With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  At this hour of night breaking into morning, there were few enough people in the hospital corridors and those who were present did not even see Him. From this He knew that He was invisible to people in the way that gods were invisible. Moving among ordinary men and knowing that He could smite them at any moment illustrated irrefutably to Him what He was and would always be.

  He breathed. He smiled. It was soundless in His skull.

  Supremacy is as supremacy does.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  LYNLEY REMAINED WITH HER THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT and long into the day that followed. He used the time largely to disengage her face—so pale upon the pillow—from what she was now, from the body to which she had been reduced. In this, he tried to tell himself that it was not Helen he was looking upon. Helen was gone. In that instant in which everything had been transformed for them both, she had fled. The Helen of her had soared from the framework of bone, muscle, blood, and tissue, leaving behind not the soul, which defined her, but the substance, which described her. And that substance alone was not and could never be Helen.

  But he couldn’t make a go of that because when he tried, what came to him were images, for he had known her simply far too long. She’d been eighteen years old and not his in any way but rather the chosen mate of his friend. Meet Helen Clyde, St. James had told him. I’m going to marry her, Tommy.

  D’you think I’ll do for a wife? she had asked. I haven’t a single wifely talent. And she’d smiled a smile that had engaged his heart, but rather in friendship than in love.

  Love had come later, years and years later, and in between the friendship and the love what had bloomed was tragedy, change, and sorrow, altering all three of them unrecognisably. Madcap Helen no more, St. James no longer the fervent batsman in front of the wicket, and himself knowing he’d been the cause. For which sin there was no forgiveness. One did not alter lives and simply walk away from the damage.

  He’d been told once that things are at any given moment just as they are supposed to be. There are no mistakes in God’s world, he’d been told. But he could not believe that. Then or now.

  He saw her in Corfu, a towel spread beneath her on the beach and her head thrown back so that the sun could strike her face. Let’s move to a sunny climate, she’d said. Or at least let’s disappear into the tropics for a year.

  Or thirty or forty?

  Yes. Brilliant. We’ll Lord Lucan it. With less cause, of course. What do you think?

  That you’d miss London. The shoe sales if nothing else.

  Hmm, there is that, she said. I am a lifelong victim of my feet. The perfect target for male designers with ankle fetishes, I’m the first to admit it. But have they no shoes in the tropics, Tommy?

  Not the sort you’re used to, I’m afraid.

  The silly stuff of her that made him smile, the very maddening Helen of her.

  Can’t cook, can’t sew, can’t clean, can’t decorate. Honestly, Tommy, why do you want me?

  But why did one person ever want another? Because I smile with you, because I laugh at your banter, which you and I both know very well is designed just for that…to make me laugh. And the why of that is that you understand and have done from the first: who I am, what I am, what haunts me most and how to banish it. That’s why, Helen.

  And there she was in Cornwall, standing before a portrait in the gallery, his mother at her side. They were looking upon a grandfather with too many greats in front of him to know exactly how far back he was in time. But that didn’t matter because her concern was centred on genetics and she was saying to his mother, D’you think there’s any chance that terrible nose could pop up again somewhere along the line?

  It’s rather ghastly, isn’t it? his mother murmured.

  At least it shades his chest from the sun. Tommy, why didn’t you point this picture out to me before you proposed? I’ve never seen it before.

  We kept it hidden in the attic.

  That was very wise.

  The Helen of her. The Helen.

  You cannot know someone for seventeen years and not have a swarm of memories, he thought. And it was the memories that he felt might kill him. Not that they existed but that there would be no more of them from this point forward and that there were others he’d already forgotten.

  A door opened in the room, somewhere behind him. A soft hand took his, shaping his fingers round a hot cup. He caught the scent of soup. He looked up to see his mother’s tender face.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he whispered. “Tell me what to do.”

  “I can’t do that, Tommy.”

