With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  He said, “I was not offering a response to your words, as it turns out, Barbara. I was merely reacting to what you said. This was wrong of me, this reacting and not simply replying. I felt…No, I thought, She doesn’t understand, this woman, nor can she possibly understand. Without the facts, she judges, and I’ll set her straight. This was wrong of me, so I apologise as well.”

  “Understand what?” Barbara heard the water gushing freely in her shower and she knew she ought to turn it off. But she didn’t want to ask him to hold on while she did that because she feared he’d be gone altogether if she did.

  “What it was about Hadiyyah’s behaviour…” He paused, and she thought she could hear the sound of a match being lit. He would be smoking, putting off his answer in that way they’d been taught by society, culture, films, and the telly. He finally said, very quietly, “Barbara, it began…No. Angela began with lies. Where she was going and whom she was seeing. She ended with lies as well. A trip to Ontario, relatives there, an aunt—her godmother, in fact—who was ill and to whom she owed much…And you will have guessed—have you not?—that none of that is the case at all, that there is someone else, as I was someone else for Angela once…. So for Hadiyyah to lie to me as she did…”

  “I understand.” Barbara found that she wanted only to stop the pain that she could hear in his voice. She didn’t need to know what Hadiyyah’s mother had done and with whom she’d done it. “You loved Angela, and she lied to you. You don’t want Hadiyyah to learn to lie as well.”

  “For the woman you love more than your life,” he said, “the woman you have given up everything for, who has borne your child…the third of your children with the other two lost to you forever…”

  “Azhar,” Barbara said, “Azhar, Azhar. I’m sorry. I didn’t think…You’re right. How could I possibly know what it’s like? Damn. I wish…” What? she asked herself. That he was there, she answered, there in the room so that she could hold him, so that something could be transferred from her to him. Comfort, but more than comfort, she thought. She’d never felt lonelier in her life.

  He said, “No journey is easy. This is what I’ve learned.”

  “That doesn’t help the pain, I expect.”

  “How true. Ah, Hadiyyah is stirring. Would you like to—”

  “No. Just give her my love. And Azhar, next time you have to go to a conference or something, think of me, all right? Like I said, I’m happy to look after her while you’re away.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I think of you often.” And he gently rang off.

  At her end, Barbara held on to the receiver. She kept it pressed to her ear, as if this would maintain the brief contact she’d had with her neighbour. Finally she said to no one, “’Bye, then,” and replaced the phone. But she rested her fingers on it, and she could feel her pulse beating in the tips of them.

  She felt lighter, warmer. When she finally made her way to the shower, she hummed not “Raining in My Heart” but rather “Everyday,” which seemed more appropriate to her altered mood.

  Afterwards, the drive to New Scotland Yard didn’t bother her. She passed the journey pleasantly, without a single cigarette to buoy her. But all this good cheer faded once she arrived in the incident room.

  The place was abuzz. Small knots of people gathered round three different desks, and all of them were focussed on a tabloid opened upon each. Barbara approached a group that Winston Nkata was part of, standing to the rear with his arms crossed on his chest, as was his fashion, but none the less riveted.

  She said to him, “What’s up?”

  Nkata inclined his head towards the desk. “Paper’s done their piece on the guv.”

  “Already?” she asked. “Holy hell. That was fast.” She looked round. She noted the grim expressions. She said, “He wanted to keep that bloke Corsico occupied. Didn’t that work, or something?”

  “He was occupied, all right,” Nkata said. “Tracked down his house and ran a picture of it. He doesn’t say what street, but he says Belgravia.”

  Barbara’s eyes widened. “The sod. That’s bad.”

  She worked her way forward as other of her colleagues moved off, having had their look at the paper. She flipped it to the front page to see the headline: “His Lordship the Cop” and an accompanying photo of Lynley and Helen, arms round each others’ waists and champagne glasses in their hands. Havers recognised the picture. It had been taken at an anniversary party the previous November. Webberly and his wife, celebrating their twenty-fifth, just days before a killer had attempted to make him another of his victims.

  She skimmed the accompanying article as Nkata joined her. She saw that Dorothea Harriman had done her part, as Lynley had described it to her, encouraging Corsico to pursue information left, right, and centre. But what they had all failed to anticipate was the speed with which the reporter would be able to put together his facts, mould them into the usual breathless prose of the typical tabloid story, and combine them with information that was more than the public had a right to know.

  Like the approximate location of the Lynleys’ house, Barbara thought. There was going to be hell to pay for that.

  She found the photograph of the Eaton Terrace house when she made the jump to page four for the continuation of the story. She found there, in addition to that picture, another photo, of the Lynley family pile in Cornwall, along with one of the superintendent as an adolescent in his Eton togs as well as one with him posing with his fellow oarsmen at Oxford.

  “Flipping, flaming hell,” she muttered. “How in God’s name did he get this stuff?”

  Nkata’s response was, “Makes you wonder what he’s going to unearth when he gets to the rest of us.”

  She looked up at him. If he could have looked green, he would have looked green. Winston Nkata would not want his background offered up for public consumption. She said, “The guv will keep him away from you, Winnie.”

