With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  They were on their way to do so—wending their way through the market, back to Lynley’s car—when his mobile rang.

  The message was terse, its meaning unmistakable: He was wanted immediately on Shand Street, where a tunnel beneath the railway took the narrow little thoroughfare to Crucifix Lane. They had another body.

  Lynley flipped off the phone and looked at Havers. “Crucifix Lane,” he said. “Do you know where it is?”

  A vendor at a nearby stall answered the question. Right up Tower Bridge Road, he told them. Less than half a mile from where they stood.

  A RAILWAY VIADUCT shooting out from London Bridge station comprised the north perimeter of Crucifix Lane. Bricks formed it, so deeply stained with more than a century of soot and grime that whatever their original colour had been, it was now a distant memory. What remained in that memory’s place was a bleak wall done up in variations of carbonaceous sediment.

  Into this structure’s supporting arches had been built various places of business: lockups for hire, warehouses, wine cellars, car-repair establishments. But one of the arches created a tunnel through which ran a single lane that was Shand Street. The north part of this street served as the address of several small businesses closed at this hour of the morning and the south part of it—the longer part—curved under the railway viaduct and disappeared into the darkness. The tunnel here was some sixty yards long, a place of deep shadows whose cavernous roof was bandaged with corrugated steel plates from which water dripped, soundless against the consistent rumble of early morning trains heading into and out of London. More water ran down the walls, seeping from the rusty iron gutters at a height of eight feet, collecting in greasy pools below. The scent of urine made the tunnel’s air rank. Broken lights made its atmosphere chilling.

  When Lynley and Havers arrived, they found the tunnel completely sealed off at either end, with a constable at the Crucifix Lane end who—clipboard in hand—was restricting entrance. He had apparently met his match in the early representatives of the news media, however, those hungry journalists who monitored every police station’s patch in the hope of being first with a breaking story. Five of them had already assembled at the police barrier, and they were shouting questions into the tunnel. Three photographers accompanied them, creating strobe-like lighting as they shot above and around the constable who was trying vainly to control them. As Lynley and Havers showed their identification, the first of the television news vans pulled up, disgorging camera and soundmen onto the pavement as well. A media officer was needed desperately.

  “…serial killer?” Lynley heard one of the journalists call out as he crossed the barrier with Havers behind him.

  “…kid? Adult? Male? Female?”

  “Hang on, mate. Give us bloody something.”

  Lynley ignored them, Havers muttered, “Vultures,” and they moved in the direction of a low-slung, paintless, and abandoned sports car sitting midway through the tunnel. Here, they learned, the body had been discovered by a taxi driver on his way from Bermondsey to Heathrow, from which he would spend the day driving transatlantic fares into London for an exorbitant price made more exorbitant by the perennial tailback on the east side of the Hammersmith Flyover. That driver was long gone, his statement taken. In his place the SOCO team already worked, and a DI from the Borough High Street station waited for Lynley and Havers to join him. He was called Hogarth, he said, and his DCI had given the word to make no moves till someone from Scotland Yard checked out the crime scene. It was clear he wasn’t happy about that.

  Lynley couldn’t be troubled with unruffling the DI’s feathers. If this was indeed another victim of their serial killer, there would be far greater concerns than someone’s not liking having his patch invaded by New Scotland Yard.

  He said to Hogarth, “What have we got?” as he donned a pair of latex gloves handed over by one of the scenes-of-crime officers.

  “Black kid,” Hogarth replied. “Boy. Young. Twelve or thirteen? Hard to tell. Doesn’t fit the MO of the serial, you ask me. Don’t know why you lot got a call.”

  Lynley knew. The victim was black. Hillier was covering his well-tailored backside in advance of his next press briefing. “Let’s see him,” he said, and he stepped past Hogarth. Havers followed.

