With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  Ulrike told him what little she knew. As far as she understood, Reverend Savidge’s foster son Sean Lavery had been at Colossus as usual on the previous day and had left as usual on his regular bus. She’d heard nothing contrary to that from his computer instructor, and his instructor hadn’t reported him as absent, which he definitely would have done because Sean had come to them via a social worker, and Colossus always kept in touch.

  Where the hell was he, then? Reverend Savidge demanded. There were boys going missing all over London. Was Ulrike Ellis aware of that? Or did it not count to her if the boy in question happened to be black?

  Ulrike assured him that she’d speak with the computer instructor the first chance she had but in the meantime…Had Reverend Savidge phoned round to see if Sean had perhaps gone home with a friend? Or gone to his dad’s? Or gone to see his mum? She was still in Holloway, wasn’t she, which wasn’t a particularly difficult trip for a boy Sean’s age to make. Sometimes boys do just go off for a bit, she’d said to Savidge.

  He said, “Not this boy, madam,” and he rang off abruptly.

  Ulrike said, “Oh Lord,” and Lynley knew it was a prayer.

  He said one himself. Reverend Savidge’s next call, Lynley reckoned, was going to be to his local police.

  ONLY ONE OF THE two detectives left the building after the phone call from Reverend Savidge. The other—the unattractive woman with the chipped front teeth and the ridiculous red high-top trainers—remained behind. The man, Detective Superintendent Lynley, was going to head up to South Hampstead to talk to Sean Lavery’s foster father. His subordinate, Detective Constable Barbara Havers, was going to hang round as long as it was necessary to have a word with Griffin Strong. Ulrike Ellis processed all this in a matter of seconds once the cops had finished with her: Lynley asked for Bram Savidge’s address; Havers asked could she have a wander round the premises, the better to manage a word here and there.

  Ulrike knew she could hardly say no. Things were bad enough without her being anything less than cooperative. So she agreed to the constable’s request. For no matter what had happened beyond the walls of this place, Colossus and what Colossus represented were larger than the life of one boy or a dozen boys.

  But even as she reassured herself that Colossus would emerge unscathed from this setback, Ulrike worried about Griff. He should have shown up at least two hours ago, no matter what she’d told the cops about the putative delivery of T-shirts and sweatshirts. The fact that he hadn’t…

  There was nothing to do but phone him on his mobile and warn him what to expect when he arrived. She wouldn’t be blatant about it, however. She didn’t trust the security of mobile phones. Instead she would tell him to meet her at the Charlie Chaplin pub. Or in the shopping centre up on the corner. Or at one of the market stalls just outside. Or even in the subway that led to the underground station because what did it matter when what was important was simply that they meet so she could warn him…Of what? she asked herself. And why?

  Her chest was hurting. It had been hurting for days, but it had suddenly become worse. Did one have heart attacks at thirty years old? When she’d squatted in front of the filing drawer, she’d experienced a combination of light-headedness and increased chest pain that nearly overcame her. She’d thought she would swoon. God. Swoon. Where had that word come from?

  Ulrike told herself to stop it. She picked up the phone and dialed for an outside line. When she had it, she tapped in the number of Griff Strong’s mobile. She’d interrupt him doing whatever he was doing, but that couldn’t be helped.

  Griff said, “Yes?,” on the other end. He sounded impatient, and what was that about? He worked at Colossus. She was his boss. Deal with it, Griff.

  She said, “Where are you?”

  He said, “Ulrike…” in a voice whose tone was a message in itself.

  But the fact he’d used her name told her he was in a place of safety. She said, “The police have been. I can’t say more. We need to meet before you get here.”

  “Police?” His previous impatience was gone. Ulrike could hear the fear that replaced it. She herself felt a corresponding frisson.

  She said, “Two detectives. One of them is still in the building. She’s waiting for you.”

  “For me? Shall I—”

  “No. You must come in. If you don’t…Look, let’s not have this conversation on a mobile. How soon can you meet at…say, at Charlie Chaplin?” And then because it was more than reasonable, “Where are you?,” so she could determine how long it would take him to get there.

