With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  At the end, she said, “I want to tell the superintendent, sir.” When Stewart’s expression suggested that he smelled something bad, she altered her declaration to, “I’d like to tell him, that is. He thinks Helen’s shooting has to do with this investigation, with that profile in The Source as the way the shooter found her. He needs to know…It’ll give him one less thing to think about, I expect.”

  Stewart appeared to look at this from every angle before he finally agreed. But, he told her, she was to do the paperwork related to their call in Harrow Road, and she was to do that before setting off for St. Thomas’ Hospital.

  It was past one in the morning, then, when she finally staggered down to her car. Then the blasted Mini choked on her, and she sat with her head on the steering wheel, willing the damn engine to turn over properly. In her head, she heard that same admonition from some mystical automotive dimension suggesting that she might want to get the car seen to before it conked out altogether. She muttered, “Tomorrow. All right? Tomorrow,” and hoped that promise was enough.

  It was. The engine finally started.

  At this time of night, the streets of London were virtually empty. No sane taxi driver was out, trying to get a fare in Westminster, and the buses ran far less frequently. An occasional car was passing by, but largely the streets were as vacant as the pavements where the homeless tucked themselves into doorways. So she made quick time to the hospital.

  As she drove, she realised that he might not be there, that he might have gone home and tried to get some sleep, in which case she would not disturb him. But when she arrived and pulled into a drop-off point directly down from Lambeth Palace Road, she saw his Bentley at the far end of the carpark. He was with Helen, then, as she’d reckoned he would be.

  She gave passing thought to the risk of shutting the Mini’s engine off after she’d finally got it going. But the risk was necessary because she wanted to be the one to tell Lynley about the boy. She felt a need to relieve at least some small portion of the guilt he was carrying round, so she turned the key in the ignition and waited for the Mini’s hiccupping to come to an end.

  She grabbed up her shoulder bag and got out of the car. She was just about to walk towards the entrance when she saw him. He’d come out of hospital, and the look of him—how he walked and how he held his shoulders—told her how permanently altered he was. She hesitated, then. How to approach a dearly loved friend…How to approach him in such a time of devastation? At the end, she didn’t think she could. Because, after all, what difference did it actually make with his life now, as it was, in ruins?

  He trudged across the carpark to the Bentley. There he looked up. Not at her but at a spot in the carpark out of her range of vision. It was as if someone had called his name. And then a figure quickly emerged from the darkness and things happened very swiftly after that.

  Barbara saw that the figure wore all black. He moved over to Lynley. There was something in his hand. Lynley looked round. Then he turned in a flash back to his car. But he got no farther. For the figure reached him and pressed the object that he carried into Lynley’s side. Not even a second passed before Barbara’s superintendent was on the ground and the hand that held the object pressed to him again. His body jerked and the figure in black looked up. Even from a distance, Barbara saw she was gazing on Robbie Kilfoyle.

  It had all taken three seconds, perhaps less. Kilfoyle grabbed Lynley by his armpits and dragged him quickly to what Barbara should have bloody well seen, she thought, if she hadn’t been so focussed on Lynley. A van was parked deeply in the shadows, its sliding door open. In another second, he’d got Lynley inside.

  Barbara said, “Bloody sodding hell,” weaponless and for a moment utterly directionless. She looked to the Mini for something she could use…She reached for her mobile to phone for help. She punched in the first nine as, across the carpark, the van roared to life.

  She dived for her car. She threw her bag and her mobile inside, phone call incomplete. She would punch in the last two nines in a moment, but in the meantime she had to get going, had to get on his tail, had to follow and shout the direction she was traveling into the mobile so that an armed unit could be sent on its way because the van, the bloody van, was moving, it was coming across the carpark now. It was red, as they’d suspected, and on its side were the faded letters they’d seen in the film.

  Barbara shoved her key into the ignition and turned it. The engine ground. It did not engage. Across from her, the van was rumbling towards the exit. Its lights swept her way. She ducked because he had to think he had an all clear so he’d keep his pace slow, steady, and unsuspecting. She could follow then and ring for the men with the nice big guns to take down this useless piece of human excrement before he did something to someone who meant everything to her to someone who was her friend her mentor and who at this moment would not fight back would not care to fight back and would think Do with me as you will and she could not let that happen to Lynley.

  The car did not start. It would not start. Barbara heard herself shriek. She leaped out. She slammed the door behind her. She dashed across the carpark. She thought how he’d been heading to the Bentley, had been near to the Bentley, so there was a chance…

  And he’d dropped the keys as he’d fallen. He’d dropped the keys. She grabbed them up with a sob of gratitude that she forced herself to quell and then she was in the Bentley. Her hands were shaking. It took a century to get the key into the ignition but then the car was starting and she was trying to get the damn seat into a place where she could reach the accelerator and the brake because his legs were long because he was nearly a foot taller than she. She jerked the car into gear and reversed it and prayed that the killer was being careful careful careful because the last thing he would want was to attract attention to his driving.

