That was the irony about police work. Care too little and more people died. Care too much and you couldn’t catch their killer.
“I’D LIKE A WORD,” Lynley said. “Now.” He didn’t add sir and he made no real effort to modulate his voice. Had he been present, Hamish Robson no doubt would have taken note of everything his tone implied about aggression and the need to settle a score, but Lynley didn’t care about that. They’d negotiated an arrangement. Hillier hadn’t upheld it.
The AC had just concluded a meeting with Stephenson Deacon. The head of the Press Bureau had left Hillier’s office looking as grim as Lynley felt. Things were obviously not going smoothly at that end of things, and for a moment Lynley took a perverse pleasure in this. The thought of Hillier eventually dangling in the wind of the Press Bureau’s machinations before a pack of baying journalists was deeply gratifying just now.
Hillier said, as if he hadn’t spoken, “Where the hell is Nkata? We’ve a meeting with the media coming up and I want him here in advance.” He gathered up an array of papers spread out on his conference table and shoved them at an underling who was still seated there, having attended the meeting that had gone on prior to Lynley’s arrival. He was a razor-thin twentysomething in John Lennon spectacles who was continuing to take notes as he apparently tried to avoid becoming the focus of Hillier’s exasperation. “They’re on to colour,” the AC said curtly. “So who the hell over there”—he jerked his finger in what Lynley decided was supposed to be a southerly direction, meaning south of the river, meaning the Shand Street tunnel—“leaked that bit to those predators? I want to know and I want that bugger’s head on a dish. You, Powers.”
The underling jumped to, leaning in to say, “Sir? Yes, sir?”
“Get that halfwit Rodney Aronson on the phone. He’s running The Source these days, and the colour question came in by phone from someone on that rotten little rag. Trace it back to us that way. Put pressure on Aronson. On anyone else you come across as well. I want every leak plugged by the end of the day. Get on to it.”
“Sir.” Powers scooted from the room.
Hillier went to his desk. He picked up the phone and punched in a few numbers, either oblivious of or indifferent to Lynley’s presence and his state of mind. Unbelievably, he began to book himself a massage.
Lynley felt as if battery acid were running through his veins. He strode across the room to Hillier’s desk, and he pushed the button to disconnect the AC from his phone call. Hillier snapped, “What the bloody hell do you think you’re—”
“I said I want a word,” Lynley cut in. “You and I had an arrangement, and you’ve violated it.”
“Do you know who you’re talking to?”
“Only too well. You brought Robson in as window dressing, and I allowed it.”
Hillier’s florid face went crimson. “No one bloody allows—”
“Our agreement was that I would decide what he saw and what he didn’t see. He had no business at anyone’s crime scene, but there he was, given access. There’s only one way that sort of thing happens.”
“That’s right,” Hillier said. “Keep it in mind. There’s only one way anything happens round here and you are not that way. I’ll decide who has access to what, when, and how, Superintendent, and if it comes to me that it might advance the investigation by having the Queen turn up to shake hands with the corpse, then prepare yourself to tug your forelock because her Roller’s going to drop her off for a look. Robson’s part of the team. Cope with it.”
Lynley was incredulous. One moment the assistant commissioner was frothing at the mouth about locating leaks within the investigation; the next moment he was happily welcoming a potential snout right into their midst. But the problem went beyond what Hamish Robson might deliberately or inadvertently reveal to the media. He said, “Had it occurred to you that you’re putting this man at risk? That you’re exposing him to danger just for the hell of it? You’re making yourself look good at his expense, and if anything goes wrong, it’s down to the Met. Have you thought of that?”
“You’re so far out of order—”
“Answer my question!” Lynley said. “There’s a killer out there who’s taken five lives, and for all we know he was standing behind the barrier this morning, among the gawkers, taking note of everyone who came and went.”
“You’re being hysterical,” Hillier said. “Get out of this office. I’ve no intention of listening to you rant like a common lout. If you can’t handle the pressure of this case, then take yourself off it. Or I’ll do it for you. Now where the hell is Nkata? He’s meant to be here when I talk to the press.”
