what she was talking about. Just to the other side of the barricade, Hamish Robson gestured to them. At least, Lynley thought grimly, they’d managed to thwart AC Hillier in this: The constable standing watch had followed Lynley’s orders to the letter. Robson had no police identification; he would not be allowed beyond the barrier no matter what Sir David Hillier had told him to do.

  Lynley lowered the window, and Robson worked his way over to the car. He said, “The constable here wouldn’t—”

  “Those were my orders. You can’t go onto this crime scene, Dr. Robson. You shouldn’t have been allowed onto the last one.”

  “But the assistant commissioner—”

  “I’ve no doubt he rang you, but it’s just not on. I know you mean well. I also know you’re caught in the middle, one of us a rock and the other a hard place. I apologise for that. For that and the inconvenience to you, coming all this way. But as it is—”

  “Superintendent.” Robson shivered, shoved his hands into his pockets. He’d obviously come in a hurry, without umbrella or raincoat. Great patches of damp extended across his shoulders, his spectacles were spotted with rain, and what little hair he had was sagging wetly round his face and into his forehead. “Let me help,” he said urgently. “It’s completely pointless to send me back to Dagenham when I’m already here, available to you.”

  “That’s something you’ll have to take up with AC Hillier,” Lynley said, “the pointlessness of it.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.” Robson glanced round and nodded a few yards down the road. “Will you pull over there for a moment so we can talk about this?”

  “I have nothing more to say.”

  “Understood. But I have, you see, and I’d very much like you to hear me out.” He stepped back from the car in what seemed like a gesture of goodwill, one that left the decision up to Lynley: Drive off or cooperate. Robson said, “A few words. That’s all,” and he gave a wry smile. “I wouldn’t mind getting out of this rain. If you’ll let me get in the car, I promise to be gone the moment I’ve said my bit and heard your response to it.”

  “And if I have no response?”

  “You’re not that sort. So may I…?”

  Lynley considered, then nodded sharply once. Havers said, “Sir,” in that uncharacteristically beseeching manner she used when she disapproved of a decision he’d taken. He said, “We may as well, Barbara. He’s here. He may have something we can use.”

  “Crikey, are you—” She bit off her words as the back door opened and Hamish Robson sank into the car.

  Lynley drove a short distance away, beyond the crowd. He pulled to the kerb, the engine still running and the wipers still moving rhythmically across the windscreen.

  Robson didn’t fail to take notice of this. He said, “I’ll be quick, then. “I’d expect this crime scene to be different to the others. Not in all ways but in some. Am I right?”

  “Why?” Lynley asked. “Were you anticipating as much?”

  “Is it different?” Robson persisted. “Because, you see, with profiling, we often see—”

  “With respect, Dr. Robson, your profiling has got us nowhere so far. Nowhere important, and not one step closer to the killer.”

  “Are you sure?” Before Lynley could answer, Robson leaned forward in his seat. He went on, his voice kind. “I can’t imagine having your job. It must be more draining than anyone can picture. But you must not blame yourself for this death, Superintendent. You’re doing your best. No one could ask more of you than that, so you mustn’t ask more than your best of yourself. That’s the road to madness.”

  “Professional opinion?” Lynley asked sardonically.

  Robson took the two words at their face value and ignored Lynley’s tone, saying, “Completely. So let me give you a fuller opinion. Let me see the crime scene. Let me give you some guidance that you’ll be able to use. Superintendent, in a psychopath the compulsion to kill only grows stronger. With each crime, it escalates; it does not subside. But each time, to achieve pleasure it takes more and more of whatever the killer’s been doing during the commission of the crime to fulfill himself. So understand me. There’s profound danger here. To young men, to boys, to little children, to…we don’t know for sure, so for God’s sake let me help you.”

  Lynley had been watching Robson through his rearview mirror, Havers from her seat where she’d turned to observe the psychologist as he spoke. The man looked as if he’d shaken himself with the passion of his words, and he turned from them to look out of the window when he’d finally finished speaking.

  Lynley said, “What’s your own background, Dr. Robson?”

  Robson was gazing to his left, in the direction of a yew hedge dripping small pools of water onto the pavement. He said, “Sorry. I can’t abide what’s done to children in the name of love. Or play. Or discipline. Or whatever.” Then he was silent. Only the soft whirr of the wipers brushing off the windscreen and the purr of the Bentley’s engine broke the quiet. He finally said, “For me it was my maternal uncle. Wrestling, he called it. But it wasn’t. That sort of thing rarely is between an adult and a male child when it’s the adult’s idea. But the child, of course, never understands.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lynley said. He too turned in his seat then and looked at the psychologist directly. “But perhaps that makes you less objective than—”

  “No. Believe me, it makes me someone who knows exactly what to look for,” Robson said. “So let me see the crime scene. I’ll tell you what I think and what I know. The decision to act is up to you.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “God damn it—”

  “The body’s been moved, Dr. Robson
,” Lynley cut in. “The only crime scene for you to look at is a fallen beech tree and a hollow beneath it.”

