With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Voices came from the direction of the chancel, where a group of what appeared to be students stood round someone pointing out details on the tester above the pulpit. Three out-of-season tourists were flipping through postcards at a bookstall directly across from the entrance, but no one appeared to be waiting for a meeting with anyone. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that, like most medieval cathedrals, Southwark had no regular pews, so there was no fifth-row-from-the-back-and-on-the-left seating where Charlie Burov, aka Blinker, might have slouched in anticipation of their arrival.

  “So much for his churchgoing proclivities,” Lynley murmured. As Havers looked round, sighed, and muttered a curse, he added, “Mind the mouth, Constable. Lightning is never a dear commodity when it comes to the Lord.”

  “He might’ve at least sussed out the place first,” she groused.

  “In the best of all worlds.” Lynley finally spied a spindly, black-garbed figure near the baptismal font, who was darting looks in their general direction. “Ah. Over there, Havers. That could be our man.”

  He didn’t run off as they approached him, although he cast a nervous glance towards the group at the pulpit and then another towards the people at the bookstall. When Lynley asked politely if he was Mr. Burov, the boy said, “’S Blinker. You the fuzz, then?” out of the side of his mouth like a character in a bad film noir.

  Lynley introduced himself and Havers while he gave the boy a quick appraisal. Blinker appeared to be round twenty years old with a face that would have been completely nondescript had not head shaving and body piercing been in vogue. As it was, studs erupted from his face like a visitation of smallpox in silver and when he spoke, which was with some difficulty, it was to reveal half a dozen additional studs lined up along the edge of his tongue. Lynley didn’t want to think about the difficulty they presented the boy in eating. Hearing the difficulty they presented him in speaking was bad enough.

  “This might not be the best place to have our conversation,” Lynley noted. “Is there somewhere nearby…”

  Blinker agreed to a coffee. They managed to find a suitable café not far from St. Mary Overy Dock, and Blinker slid onto a chair at one of the grubby, Formica-topped tables where he studied the menu, and said, “C’n I get a spag bol, then?”

  Lynley eased a malodorous ashtray towards Havers and said to the boy, “Be my guest,” although he shuddered at the thought of personally ingesting any kind of food—not to mention any kind of pasta—served up in a place where one’s shoes adhered to the lino and the menus looked in need of disinfectant.

  Blinker apparently took Lynley’s reply as licence for liberality, for when the waitress came for their order he added gammon steak, two eggs, chips, and mushrooms along with a tuna and sweet-corn sandwich to the spaghetti. Havers ordered an orange juice, Lynley a coffee. Blinker grabbed the plastic salt shaker and began rolling it between his palms.

  He didn’t want to talk until he’d “had a nosh,” he told them. So they waited in silence for the first of his plates to arrive, Havers taking the opportunity for another smoke, Lynley nursing his coffee and steeling himself to the spectacle of the boy working food past his tongue studs.

  He’d apparently had plenty of practice, as things turned out. When the first plate was deposited in front of him, Blinker made quick work of the gammon steak and its companions, with minimum fuss and—blessedly—even less display. When he’d sopped up the remaining egg yolk and gammon grease with a triangle of toast, he said, “Better, that,” and appeared ready to give himself over for conversation and a cigarette, which he cadged from Havers while he waited for the pasta’s arrival on the scene.

  He was “that torn up” about Kimmo, he told them. But he’d warned his mate—he’d warned him a hundred million times—about taking it up the chute from blokes he didn’t know. Kimmo always claimed the risk was worth it, though. And he always made them use a spunk bag…even if, admittedly, he didn’t always turn round at the vital moment to make sure it was on.

  “I tol’ him it wa’n’t about some bloke infectin’ him, for God’s sake,” Blinker said. “It was about ’xactly what happened to him anyways. I never wanted him out there alone. Never. When Kimmo was on the streets, I was on the streets wif him. Tha’s the way it was s’posed to be.”

  “Ah,” Lynley said. “I’m getting the picture. You were Kimmo Thorne’s pimp, then?”

  “Hey. It wa’n’t like that.” Blinker sounded affronted.

