With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  “What? He’s got a room here…That’s why. Look, he won’t want to be woken up.”

  “We’ll do those honours for you, then,” Lynley said. “Where is it?”

  “Top floor,” she said. “Forty-one. It’s a single. He doesn’t have to pay. Mr. Tatlises takes it out of his wages. Half price as well.” She said all this as if the information might be enough to keep them from speaking to the night clerk. As Lynley and Barbara headed for the lift, the girl reached for the phone. There was little doubt she was phoning either for reinforcements or to warn room 41 that the cops were on their way up.

  The lift was a pre–World War I affair, a grilled cage that ascended at the dignified pace necessary for mystical assumptions into heaven. It was suitable for two individuals without luggage. But possession of luggage did not appear to be one of the qualifications for filling out a registration card in this hotel.

  The door to 41 was open when they finally got there. The occupant was waiting for them, pyjamas on body and foreign passport in hand. He looked to be round twenty years old. He said, “Hello. How do you do. I am Ibrahim Selçuk. Mr. Tatlises is my uncle. I speak English little. My papers are in order.”

  Like the words of the receptionist below, all of what he said was rote: lines you must recite if a cop asks you questions. The place was probably a hotbed of illegal immigrants, but that was something they were not concerned about at the moment as Lynley made clear to the man when he said, “We’re not involved in immigration. On the eighth, a young boy was brought to this hotel by an odd-looking man with yellow-white hair and dark glasses. An albino, we call him. No colour in his skin. The boy was young, blond—” Lynley showed Selçuk the picture of Davey Benton, which he took from his jacket pocket along with the mug shot taken of Minshall by the Holmes Street police. “He may have left in the company of another man who’d already booked a room here.”

  Barbara added, “And this song and dance—young boys being brought to this place by the albino man and leaving later with some other bloke?—it’s supposedly happened over and over, Ibrahim, so don’t let’s try to pretend you haven’t seen the action.” She thrust the two e-fits at the night receptionist then, saying, “He might look like this. The man the young boy left with. Yes? No? Can you confirm?”

  He said uneasily, “My English is little. I have passport here.” And he danced from one foot to another like someone needing to use the toilet. “People come. I give them card to sign and keys. They pay in cash, that is all.” He gripped the front of his pyjamas, in the area of his crotch. “Please,” he said, casting a look back over his shoulder.

  Barbara muttered, “Bloody hell.” And to Lynley, “‘I’m about to wet myself’ is probably not part of his English lessons.”

  Behind the man, his room was dark. In the light from the corridor, they could see that his bed was rumpled. He’d definitely been sleeping, but he’d also been prepared by someone at some point to keep his answers minimal at all times, admitting to nothing. Barbara was about to suggest to Lynley that forcing the bloke to hold his bladder for a good twenty minutes might go some distance towards loosening his tongue when a diminutive man in a dinner suit came trundling towards them from round the corner.

  This had to be Mr. Tatlises, Barbara thought. His look of determined good cheer was spurious enough to act as his identification. He said in a heavy Turkish accent, “My nephew, his English wants repair. I am Mr. Tatlises and I’m happy to help you. Ibrahim, I will handle this.” He shooed the boy into his room again and he closed the door himself. “Now,” he said expansively, “you need something, yes? But not a room. No no. I’ve been told that already.” He laughed and looked from Barbara to Lynley with a we-boys-know-where-we-want-to-plant-it expression that made Barbara want to invite the little worm to take a bite of her fist. Like someone would want to have a shag with you? she wanted to ask him. Puhh-leez.

  “We understand that this boy was brought here by a man called Barry Minshall.” Lynley showed Tatlises the relevant photos. “He left in the company of another man who, we believe, resembles this individual. Havers?” Barbara showed Tatlises the e-fits. “Your confirmation of this is what we require at this point.”

  “And after that?” Tatlises inquired. He’d given a scant glance to the photos and the drawings.

  “You’re not really in a position to wonder what happens after that,” Lynley told him.