“Are you listening to me? Have you any idea…” Lynley wanted to pound his fist on the top of the AC’s desk, just to feel something beyond outrage for a moment. He tried to calm himself. He lowered his voice. “Listen to me, sir. It’s one thing for a killer to mark one of us. That’s part of the risk we face when we take the job. But to put someone in the sight lines of a psychopath just to protect your political backside—”
“That’s enough!” Hillier looked apoplectic. “That’s bloody well enough. I’ve put up with your insolence for years but you’re so far out of order at this point…” He came round the desk, stopping within three inches of Lynley. “Get out of this office,” he hissed. “Get back to work. For the moment, we’re going to pretend this conversation never happened. You’re going to go about your business, you’re going to obey every order that comes in your direction, you’re going to get to the bottom of this mess, and you’re going to make a prompt arrest. After that”—here Hillier poked Lynley’s chest and Lynley’s vision went red although he managed to restrain himself from reacting—“we’ll decide what’s going to happen to you. Have I made myself clear? Yes? Good. Now get back to work and get a result.”
Lynley allowed the AC the last word although it felt like swallowing poison to do so. He turned on his heel and left Hillier to his political scheming. He used the stairs to descend to the incident room, cursing himself for thinking he could make a difference in Hillier’s way of doing business. He needed to keep his focus on matters that counted, he realised, and the AC’s use of Hamish Robson was going to have to be eliminated from that list.
All the members of the murder squad were in the picture with regard to the Shand Street tunnel body, and when Lynley joined them it was to find them as subdued as he expected. All counted, they numbered thirty-three now: from the constables on the street to the secretaries keeping track of all the reports and relevant documentation. Being defeated by a single individual when they had the power of the Met behind them—with everything from sophisticated communications systems and CCTV films to forensic labs and databases—was more than disheartening. It was humiliating. And worse, it had failed to stop a killer.
So they were much subdued when Lynley entered. The only noise among them was the tapping of computer keys. That too ceased when Lynley said quietly, “What’s the form?”
DI John Stewart spoke from one of his multicoloured outlines. Triangulating the crime scenes wasn’t proving fruitful, he said. The killer was, literally, all over the London map. This suggested a confident knowledge of the city, which in turn suggested someone whose day job would give him that knowledge.
“Taxi driver comes to mind, obviously,” Stewart said. “Minicab driver. Bus driver as well, since not one body site is particularly far off a bus route either.”
“The profiler’s saying he’s working a job below his ability,” Lynley acknowledged, although he was loath even to mention Hamish Robson after his contretemps with Hillier.
“Courier works as well,” one of the DCs pointed out. “Riding round on a motorbike’d give you the Knowledge as good as studying to drive a black cab.”
“Even a bicycle,” someone else said.
“But, then, where does the van come in?”
“Personal transport? He doesn’t use it for his job?”
“What do we have on the van?” Lynley asked.
“Who talked to the St. George’s Gardens witness?”
A team two constable spoke up. Careful massaging of the witness had initially gleaned nothing, but she’d phoned in late last night with a sudden memory, which, she said, she hoped was a real memory and not a combination of imagination and her desire to help the police. At any rate, she felt she could say with confidence that it was a full-size van they were looking for. It had faded white lettering on the side, suggesting it was or had once been a business van.
“Confirmation for the Ford Transit, essentially,” Stewart said. “We’re working with the DVLA list, looking for a red one that belongs to a business.”
“And?” Lynley said.
“Takes time, Tommy.”
“We haven’t got time.” Lynley heard the agitation in his voice and he knew the others heard it as well. He was reminded at the worst possible moment that he wasn’t Malcolm Webberly, that he didn’t possess the former superintendent’s calm, nor his steady approach when under pressure. He saw in the faces gathered round him that the other officers were thinking this as well. He said more evenly, “Move forward on that front, John. The moment you’ve got something, I’ll want to know.”
