With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  “Jesus, no. I just meant…You and I…” He made that gesture of his that was meant to seem boyish, the hand through the hair. It tousled nicely. He no doubt had it cut to do so. “I can’t think you want it getting about that you and I…Some things are best left private. So…” He flashed her that smile again. He looked over the top of her desk to the dates and the calendar. “What’re you up to? How’d the board meeting go, by the way?”

  “You’d better leave,” she told him.

  He looked confused. “Why?”

  “Because I’ve work to do. Your day may have ended, but mine has not.”

  “What’s wrong?” The boyish hand-to-hair again. She’d once thought it charming. She’d once seen it as an invitation to touch his hair herself. She’d reached to do so and she’d actually grown wet at the contact: her humble fingers, his glorious locks, prelude to both the kiss and the hungry pressure of his body against hers.

  She said, “Five of our boys are dead, Griff. Possibly six, because there’s another been found this morning. That’s what’s wrong.”

  “But there’s no connection.”

  “How can you say that? Five boys dead and what they all have in common besides trouble with the law is enrollment here.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “I know that. I meant this Dennis Butcher thing. There’s no connection. He wasn’t one of mine. I didn’t even know him. So you and I…well, no one’s going to need to know.”

  She stared at him. She wondered how she had failed to see…What was it about physical beauty? she asked herself. Did it make the beholder stupid as well as blind and deaf?

  She said, “Yes. Well.” And added, “Have a nice evening, won’t you,” and picked up her pen and bent her head to her work.

  He said her name once more, but she didn’t respond. And she didn’t look up as he left the office.

  But his message remained with her after he was gone. These murders had nothing to do with him. She thought about this. Couldn’t it also be the case that they had nothing to do with Colossus? And if that was the case, wasn’t it true that by attempting to root out a killer from the organisation, Ulrike was turning a spotlight upon all of them, encouraging the police to dig deeper into everyone’s background and movements? And if she did that, wasn’t she also thereby asking the police to ignore everything that could point to the real killer, who would go on killing as the fancy took him?

  The truth was that there had to be yet another connection among the boys, and it had to be a connection beyond Colossus. The police had so far failed to see this, but they would. They definitely would. Just so long as she held them off and kept their noses out of Elephant and Castle.

  NOT A SOUL was on the pavement when Lynley made the turn into Lady Margaret Road in Kentish Town. He parked in the first available space he came to, in front of an RC church on the corner, and he walked up the street in search of Havers. He found her smoking in front of Barry Minshall’s home. She said, “He called for the duty solicitor straightaway once I got him to the station,” and handed over a photo in a plastic evidence bag.

  Lynley looked at it. It was much as Havers had picturesquely described it on the phone to him. Sodomy and fellatio. The boy appeared to be about ten.

  Lynley felt ill. The child could be anyone, anywhere, anytime, and the men taking their pleasure from him were completely unidentifiable. But that would be the point, wouldn’t it. Satisfying the urge was all there was to monsters. To them, it was merely a case of hunter and prey. He gave the picture back to Havers and waited for his stomach to settle before he gazed at the house.

  Number 16 Lady Margaret Road was a sad affair, a brick-and-masonry building of three floors and a basement with every inch of its masonry and wood in need of paint. It had no formal house number attached to its door or to the squared-off columns that defined its front porch. Rather, 16 had been scrawled in marking pen on one of these pillars, along with the letters A, B, C, and D and the appropriate up and down arrows indicating where those respective flats could be found: in the basement or in the house proper. One of London’s great plane trees stood along the pavement, filling the small front garden with a covering of dead and decomposing leaves as thick as a mattress. The leaves obscured everything: from the sagging, low front wall of brick to the narrow path leading up to the steps, to the steps themselves: five of them which climbed to a blue front door. Two panels of translucent glass ran vertically up the middle half of this, one of them badly cracked and asking to be broken altogether. There was no knob, only a dead bolt surrounded by wood worn down by thousands of hands having pushed the door inward.