  Robson sank back into the seat. He gazed out at the street, where an ambulance had come along Wood Lane up to the barrier erected by the police. It drove without lights whirling or siren blaring. One of the constables went out into the street and halted traffic—already slowed to a curious crawl anyway—long enough for the ambulance to pass. It did so unhurriedly; there was no urgency to get its burden to hospital quickly. This gave the photojournalists time to record the moment for the newspapers. Perhaps it was the sight of them that prompted Robson to ask his next question.

  “Will you let me look at the photos, then?”

  Lynley considered this. The police photographer had completed his work by the time he and Havers had arrived on the scene, and a videographer had been recording the body, the site, and the ensuing activity round the body and the site when they’d descended the slope. The incident caravan was not that far from where they were sitting at this moment. Doubtless, in that caravan there would be a visual record of the crime scene already suitable for Robson’s viewing.

  It wouldn’t hurt at this point to let the profiler look at what they had: video footage, digital pictures, or whatever else the murder squad had so far produced. It would also act as a compromise between what Hillier wanted and what Lynley was determined not to give him.

  On the other hand, the psychologist wasn’t wanted here. No one at the scene had requested him and it was only down to Hillier’s interference and his desire for something to feed to the media that had brought Robson here in the first place. If Lynley gave in to Hillier now, the AC would probably bring in a psychic next. And after that, what? Someone to read tea leaves? Or the entrails of a lamb? It couldn’t be allowed to happen. Someone had to gain control over the lurching, runaway wagon of this entire situation, and this was the moment to do it.

  Lynley said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Robson.”

  Robson looked deflated. He said, “Your last word on the subject?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you certain that’s wise?”

  “I’m not certain of anything.”

  “That’s really the hell of it, isn’t it?”

  Robson got out of the car, then. He headed back towards the barricade. He passed DI Widdison on his route, but he made no attempt to speak to him. For his part, Widdison saw Lynley’s car and raised a hand as if to stop him from leaving the scene. Lynley lowered the window as the DI hurried over.

  “We’ve had a call from the Hornsey Road station,” Widdison said when he reached the car. “A boy’s gone missing, reported by his parents last night. He fits the general description of our victim.”

  “We’ll take it,” Lynley said as Havers emptied her shoulder bag on the floor to find her notebook and take down the address.

  IT WAS IN Upper Holloway, on a small housing estate just off Junction Road. There, round the corner from William Beckett Funeral Directors and Yildiz Supermarket, they found a serpentine stretch of tarmac splendidly called Bovingdon Close. It was a pedestrian precinct, so they left the Bentley on Hargrave Road where a bearded vagrant with a guitar in one hand and a wet sleeping bag dragging on the pavement behind him offered to keep an eye on the car for the price of a pint. Or a bottle of wine, if they felt so inclined and he did a good job of keeping the local riffraff away from “s’ch a fine motor as yairs is, master.” He wore a large green rubbish bag as a mackintosh in the rain, and he sounded like a character from a costume drama, someone who’d spent far too much of his youth tuned in to BBC1. “They’s ferrinners plenty round here,” he informed them. “You can’t leave nothin’ lying ’bout what they don’t put their mitts on it, sir.” He appeared to search vaguely in the direction of his head for something to tug respectfully as he concluded. When he spoke, the air became heavy with the scent of teeth in need of extraction.

  Lynley told the man he was welcome to keep his eyes glued to the car. The vagrant hunkered down on the nearest stairs to one of the terrace houses, and—rain or not—he began to pluck at the three strings remaining on his guitar. Sourly, he eyed a pack of young black kids wearing rucksacks on their backs, trotting along the pavement across the street.

  Lynley and Havers left the man to it and set off into Bovingdon Close. They accessed this by means of a tunnel-like opening in the cinnamon-coloured brick buildings that comprised the housing estate itself. They were looking for number 30, and they found it not far from the estate’s sole recreational area: a triangular green with dormant rosebushes languishing in each of the three corners and a small bench set against one side. Other than four saplings struggling for life in the green’s patch of lawn, there were no trees in Bovingdon Close, and the houses that didn’t face the tiny recreational area faced each other across a width of tarmac that didn’t measure more than fifteen feet. In the summer when the windows were open, everyone would doubtless be into everyone else’s business.

