With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley didn’t reply to this. He heard Robson say to someone else, voice away from the phone, “Tell her a moment, please.” His next client had arrived, no doubt. They had little enough time to conclude their conversation.

  Lynley said, “Fred and Rosemary West. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. How common was that? Could the police have anticipated it?”

  “Male and female killers? Or two killers working as a team?”

  “Two killers,” Lynley said.

  “Well of course, the problem was the disappearance factor in both of those examples, wasn’t it? The lack of bodies and crime scenes to gather information from. When people simply disappear—bodies buried in basements for decades, hidden on the moors, what you will—there’s nothing to interpret. In the case of Brady and Hindley, profiling didn’t exist then, anyway. As for the Wests—and this would be the case for all serial-killing couples—there’s one dominant partner and one submissive partner. One kills, one watches. One starts the process, one finishes it off. But may I ask…Is this where you’re heading with the investigation?”

  “Male and female? Two males?”

  “Either, I suppose.”

  “You tell me, Dr. Robson,” Lynley said. “Could we have two killers?”

  “My professional opinion?”

  “That’s all you’ve got.”

  “Then, no. I don’t think so. I stand by what I’ve already given you.”

  “Why?” Lynley asked. “Why stand by what you gave us originally? I’ve just given you two details you didn’t have earlier. Why don’t they change things?”

  “Superintendent, I can hear your anxiety. I know how desperate—”

  “You don’t,” Lynley said. “You can’t. You don’t.”

  “All right. Accepted. Let’s meet at half past five. Whitecross and Dufferin. The fruit and veg man. He’s the first stall you come to. I’ll wait there.”

  “Whitecross and Dufferin,” Lynley said. He rang off and carefully replaced the receiver.

  He found that he was sweating lightly. His palm left a mark on the telephone. He took out his handkerchief and mopped his face. Anxiety, yes. Robson was right about that.

  “Acting Superintendent Lynley?”

  He didn’t need to look up to know it was Dorothea Harriman, always appropriate with her appellations. He said, “Yes, Dee?”

  She said nothing more. He did look up then. She had an expression asking for forgiveness in advance. He frowned. “What is it?”

  “Assistant Commissioner Hillier. He’s on his way down to see you. He rang me up personally and told me to keep you in your office. I said I would, but I’m happy to pretend you were already gone when I got here to tell you.”

  Lynley sighed. “Don’t risk your own position. I’ll see him.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. God knows I need something to lighten up my day.”

  THE MIRACLE, Barbara Havers found, was that Wendy was not in the clouds this time round. In fact, when Barbara arrived at the woman’s eponymous stall in Camden Lock Market, she was willing to wager that the aging hippie had actually taken the cure. Standing within the confines of her tiny establishment, Wendy still looked like hell on a tricycle—there was something about long grey locks, ashen skin, and multicoloured caftans fashioned from counterpanes of the subcontinent that simply did not appeal—but at least her eyes were clear. The fact that she didn’t remember Barbara’s earlier visit was something of a worry, but she seemed willing to believe her sister when Petula told her from behind the counter of her own establishment, “You were out of it, luv,” at the time of their previous introduction to each other.

  Wendy said, “Whoops,” and gave a shrug of her fleshy shoulders. Then to Barbara, “Sorry, dear. It must’ve been one of those days.”

  Petula confided to Barbara with no small degree of pride that Wendy was “twelve-stepping it, again.” She’d tried it before and it “hadn’t taken,” but the family had hopes it would this time round. “Met a bloke who gave her the ultimatum,” Petula added under her breath. “And Wendy’ll do anything for a length, you see. Always would. Has the sex drive of a she-goat, that girl.”

  Whatever it took, Barbara thought. She said, “Ambergris oil,” to Wendy. “Have you sold any? This would be recently. Last few days, maybe?”