“As to that…,” Stewart hadn’t made eye contact at Lynley’s outburst, instead making a notation that he underscored three times partway down his precise outline. “We’ve got two sources from the Net. For the ambergris oil.”
“Only two?”
“It’s not your everyday purchase.” The two sources were in opposite directions: a shop called Crystal Moon on Gabriel’s Wharf—
“That’s a south-of-the-river location for us,” someone noted hopefully.
—and a stall in Camden Lock Market called Wendy’s Cloud. Someone would need to suss out each place.
“Barbara lives up in the Camden Lock area,” Lynley said. “She can deal with that. Winston can…Where is he, by the way?”
“Hiding from Dave the Knave, probably,” was the reply, an irreverent reference to Hillier. “He’s started getting fan mail from the telly watchers, has Winnie. All those lonely birds looking for a man with promise.”
“Is he in the building?”
No one knew. “Get him on his mobile. Havers as well.”
As he spoke, Barbara Havers arrived. Winston Nkata followed in her wake seconds later. The others greeted them with tension-diffusing hoots and ribald greetings that suggested their dual advent had a personal explanation behind it.
Havers gave them two fingers. “Sod you lot,” she said affably. “I’m surprised to find you outside of the canteen.”
For his part, Nkata merely said, “Sorry. Trying to track down a social worker for the Salvatore boy.”
“Success?” Lynley asked.
“Sod all.”
“Keep with it. Hillier’s looking for you, by the way.”
Nkata scowled. He said, “Got something on Jared Salvatore from Peckham police.” He relayed all the information he’d gathered, while the others listened and made relevant notes. “Girlfriend said he was learning to cook somewhere, but the blokes at the station aren’t giving that credence,” he concluded.
“Have someone check the cookery schools,” Lynley told DI Stewart. Stewart nodded and made a note. Lynley said, “Havers? What about Kimmo Thorne?”
She said that everything they’d been told by Blinker and then by the Grabinskis and Reg Lewis in Bermondsey Market had checked out with the Borough police. She went on to add that Kimmo Thorne had evidently been involved in a programme called Colossus, which she called “Bunch of do-gooders south of the river.” She’d gone there to check out the place: a renovated manufacturing plant not far from the knot of streets that merged at Elephant and Castle. “They weren’t open yet,” Havers concluded. “The place was locked up tight, but there were some kids hanging about, waiting for someone to show up and let them in.”
“What did they give you?” Lynley asked her.
“Not a bloody thing,” Havers said. “I said, ‘You lot involved in this place?’ and they twigged I was a copper. That was that.”
“Look into it, then.”
“Will do, sir.”
Lynley filled them in, then, on what Hamish Robson had had to say about the latest killing. He didn’t tell them that the profiler had been sent to the scene by Hillier. There was no sense in getting them worked up about something over which they had no control. Thus, he mentioned the killer’s change in attitude towards the most recent victim and the indications that he could reappear at any of the crime scenes.
Hearing this, DI Stewart set about arranging surveillance at the body sites before he went on to another report: The officers who’d been slogging through all of the relevant CCTV tapes from the areas near the body-dump sites were continuing that tedious job. It wasn’t exactly gripping drama, but the constables in question were soldiering on, supported by vats of hot coffee. They were looking not only for a van but for another means of transporting a body from point A to point B, and one that wouldn’t necessarily be noticed by people living in the vicinity: milk float, street-sweeping trolley, and the like.
To this information, he added that they’d had a report from SO7 on the makeup worn by Kimmo Thorne. The brand was No. Seven, commonly sold at Boots. Did the superintendent want them to start observing all the CCTV films from the Boots outlets nearest Kimmo Thorne’s home? He didn’t sound thrilled with this possibility. Still, he pointed out, “That might give us something. Bloke at the till disapproving how the Thorne kid was bent and wanting to do him in? That sort of thing.”