  “Then I do not see how—”

  “Listen, Jack-o-mate,” Barbara broke in. “I expect your handmaiden of the boots downstairs put you in the picture that we’re not here from your local station: two rozzers looking round their new patch for a nice bit of dosh from the likes of you, if that’s how you keep this operation going. This’s just a bit bigger than that, so if you know something about what’s been going on in this rubbish tip, I suggest you unplug it and give us the facts, okay? We’ve got it from this individual”—she stabbed her finger onto Barry Minshall’s mug shot—“that one of his mates from a group called MABIL met a thirteen-year-old boy right in this hotel on the eighth. Minshall claims it’s a regular arrangement, since someone from here—and let me guess it’s you—belongs to MABIL as well. How’s this all sounding to you for a lark?”

  “MABIL?” Tatlises said, with some fluttering of eyelashes to approximate confusion. “This is someone…?”

  “I expect you know what MABIL is,” Lynley said. “I also expect that if we asked you to join an identity parade, Mr. Minshall would have no trouble picking you out as the fellow member of MABIL who works here. We can avoid all that, and you can confirm his story, identify the boy, and tell us whether the man he left with looks like either one of these two sketches, or we can prolong the entire affair and haul you over to Earl’s Court Road police station for a while.”

  “If he left with him,” Barbara added.

  “I know nothing,” Tatlises insisted. He rapped on the door of room 41. His nephew opened it so quickly that it was obvious he’d been standing directly behind it listening to every word. Tatlises began speaking to him rapidly in their language. His voice was loud. He pulled the boy over by his pyjama jacket, and he snatched the sketches and the pictures, forcing the young man to study them.

  It was a nice performance, Barbara thought. He actually meant them to believe that his nephew, and not himself, was the paedophile here. She glanced at Lynley, seeking permission. He nodded. She stepped up to business.

  “Listen to me, you little wanker,” she said to Tatlises, grabbing his arm. “If you think we’re going to jump on the wagon you’re driving, you’re even stupider than you look. Leave him bloody alone and tell him to answer our questions and you can answer them as well. Got it? Or do I need to help you with your understanding?” She released him, but not before she ended her question with a twist of his arm.

  Tatlises cursed her in his language, or so she assumed he was doing from the passion of his words and the expression on his nephew’s face. He said finally, “I will report you for this,” to both of them, to which Barbara answered, “I’m wetting my knickers in terror. Now translate this for your ‘nephew’ or whatever the hell he really is. This kid…Was he here?”

  Tatlises rubbed his arm where Barbara had manhandled it. She expected him to start shouting something meaningful, like “Unconscionable brutality!,” so assiduous were his ministrations to his limb. He finally said, “I do not work nights.”

  “Brilliant. He does, though. Tell him to answer.”

  Tatlises nodded at his “nephew.” The younger man looked at the picture and nodded in turn.

  “Fine. Now let’s get on to the rest, okay? Did you see him leave the hotel?”

  The nephew nodded. “He leaves with the other. I see this. Not the albin one, how you named him?”

  “Not with the albino man, the man with yellowish hair and white skin.”

  “The other, yes.”

  “And you saw this? Them? Together? The boy walking? Talking? Alive?”

  The last word set
them both off in a babble of their own language. Finally, the nephew began to keen. He cried, “I did not! I did not!,” and a damp spot appeared in the crotch of his pyjama bottoms. “He leaves with the other. I see this. I see this.”

  “What’s going on?” Lynley demanded of Tatlises. “Have you accused him—”

  “Worthless! Worthless!” Tatlises broke in, smacking his nephew round the head. “What evil are you using this hotel for? Did you not think you would be caught?”

  The boy sheltered his head and cried, “I did not!”

  Lynley pulled the men apart, and Barbara planted herself between them. She said, “Get this straight and tattoo it on your eyeballs, both of you. This bloke brought the boy to the hotel, and this bloke left with him. Point the finger at each other and everyone in between, but there’s not a rat in this place not going down for pimping, pandering, paedophilia, and anything else that we can make stick to you. So I suggest you might want ‘cooperative as the dickens’ to be what gets written in red across your paperwork.”