  “Not the guv I’m worried about, Barb.”

  Hillier. That would be Winnie’s concern. Because if Lynley made excellent fodder for the papers, what would the tabloids do when they got their teeth into the “Former Gang Member Makes Good” variety of tale? What Nkata’s life was worth in Brixton was a moot issue at the best of times. What it would be worth should the story of his “redemption” hit the papers was a frightening one.

  A sudden silence hit the room, and Barbara looked up to see that Lynley had joined them. He looked grim, and she wondered if he was castigating himself for having made himself the sacrificial lamb that The Source had offered on the altar of its circulation figures.

  What he said was, “At least they haven’t got on to Yorkshire yet,” and a nervous murmur greeted this remark. It was the single but indelible blight on his career and his reputation: his brother-in-law’s murder and the part he’d played in the ensuing inquiry.

  “They will, Tommy,” John Stewart said.

  “Not if we give them a bigger story.” Lynley went to the china board. He looked at the photographs assembled on it and the list of activities assigned to the team members. He said, as he usually did, “What do we have?”

  The first report came from the officers who had been gathering information from the commuters who parked on Wood Lane and then walked the path down the hill, through Queen’s Wood, and up to the Highgate underground station on Archway Road. None of these people on their way to work had seen anything unusual on the morning of the day that Davey Benton’s body had been found. Several of them mentioned a man, a woman, and two men together—all of them walking dogs in the woods—but that was the extent of what they had to offer, and it did not include any descriptions, of either man or beast.

  From the houses along Wood Lane leading up to the park, similarly nothing had been gleaned. It was a quiet area in the dead of night, and nothing had apparently altered that silence on the night of Davey’s murder. This information was disheartening to everyone on the team, but better news came from the officer who’d taken the assignment to in
terview everyone in Walden Lodge, the small block of flats on the edge of Queen’s Wood.

  It was nothing to celebrate, the officer told everyone, but a bloke called Berkeley Pears—“There’s a name for you,” one of the other constables muttered—had a Jack Russell terrier that had started barking at three forty-five in the morning. “This was inside his flat, not outside,” the constable added. “Pears thought someone might be on the balcony, so he took up a carving knife and went to see. He’s sure he saw a flash of light down the hillside. On and off and on again, but shielded, like. He thought it was taggers or someone making their way to or from Archway Road. He got the dog quiet, and that was the end of it.”

  “Three forty-five explains why none of the commuters saw anything,” John Stewart said to Lynley.

  “Yes. Well. We’ve known from the first that he operates in the small hours,” Lynley said. “Anything else from Walden Lodge, Kevin?”

  “A woman called Janet Castle says she thinks she heard a cry or a shriek round midnight. Operative word thinks. She watches a lot of telly, crime dramas and the like. I think she’s a frustrated DCI Tennison, without the sex appeal.”

  “Just one cry?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Man, woman, child?”

  “She couldn’t tell.”

  “The two men in the woods…those who were walking the dog in the morning…they’re a possibility,” Lynley said. He didn’t elucidate but rather told the reporting constable to go back for further information from the commuter who’d sighted them. “What else?” he asked the others.

  “That old bloke the tagger saw in the allotments?” came the reply from another of the Queen’s Wood constables. “Turned out to be seventy-two years old and no way the killer. He can barely walk. Talks, though. I couldn’t shut him up.”

  “What did he see? Anything?”

  “The tagger. That’s all he wanted to talk about as well. Seems he’s phoned the cops over and over again about the little bugger but, according to him, they never do a damn thing because they have better things to occupy their time than catching vandals who happen to be defacing public property that’s enjoyed by all.”

  Lynley turned to the Walden Lodge constable curiously. “Anyone inside talk about that tagger, Kevin?”

  Kevin shook his head. He glanced at his notes, however, and said, “I only talked to residents of eight of the flats, though. As to the other two, one is newly empty and for sale and the other belongs to a lady taking her annual holiday in Spain.”

  Lynley considered this and saw the possibility. “Get on to the estate agents in the area. See who’s been shown that empty flat.”

  He shared with the team a further report from SO7 that had been waiting for him on his desk when he’d arrived that morning. The hair on Davey Benton’s body belonged to a cat, he told them. Additionally, there was no match between the tyres of Barry Minshall’s van and the tracks left in St. George’s Gardens. But there was a van out there that they were still seeking, and it looked as if it may have been purchased precisely for the use to which it was being put: a mobile killing site.

  “At the time of Kimmo Thorne’s death, it appears that the van was still registered to the previous owner, Muwaffaq Masoud. Someone out there has possession of that vehicle, and we’ve got to find it.”

  “You want the details released now, Tommy?” It was John Stewart who asked the question. “If we put that van in the public eye…” He made a gesture that said, You can figure out the rest.

  Lynley thought it over. The reality was that van was going to contain a treasure trove of evidence. Find it and they had their killer. But the trouble was that the situation remained unchanged: Publicising the van’s exact description, its number plates, and the writing on its side also allowed the killer to see their hand. He would either hide the vehicle in any one of the thousands of lockups round the city or he would clean and abandon it. They had to pursue the middle course in this matter.

