With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  “Which part?” Barbara asked. “Pinching them or returning them?”

  “Since you found them in his things, I expect we can say he dropped the ball on returning them.”

  “Yeah. I expect,” Barbara said. “Only I didn’t quite say I’d found them among his things, did I?”

  The magician turned his back and coiled the rope from the rope trick into a neat and snakelike mound. Barbara smiled inwardly when he did this. Gotcha, she thought. In her experience, every smooth customer had a rough edge somewhere.

  Mr. Magic gave his attention back to her. “The handcuffs may have come from me. You can see I sell them. But I’m hardly the only person in London with saucy items for purchase or for pinching.”

  “No. But I expect you’re the closest to Davey’s home, aren’t you?”

  “I’d hardly know. Has something happened to this boy?”

  “Something’s happened to him, yes,” Barbara said. “He’s pretty much dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Dead. But let’s not play echoes. When we went through his things and came up with these and his dad told us where they’d come from because Davey told him…You can see how I ended up wanting to know if they look familiar to you, Mr…. What’s your real name? I know it’s not Magic. We’ve met before, by the way.”

  He didn’t ask where. His name was Minshall, he said. It was Barry Minshall. And yes, all right, it seemed that the handcuffs had come from his stall if the boy had claimed as much to his dad. But the fact was that kids pinched things, didn’t they. Kids always pinched things. It was part of being kids. They pushed the envelope. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and since all the cops seemed to do round here was give them a talking to if they were caught misbehaving, what did they stand to lose by having a go, eh? Oh, he tried to keep an eye out for that sort of thing, but sometimes he missed a set of sticky fingers adhering to an article like glow-in-the-dark handcuffs. Sometimes, he said, a kid was just too bloody good, a regular Artful Dodger.

  Barbara listened to all this, nodding and doing her best to look thoughtful and open-minded. But she could hear the slow building of anxiety in Barry Minshall’s voice, and it acted on her the way the scent of fox acts on a pack of hounds. This bloke was lying through his teeth and out of his nostrils, she thought. He was the sort who saw himself cool as a lettuce leaf, which was just how she liked it since lettuce was always so easy to wilt.

  She said, “You’ve got a van somewhere. I saw you unloading it last time I was here. I’d like to have a look at it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s call it curiosity.”

  “I don’t think I’m obliged to show it to you. Not without a warrant, at least.”

  “Right you are. But if we go that route—which, of course, is your right—I’m going to wonder like hell if you’ve got something in that van that you don’t want me finding.”

  “I’ll be wanting to ring my solicitor about this.”

  “Ring away, Barry. Here. I’ve got a mobile you can use.” She thrust half of her arm into her capacious bag and dug round enthusiastically.

  Minshall said, “I have my own. Look. I can’t leave the stall. You’ll need to come back later.”

  “No need for you to leave the stall at all, mate,” Barbara said. “Hand over the keys to the van, and I’ll have a browse through it on my own.”

  He thought this one over behind his dark glasses and beneath the Dickensian stocking cap. Barbara could imagine the wheels turning furiously in his head as he tried to decide which route to take. Demanding both a solicitor and a search warrant was the sensible and the wise thing to do. But people were seldom either sensible or wise when they had something to hide and the cops turned up unexpectedly asking questions and wanting answers on the spot. That was when people made the foolish decision to bluff their way through a few difficult moments, mistakenly assuming that Inspector Plod had come calling and concluding they were more than a match for him. They thought that if they asked for their solicitor immediately—doing what those American police dramas always called “lawyering up”—they’d be marking themselves forever with a scarlet G for Guilty across their chests. Truth was, they’d be marking themselves with the scarlet I for Intelligent. But they seldom thought that way under pressure, which was what Barbara was depending upon now.

  Minshall reached his decision. He said, “This is a waste of your time. Worse, it’s a waste of mine. But if you believe it’s necessary for whatever reason…”

  Barbara smiled. “Trust me. I’m one of the lot who serve, protect, and do no ill.”