  Wendy shook her grey locks. “Massage oil by the litre,” she said. “I’ve six spas who’re my most regular customers. They go in big for relaxants like eucalyptus. But no one’s doing ambergris. Which’s just as well, if you want to know my opinion. What we do to animals, someone out there will do to us eventually. Like aliens from another planet or something. They might like our fat just fine—the way we like whale blubber—and God only knows what they’ll use it for. But just you wait. It’s going to happen.”

  “Wendy, luv,” Petula said, with one of those save-it-for-later chimes to her voice. She’d taken out a cloth and was using it to dust candles and the shelves they stood on. “It’s okay, dear.”

  “I don’t even know when I last had ambergris oil in stock,” Wendy said to Barbara. “If someone asks for it, I tell them what I think.”

  “And has anyone asked for it?” Barbara brought out the e-fits of their possible suspects. She was finding this part of the routine rather tedious, but who really knew when she was going to strike that vein of gold? “One of these blokes, p’rhaps?”

  Wendy looked at the drawings. She frowned and then dug a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from deep within her copious cleavage. One of the lenses was cracked, so she used the other like a monocle. No, she told Barbara, neither of these blokes looked like anyone who’d come to the Cloud.

  Barbara knew how unreliable her information would be—her drug use considered—so she showed the e-fits to Petula as well.

  Petula made a study of both of them. Truth was, there were so many people coming into the market, especially at the weekends. She didn’t like to say one of these blokes had been in, but at the same time, she didn’t like to say neither of them had been in either. They looked a bit like beatnik poets, didn’t they? Or clarinet players in a jazz band. One half-expected to see their sort in Soho, didn’t one? Course one didn’t—not that much any longer—but there was a time—

  Barbara created a diversion on Memory Lane with a question about Barry Minshall. “Albino magician” certainly got Petula’s attention—Wendy’s as well—and there was a moment when Barbara thought that the mention of Minshall’s name and a description of him was going to bear fruit. But no, an albino magician dressed in black and wearing dark glasses and a red stocking cap would be fairly memorable, even in Camden Lock Market. Minshall, they both said, was someone they definitely would have remembered.

  Barbara realised that the tree of Wendy’s Cloud was not going to produce, no matter how she attempted its pollination. She returned the e-fits to her shoulder bag and left the two sisters to close up for the day, pausing on the pavement outside to light up a fag and consider her next move.

  Late afternoon, and she could have gone home, but she had another route to explore. She hated the fact that all she kept turning down was one dead end after another, so she made her decision and went for her car. It was no great distance from Camden Lock to Wood Lane. And she could always go from there to the Holmes Street police station to see what more she could rattle out of Barry Minshall if things came to that.

  She made her way north to Highgate Hill, doing a bit of rat-running in order to avoid the rush hour. It took her less time than she’d anticipated, and from there it was easy enough to negotiate the route to Archway Road.

  She made one stop prior to taking herself to Wood Lane. A call to the incident room gleaned her the name of the estate agent who was selling the vacant flat in Walden Lodge that she’d heard about from one of the murder squad’s meetings. In the no-stone-left-unturned category, she knew that he was probably a pebble with nothing beneath it, but she went there anyway and had a word with the bloke, waving her e-fits in his
direction for good measure. Sod bloody all on a toasted tea cake was what she got for the effort. She felt like a Girl Guide selling biscuits in front of a Weight Watchers’ meeting. There wasn’t a taker anywhere.

  She went on to Wood Lane. There, she found the street crowded with cars parked its entire length. These would be the vehicles of commuters who drove in to town from the northern counties and parked to take the underground for the rest of the journey. Among them, the police were still searching for someone who had seen something in the early morning hours of the day that Davey Benton’s body had been found. Beneath the windscreen wiper of each car, a handout was tucked, and Barbara assumed it was this that asked for additional information from the daily commuters. For what it was worth. Perhaps a lot. Perhaps nothing at all.

  At Walden Lodge, a descending drive led in the direction of an underground carpark. Barbara pulled her Mini into this drive. She was blocking access, but that couldn’t be helped.