  The body had been deposited unceremoniously in the abandoned car, where the driver’s seat had over time disintegrated down to metal frame and springs. There, with its legs splayed out and its head lolling to one side, it joined Coke bottles, Styrofoam cups, carrier bags of rubbish, McDonald’s take-away containers, and a single rubber glove that lay on what had once been the rim of the car’s back window. The boy’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at what remained of the car’s rusted steering column, short dreadlocks springing out of his head. With smooth walnut skin and perfectly balanced features, he had been quite lovely. He was also naked.

  “Hell,” Havers murmured at Lynley’s side.

  “Young,” Lynley said. “He looks younger than the last. Christ, Barbara. Why in God’s name…“ He didn’t finish, letting the unanswerable go unasked. He felt Havers’ glance graze him.

  She said with a prescience that came from working with him for years, “There’re no guarantees. No matter what you do. Or what you decide. Or how. Or with whom.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “There are never guarantees. But he’s still somebody’s son. All of them were that. We can’t forget it.”

  “Think he’s one of ours?”

  Lynley took a closer look at the boy, and upon a first glance, he found himself agreeing with Hogarth. While the victim was naked as had been Kimmo Thorne, his body clearly had been dumped without ceremony and not laid out like all the others. He had no piece of tatting as a modesty wrap on his genitalia, and there was no distinguishing mark on his forehead, both additional features of Kimmo Thorne’s body. His abdomen did not appear to be incised, but perhaps more important, the position of the body itself suggested haste and a lack of planning that were uncharacteristic of the other murders.

  As the SOCO team moved round him with their evidence bags and collection kits, Lynley made a closer inspection. This proved to tell him a more complete tale. He said, “Have a look at this, Barbara,” as he gently lifted one of the boy’s hands. The flesh was deeply burned, and the marks of a restraint dug into the wrist.

  There was much about any serial killing that was known only by its perpetrator, held back by the police for the dual reason of protecting the victims’ families from unnecessarily heartbreaking knowledge and of winnowing out false confessions from the attention seekers who plagued any investigation. In this particular case, there was much that still remained police knowledge only, and both the burns and the restraints were part of that knowledge.

  Havers said, “That’s a pretty good indication of what’s what, isn’t it?”

  “It is.” Lynley straightened up and glanced over to Hogarth. “He’s one of ours,” he said. “Where’s the pathologist?”

  “Been and gone,” Hogarth replied. “Photographer and videographer as well. We’ve just been waiting for you lot before we clear him out of here.”

  The rebuke was implied. Lynley ignored it. He asked for the time of death, for any witnesses, for the taxi driver’s statement.

  “Pathologist’s given us a time of death between ten and midnight,” Hogarth said. “No witnesses to anything so far as we can tell, but that’s not surprising, is it. Not a place you’d find anyone with brains after dark.”

  “As for the taxi driver?”

  Hogarth consulted an envelope that he took from his jacket pocket. It evidently did duty as his notepad. He read off the name of the driver, his address, and the number of his mobile phone. He’d had no fare with him, the DI added, and the Shand Street tunnel was part of his regular route to work. “Goes past between five and half past every morning,” Hogarth told them. “Said this”—with a nod at the abandoned car—“has been here for months. Complained about it more’n once, he said. Bang
ed on about how it’s asking for trouble when Traffic Division can’t seem to get round to—” Hogarth’s attention went from Lynley to the Crucifix Lane end of the tunnel. He frowned. “Who’s this? You lot expecting a colleague?”

  Lynley turned. A figure was coming along the tunnel towards them, backlit from the lights for the television cameras that were rolling in the street. There was something familiar about the shape of him: big and bulky, with a slight stoop to the shoulders.

  Havers was saying cautiously, “Sir, isn’t that…” when Lynley himself realised who it was. He drew in a breath so sharp that he felt its pressure beat within his eyes. The interloper on the crime scene was Hillier’s profiler, Hamish Robson, and there could be only one way he’d gained access to the tunnel.

  Lynley didn’t hesitate before striding towards the man. He took Robson by the arm without preamble. “You need to leave at once,” he said. “I don’t know how you managed to cross that barrier, but you’ve no business here, Dr. Robson.”