  Even the thought of the police at Colossus didn’t put Griffin off his stride, however. He said, “Fifteen minutes.”

  Not at home, then. But she’d deduced that much when he’d said her name. She knew she wouldn’t get anything more from him.

  “Charlie Chaplin, then,” she said. “Fifteen minutes.” She rang off.

  What remained was the waiting. That and wondering what the constable was doing as she had her ostensible look round the premises. Ulrike had determined in a flash that it benefitted Colossus for the DC to have this look unattended. Allowing her to wander freely sent a message about Colossus having nothing to hide.

  But Lord, Lord, her chest was pounding. Her cornrow plaits were far too tight. She knew if she pulled on one of them, the whole lot would detach from her scalp, rendering her bald. What did they call it? Stress causing one’s hair to fall out? Alopecia, that was it. Was there something called spontaneous alopecia? Probably. She’d be afflicted with that next.

  She got up from her desk. From a rack next to the door, she plucked her coat, her scarf, and her hat. She slung these over her arm and left her office. She ducked down the corridor and slid into the loo.

  There she prepared. She wore no makeup, so there was nothing to check save the condition of her skin, which she blotted with toilet tissue. Her cheeks bore the faint pockmarks of an adolescence given over to outbreaks of acne, but she felt it was an overt mark of self-absorption to use some sort of foundation to cover them. That smacked of a lack of self-acceptance and sent the wrong message to the board of trustees who’d hired her for the strength of her character.

  Which was what she was going to need if Colossus was to get through this bad period. Strength. Plans had long been laid for the organisation’s expansion to a second location—this one in North London—and the last thing the development committee needed over at the administration and fund-raising offices was the news that Colossus was being mentioned in the same sentence as a murder investigation. That would bring expansion to a screeching halt, and they needed to expand. The urgency was everywhere. Kids in care. Kids on the street. Kids selling their bodies. Kids dying from drugs. Colossus had the answer for them, so Colossus had to be able to grow. The entire situation they were in at the moment had to be dealt with expeditiously.

  She had no lipstick, but she did carry gloss. She rooted this out of her bag and smoothed it across her lips. She adjusted the neck of her sweater a bit higher and shrugged on her coat. She put on the hat and the scarf and decided she looked enough like a supervisor to get through the meeting with Griffin Strong without being accused of personifying carpe diem in the worst possible way. This was about Colossus, she reminded herself and would remind Griff when she finally saw him. Everything else was secondary.

  BARBARA HAVERS WASN’T about to cool her heels in her wait for Griffin Strong. Instead, after she told Ulrike Ellis that she’d “poke round a bit, if no one minds,” she left the director’s office to do so before Ulrike could assign her a watchdog. She then had a proper wander round the building, which was filling up with Colossus participants newly returned from late lunch, from cigarettes in the carpark, or from whatever dubious else they’d been doing. She watched them drift off to various activities: Some went to a computer room, some to a large educational kitchen, some to small classrooms, some to a conference room where they sat in a circle and talked earnestly, overseen by an adult who documented their ideas or concer
ns on a flip chart. The adults in question Barbara took close note of. She would need to get the name of each one. Each one’s past—not to mention his present—would have to be checked out. Just because. Grunt work, all of it, but it had to be done.

  She got aggro from no one as she had her wander. Most everyone simply and in some cases studiously ignored her. Eventually, she made her way into the computer room, where a mixed bag of adolescents appeared to be working on Web designs and a tubby male instructor round Barbara’s own age was guiding an Asian youth through the use of a scanner. When he said, “You try it this time,” and stepped away, he saw Barbara and came over to her.

  “Help you?” he said quietly. He kept it friendly enough, but there was no disguising the fact that he knew who she was and what she was there for. The news was apparently traveling at a jackrabbit pace.

  “Grass doesn’t grow here, does it?” Barbara said. “Who’s spreading the word? That bloke Jack in reception?”