  When she climbed the front steps of the squat brick structure—so out of place in a street of otherwise historical buildings—she found that the front door was propped open. A yellow bucket of water held it so, and “The Moppits” was printed in red upon this. So much for security, Barbara thought. She entered the building and called out a hello.

  A young man popped his head round the first corner. He had a mop in hand, and he wore a tool belt from which cleaning implements dangled officially. One of the Moppits, Barbara concluded, as above her in the building someone began hoovering.

  “Help you?” the young man inquired, hitching up his tool belt. “Not s’posed to let anyone in.”

  Barbara showed him her identification. She was working on the Queen’s Wood murder, she told him.

  He told her hastily that he knew nothing about that. He and his wife were merely a mobile cleaning service. They didn’t live here. They came in once a week to do the sweeping, mopping, hoovering, and dusting of the common areas. And the windows as well, but only four times a year and today wasn’t one of those days.

  It was too much information, but Barbara put that down to nerves: A cop pops up on someone’s horizon and suddenly everything can be open to interpretation. Best explain your life down to the minutest detail.

  She had the flat number of the gent who’d seen the light flashing in the woods in the early morning hours when Davey’s body had been found. She had his name as well: Berkeley Pears, which sounded like a brand of tinned fruit to her. She told the Moppit where she was heading and went for the stairs to seek him out.

  When she knocked on his door, a dog began yapping behind it. It was the kind of yapping she associated with a terrier in need of discipline, and she wasn’t disabused of this notion when four different locks were released and the opening door allowed a Jack Russell to charge forward, intent upon her ankles. She pulled back and raised her bag to club the animal off, but Mr. Pears appeared in the terrier’s wake. He blew on something that made no noise, but the dog apparently heard it. He—or was it she?—dropped to the floor at once, panting happily, as if a job had been well done.

  “Excellent, Pearl,” Pears told the loathsome beast. “Good dog. Treaties?” Pearl wagged her tail.

  “She’s supposed to do that?” Barbara said.

  “It’s the startle factor,” the dog’s owner replied.

  “I could’ve clubbed her. She could’ve been hurt.”

  “She’s fast. She’d’ve had you before you had her.” He widened the door and said, “Bowl, Pearl. Now.” The dog dashed inside, presumably to wait by her dish for a reward. “C’n I help you?” Berkeley Pears then asked Barbara. “How did you get into the building? I thought you were management. We’re set to fight a legal battle over this, and she’s trying to intimidate us out of it.”

  “Police.” Barbara showed him her ID. “DC Barbara Havers. Could I have a word?”

  “This’s about the boy in the woods? I’ve already told them what little I know.”

  “Yeah. Got it. But another set of ears…? You never know what’s going to turn up.”

  “Very well,” he said. “Come in if you must. Pearlie?”—this in the direction of the kitchen—“Come, darling.”

  The dog trotted out, bright eyed and friendly, as if she hadn’t been a nasty little killing machine only moments before. She jumped into her master’s arms and stuck her nose in the breast pocket of his tattersall shirt. He chuckled and dug in another pocket for her treat, which she swallowed without chewing.

  Berkeley Pears was a type, there was no doubt of it, Barbara thought. He probably wore patent-leather shoes and an overcoat with a velvet collar when he left his digs. You saw his kind occasionally on the tube. They carried furled umbrellas, which they used as walking sticks, they read the Financial Times as if it meant something to them, and they never looked up till they reached their destination.

  He showed her into his sitting room: three-piece suite in position, coffee table arranged with copies of Country Life and a Treasures of the Uffizi art book, modern lamps with metal shades at precise angles suitable for reading. Nothing was out of place in here, and Barbara assumed nothing dared to be…although three noticeable yellowish stains on the carpet gave testimony to at least one of Pearl’s less than salubrious canine activities.