  She saw she’d got through. Tatlises backed off from his nephew. His nephew shrank back into his room. Both of them were reborn before their eyes. Tatlises might have had a dodgy arrangement with his MABIL friends about the use of the Canterbury Hotel, and he might have also collected a trunkful of lolly from allowing its rooms to be used for underage homosexual trysts, but it did seem he drew the line at murder.

  He said, “This boy…” and took up the picture of Davey Benton.

  “That’s right,” Barbara said.

  “We’re fairly certain he left here alive,” Lynley told the man. “But he might have been killed in one of your rooms.”

  “No, no!” Nephew’s English was improving miraculously. “Not with the albino. With the other man. I see this.” And he turned to his putative uncle and spoke at some length in their mutual tongue.

  Tatlises translated. The boy in the picture had come with the albino and they had gone up to room 39, which had been booked earlier and checked in to by another man. The boy left with that man some hours later. Two, perhaps. No more than that. No, he had not appeared ill, drunk, drugged, or anything else for that matter, although Ibrahim Selçuk had not studied the boy, to tell the truth. He’d had no reason to. It was not the first time a boy had come with the albino man and left with another man.

  The night clerk added that the identity of the boys changed and the identity of the men booking the room changed, but the man who coupled them was always the same: the albino from the picture that the police had with them.

  “That is all he knows,” Tatlises finished.

  Barbara showed the night clerk the sketches again. Was the man who booked the room either of these two blokes? she wanted to know.

  Selçuk studied them and chose the younger of the two. “Maybe,” he said. “It is something like.”

  They had the confirmation they needed: Minshall was apparently telling the truth insofar as the Canterbury Hotel went. So there was a slim hope that the hotel itself still had more it could reveal. Lynley asked to see room 39.

  “There will be nothing,” Tatlises said hastily. “It has been thoroughly cleaned. As is every room once it has been used.”

  Lynley was firm on this point, however, and they descended a floor, leaving Selçuk behind them to return to his sleep. Tatlises brought a master key from his pocket and admitted Lynley and Havers to the room in which Davey Benton had met his killer.

  It was a dismal enough chamber of seduction. A double bed was its centrepiece, covered with the sort of quilted floral counterpane that would hide a multitude of mankind’s transgressions, from liquids spilt to bodily fluids leaked. Against one wall, a blond wooden chest served double duty as a desk, with a kneehole into which a mismatched chair was thrust. On top of this, a plastic tray held the requisite tea-making equipment, with a grubby tin pot to use for the brew and a grubbier electric kettle for boiling the water. Dingy curtains covered the single transom window, and brown fitted carpet bore streaks and stains, stretching across the floor.

  “The Savoy must be in real agony over the competition,” Barbara remarked.

  Lynley said, “We’ll want SOCO over here. I want a thorough going-over.”

  Tatlises protested. “This room has been cleaned. You will find nothing. And nothing occurred in here that—”

  Lynley swung on him. “I don’t particularly care to have your opinion at this point,” he said. “And I suggest you don’t care to give it.” And to Barbara, “Phone SOCO. Stay in this room till they get here. Then get whatever registration card was signed for this”—he seemed to seek a word—“place and check the address on it. Put Earl’s Court Road into the picture about everything going on here, if they aren’t already. Talk to their chief super. No one less.”

  Barbara nodded. She felt a rush of pleasure, both at the sensation of progress being made and at the responsibility given her. It was almost like old times.

  She said, “Right, will do, sir,” and took out her mobile as he directed Tatlises from the room.

  LYNLEY STOOD outside the hotel. He tried to shake off the sensation that they were blindly swinging their fists at an enemy more adept at dodging than they were at forcing him into submission.

  He phoned Chelsea. St. James would have had time to read and to assess the next group of reports he’d sent over to Cheyne Row. Perhaps, Lynley thought, there would be something uplifting he had to share. But instead of his old friend answering, it was Deborah’s voice Lynley heard. No one at home. Leave a message at the tone, please.