  “Fine. All right. But you’ll have to wait while I close up the stall, and then I’ll take you to the van. It’ll take a few minutes, I’m afraid. I hope you have the time.”

  “Mr. Minshall,” Barbara said, “you are one lucky sod. Because time is exactly what I have today.”

  WHEN LYNLEY arrived back at New Scotland Yard, he discovered that the media were already gathering, setting up shop in the little park that covered the corner where Victoria Street met Broadway. There, two distinct television crews—recognisable by the logos on their vans and on their equipment—were in the process of constructing what appeared to be a broadcasting point while nearby beneath the dripping trees in the park, several reporters milled about, distinguishable from the crew by their manner of dress.

  Lynley observed this with a hollow heart. It was, he knew, too much to hope for that the media were here for any reason other than the killing of a sixth adolescent boy. A sixth killing warranted their immediate attention. It also made them unlikely to go along with how the DPA wanted them to cover the situation.

  He negotiated the confusion in the street and pulled into the entrance that would take him down to the carpark. There, however, the officer in the kiosk didn’t employ his usual one finger acknowledgement and lift the barrier for him. Instead, he sauntered out to the Bentley and waited while Lynley lowered the window.

  He bent to the interior. “Message for you,” he said. “You’re to go straight to the assistant commissioner’s office. Do not pass go and all the trappings, if you know what I mean. AC made the call personally. Making sure there was no ifs, ands, and buts about it. I’m to phone to tell him you’ve arrived, ’s well. Question is, how much time d’you want? We can make it anything, only he doesn’t want you stopping to talk to your team on the way.”

  Lynley muttered, “Christ.” Then after a moment’s thought, “Wait ten minutes.”

  “Right you are.” The officer stepped back and admitted Lynley to the carpark. In the subdued light and the silence, Lynley used the ten minutes to close his eyes, remaining in the Bentley with his head pressed against the headrest.

  It was never easy, he thought. You believed it might become so eventually if you were exposed to enough of horror and its aftermath. But just at the point where you thought you had mastered insentience, something occurred to remind you that you were still fully human, no matter what you’d previously thought.

  That had been the case while standing alongside Max Benton as he’d identified the body of his oldest son. No Polaroid picture would do for him, no viewing from behind a glass partition, a safe distance from which there would always be certain aspects of the boy’s death that he would not have to know or at least not have to see firsthand. Instead he’d insisted upon seeing it all, refusing to say whether it was his missing boy until he’d been a witness to everything that marked the way Davey had gone to his death.

  Then what he’d said was, “He fought him, then. Like he was meant to. Like I taught him. He fought the bastard.”

  “This is your son, Mr. Benton?” Lynley asked, the formality not only an automatic question but also a way to avoid the onslaught of restrained emotion—that could never actually be adequately restrained—that he felt trying to burst from the other man.

  “Said from the first that the world can’t be trusted,” Benton replied. “Said from the first it’s a brutal place.
But he never wanted to listen like I tried to get him to listen, did he. And this is what happens. This. I want ’em here, the rest ’f ’em. I want ’em to see.” His voice broke then and he went on in anguish. “Bloke tries his best to teach his kids what’s what out there. Bloke lives to make them understand that they got to take a care, be on their guard, know what could happen…Tha’s what I told him, our Davey. And no coddling from Bev either ’cause they’re meant to be tough, the lot of them. You look like that and you got to be tough, you got to be aware, you got to know…You got to understand…Listen to me, you little sod. Why don’t you see it’s for your own bloody good…?” He wept then, collapsing against a wall and then hitting that wall with his fist, saying, “Damn you to hell,” with his voice catching as his sobbing trapped the words in his throat.

  There was no comfort, and Lynley honoured Max Benton’s grief by not offering him any. He just said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Benton,” before he guided the broken man away.