  “So you weren’t his pimp?” Barbara Havers put in. “What would you call it when it was home with its mother?”

  “I was his mate,” Blinker said. “I kept watch for any nasty sort of business ’at might be going on, like some bloke wif more on his mind than a bit ’f fun wif Kimmo. We worked together, like a team. It wa’n’t my fault, was it, Kimmo being the one they fancied?”

  Lynley wanted to say that Blinker’s appearance might have had something to do with who was being fancied by the punters, but he let the subject go. He said, “The night Kimmo disappeared, he didn’t start out with you, then?”

  “I di’n’t even know he was going out, did I. We’d done Leicester Square the night before, see, and we’d found a party wanting some entertainment over in Hollen Street, so we did a bit of business wif them. We had enough dosh off that that we di’n’t need to be out again and Kimmo said his gran wanted him home for a night anyways.”

  “Was that normal?” Lynley asked.

  “Nah. So I should’ve known summat was up when he said it, but I didn’t cos it was fine wif me not to go out. I had the telly…and other things to do.”

  “Such as?” Havers asked. When Blinker didn’t respond, merely looking in the direction of the kitchen for his spaghetti Bolognese to put in an appearance, she said, “What else were you two into besides prostitution, Charlie?”

  “Hey. Like I said. We never were into—”

  “Let’s not play games,” Havers cut in. “Tart it up any way you want, but the truth is, if you get paid for it, Charlie, it’s not true love. And you did get paid for it, right? Isn’t that what you said? And isn’t that why you didn’t need to be going out another night? Because Kimmo had earned you enough cash for a week probably, providing ‘entertainment’ in Hollen Street. I’m wondering what you did with the lolly, though. Smoke it, shoot it, snort it? What?”

  “You know, I don’ have to talk to you lot,” Blinker said hotly. “I could get up right now and be out of that door faster’n—”

  “And miss your spaghetti Bolognese?” Havers asked. “Holy hell, not that.”

  Lynley said, “Havers,” in the tone he generally used—with limited success—to restrain her. And to Blinker, “Would it have been like Kimmo to go off on his own? Despite your usual arrangement?”

  “He did sometimes, yeah. Like I said. I tol’ him not to, but he did it anyways. I said it wa’n’t safe. He wa’n’t a big bloke, was he, an’ if he misjudged who he let do him…” Blinker crushed his cigarette and looked away. His eyes grew watery. “Stupid little bugger,” he muttered.

  His spaghetti Bolognese showed up, along with a dispenser of cheese that looked like sawdust deficient in iron. This he sprinkled delicately over the pasta and tucked in, his emotion subdued by his appetite. The café door opened and two workmen entered, jeans whitened by plaster dust and thick-soled shoes crusted with cement. They called out familiar hellos to the cook who was visible by means of a serving hatch, and they chose a table in a corner where they placed their orders for a multicourse meal not unlike the one Blinker himself had requested.

  “I tol’ him this would happen if he went it alone,” Blinker said when he had finished wolfing down the pasta and was waiting for his tuna and sweet-corn sandwich. “I tol’ him over an’ over, but he never listened, did he. He said he could tell about blokes, he could. The bad ones, he said, they have this kind of smell ’bout them. Like they been thinking too long what they want to do to you and it makes their skin all oily and cooked up, like. I tol’ him t
hat was rubbish and he had to take me wif him no matter what, but he wasn’t having any of that, was he, so look what happened.”

  “So you think this is the work of a punter,” Lynley said. “Kimmo making a bad judgment call when he was alone.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “Kimmo’s gran said you’ve got him in trouble,” Havers said. “She claims he was flogging stolen property you handed over to him. What d’you know about that?”

  Blinker rose in his chair as if he’d been mortally wounded. “I never!” he said. “She’s a bloody liar, she is. Flaming old cow. She di’n’t like me from the first and now she’s tryin to get me under the cosh, i’n’t she. Well, any trouble Kimmo got in di’n’t have nothing to do wif me. You ask round Bermondsey and see who knows Blinker and who knows Kimmo. Tha’s what you do.”