  “If I let her…Mum, how can I let her…them? And if I do that, is it ego? Or is it ego if I don’t? What would she want? How can I know?”

  She came close to him. He turned back to his wife. His mother curved her hand round his head so she cradled his cheek. “Dearest Tommy,” she murmured. “I would take this from you if I could.”

  “I’m dying. With her. With them. And that’s what I want, actually.”

  “Believe me. I know. No one can feel what you feel, but all of us can know what you feel. And, Tommy, you must feel it. You can’t run away. It won’t work like that. But I want you to try to feel our love as well. Promise you’ll do that.”

  He felt her bend and kiss the top of his head, and in that action, although he could hardly bear it, he also knew there was healing as well. But that was even worse than what lay before him in the immediate future. That he might stop feeling this agony someday. He didn’t know how he could live through that.

  His mother said, “Simon’s come back. Will you speak to him? I think he has news.”

  “I can’t leave her.”

  “I’ll stay. Or I’ll send Simon to you. Or I can get the message if you’d like.”

  He nodded numbly and she waited in silence for him to make up his mind. He finally handed the cup back to her, the soup untouched. “I’ll go to him,” he said.

  His mother took his place at the bed. He turned at the door and saw her lean towards Helen’s head and touch the dark hair that fell back from her temples. He left her to maintain a vigil over his wife.

  St. James was just outside in the corridor. He looked less haggard than the last time Lynley had seen him, which suggested he’d gone home for some sleep. Lynley was glad of this. The rest of them were operating on nerves and caffeine.

  St. James suggested they find the café and when they reached it, the smell of lasagne suggested the hour of the day to be somewhere between noon and eight o’clock at night. Inside the hospital, Lynley had long since lost track of time. Where Helen was, the lights were dim, but elsewhere it was forever fluorescent daytime, with only the changing faces of staff members with each new shift suggesting that hours were passing normally for the rest of the world.

  Lynley said, “What time is it, Simon?”

  “Half past one.”

  “Not in the morning, though.”

  “No. Afternoon. I’m getting you something.” He nodded to the stainless steel and glass of the buffet. “What would you like?”

  “It doesn’t matter. A sandwich? I’m not hungry.”

  “Consider it medicinal. It’ll be easier that way.”

  “Egg mayonnaise, then, if they have it. Brown bread.”

  St. James went to fetch it. Lynley sat at a small table in the corner. Other tables were occupied by staff, by members of patients’ families, by ministers, and in one case by two nuns. The café reflected the sombre nature of what went on in the building it served: Conversation was hushed; people seemed careful not to clatter their crockery and cutlery.

  No one glanced his way, for which Lynley was grateful. He felt raw and exposed, as if he had no protection from the knowledge of others and the judgements that they could pass upon his life.

  When St. James returned, he brought egg sandwiches on a tray. He’d bought one for himself as well, and he’d picked up a bowl of fruit and a Twix bar along with two cartons of Ribena.

  They
ate first, in companionable silence. They’d known each other for so many years—from their very first day at Eton, in fact—that words would be superfluous at the moment. St. James knew; Lynley could tell that in his face. Nothing needed to be said.

  St. James nodded his approval when Lynley finished the sandwich. He moved the bowl of fruit in his direction and followed that with the chocolate bar. When Lynley had eaten as much of both as he could stand, his friend finally relayed his information.

  “Belgravia have the gun. They found it in one of the gardens, along the route from the mews where that Range Rover had been dented, to the house where the au pair reported a break-in. They had to leap one brick wall after another to get away. They lost the gun along the route in some shrubbery, evidently. They wouldn’t have had time to go back for it, even if they knew it was missing.”

  Lynley looked away from St. James’s face because he knew his friend was watching him carefully and gauging him with every word. He’d want to make sure he told Lynley nothing that might push him over the edge again. This told Lynley he knew about Hillier and New Scotland Yard, in what seemed now like another lifetime.

  “I won’t storm the Belgravia station,” he said. “You can say the rest.”