  Each of the houses had been given a sandwich-size plot of earth in front of its door that the more optimistic inhabitants were treating as their gardens. In front of number 30, the patch of earth in question was a rough triangle of dying grass, and a child’s bike lay on its side upon it, next to a green plastic garden chair. Near this a tattered shuttlecock looked as if a dog had been chewing on it. The accompanying racquets leaned against the wall by the front door, most of their strings broken.

  When Lynley rang the bell, a man in miniature opened the door. He was not even eye to eye with Havers, top heavy with the look of someone who weight trained to compensate for his lack of height. He was red eyed and unshaven, and he glanced from them to the tarmac beyond them as if expecting someone else.

  He said, “Cops,” like the answer to a question no one had asked.

  “That’s who we are.” Lynley introduced himself and Havers and waited for the man—they knew only that his name was Benton—to ask them in. Beyond him, Lynley could see the doorway to a darkened sitting room and the shapes of people seated inside. A child’s querulous voice asked why couldn’t they open the curtains, why couldn’t he play, and a woman shushed him.

  Benton said harshly over his shoulder in that direction, “You mind what I told you.” Then he gave his attention back to Lynley. “Where’s the uniform?”

  Lynley said they weren’t part of the uniformed patrol but rather they worked in a different department and were from New Scotland Yard. “May we come in?” he asked. “It’s your son that’s gone missing?”

  “Didn’t come home last night.” Benton’s lips were dry and flaky. He licked them.

  He stepped back from the door and led them into the sitting room, at the end of a corridor of no more than fifteen feet. In the semidarkness there, five people were arrayed on chairs, the sofa, a footstool, and the floor. Two young boys, two adolescent girls, and a woman. She was Bev Benton, she said. Her husband was Max. And these were four of their children. Sherry and Brenda the girls, Rory and Stevie the boys. Their Davey was the one gone missing.

  All of them, Lynley noted, were uncommonly small. To one degree or another, all of them also resembled the body in Queen’s Wood.

  The boys were meant to be at school, Bev told them; the girls were meant to be at work in the food stalls at Camden Lock Market. Max and Bev themselves were meant to be serving the public from their fish van in Chapel Street. But no one was going anywhere from this house till they had word about Davey.

  “Something’s happened to him,” Max Benton said. “They would’ve sent regular coppers otherwise. We’re none of us so thick ’s we don’t know that much. What is it, then?”

  “It might be best for us to speak without the children here,” Lynley said.

  Bev Benton keened two words, “Oh God.”

  Max barked at her, “We’ll have none of that,” and then said to Lynley, “They stay. If it’s an object lesson they’re about to have, then I by God want them having it.”

  “Mr. Benton—”
<
br />   “There’ll be no Mr. Benton about it,” Benton said. “Give us the brief.”

  Lynley wasn’t about to go at it that way. He said, “Have you a photograph of your son?”

  Bev Benton spoke. “Sherry, pet, fetch Davey’s school picture from the fridge for the officer.”

  One of the two girls—blonde like the body in the woods, and identically fair skinned, delicate featured, and small boned—left them quickly and just as quickly returned. She handed over the picture to Lynley, her eyes cast down to his shoes, and then returned to the footstool, which she shared with her sister. Lynley dropped his gaze to the picture. A cheeky-looking boy grinned up at him, his fair hair darkened by the gel that formed it into little spikes. He had a sprinkling of freckles across his nose and headphones slung round his neck, above his school-uniform pullover.

  “Slipped them on at the last minute, he did,” Bev Benton commented, as if in explanation of the headphones, which were hardly part of his regulation school attire. “Likes his music, Davey. Rap music. Mostly those blacks from America with the p’culiar names.”

  The boy in the photo resembled the body they had, but only an identification made by one of the parents could confirm this. Still, no matter what sort of lesson Max Benton wanted the rest of his children to have, Lynley had no intention of offering it to them. He said, “When was the last time you saw Davey?”

  “Yesterday morning.” Max was the one to answer. “He got off to school like always.”

  “Didn’t come home when he was due, though,” Bev Benton said. “He was meant to mind Rory and Stevie here.”

  “I went to tae kwon do to see was he there,” Max added. “Last time he bunked off doing something he was meant to do, that’s where he claimed he went instead.”

  “Claimed?” Barbara Havers asked. She’d remained in the doorway, and she was writing in her new spiral notebook.

  “He was meant to come to our fish stall in Chapel Market one day,” Bev explained. “To help his dad. When he didn’t come, he said he’d gone to tae kwon do and lost the time. There’s a bloke he’s had some trouble with—”