  Minshall lived in flat A, which was in the basement. Its means of access was down a flight of steps, round the side of the house, and along a narrow passage where rainwater pooled and mould grew at the base of the building. Just outside the door was a cage holding birds. Doves. They cooed softly at the human presence.

  Lynley had the warrants; Havers had the keys. She handed them over and let him do the honours. They stepped inside into utter darkness.

  Finding a light was a matter of stumbling through what seemed to be a sitting room that had been thoroughly turned over by a burglar. But when Havers said, “Got a light here, sir,” and switched on a dim bulb on a desk, Lynley saw that the condition of the place was due only to slovenly housekeeping.

  “What d’you reckon that smell is?” Havers asked.

  “Unwashed male, dodgy plumbing, semen, and poor ventilation.” Lynley donned latex gloves; she did the same. “That boy was here,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  “The one in the picture?”

  “Davey Benton. What’s Minshall claiming?”

  “He’s plugged it. I thought we’d get him on the CCTV cameras in the market, but the cops in Holmes Street told me they’re just for show. No film inside them. There’s a bloke there—he’s called John Miller—who could probably ID a photo of Davey, though. If he’ll talk at all.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “I think he’s bent himself. Towards underage boys. I got the impression if he fingers Minshall, Minshall fingers him. Scratch mine, scratch yours.”

  “Wonderful,” Lynley murmured grimly. He worked his way across the room and found another light by a sagging sofa. He switched it on and turned to look at what they had.

  “Pay dirt in a saucepan,” Havers said.

  He couldn’t disagree. A computer that doubtless had an Internet connection. A video player with racks of tapes beneath it. Magazines with graphic pictures of sex, others filled with S&M photos. Unwashed crockery. The paraphernalia of magic. They picked through this at different parts of the room till Havers said, “Sir? Do you make of these what I make of these? They were on the floor beneath the desk.”

  She was holding up what appeared to be several tea towels. They were stiffened in spots, as if they’d been used while sitting at the computer, for matters having nothing to do with drying plates and glasses.

  “He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” Lynley moved into what was a sleeping alcove, where a bed bore sheets of much the same appearance and condition as the tea towels. The place was a treasure trove of DNA evidence. If Minshall had engaged in his frolics with anyone other than his computer and the palm of his hand, there was going to be enough indication of that here to send him away for decades, if the anyone in question was an underage boy.

  On the floor next to the bed was yet another magazine, limp with someone’s continual inspection of it. Lynley picked it up and leafed through it quickly. Raw photos of women, nude, legs splayed. Come-hither looks, wet lips, fingers stimulating, entering, caressing. It was sex reduced to base release and nothing else. It depressed Lynley to his core.

  “Sir, I’ve got something.”

  Lynley returned to the sitting room, where Havers had been going through the desk. She’d found a stack of Polaroid pictures, which she handed over.

  They were not pornography. Instead, in each of them a different young boy was kitted
out in magician’s togs: cape, top hat, black trousers and shirt. Occasionally a wand under the arm for effect. They were all engaged in what seemed to be the same trick: something with scarves and a dove. There were thirteen of them altogether: white boys, black boys, mixed-race boys. Davey Benton was not among them. As for the others, the parents and relatives of the dead boys would have to look them over.

  “What’s he said about that photo in his van?” Lynley asked when he had flipped through the Polaroids a second time.

  “Doesn’t know how it got there,” Havers said. “Wasn’t him put it there. He’s completely innocent. It’s some mistake. Yadda yadda more yadda.”

  “He could be telling the truth.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Lynley looked round the flat. “So far there’s no child pornography in here.”

  “So far,” Havers said. She indicated the VCR and its accompanying cassettes. “You can’t tell me those videos are by Disney, sir.”

  “I’ll give you that. But tell me: Why would he have a photo in his van and none where it’s infinitely safer for him to have it: here inside his flat? And why would all indication of what he’s been up to sexually be referenced to women?”