  He said, “Get the details out to every station in town.”

  He made additional assignments, then, and Barbara received hers with as much good grace as she could muster, considering that the first half of the assignment required her to compile her report on John Miller, the bath-salts vendor at the Stables Market. The second half got her out in the street where she preferred to be, however. Canterbury Hotel in Lexham Gardens. Find the night clerk and talk to him about who paid for a room for a single night on the evening that Davey Benton died.

  Lynley was going on to the other assignments—everything from obtaining Minshall’s mobile phone records to tracing the attendees at the last meeting of MABIL in St. Lucy’s Church, by fingerprints if necessary—when Dorothea Harriman ushered Mitchell Corsico into the incident room.

  She looked apologetic about it. Her expression clearly said, Orders from above.

  Lynley said, “Ah. Mr. Corsico. Come with me please,” and he left the squad to get back to work.

  Barbara heard the steel in his voice. She knew that Corsico was about to get an earful.

  LYNLEY HAD A copy of The Source. It had been supplied him by the guard in the kiosk when he’d arrived a short while earlier. He’d looked it over and had seen the error of his ways: How much hubris had he actually demonstrated, he wondered, in assuming he could outsmart a tabloid? The tabloids’ bread and butter was produced through the means of digging up useless information, so he’d expected the lordship business, the Cornwall business, and the Oxford and Eton business as well. But he hadn’t expected to see a photograph of his London home gracing the paper, and he was determined that the reporter would put no other officers in jeopardy by giving them the same treatment.

  “Ground rules,” he said to Corsico when he and the reporter were alone.

  “You didn’t like the profile?” the young man asked, hitching up his jeans. “There wasn’t even the ghost of a suggestion about the incident room or what you’ve got on the killer. Or haven’t got,” he added with a sympathetic smile that Lynley wanted to smear across his face.

  “These people have wives, husbands, and families,” Lynley said. “Back off from them.”

  “Not to worry,” Corsico said helpfully. “You’re by far the most interesting of the lot. How many cops can boast an address a stone’s throw from Eaton Square? I had a phone call this A.M. from a DS up in Yorkshire, by the way. Can’t give you his name, but he said he had some information we might want to print as a follow-up to today’s piece. Care to comment?”

  That would be DS Nies, Lynley thought, of the Richmond police. He would no doubt have loved to bend the reporter’s ear about time spent rubbing elbows with the Earl of Asherton in the nick. And the rest of Lynley’s squalid past would come oozing out of the woodwork as well: drink driving, a car wreck, a crippled friend, all of it.

  He said, “Listen to me, Mr. Corsico,” and the phone rang on his desk at that moment. He snatched it up, said, “Lynley. What?”

  He heard in reply: “I don’t look at all like that sketch, you know.” It was a man’s voice, perfectly friendly. Some sort of tea-dancing music played in the background. “The one on telly. And what is it that you prefer to be called: superintendent or m’lord?”

  Lynley hesitated, a deadly calm come over him. He was all too aware of Mitchell Corsico’s presence in the room. He said to his caller, “Would you wait a moment please,” and was about to tell Corsico to give him a few minutes’ privacy when the voice continued.

  “I’ll ring off if you try that, Superintendent Lynley. There. I suppose I’ve made my decision about what to call you, haven’t I.”

  “Try what?” Lynley asked. He looked towards his office door and the corridor, fixed upon flagging someone down. Failing that, he reached for a yellow pad on his desk to write the necessary note.

  “Please. I’m not a fool. You won’t be able to trace this call because I won’t be on long enough for you to do it. Just listen.”

  Lynley waved Corsico over to his desk. Co
rsico feigned misunderstanding, pointing at his own chest and frowning. Lynley wanted to strangle the man. He waved him over again, “Fetch DC Havers” on the paper he finally shoved at him. “Now,” he said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “You’ll get the computer records of this call anyway, won’t you?” the voice asked him pleasantly. “That’s how you work. But by the time you do it, I will have already impressed you once again. Indeed, I’ll have absolutely dazzled you. You’ve a beautiful wife, incidentally.”

  Although Corsico had already gone for Havers, Lynley said to his caller, “I’ve a reporter in my office. I’d like to usher him out. Will you hang on while I do that?”

  “Come now, Superintendent Lynley, you can’t expect me to fall for that.”

  “Shall I put him on the line to convince you? He’s called Mitchell Corsico and—”

  “And unfortunately I can’t get a glimpse of his identification, although I’m sure you’d like to arrange that. No. There’s no need. I intend to be brief. First, I’ve signed a letter to you. The mark of Fu. The reason for this doesn’t matter, but does the information itself suffice to convince you who I am? Or shall I add a reference to navels as well?”

  Lynley said, “I’m convinced.” Those details were among the few which the papers had no knowledge of. They identified the caller as the real thing or as someone close to the investigation, in which case Lynley knew the voice would have been familiar to him, which it was not. He had to get a trace on this call. But a single wrong move on his part and he knew that the killer would break the connection before Havers got to the room.