  “It would be part of his job,” the man replied. He introduced himself as Neil Greenham, and he offered his hand to shake. It was soft, feminine, and a little too warm. He went on to say that Jack’s information had been largely unnecessary. “I would have known you were a cop anyway.”

  “Personal experience? Clairvoyance? My fashion sense?”

  “You’re famous. Well, relatively. As these things go.” Greenham went to a teacher’s desk in one corner of the room. From there, he took a folded newspaper. He returned to her and handed it over. “I picked up the latest Evening Standard on my way back from lunch. Like I said, you’re famous.”

  Curiously, Barbara unfolded it. There on the front page, the headline shrieked the news of the early morning discovery in the Shand Street tunnel. Beneath it, were two photographs: One was a grainy picture of the tunnel’s interior, in which several figures round a sports car were silhouetted by the stark portable lights brought in by the SOCO team; the other was a fine, clear shot of Barbara herself, along with Lynley, Hamish Robson, and the local DI, as they spoke outside the tunnel and in view of the press. Only Lynley was identified by name. There was, Barbara thought, little blessing in that.

  She handed the paper back to Greenham. “DC Havers,” she said. “New Scotland Yard.”

  He nodded at the paper. “Don’t you want that for your scrapbook?”

  “I’ll buy three dozen on my way home tonight. Could we have a word?”

  He gestured to the classroom and the young people at work. “I’m in the middle of something. Can it wait?”

  “They look like they’re coping without you.”

  Greenham ran his gaze over them as if checking for the truth of this statement. He gave a nod then and indicated they could speak in the corridor.

  “One of yours is gone missing,” Barbara told him. “Have you heard that yet? Has Ulrike told you?”

  Greenham’s eyes shifted from Barbara to the corridor; he looked in the direction of Ulrike Ellis’s office. Here, Barbara thought, was a piece of news that apparently hadn’t traveled on the jackrabbit express. And that was curious, considering Ulrike’s telephone promise to Reverend Savidge to talk to the computer instructor about the newly missing boy.

  Greenham said, “Sean Lavery?”

  “Bingo.”

  “He just hasn’t come in yet today.”

  “Aren’t you meant to report him?”

  “At the end of the day, yes. He could merely be late.”

  “As the Evening Standard’s pointing out, a dead boy was found in the London Bridge area round half past five this morning.”

  “Sean?”

  “We don’t know yet. But if it is, that’s two.”

  “Kimmo Thorne as well. The same killer, you mean. Serial…”

  “Ah. Someone does read the newspapers round here. I was getting a little curious about that, why no one seemed to know Kimmo’s dead. You knew, but you didn’t talk about it with any of the others?”

  Greenham shifted weight from one leg onto the other. He said, sounding not too comfortable about the admission, “There’s a bit of a divide. Ulrike and the assessment people on one side; the rest of us on the other.”

  “And Kimmo was still at the assessment level.”

  “Right.”

  “Yet you knew him.”

  Greenham wasn’t about to be caught by the undercurrent of accusation in the remark. He said, “I knew who he was. But who wouldn’t have known who Kimmo was? Cross-dresser? Eye shadow, lipstick? He was hard to miss and harder to forget, if you know what I mean. So it wasn’t only me. Everyone knew Kimmo five minutes after he walked through the door.”

  “And this other kid? Sean?”

  “Loner. A bit hostile. Didn’t want to be here, but he was willing to give computers a try. In time, I think we could’ve got through.”

  “Past tense,” Barbara said.

  Greenham’s upper lip looked damp. “That body…”

  “We don’t know who it is.”

  “I suppose I assumed…with you here and all…”

  “Not a good idea, assuming.” Barbara took out her notebook. She saw the look of alarm pass across Greenham’s pudgy face. She said, “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Greenham.”

  He recovered quickly. “Address? Education? Background? Hobbies? Do I kill adolescent boys in my spare time?”