  “Because he won’t take a trip to the nick for that. And he’s smart enough to know it,” she replied. “As for the rest, give me ten minutes to find it on that computer. If it takes that long.”

  Lynley told her to have at it. He went down a corridor beyond the sitting room and found a grimy bathroom and beyond it a kitchen. More of the same in both of the locations. A SOCO team would have to delve into it. There were going to be fingerprints galore, in addition to trace evidence deposited by anyone who’d been inside the place.

  He left Havers to the computer and went back outside, following the path to the front of the house. There, he climbed the steps to the porch and rang each of the bells for the flats within. Only one yielded an answer. Flat C on the first floor was occupied, and the voice of an Indian woman told him to come up. She would be happy to talk to the police as long as he had identification that he would be willing to slide under her door when he got there.

  This sufficed to gain him entry to a flat with a view of the street. A sari-clad middle-aged woman admitted him, handing back his warrant card with a formal little bow. “One cannot be too careful, I find,” she told him. “It is the way of the world.” She introduced herself as Mrs. Singh. She was a widow, she revealed, of no children, straitened circumstances, and little opportunity to marry again. “Alas, my child-bearing years are over. I would serve only to care for someone else’s children now. Would you have tea with me, sir?”

  Lynley demurred. Winter was long and she was lonely and he otherwise would have stopped long enough to give her a pleasant half hour or so. But the temperature in her flat was tropical and even if that hadn’t been the case, what he needed from her was a matter of a few minutes’ conversation, and he could afford no more time than that. He told her he’d come to inquire about the gentleman in the basement flat. Barry Minshall, by name. Did she know him?

  “The odd man with the stocking hat, oh yes,” Mrs. Singh replied. “Has he been arrested?”

  She asked the question as if the word finally were understood between them.

  “Why do you ask that?” Lynley said.

  “The young boys,” she said. “They came and they went from that basement flat. Day and night. I did phone the police three times about it. I believe you must investigate this man, I told them. Something clearly is not right. But I fear that they saw me as a meddlesome woman, getting into business that was not my own.”

  Lynley showed her the picture of Davey Benton he’d had from the boy’s father. “Was this boy one of them?”

  She studied it. She carried it to the window overlooking the street and she gazed from the picture to the ground below, as if trying to see Davey Benton in memory as he might have been: entering the front garden and going down the steps to the path to the basement flat. She said, “Yes. Yes. I have seen this boy. One day that man met him out there on the street. I saw this. He wore a cap, this boy. But I saw his face. I did.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Oh yes. I am certain. It is the headphones in this picture, you see. He had them as well, from a player of some kind. He was quite small and very pretty, just like this boy in the picture.”

  “Did he and Minshall go into the basement flat?”

  They went down the stairs and round the side of the house, she told him. She hadn’t seen them go into the flat, but one could assume…She had no idea how long they were there. She didn’t spend all of her time at the window, she explained with an apologetic laugh.

  But what she’d said was enough, and Lynley thanked her for it. He turned down yet another offer of tea and descended the outer stairs to the basement flat once more. Havers met him at the door. She said, “Got him,” and led Lynley to the computer. On the screen was a list of the sites that Barry Minshall had visited. It didn’t take a degree in cryptology to read their titles and know what they were all about.

  “Let’s get SOCO over here,” Lynley said.

  “What about Minshall?”

  “Let him languish till morning. I want him to think about us crawling round his flat, uncovering the slime trail of his existence.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WINSTON NKATA WAS IN NO HURRY TO GET TO WORK THE next morning. He knew he was going to take good-humoured heat from his colleagues over his appearance on Crimewatch, and he didn’t feel like facing it yet. Nor did he really have to because Crimewatch had actually produced a possible break in the case, and he would be tracking that break down before he headed over the river for the day.