  Now, in the carpark, Lynley took the time he needed to recover, knowing he had been touched more deeply than ever before in the face of a parent’s loss of a child because he too would soon join the ranks of men with sons in whom their fathers sometimes unwisely invest their dreams. Benton was right, and Lynley knew it. A man’s duty was to protect his offspring. When he failed in that duty—failed spectacularly, as was the failure felt by any parent who lost a child to murder—his guilt was second only to his grief. Marriages broke down as a result; loving families were torn asunder. And everything once held dear and secure was shattered by the advent of an evil every parent feared might alight upon his child, but one that no one could anticipate.

  There was no recovering from such an event. There was no waking up some future morning, having successfully swum all night in the Lethe. That did not happen—ever—to the parents of a child whose life was taken by a killer.

  Six now, Lynley thought. Six children, six sets of parents, six families. Six and all the media counting.

  He went, as requested, up to AC Hillier’s office. By now Robson would have informed the assistant commissioner of Lynley’s refusal to allow him onto the crime scene, and Hillier would doubtless be in a state about that.

  The AC was in a meeting with the head of the Press Bureau. So Hillier’s secretary informed Lynley. However, the AC had left explicit orders that, on the off chance that Acting Superintendent Lynley put in an appearance whilst the meeting was ongoing, he should join them at once. “He’s bearing…” Judi MacIntosh hesitated. It seemed more for effect than out of the necessity to find the perfect words. “He’s bearing a certain degree of animosity towards you at the moment, Superintendent. Forewarned and so on?”

  Lynley acknowledged her with a polite nod. He often wondered how Hillier had managed to acquire a secretary so perfectly matched to his style of leadership.

  Stephenson Deacon had brought two young assistants with him to his meeting with Hillier, Lynley discovered when he joined them. One male and one female, they both looked like interns: fresh scrubbed, eager, and solicitous. Neither Hillier nor the acidulous Deacon—who’d come along from the Directorate of Public Affairs bearing a litre of soda water for some reason—offered any introductions.

  “You’ve seen the circus, I take it,” Hillier said to Lynley without preamble. “The established briefings aren’t giving satisfaction. We’re countering with something to head them off.”

  The male intern, Lynley noted, was religiously writing down Hillier’s every word. The female, on the other hand, was studying Lynley with a discomfiting intensity, giving the job the rapt attention of a predator.

  “I thought you were doing Crimewatch, sir,” Lynley said.

  “The Crimewatch decision was before all this. Obviously, it’s not going to suffice by itself.”

  “Then what?” Lynley hadn’t given the assistant commissioner the information about the CCTV footage, and he didn’t do so now. He wanted to wait till he heard from Havers about her interview at the Stables. “You’re not going to feed them misinformation, I hope.”

  Hillier didn’t look pleased with this remark, and Lynley realised it had been ill advised. “That’s not my habit, Superintendent,” the AC said. And then to the head of the Press Bureau, “Tell him, Mr. Deacon.”

  “Embedding.” Deacon uncapped his soda water and took a swig. “Buggers’ll have sod all to complain about then. Begging your pardon, Miss Clapp,” he added to the young woman, who looked nonplussed to be on the receiving end of this social nicety.

  Lynley thought he understood, but he didn’t want to. He said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Embedding,” Deacon repeated, his tone impatient. “Placing a journalist inside the inquiry. A firsthand witness to how the police investigate on crime of this scale. The sort of thing they sometimes do in wartime, if you know what I mean.”

  “Surely you’ve heard of this, Superintendent?” Hillier asked.