  “They’re fairly certain the gun they found is the one that was used. They’ll do the ballistics study on the bullet they took from…from Helen, naturally, but the gun—”

  Lynley turned back to him. “What kind is it?”

  “Handgun. Twenty-two calibre,” St. James said.

  “Black-market special.”

  “It looks that way. It hadn’t been there long, in the garden. The home owners claimed to know nothing about it, and a look at the shrubbery supported their claim. It was freshly broken up. In the other gardens along the way as well.”

  “Footprints?”

  “Everywhere. Belgravia are going to catch them, Tommy. Soon.”

  “Them?”

  “There were definitely two of them. One of them was mixed race. The other…They’re not sure yet.”

  “The au pair?”

  “Belgravia have spoken to her. She says she was with the baby she looks after when she heard a window being broken down below, at the back of the house. By the time she got down to see what was going on, they were inside and she met them at the bottom of the stairs. One of them was already at the front door, heading out. She thought they’d burgled the house. She started screaming, but she also tried to stop them from getting away, God only knows why. One of them lost his hat.”

  “Is someone getting an e-fit made?”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to be necessary.”

  “Why?”

  “The house on Cadogan Lane with the CCTV cameras? They’ve got images. They’re being enhanced. Belgravia are going to run them on television and the papers will print the best of the lot. This is…” St. James raised his head ceilingward. Lynley saw how difficult this was for his friend. Not only the knowledge of what had happened to Helen but also the gathering of information to pass on to Helen’s husband and her family. The effort left him no time for grief. “They’re putting everything they have into this, Tommy. They’ve more volunteers than they can use, from stations all over town. The papers…You’ve not seen them, have you? It’s been an enormous story. Because of who you are, who she is, your families, everything.”

  “Just the sort of thing the tabloids love,” Lynley said bitterly.

  “But they’re carrying the public along with them, Tommy. Someone is going to see the pictures from the CCTV camera and turn the boys in.”

  Lynley said, “The boys?”

  St. James nodded. “At least one of them, apparently, was a boy. The au pair says he looked about twelve years old.”

  “Oh my God.” Lynley looked away, as if this would prevent his mind from making the inescapable connection.

  St. James made it anyway. “One of the Colossus boys…? In the company of the serial killer but without knowing his companion is the serial killer?”

  “I gave him—them—an invitation to my home. Right in the pages of The Source, Simon.”

  “But there was no address, no street name. A killer looking for you couldn’t have found you through that article. It’s impossible.”

  “He knew who I was, what I look like as well. He could have followed me home from the Yard on any day. And then all that would be left for him was laying his plan and waiting for an appropriate time.”

  “If that’s the case, why take a boy with him?”

  “To give him a sin. So he could be his next victim when the job on Helen was done.”

  THEY’D DECIDED to let Hamish Robson stew for a night in lockup. It would be something of a taste of the future. So they’d taken the profiler to the Shepherdess Walk police station which, while it wasn’t the closest lockup to his flat near the Barbican, allowed them to avoid negotiating a route which would take them deeper into the City to get to the Wood Street station.

  Search warrant in hand, they spent most of the following day in Robson’s flat, building their case against the psychologist. One of the first bits of evidence they found was his laptop computer squirreled away in a cupboard, and Barbara made short work of tripping along the trail of electronic bread crumbs that Robson had left upon it.

  “Kiddy porn,” she said to Nkata over her shoulder when she found the first of the images. “Boys and men, boys and women, boys and animals, boys and boys. He’s a real piece of work, our Hamish.”

  For his part, Nkata found an old A to Z with the location of St. Lucy’s Church circled on the corner of Courtfield Road. And tucked into its pages was the name and address of the Canterbury Hotel as well as a business card with “Snow” and a phone number printed on it.