  From the sitting room, his mother’s usual morning fare—BBC Breakfast—was doing its regular bit of recycling the news, traffic, weather, and special reports every thirty minutes on the telly. They’d reached the part where they were informing the public of what was on the front page of every national broadsheet and tabloid. From this, he was able to assess the temperature of the press regarding the serial killings.

  According to BBC Breakfast, the tabloids were making the most of the Queen’s Wood body, which at least had driven Bram Savidge and his accusations of institutional racism off their front pages. But Savidge still had a spot relegated to him, and those reporters not attempting to unearth more data about the body in the woods appeared to be conducting interviews wherever they could find them with people bearing grievances against the police. Navina Cryer shared space with the Queen’s Wood body on the front of the Mirror, telling her tale of being ignored when she reported Jared Salvatore missing shortly after his disappearance. Cleopatra Lavery had managed to conduct a telephone interview from inside Holloway Prison with News of the World, and she had much to say on the subject of the criminal-justice system and what it had done to “her lovely Sean.” Savidge and his African wife had been interviewed at home by the Daily Mail, complete with half-page photos of the wife playing a musical instrument of some sort under the fond eye of her husband. And according to what he was able to pick up from the presenters’ comments on the telly as they nattered on about the other papers, Nkata could tell that the rest of the press were not going softly on the Met in the face of another boy’s murder. One killer and how many cops? was the rhetorical question being asked by the news media with lofty irony.

  Which was why Crimewatch and the manner in which the programme depicted the Met’s endeavours in the investigation had been so crucial. Which was also why AC Hillier had attempted to usurp the director’s job prior to the broadcast on the previous evening.

  He wanted a split-screen effect, he’d told the men in the studio. DS Nkata would be identifying the dead boys by name and by photograph during the course of the programme, and having a head shot of Nkata speaking on one side of the screen while he identified photos of the victims of the serial killer on the other side of the screen would drive home to the viewers—by means of DS Nka
ta’s sombre demeanour—how seriously the Met was taking the situation and the pursuit of this killer. That, of course, was utter cock. What Hillier wanted front and centre was what he and the Directorate of Public Affairs had wanted front and centre from the first: a black face attached to a rank senior to that of detective constable.

  The assistant commissioner didn’t get his way. They didn’t go for anything fancy on Crimewatch, he’d been told. Just video footage if it was available, e-fits, photographs, dramatic reconstructions, and interviews with investigators. The people in makeup would buff away the shine on the face of anyone in front of the camera, and the sound blokes would clip a microphone onto the lapel of a jacket so it looked like something other than an insect about to crawl onto the presenter’s chin, but Steven Spielberg this group was not. This was a low-budget operation, thank you very much. So who was going to say what to whom and in what order, please?

  Hillier wasn’t happy, but he could do nothing about it. He made sure that DS Winston Nkata was introduced by name, however, and he made doubly certain he repeated that name during the course of the broadcast. Other than that, he explained the nature of the crimes, gave the relevant dates, showed the locations where the bodies had been found, and sketched out a few details of the ongoing investigation in a manner that suggested he and Nkata were working it shoulder to shoulder. That plus the e-fit of the Square Four Gym mystery man, the reconstruction of Kimmo Thorne’s abduction, and Nkata’s recitation of the names of the dead boys comprised the programme’s entirety.

  The endeavour bore fruit. This, at least, made the whole enterprise worthwhile. It even made the prospect of having the piss taken out of him by his fellow officers somewhat bearable since Nkata intended to enter the incident room with solid information later that morning.

  He finished his breakfast as the BBC was doing yet another traffic round-up. He ducked out of the flat to his mum’s “Mind how you go, Jewel” and his dad’s chin nod and soft “Proud of you, son,” and he made his way along the outdoor corridor and down the stairs as he buttoned his overcoat against the chill. Across the grounds of Loughborough Estate, he met no one save a mum shepherding three small children in the general direction of the primary school. He made it to his car and began to climb inside, only to see that the right front tyre had been slashed.