  Robson was clearly surprised by the greeting. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the barrier through which he’d just come. He said, “I had a phone call from Assistant—”

  “I’ve no doubt of that. But the assistant commissioner was out of order. I want you to clear out. Immediately.”

  Behind his glasses, Robson’s eyes assessed. Lynley could feel the evaluation going on. He could read the profiler’s conclusion as well: subject experiencing understandable stress. True enough, Lynley thought. Each time the serial killer struck, the bar would be raised. Robson hadn’t seen stress yet, compared to what he’d see if the killer snuffed out someone else before the police got to him.

  Robson said, “I can’t pretend to know what’s going on between you and AC Hillier. But now that I’m here, I might be of use to you if I have a look. I’ll keep my distance. There’s no risk I’ll contaminate your crime scene. I’ll wear what you need me to wear: gloves, overalls, cap, whatever. Now I’m here, use me. I can help you if you’ll let me.”

  “Sir…?” Havers spoke.

  Lynley saw that from the opposite end of the tunnel, a trolley had been wheeled, the body bag upon it ready to be used. A SOCO team member stood with paper bags prepared for the victim’s hands. All that was required was a nod from Lynley and part of the problem engendered by Robson’s presence would be taken care of: There would be nothing for him to see.

  Havers said, “Ready?”

  Robson said quietly, “I’m already here. Forget how and why. Forget Hillier altogether. For God’s sake, use me.”

  The man’s voice was as kind as it was insistent, and Lynley knew there was truth in what he said. He could hold rigidly to the arrangement he’d negotiated with Hillier or he could use the moment and refuse to let it mean anything else than simply that: seizing an opportunity in front of him, one that presented a chance to have a bit more insight into the mind of a killer.

  Abruptly, he said to the team members waiting to bag the body, “Hang on for a moment.” And then to Robson, “Have a look, then.”

  Robson nodded, murmured, “Good man,” and approached the paintless car. He went no closer than four feet from it and when he wanted to examine the hands, he did not touch them but rather asked DI Hogarth to do it. For his part, Hogarth shook his head in disbelief but cooperated. Having Scotland Yard there at all was bad enough; having a civilian on the scene was unthinkable. He lifted the hands with an expression that said the world had gone mad.

  After several minutes of contemplation, Robson returned to Lynley’s side. He said first what Lynley and Havers had themselves said, “So young. God. This can’t be easy for any of you. No matter what you’ve seen in your careers.”

  “It isn’t,” Lynley said.

  Havers came to join them. By the car, the preparations began for transferring the body onto the trolley, to remove it for postmortem examination.

  Robson said, “There’s a change. Things are escalating now. You can see he’s treated the body completely differently: no covering of the genitals, no respectful positioning. There’s no regret at all, no psychic restitution. Instead, there’s a real need to humiliate the boy: legs spread out, genitalia exposed, seated with the rubbish deposited by vagrants. His interaction with this boy prior to death was unlike his interactions with the others. With them, something occurred to stir him to regret. With this boy, that didn’t happen. Rather, its opposite did. Not regret, then, but pleasure. And pride in the accomplishment as well. He’s confident now. He’s sure he won’t be caught.”

  Havers said, “How can he think that? He’s put this kid on a public street, for God’s sake.”

  “That’s just the point.” Robson gestured to the far end of the tunnel, where Shand Street opened up to the small businesses that lined it in a few dozen yards of South London redevelopment that took the form of modern brick buildings with decorative security gates in front of them. “He’s placed the body where he could easily have been seen doing so.”

  “Couldn’t you argue the same of the other locations?” Lynley asked.