  Lynley had, of course. He merely couldn’t believe that the Press Bureau was considering adopting something so foolhardy. He said to Hillier, “We can’t do that, sir,” endeavouring to be as polite as possible, which was something of an effort. “It’s unheard of and—”

  “Certainly it’s never been done, Superintendent,” Stephenson Deacon said with a specious smile. “But that’s not to say that it can’t be done. We have in the past, after all, invited the media along on coordinated arrests. This merely takes it one step further. Placement of a diligently chosen reporter—from a broadsheet, mind you, we’ll draw the line at tabloid journalists—can turn the tide of public opinion. Not only towards this particular investigation but also towards the entire Met. I don’t have to point out to you how agitated the public are becoming over this case. The front page of today’s Daily Mail, for example—”

  “—will be used to line someone’s rubbish bin tomorrow,” Lynley said. He addressed his next remarks to Hillier, and he tried to sound as rational as Deacon. “Sir, this sort of thing could create unimaginable difficulties for us. How could the team—at a morning meeting, for example—speak freely when they know that any word they say might end up on the front page of the next edition of the Guardian? And how do we address the problem of the Contempt of Court Act if a journalist’s among us?”

  “That,” Hillier said quite evenly, although he was keeping his eyes on Lynley and had been doing so from the moment Lynley had entered the room, “is the journalist’s problem, not ours.”

  “Have you any idea how often we toss about names?” Although Lynley could feel himself losing the edge he had on his temper, he believed the issues involved were more important than his ability to express them with Holmesian dispassion. “Can you imagine what the reaction is going to be from an individual who finds himself named as ‘helping with police inquiries’ when that isn’t the case at all?”

  “That would be down to the broadsheet involved, Superintendent,” Deacon said smugly.

  “And in the meantime, if the individual named is actually the killer we’re looking for? If he then goes to ground?”

  “Surely you’re not suggesting that you wish him to keep on killing so that you might find him,” Deacon said.

  “What I’m suggesting is that this isn’t a bloody game. I’ve just been with the father of a thirteen-year-old boy whose body—”

  “We need words about that,” Hillier interrupted. He finally took his gaze off Lynley and directed it to Deacon. He said, “Come up with the list of names, Stephenson. I’d like CVs on them all. Sample articles as well. I’ll have a decision for you in—” He looked at his watch and then consulted the diary on his desk, “—I should think forty-eight hours will be sufficient.”

  “D’you want a word leaked to the proper ears?” This came from the male minion, who’d finally looked up from his note taking. The female continued to say nothing, and her inspection of Lynley did not shift.

  “Not at the moment,” Hillier said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “That’s tha
t, then,” Deacon said.

  Lynley watched as the three of them gathered up notebooks, manila folders, briefcases, and bags. They left the room in a line, with Deacon at the head. Lynley didn’t follow but rather used the time in an attempt to marshall tranquility.

  He finally said, “Malcolm Webberly was a miracle worker.”

  Hillier sat behind his desk and observed Lynley over steepled fingers. “Don’t let’s talk about my brother-in-law.”

  “I think we need to,” Lynley went on. “It’s only just come to me the lengths he must have gone to to keep you under wraps.”

  “Watch yourself.”

  “I don’t think it benefits either of us if I do.”

  “You can be replaced.”

  “Which you couldn’t do to Webberly? Because he’s your brother-in-law, and there was no way on earth that your wife would see you sacking her sister’s husband? Not when she knew her sister’s husband was the only thing standing between you and the end of your career?”

  “That’s quite enough.”

  “You’ve got everything the wrong way round in this investigation. You’ve probably always been like that, with only Webberly standing between you and the discovery of—”

  Hillier surged to his feet. “I said that’s enough!”

  “But now he’s not here and you’re exposed. And I’m left with the option of seeing you hang us all or just yourself. So which course do you expect me to take?”

  “I expect you to obey the orders you’re given. As they’re given and when they’re given.”

  “Not when they’re senseless.” Lynley tried to calm himself. He managed to say in a quieter tone, “Sir, I can’t let you interfere any longer. I’m going to have to demand that you either stop meddling in the investigation or I’ll have to…” And there Lynley stopped, halted in midstride by the satisfied expression that flitted briefly across Hillier’s face.