  “Start with how you fit in the hierarchy round here.”

  “There is no hierarchy.”

  “You said there was a divide. Ulrike and assessment on one side. Everyone else on the other. How did that come about?”

  He said, “You misunderstand. The divide has to do with information and how it’s shared. That’s all. Otherwise, we’re all on the same page at Colossus. We’re about saving kids. That’s what we do.”

  Barbara nodded thoughtfully. “Tell that to Kimmo Thorne. How long have you been here?”

  “Four years,” he replied.

  “And before?”

  “I’m a teacher. I worked in North London.” He gave the name of a primary school in Kilburn. Before she could ask, he told her he’d left that employment because he’d come to realise he preferred to work with older children. He added that he’d also had issues with the head teacher. When Barbara asked what sort of issues, he told her forthrightly that they were about discipline.

  “Which side of the fence did you happen to reside on?” Barbara asked. “Sparing and spoiling or as the twig is bent?”

  “You’re rather full of clichés, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a walking encyclopaedia of them. So…?”

  “It wasn’t corporal punishment,” he told her. “It was classroom discipline: the removal of privileges, a thorough talking to, a brief spate of social ostracism. That sort of thing.”

  “Public ridicule? A day in the stocks?”

  He coloured. “I’m trying to be frank with you. You’ll phone them up, I know. They’re going to tell you we had our differences. But that’s only natural. People are always of different opinions.”

  “Right,” Barbara said. “Well, we all have those, don’t we, our different opinions? You have them here as well? Difference of opinions leading to conflicts leading to…Who knows what? Perhaps the divide you mentioned?”

  “I’ll repeat the point I tried to make before. We’re all on the same page. Colossus is about the kids. The more people you talk to, the more you’re going to understand that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I see that Yusuf needs my help.” He left her then, returning to his classroom where the Asian boy was bent over the scanner looking as if he wished to hammer it. Barbara knew the feeling.

  She left Greenham to his students. Her further exploration of the premises—still unimpeded—took her to the very back of the building. There she found the kit room where a group of kids were being set up with appropriate dress and equipment for winter kayaking on the Thames. Robbie Kilfoyle—he of the earlier cardplaying and the Euro-Disney baseball cap—had them lined up, and he was measuring them for wetsuits, a row of w
hich hung along one wall. He’d pulled life jackets from a shelf as well, and those who were done being measured were sorting through these, finding one that fitted. Conversation among them was muted. It appeared they’d all finally got the word: either about Kimmo Thorne or about the cops asking questions.

  Kilfoyle dismissed them to the game room when they had their wet suits and their life jackets. Wait there for Griffin Strong, he told them. He would be assisting their assessment leader on the river trip, and he was going to grouse about it if he didn’t find them all ready when he showed up. Then, as they filed out, Kilfoyle went on to sort through a mound of Wellingtons piled on the floor. He began to pair them and slide them onto shelves that were marked with sizes. He gave Barbara a nod of recognition. “Still here?” he said.

  “As ever. Seems we’re all waiting for Griffin Strong.”

  “Truth to that, all right.” There was an airiness to his voice suggesting double meanings. Barbara took note.

  “Volunteer here long?” she asked him.

  Kilfoyle thought about that one. “Two years?” he said. “Bit more. Something like twenty-nine months.”

  “What about before that?”

  He gave her a look, one that said he knew this was no simple chat on her part. “This’s my first spate of volunteering anywhere.”

  “Why?”

  “Which? The first-time part or the volunteering-at-all part?”

  “Volunteering at all.”

  He stopped his work, a set of Wellingtons in his hand. “I do their sandwich deliveries, like I said in reception. That’s how I met them. I could see they needed help because—between you and me—they pay their actual employees shit, so they can never find enough help or keep them long when they do find them. I started hanging about after my lunch deliveries were done for the day. Doing this, doing that, and hey, presto, I was a volunteer.”

  “Nice of you.”

  He shrugged. “Good cause. Besides, I’d like to be taken on eventually.”