Lynley didn’t want to count anything out at this point. So he gave the nod for Stewart to assign a team to get on to the security tapes from the Boots outlets in the vicinity of Kimmo Thorne’s Southwark home. He himself assigned the two outlets for oil of ambergris to Nkata and to Havers, telling Havers to look in on Wendy’s Cloud when she headed home at the end of the day. In the meantime, she would accompany him to Elephant and Castle. He was determined to see himself what could be gained from a call upon Colossus. If one of the boys had been associated with it, what was to say the rest of the victims—still unidentified—might not have been allied with it as well?
“Couldn’t this last’ve been a copycat killing?” Havers asked. “That’s something we haven’t talked about yet. I mean, I know how Robson explained the differences between this body and the others, but those differences could be owing to someone knowing something about the crime scene but not everything, right?”
That couldn’t be discounted, Lynley agreed. But the truth was that copycat killings came from information generated by the news media, and despite the fact that they had a leak somewhere in the investigation, he knew that it was a recent one. The press jumping on the fact that the latest body was black was evidence of that since there were far more sensational details to exploit on the front pages of the tabloids than that one. And Lynley knew how the media worked: They weren’t about to withhold something gruesome if it had the potential to sell another two hundred thousand copies of their papers. So indications were strong that they didn’t have anything gruesome on record yet, which suggested this killing wasn’t a copy of the earlier ones but rather another death in a line of similar deaths, all bearing the signature of a single killer.
That was the person they had to find, quickly. For Lynley was perfectly capable of making the psychological jump implied by everything Hamish Robson had told him that morning about the man they were looking for: If he’d treated this last body with contempt and without remorse, things were escalating now.
CHAPTER NINE
NKATA MANAGED TO DEPART VICTORIA STREET WITHOUT a run-in with Hillier. He’d had a message on his mobile from the AC’s secretary advising him of “Sir David’s wish to confer prior to the next press briefing,” but he decided to ignore it. Hillier no more wanted to confer with him than he wanted to be exposed to the Ebola virus, and that was a fact, one which Nkata had been reading between the lines of his every meeting with the
man. He was tired of being Hillier’s token nod-of-head to equal opportunities for minorities at the Met. He knew if he continued to play along with the propaganda, he was going to end up despising his profession, his associates, and himself. That wasn’t fair on anyone. So he escaped from New Scotland Yard directly upon the conclusion of the meeting in the incident room. He used oil of ambergris as his excuse.
He made his way across the river to Gabriel’s Wharf, an expensive square of riverfront tarmac which stood just beyond the midway point between two of the bridges that spanned the Thames: Waterloo and Blackfriars. It was a summertime kind of place, completely open to the air. Despite the cheery lights strung above it in crisscross fashion—and lit, even though it was still daylight—in winter the wharf was experiencing little custom. No one at all was doing business in the shop hiring out bicycles and inline skates, and while there were a few browsers in the small, ramshackle galleries that defined the wharf’s boundaries, the other enterprises were virtually deserted. These comprised restaurants and food stalls, which in summer would be hard pressed to keep up with the demand for the crepes, pizzas, sandwiches, jacket potatoes, and ices that were largely going ignored at present.
Nkata found Crystal Moon lodged between two take-aways: crepes on the left and sandwiches on the right. It was part of the eastern portion of the wharf, where shantylike shops and galleries backed right up to a line of tenements. The upper floors of these had long ago been painted with trompe l’oeil windows, each of a style so different from the last that the overall feeling was one of speeding round Europe on foot. Georgian London windows gave way within four paces to rococo Paris, which in turn faded fast to the doge’s Venice. It was nothing if not fanciful, in keeping with the wharf itself.
Crystal Moon maintained the whimsical atmosphere, inviting one to enter through a beaded curtain fashioned to look like a galaxy dominated by a slice of lunar green cheese. Nkata ducked through this and opened the door beyond it, expecting to be greeted inside by a pyramid- wearing hippie hopeful who called herself something like Aphrodite but whose real name was Kylie from Essex. Instead, he found a grandmotherly type seated on a tall stool next to the till. She was wearing a soft pink twin set and purple beads and she was leafing through a glossy magazine. A stick of incense burning next to her spread the scent of jasmine into the air.
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