  He’d turned left. She did the same. She revved the engine of the huge car, and it leapt ahead like a well-trained thoroughbred and she swore as she gained control over it control over her reactions control over her exhaustion which was no longer exhaustion at all but raging adrenaline and the need to stop this bugger in his tracks arrange a little surprise for the bastard bring out a hundred cops if necessary and all of them armed so that they could storm his bloody little mobile killing site and he couldn’t hurt Lynley while the van was in motion so she knew she was all right until it stopped. But she needed to let the cops know where she was heading, so the moment she finally caught sight of Kilfoyle’s van crossing Westminster Bridge, she reached for the mobile. And realised it was back in the Mini along with her bag, left where she’d thrown them when she’d leapt into her car, her call to 999 incomplete.

  She shouted, “Shit! Shit!,” and knew that, barring a miracle, she was on her own. You and me, babe. Lynley’s life in the balance because that was it, wasn’t it, this was going to be the pièce de résistance, you bloody sod, this was going to put your miserable name in lights—you would kill the cop who was looking for you and you would do to him what you’d done to the others and as he was he could not fight back and as he’d been in the carpark he wouldn’t care about fighting to save himself and you know that, don’t you, just as you knew where to find him, you sod, because you’d read the papers and you’d watched the telly and now you were going to have real fun.

  She didn’t know where they were. The bugger was good when it came to rat runs but he’d be good, wouldn’t he, because he bicycled and he knew the streets he knew the byways he knew the whole flaming town.

  They were heading northeast. That was all she could tell. She stayed behind as far as she dared without losing him altogether. She drove without headlights, which he could not do if he wanted to look normal casual just going from point A to point B in all innocence at whatever time it was, which felt like two in the morning or later. She couldn’t risk stopping at a phone box or grabbing up a pedestrian—had there even been one—and demanding the use of his mobile. All she could do was remain in pursuit and think feverishly of what she could do
when she got to wherever the hell they were going which she knew would be the spot where he’d killed the others. And then transported their bodies so where do you plan to place Lynley’s, you piece of filth? But that would not happen even if the superintendent welcomed it in his present state because she would not allow it because although that bugger had the weapons she had surprise and she bloody well intended to use it. Only what was it that was the surprise other than her presence which was going to mean sweet FA to this bastard with his stun gun his knives his duct tape his restraints his bloody sodding oils and his marks on the forehead.

  Wheel brace in the boot of the Bentley. That was what it boiled down to and what the hell was she supposed to do with that? Don’t you fucking touch him or I’ll swing this thing at your miserable head while I’m dodging your stun gun and you’re leaping upon me with your carving knife? How was that going to work?

  Up ahead, he turned once more and it looked like a final time. They’d been driving and driving, at least twenty minutes and possibly longer. Just before the turn, they’d crossed over a river which damn well wasn’t the Thames way up here when way up here was far north and east of where they’d begun. Then they’d passed an outdoor storage facility at the northeast edge of the river and she’d thought, He’s got a bloody lockup where he does the job, just like we’d thought at some point along the route that’s brought us to this miserable moment. But he passed the storage facility with its neat row of lockups lined up along the river and instead he pulled into a carpark just beyond. It was large, vast when she compared it to where he’d been parked at St. Thomas’ Hospital. Above it was a sign that finally told her where they were, Lea Valley Ice Centre. Essex Wharf. They were at the River Lea.

  The ice centre was an indoor skating rink looking like an antique Quonset hut. It sat some fifty yards off the road, and Kilfoyle drove to the left of it where the carpark made a dogleg that possessed two distinct advantages for a killer: It was overgrown with evergreen shrubbery and the streetlamp above it was broken. When the van was parked there, it was completely in shadow. No one driving by would see it from the street.

  The van’s lights went out. Barbara waited for a moment to see if Kilfoyle planned to emerge. If he dragged his victim out and did his stuff in the bushes…only how the hell could he burn someone’s hands in the bushes? No, she thought. He’d do it inside. He had no need to depart his mobile execution site. He just had to find a spot where no one was likely to hear any noise coming from the van, a spot where no one was likely ever to see the van. He’d do his stuff and then go on his way.

  Which meant she had to do her business first.

  She’d been idling the Bentley at the kerb, but now she slowly pulled into the carpark herself. She watched and waited for some sort of sign, like the slight motion of the vehicle as Kilfoyle moved round inside it. She got out of the car, although she left it running. She looked for something…for anything she could use. Surprise was the only thing she had, she reminded herself. What then constituted the biggest surprise she could give the sodding freak?

  She went over the details feverishly. What they knew and everything they had tried to guess. He restrained them, so he’d be doing that now. For the drive, he’d have placed Lynley where he could zap him with the stun gun whenever he seemed to be coming to his senses. But now he’d be restraining him. And in the restraint came the hope of salvation. For as the restraints immobilised Lynley, so did they protect him. And that’s what she wanted.

  Protection gave her the answer she needed.

  LYNLEY WAS aware of his inability to order his body to move. What was gone from him was the message-to-action workings of his brain. Nothing was natural. He had to think about moving his arm instead of just moving it, but it didn’t move anyway. The same for his legs. His head felt unduly heavy, and somewhere his muscles were being told to short-circuit. It felt as if his nerve endings were in warfare.