  “Bermondsey?” Lynley asked.

  But Blinker was saying nothing else. He was, instead, fuming at the idea that someone had fingered him as a thief instead of as what he really was, a common chili chump on the street, promoting the services of a fifteen-year-old boy.

  Lynley said, “Were you and Kimmo lovers, by the way?”

  Blinker shrugged, as if the question were unimportant. He looked round for his tuna sandwich, saw it waiting for delivery on the sill of the serving hatch, and went to fetch it himself. The waitress said, “Hang on, mate. I’ll get to you soon ’nough.”

  Blinker ignored her and took the sandwich to the table. There, he didn’t sit again. Nor did he eat. Instead, he wrapped the sandwich in his used paper napkin and shoved the package into the pocket of his worn leather jacket.

  Lynley watched him and saw that the young man wasn’t so much piqued by his final question as he was grieved in a way that he clearly had not expected to be. In a quivering muscle visible on his jaw, the answer lay. He and the dead boy had indeed been lovers, if not recently then initially, and probably before they had set off on a course of making money through the use of Kimmo’s body.

  Blinker looked at them as he zipped his jacket. He said, “Like I said. Kimmo wouldn’t’ve had no trouble if he stayed wif me. But he didn’t, did he? He went his own way when I tol’ him not to. Thought he knew the world, he did. And look where it got him.” That said, he was gone, making for the door and leaving Lynley and Havers studying the remains of his spaghetti Bolognese like high priests searching for auguries.

  Havers said, “Didn’t even say cheers for the meal.” She picked up his fork and twirled two strands of the pasta onto it. This she then raised to the level of her eyes. “The body, though. Kimmo’s body. None of the reports claim sex before he died, do they?”

  “None of the reports,” Lynley agreed.

  “Which could mean…?”

  “That his death has nothing to do with working the streets. Unless, of course, what happened that night happened before they ever got to the sex.” Lynley pushed his coffee cup to the centre of the table, most of it undrunk.

  “But if we have to eliminate sex as part…?” Havers asked.

  “Then the question is: How are you at getting up before dawn?”

  She looked at him. “Bermondsey?”

  “I’d say that’s our next direction.” Lynley watched her as she considered this, the fork still dangling from her fingers.

  She finally nodded, but she didn’t look pleased. “I hope you’re planning to be part of that party.”

  “I’d hardly let a lady prowl round South London in the dark on her own,” Lynley replied.

  “That’s good news, then.”

  “I’m glad you’re reassured. Havers, what are you intending to do with that pasta?”

  She glanced at him, then back at the fork still dangling in the air. “This?” she said. She popped the spaghetti into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. “They definitely need to do some work on their al dente,” she told him.

  JARED SALVATORE, the second victim of their murderer—to whom they’d begun referring as Red Van for want of another sobriquet—had lived in Peckham, some eight miles as the crow flies from where his body had been found in Bayswater. Since from Pentonville Prison Felipe Salvatore had not been able to provide a recent address for his family, Nkata went first to their last-known abode, which was a flat in the wilderness of North Peckham Estate. This was a place where no one wandered unarmed after dark, where cops were not welcome, where turf was marked. It offered the worst there was in communal living: dismal lines of washing hanging from balconies and from drainpipes, broken and tyreless bicycles, shopping trolleys given over to rust, and every kind of rubbish imaginable. The North Peckham area made Nkata’s own housing estate look like Utopia on opening day.

  At the address he’d been given for the Salvatore family, Nkata found no one at home. He knocked up neighbours who either knew nothing or were willing to say nothing, until he found one who offered the information that the “crackhead cow and her snivellers” had finally been evicted after a monumental battle with Navina Cryer and her crew, all of whom hailed from Clifton Estate. That was the extent of the information available on the family. But having been given a new name—that of Navina Cryer—Nkata next went to Clifton Estate to seek her and whatever information she could give him of the Salvatores.