  “You could do, but consider this. In the other locations, there was far less risk for him. He could have used something no witness would question as he transported the body from his vehicle to the dump site: a wheelbarrow, for example, a large duffel bag, a street sweeper’s trolley. Anything that wouldn’t seem out of place in that particular area. All he had to do was get the body from his vehicle to the dump site itself, and under cover of darkness, using that reasonable means of transport, he’d be fairly safe. But here, he’s out in the open the moment he puts the body into that derelict car. And he didn’t just dump it there, Superintendent. It only looks dumped. But make no mistake. He arranged it. And he was confident he wouldn’t be caught at his work.”

  “Cocky bastard,” Havers muttered.

  “Yes. He’s proud of what he’s been able to accomplish. I expect he’s somewhere nearby even now, watching all the activity he’s managed to provoke and enjoying every bit of it.”

  “What d’you make of the missing incision? The fact that he didn’t mark the forehead. Can we conclude he’s backing off now?”

  Robson shook his head. “I expect the missing incision merely means that, for him, this killing was different to the others.”

  “Different in what way?”

  “Superintendent Lynley?” It was Hogarth, who’d been supervising the transfer of the body from the car to the trolley. He’d stopped the action prior to the body bag being zipped round the corpse. “You might want a look at this.”

  They went back to him. He was gesturing to the boy’s midsection. There, what had been obscured before by the body’s slumped position in the seat was visible now that it was stretched on the trolley. While the incision from sternum to navel had indeed not been made on this most recent victim, the navel itself had been removed. Their killer had taken another souvenir.

  That he’d done so after death was evident in the lack of blood from the wound. That he’d done so in anger—or possibly in haste—was evident in the slash across the stomach. Deep and uneven, it provided access to the navel, which a pair of secateurs or scissors had then removed.

  “Souvenir,” Lynley said.

  “Psychopath,” Robson added. “I suggest you post surveillance at all the previous crime scenes, Superintendent. He’s likely to return to any one of them.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FU WAS CAREFUL WITH THE RELIQUARY. HE CARRIED IT before Him like a priest with a chalice and set it down on a tabletop. Gently, He removed the lid. A vaguely putrescent odour wafted upward, but He found that the smell did not bother Him nearly as much as it had done at first. The scent of decay would fade soon enough. But the achievement would be there forever.

  He looked down upon the relics, satisfied. There were two of them now, nestling like shells in a rain cloud. With the slightest of shakes, the cloud subsumed them, and that was the beauty of where He’d placed them. The relics were gone, but still they we
re there, like something hidden within the altar of a church. In fact, the activity of reverently moving the reliquary from one place to another was indeed just like being in a church, but without the social restrictions that churchgoing always placed upon members of the congregation.

  You’ll sit up straight. You’ll stop the fidgeting. D’you need a lesson in how to behave? When you’re told to kneel, you do it, boy. Put your palms together. God damn it. Pray.

  Fu blinked. The voice. At once distant and present, telling him a maggot had slunk into his head. In through His ear and onward to His brain. He’d been less than careful, and the thought of church had given it entry at last. A snicker initially. Then an outright laugh. Then the echo of pray, pray and pray.

  And, Finally looking for a job, are you? Where d’you expect to find one, stupid git? And you get out of the way, Charlene, or do you want some of this for yourself?

  It was yammer and yammer. It was shout and shout. It sometimes went on for hours at a time. He’d thought He’d finally rid Himself of the worm, but thinking of church had been His mistake.

  I want you out of this house, you hear? Sleep in a doorway if that’s what it takes. Or don’t you have the bottle for that?

  You drove her there, blast you. You did her in.

  Fu squeezed His eyes shut. He reached out blindly. His hands found an object, and His fingers felt buttons. He pushed them indiscriminately until sound roared forth.

  He found Himself staring at the television set, where a picture came into focus as the voice of the maggot faded away. It took Him a moment to understand what He was looking at: The morning news was assaulting His ears.

  Fu gazed at the screen. Things began to make sense. A female reporter with wind-tousled hair stood in front of a police barricade. Behind her, the black arch of the Shand Street tunnel gaped like the upper jaw of Hades, and deep within that piss-scented cavern, temporary lights illuminated the back end of the abandoned Mazda.