  This, along with Barry Minshall’s earlier identification of Robson’s photograph and 2160 as part of the phone number of the doctor’s employer, was enough to bring a SOCO team onto the scene and to send another to Walden Lodge. The first would be looking for further evidence in Robson’s car. The second would be gathering what it could from his mother’s flat. It seemed unlikely that he’d have brought Davey Benton or anyone else into his digs here near the Barbican. But at least Davey would have ridden over to Wood Lane with Robson and, once there, he would have left his mark inside Esther Robson’s flat.

  When they had enough to put him away as a paedophile if nothing else, they went to the station. He’d already phoned for his solicitor, and after a wait for her to turn up from the magistrate’s court, Barbara and Nkata met them both in an interview room.

  It was, Barbara thought, a nice touch for Robson to employ a female solicitor. She was called Amy Stranne, and she appeared to have achieved an advanced university degree in impassivity. She matched her utter lack of expressive reaction with a severe, short haircut, an equally severe black suit, and a man’s tie knotted at the throat of her white silk shirt. She took a pristine legal pad from her briefcase, along with a manila folder whose contents she consulted before speaking.

  “I’ve advised my client of his rights,” she said. “He wishes to cooperate with you in this interview because he feels there are significant aspects of the current investigation that you don’t understand.”

  Too right, Barbara thought. Bless his black little heart. The psychologist knew he was going to be locked up for years. Like Minshall, the slimy sod was already trying to position himself for a lesser sentence.

  Nkata said, “We got SOCO sifting through your vehicle, Dr. Robson. We got SOCO sifting through your mum’s flat. We got a team at the Yard searching for the lockup you got to have somewhere in town, because we ’xpect that’s where you got the van hidden, and we got ’bout half a dozen officers treading through your background to find anything anyone else might miss.”

  Robson’s haggard face suggested that his accommodation in Shepherdess Walk hadn’t been to his liking. He said, “I didn’t—”

  “Please,” Barbara said. “If you didn’t kill Davey Benton, we’
d be happy to hear what actually happened to him between the time you raped him and the time he ended up a body in the woods.”

  Robson flinched at the baldness of the statement. Barbara wanted to point out to him that there was actually no palatable way to portray what had happened to the thirteen-year-old. Robson said, “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

  “Him?”

  “The boy. Davey. Snow told me they always went willingly. He said they were well prepared.”

  “Like a joint of beef?” Barbara asked. “All salt-and-peppered?”

  “He said they were ready and they wanted it.”

  “It?” Nkata said.

  “The encounter.”

  “The rape,” Barbara clarified.

  “It wasn’t…!” Robson looked to his solicitor. Amy Stranne was taking notes, but she appeared to sense his glance in her direction, because she looked up. She said, “It’s up to you, Hamish.”

  “You’ve got healed scratches on your hands and arms,” Barbara noted. “And we’ve got skin under Davey’s fingernails. We’ve evidence of forcible sodomy as well. So what is it about this scenario that we ought to be taking as a voluntary sexual encounter…not that sex with thirteen-year-olds is legal, by the way. But we’re willing to set that aside for a moment if only to hear your version of the romantic seduction which apparently—”

  “I didn’t intend to hurt him,” Robson said. “I panicked. That’s all. He’d been cooperative. He’d been enjoying…Perhaps he was hesitant, but he wasn’t telling me to stop. He wasn’t. I swear he was liking it. But when I turned him round…” Robson’s face was grey. His thin hair drooped across his forehead. Spittle dried at the corners of his mouth, buried within his nicely trimmed goatee. “I just tried to keep him quiet after that. I told him the first time was always a little frightening, even a little painful, but he wasn’t to worry.”

  “How nice of you,” Barbara noted. She wanted to rip the sorry bugger’s eyes out. Next to her, Nkata stirred. She told herself to back off, which she knew her colleague was also telling her through his body language. But she didn’t want this sod to think that their silence—her silence—implied approval, even though she knew her silence was crucial in order to keep him talking. She pressed her lips together and bit down to keep them in place.