  Navina turned out to be a sixteen-year-old girl who was hugely pregnant. She lived with her mother and her two younger sisters, along with two toddlers in nappies who, during Nkata’s conversation with the girl, were never identified as belonging to anyone. Unlike the denizens of North Peckham Estate, Navina was only too happy to talk to the police. She took a long look at Nkata’s warrant card, took a longer look at Nkata himself, and ushered him inside the flat. Her mother was at work, she informed him, and the rest of that lot—by which he reckoned she meant the other children—could look after themselves. She led him to the kitchen. There a table held several loads of unwashed laundry, and the air was ripe with the scent of disposable nappies in need of disposal.

  Navina lit a cigarette on one of the grimy stove’s gas burners, and she leaned against it rather than taking a seat at the table. Her stomach protruded so far that it was difficult to see how she actually remained upright, and beneath the taut material of her leggings, her veins stood out like worms after rainfall. She said abruptly, “’Bout time, innit. Wha’ was it lit the fire under you lot? I’d like to know, so nex’ time I got the right approach.”

  Nkata sorted through these remarks. He concluded from them that she’d been expecting the police. Considering the information he’d gleaned from the one neighbour willing to talk on North Peckam Estate, he assumed she was referring to the outcome—whatever it had been—of her reported altercation with Mrs. Salvatore.

  He said, “Woman over North Peckham…? She told me you might know the whereabouts of Jared Salvatore’s mum. ’S that right?”

  Navina narrowed her eyes. She took a deep hit on her cigarette—deep enough to make Nkata shudder for her unborn child—and as she blew the smoke out, she studied him, then studied the ends of her fingernails, which were painted fuchsia and matched her toenails. She said slowly, “Wha’ ’bout Jared? You got word on him?”

  “Word for his mum, you can tell me where she is,” Nkata replied.

  “Like she going t’ care, you mean?” Navina sounded scornful. “Like he mean more to her than flake? That cunt di’n’t even know he was gone till I tol’ her, mister, an’ if you find her under wha’ever car she been dossin since they got done wif her on North Peckham, you c’n tell her I said she c’n die an’ I spit on her coffin an’ be glad to do it.” She took another hit on the cigarette. Nkata saw that her fingers were shaking.

  He said, “Navina, c’n we reverse things here? I’m in the dark.”

  “How? Wha’ more do I got to tell you lot? He been gone an’ gone an’ it ain’t like him, which is what I been sayin over and over. Only no one’s listenin an’ I just ’bout ready—”

  “Hang on,” Nkata said. “C’n I get you to sit over here? I’m sorting t
his, but you’re going too quick.” He pulled a chair from beneath the table and indicated she should take it. One of the toddlers trundled into the kitchen at that point, nappy hanging nearly to his knees, and Navina took a moment to change him, which consisted of ripping the nappy off, tossing it into a swing bin—with its load mercifully intact—and strapping him into another without undo ceremony, the remains of his droppings still clinging to his flesh. After that, she rooted out a boxed Ribena for the child and handed it over, leaving him to suss out a manner of detaching its straw and driving it into the small carton. Then she lowered herself into the chair. All along her cigarette had dangled from her lips, but now she stubbed it out in an ashtray that she took from beneath the pile of dirty laundry.

  Nkata said to her, “You reported Jared missing? Tha’s what you’re telling me?”

  “I tol’ the cops d’rectly he di’n’t show up for the antenatal. I knew right then there was summat wrong ’cause he always come, di’n’t he, to see ’bout his baby.”

  Nkata said, “He’s the dad, then? Jared Salvatore’s your baby’s dad?”

  “An’ proud to be from the first, he was. Thirteen years old, not many blokes get started so fast, and he liked that, Jared. It made him swell up bigger ’n you would’ve believed, the day I tol’ him.”

  Nkata wanted to know what she’d been doing messing with a mere boy who should have been at school making a future and not out on the loose making babies, but he did not ask. Navina herself should have been at school, if it came to that, or at least she should have been doing something more useful than offering herself to a randy adolescent at least three years her junior. She also had to have been doing the job with Jared since the boy had been twelve. It made Nkata’s head swim, just thinking about it. And knowing that at twelve years old, with a willing female, he too might have happily plunged away his life, hot for that fleshy moment of contact and thinking about nothing else.