  Pears said, “I wouldn’t’ve seen a thing, you understand, if it hadn’t been for Pearl. And you’d think I’d get a thank-you for that, but all I’ve heard is, ‘The dog must go.’ As if cats are less of a bother”—he said cats the way others said cockroaches—“when all the time that creature in number five howls morning and night like it’s being skewered. Siamese. Well. What else would you expect? She leaves the little beast for weeks, while I’ve never left Pearl for so much as an hour. Not an hour, mind you, but does that count? No. One night when she barks and I can’t quieten her quick enough and that is it. Someone complains—as if they don’t all have contraband animals, the lot of them—and I get a visit from management. No animals allowed. The dog must go. Well, we intend to fight them to the very death, I tell you. Pearl goes, I go.”

  That, Barbara thought, might have been the master plan. She wedged her way into the conversation. “What did you see that night, Mr. Pears? What happened?”

  Pears took the sofa, where he cradled the terrier like a baby and scratched her chest. He indicated the chair for Barbara. He said, “I assumed it was a break-in at first. Pearl began…One can only describe it as hysterical. She was simply hysterical. She woke me from a perfectly sound sleep and frightened me to bits. She was flinging herself—believe me, there is no other word for it—at the balcony doors and barking like nothing I’ve ever heard from her before or since. So you can see why…”

  “What did you do?”

  He looked marginally embarrassed. “I rather…well, I armed myself. With a carving knife, which was all I had. I went to the doors and tried to see out, but there was nothing. I opened them, and that’s what caused the trouble because Pearl went outside on the balcony and continued barking like a she-devil and I couldn’t get a grip on her and keep hold of the knife, so it all took a bit of time.”

  “And in the woods?”

  “There was a light. A few flashes. It’s all I saw. Here. Let me show you.”

  The balcony opened off the sitting room, its large sliding window covered by a set of blinds. Pears raised these and opened the door. Pearl scrambled from his arms onto the balcony and commenced barking, much as described. She yapped at an ear-piercing volume. Barbara could understand why the other residents had complained. A cat was nothing in comparison with this.

  Pears grabbed the Jack Russell and held her snout. She managed to bark anyway. He said, “The light was over there, through those trees and down the hill. It has to have been when the body…well, you know. And Pearl knew it. She could sense it. That’s the only explanation. Pearl. Darling. That is enough.”

  Pears stepped back inside the flat with the dog and waited for Barbara to do likewise. For her part, though, Barbara rema
ined on the balcony. The woods began to dip down the hillside directly behind Walden Lodge, she saw, but that would be something one would not know from looking at the lodge from the street. The trees grew in abundance here, offering what would be a thick screen in summer but what was now a crosshatching of branches bare in midwinter. Directly below them and right up to the brick wall that defined the edge of the lodge’s property, shrubbery grew unrestrained, making access from Walden Lodge into the woods a virtual impossibility. A killer would have had to thrash through everything from holly to bracken in order to get from here to the spot where the body had been dumped, and no killer worth his salt—let alone a bloke who’d so far managed to eliminate six youths and leave virtually no evidence behind when he dumped their bodies—would have attempted that. He would have deposited a treasure trove of useful clues in his wake. And he hadn’t done so.

  Barbara stood there thoughtfully, surveying the scene. She considered everything that Berkeley Pears had told her. Nothing he’d reported was out of place, but there was one detail that she didn’t quite understand.

  She reentered the flat, pulling the balcony door closed behind her. She said to Pears, “There was a cry of some sort heard sometime after midnight from one of the flats. We’ve had that information from the interviews we’ve done with all the residents in this building. You’ve not mentioned it.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t hear it.”

  “What about Pearl?”

  “What about her?”

  “If she heard the disturbance in the woods at this distance—”

  “I suggest she sensed it rather than heard it,” Pears corrected.

  “All right. We’ll say she sensed it. But then why didn’t she sense something wrong in the building round midnight when someone cried out?”

  “Possibly because no one did.”

  “Yet someone heard it. Round midnight. What d’you make of that?”

  “A desire to help the police, a dream, a mistake. Something that didn’t happen. Because if it did, and if it was out of the ordinary, Pearl would have reacted. Good grief, you saw how she was with you.”