  Lynley rang off without doing so. He phoned his friend’s mobile next and had luck there. St. James answered. He was just heading into a meeting with his banker, he said. Yes, he’d read the reports and there were two interesting details…. Could Lynley meethim in…what, about half an hour? He was up in Sloane Square.

  Arrangements made, Lynley set off. By car, he was five minutes from the square if traffic was moving. It was, and he wove down towards the river. He came at the King’s Road from Sloane Avenue and chugged up to the square in the wake of a number 11 bus. The pavements were crowded with shoppers at this time of day, as was the Oriel Brasserie, where he took timely possession of a table the size of a fifty-pence coin just as three women with approximately twenty-five shopping bags were leaving it.

  He ordered coffee and waited for St. James to conclude his business. His table was one in the Oriel’s front window, so he would be able to see his friend as he crossed the square and came down the neat, tree-lined walk that stretched past the Venus fountain to the war memorial. Right now, the centre of the square was empty save for pigeons that were scouting round for crumbs beneath the benches.

  Lynley took a call from Nkata while he waited. Jack Veness had provided a friend to corroborate whatever alibi he chose to come up with, and Neil Greenham had latched on to his solicitor. The DS had left word for both Kilfoyle and Strong to phone him, but they’d no doubt hear from their mates at Colossus that alibis were being asked for, which would give both of them plenty of time to cook some up before speaking again to the cops.

  Lynley told Nkata to carry on as best he could, and he picked up his coffee and downed it in three gulps. Scalding hot, it attacked his throat like a surgeon. Which was fine, he thought.

  At last he saw St. James coming across the square. Lynley turned and ordered a second coffee for himself and one for his friend. The drinks arrived as did St. James, who shed his overcoat by the door and worked his way over to Lynley.

  “Lord Asherton at rest,” St. James said with a smile as he pulled out a chair and carefully folded himself into it.

  Lynley grimaced. “You’ve seen the paper.”

  “It was hard to avoid.” St. James reached for the sugar and began his usual process of rendering his coffee undrinkable for any other human being. “Your photo is making quite a statement on the newsstands round the square.”

  “With follow-ups to come,” Lynley said, “if Corsico and his editor h
ave their way.”

  “What sort of follow-ups?” St. James went for the milk next, just a dollop, after which he began stirring his brew.

  “They’ve apparently heard from Nies. Up in Yorkshire.”

  St. James looked up. He’d been smiling, but now his face was grave. “You can’t want that.”

  “What I want is to keep them away from the rest of the squad. Particularly from Winston. They’ve set their sights on him next.”

  “With you willing to have your dirty linen aired for public consumption instead? Not a good idea, Tommy. Not fair on you and certainly not fair on Judith. Or Stephanie, if it comes to that.”

  His sister, his niece, Lynley thought. They shared in the story of the Yorkshire murder that had taken husband from one and father from the other. What rained on him as he tried to protect his team from exposure rained on his relations as well.

  “I don’t see any way round it. I’ll have to warn them it’s coming. I daresay they can cope. They’ve been through it before.”

  St. James was frowning down at his coffee. He shook his head. “Put them on to me, Tommy.”

  “You?”

  “It’ll work to keep them away from Yorkshire for a time and from Winston as well. I’m part of the team, if only tangentially. Play me up and set them on me.”

  “You can’t want that.”

  “I’m not enthusiastic about it. But you can’t want them delving into your sister’s marriage. In this way, they’d only be delving into—“

  “Driving drunk and crippling you.” Lynley pushed his coffee away. “Christ but I’ve cocked so many things up.”

  “Not this,” St. James said. “We were both drunk. Let’s not forget that. And anyway, I doubt your reporter from The Source will even touch upon the subject of my…physical situation, let’s call it. He’ll be too politically correct. Unseemly to mention it: Why d’you happen to be wearing that appliance on your leg, sir? It’s akin to asking someone when he stopped beating his wife. And anyway, if they do get on to it, I was out carousing with a friend and this is the result. An object lesson for today’s wild adolescents. End of story.”