  He was aware also of darkness and movement. When he managed to focus his eyes on something, he was also aware of warmth. The warmth attached itself to movement—not his, unfortunately—and through a haze he saw that he was not alone. A figure lay in the gloom and he was sprawled upon it, half on a body and half on the floor of the van.

  He knew it was a van. He knew it was the van. In the instant in which his name was called quietly from the shadows, in which he’d turned and thought it was a reporter who’d come to be the first to interview the non-husband and nonfather he had just become, one part of his brain told him something wasn’t right. Then he’d seen the torch in the extended hand, and he’d known whom he was looking at. After that, he’d been struck by the bolt of current and it was over.

  He didn’t know how many times he’d been hit with the stun gun during the journey to wherever they were when the van finally stopped. What he did know was that the bolts hit him with a regularity that suggested the administrator knew how long a victim’s disorientation was likely to last.

  When the van stopped and its engine shut off, the man who had called himself Fu climbed into the rear, stun-gun torch in his hand. He applied it to Lynley another time in the businesslike manner of a doctor administering a necessary injection, and the next time Lynley came to his senses and finally felt as if his muscles might be his own once more, he found that he was bound to the inside wall of the van, hanging downward by his armpits and his wrists, legs bent so that his ankles could also be bound to the wall behind him. The bindings felt like leather straps, but they could have been anything. He couldn’t see them.

  What he could see was the woman, source of the earlier warmth he’d felt. She lay bound on the floor of the van, arms stretched out to either side in the manner of a horizontal crucifixion. The cross itself was there as well, represented by a board on which she was lying. She had duct tape patched across her mouth. Her eyes were open wide in terror.

  Terror was good, Lynley managed to think. Terror was much better than resignation. As he looked at her, she seemed to sense his gaze. She turned her head. He saw that she was the woman from Colossus, but in his present state, he couldn’t recall her name. That suggested to him that Barbara Havers had been right all along, in her inimitable, stubborn, bloody-minded way: The killer in the van with them was one of the men who worked for Colossus.

  The man Fu was getting everything ready, primarily himself. He’d lit a candle and stripped, and he was anointing his naked body with a substance—this would be the ambergris, wouldn’t it?—that he took from a small brown vial. Next to him was the cooker that Muwaffaq Masoud had described to them in Hayes. It was heating up a large pan from which the scent of previously burnt meat gave off a faint odour.

  He was actually humming. It was all in a night’s work for him. They were in his power, and the manifestation of power and the execution of power were what he wanted out of life.

  On the floor of the van, the woman made a pitiful sound from beneath the duct tape. Fu turned at this, and in the light Lynley saw that he looked vaguely familiar, that he possessed that quintessential and very English face of substantial pointed nose, rounded chin, and bread-dough cheeks. He could have been a hundred thousand men on the street, but in him the strain had mutated somehow, so he was not a bland little individual working at an ordinary job and going home to the wife and the children every evening in a terrace house somewhere but, rather, he was who circumstances in life had altered him to be: someone who liked to kill people.

  Fu said, “I wouldn’t have chosen you, Ulrike. I rather like you. It was actually my mistake ever to mention Dad. But when you started asking for alibis—and it was fairly obvious that was what you were doing, by the way—I knew I had to tell you something you’d be happy with. Sitting home alone would never have cut the mustard, would it? The alone part would have made you curious.” He looked down on her, completely friendly. “I mean, you would have been all over that, p’rhaps even telling the coppers about it. And then where would we be?”

  He brought out the knife. He took it from
the little work top where the propane cooker was merrily heating not only the pan but the van itself now. Lynley could feel the warmth undulating across to him.

  Fu said, “It was meant to be one of the boys. I thought Mark Connor. You know him, don’t you? Likes to hang round in reception with Jack? Little rapist in the making, you ask me. He needs sorting, Ulrike. They all need sorting. Proper little gobshites, they are. Need discipline and no one gives that to them. Makes one wonder what kind of parents they have. Parenting, you know, is essential to development. Will you excuse me for a moment?”

  He turned back to the cooker. He took up the candle and held it to various points on his body. It came to Lynley that this was a hieratic ritual he was watching. And he was meant to be watching, like a worshipper at church.

  He wanted to speak, but his mouth too was covered with tape. He tested the bindings that held his wrists to the side of the van. They were immovable.

  Fu turned again. He stood there quite naturally in his nudity, his body glistening where he’d used the oil on it. He held up the candle and saw that Lynley was watching him. He reached for something on the work top again.

  Lynley thought it would be the torch to stun him once more, but it was instead a small brown bottle, not the one he’d been using but another that he took from a little cupboard and held up so that Lynley would be sure to see it.

  “Something new, Superintendent,” he said. “After Ulrike, I’ll switch to parsley. Triumph, you see. And there’ll be much cause for it. For triumph. For me, that is. For you? Well, I don’t expect you’ve much to feel grand about at this moment, have you? But you’re curious, still, and who can blame you? You want to know, don’t you? You want to understand.”