With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  No one had, Fu thought. No one would again. Leadenhall Market made the promise of that.

  He stood opposite a string of three shops just inside the Gracechurch Street entrance: two butchers’ shops and a fishmonger’s, all red, gold, and cream, like a Dickens Christmas. Above each shop and extending the entire length of it hung three tiers of nineteenth-century iron rails with myriad hooks reaching out from them. It was upon these that game birds had been displayed one hundred years ago, turkey upon turkey and pheasant upon pheasant, tempting the passerby to make a purchase during the appropriate season. Now they were only an antique remnant of a time long passed. But they were designed to serve Him.

  It was here that He would bring them both. Proof and witness simultaneously. It would, He decided, be a crucifixion of sorts, with arms stretched wide along the game rails and the rest of the bodies wedged within the spaces between the rails themselves. It would be the most public of His displays. It would be the most bold.

  He walked the area as He laid His plans. There were four separate ways to come into Leadenhall Market, each of them posing a different kind of challenge. But all of them shared one commonality, and it was the commonality of virtually every street within the City itself.

  There were CCTV cameras everywhere. Those in Leadenhall Place guarded Lloyd’s of London; in Whittingdon Avenue they watched over a Waterstone’s and the Royal & Sun Alliance across the street; in Gracechurch Street they guarded Barclays Bank. The best possibility was in Lime Street Passage, but even here a smaller camera hung above a greengrocer’s that He would have to pass when making His way into the market itself. It was much like choosing the Bank of England as the spot where He’d make His next “deposit.” But the challenge of it all was half the pleasure. The other half came with the commission itself.

  He would use Lime Street Passage, He decided. Its small and insignificant camera would be the easiest to get to and to render useless.

  Having made this decision, He felt at peace. He retraced His steps, into the market and then in the direction of Leadenhall Place and Lloyds of London beyond it. That was when He heard the call.

  “You, sir. Beg pardon, sir, if you’ll just hang on…”

  He paused. He turned. He saw a pear-shaped man coming towards Him, official epaulets broadening his shoulders. Fu allowed His face to fall into the slack expression that seemed to put people at ease in His presence. He offered a quizzical smile as well.

  “Sorry,” the man said as he joined Him. He was out of breath, which wasn’t a surprise. He was overweight, and his trousers and shirt did not fit him properly. He wore the uniform of a security guard and his name badge said he was called B. Stinger. Fu wondered how often he was teased about that name. Or if it was a real name at all.

  “It’s the times,” B. Stinger said. “Sorry.”

  “Something going on?” Fu looked round as if for an indication of this. “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s just that…” B. Stinger gave a rueful grimace. “Well, we saw you on the telly screens…in security, you know? You seemed to be…I told that lot you were probably looking for a shop, but they said…Anyway. Sorry, but can I help you find something?”

  Fu did what seemed natural in response. He looked round for cameras, for more cameras than He’d seen outside the market itself. He said, “What? Did you see me on CCTV?”

  “Terrorists,” the man said with a shrug. “IRA, Muslim militants, Chechens, other assorted louts. You don’t look like one of them, but when we see someone hanging about…”

  Fu widened His eyes, an oh-wow sort of look. He said, “And you thought that I…?” He smiled. “Sorry. I was having a look round. I come past here every day and I’d never actually been inside. It’s fantastic, isn’t it?” He pointed to the features He declared especially to His liking: the silver dragons, the gold-lettered signs with their deep maroon backgrounds, the decorative plasterwork. He felt like a bloody art appreciationist, but He babbled enthusiastically. At the end, He said, “Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t bring my camera. You lot might’ve had me in the nick for that. But you’re doing your job. I know that. D’you want my ID or something? I was just leaving, by the way.”

  B. Stinger held up his hands, palms outward, as if to say enough. “I just needed to have a word. I’ll tell them you’re clear.” And then he added, like a confidential aside, “Paranoid, that lot. I’m up and down those stairs at least three times an hour. It’s nothing personal.”

  Fu spoke affably. “I didn’t think it was.”

  B. Stinger waved Him off and Fu nodded good-bye. He went on His way back to Leadenhall Place.

  But there He paused. He felt the tension riding down his neck and across His shoulders, like a substance that was pouring out of His ears. This had all been for nothing, and a waste of His time when time was crucial now…He wanted to track down the security guard and take him as a prize, no matter how foolhardy such an act would be. Because now He would have to start again, and starting again when His need was this great was a dangerous proposition. It put Him in the position of being driven to carelessness. He couldn’t afford that.

  Think you’re special, gobshite? Think you’ve got something anyone would want?

  He tightened His jaw. He forced Himself to look at the cold, hard facts. This place would not do for His purpose, and He was blessed by the appearance of the security guard to demonstrate that fact. Obviously, there were more cameras within the market itself than He’d accounted for, hidden high in the vaulted ceiling, no doubt, tucked beneath an outspread dragon wing, made to look part of the elaborate plasterwork…. It made no difference. What counted was what He knew. And now He could seek another place.

  He thought about the television programme. He thought about the newspaper articles. He thought about pictures. He thought about names.

  He smiled at how simple the answer was. He knew the spot He had to seek.

  BY THE TIME Lynley and Nkata returned to New Scotland Yard, Barbara Havers had done the work on Minshall’s background. She had also viewed the Boots tapes to scan the queue behind Kimmo Thorne and Charlie Burov—aka Blinker—to see if any familiar face appeared there, and she’d additionally done her best with what other customers she could see in the shop from the CCTV footage. There was no one, she reported, who bore any resemblance to anyone she’d seen at Colossus. Barry Minshall was also not among the customers, she added. As to the e-fit from Square Four Gym and whether anyone in Boots looked like that individual…. She’d been less than enthusiastic about that sketch from the first.

  “Whole thing’s a nonstarter,” she said to Lynley.

  “What about Minshall’s background?”

  “He’s kept his nose clean up to now.”

  She’d handed the photos of the boys in magician costumes over to DI Stewart, and he’d given them to officers who were in the process of showing them to the dead boys’ parents for possible identification. She said, “If you ask me, I don’t think that’s going to get us anywhere either, sir. I compared them to the photos we’ve already got of the dead boys, and no one looks like a match to me.” She sounded unhappy with this development. She definitely fancied Minshall for the killer.

  Lynley told her to carry on digging in the background of the bath-salts vendor from the Stables Market, the bloke called John Miller who’d seemed overly interested in the goings-on at Barry Minshall’s stall.

  In the meantime, John Stewart had assigned five constables—this was all he could spare, the DI told Lynley—to handle the post-Crimewatch phone calls about the e-fit sketch and other information. Countless viewers apparently knew someone who bore a marked resemblance to the baseball-capped man who’d been seen in Square Four Gym. The constables had the job of sorting the wheat from the chaff among the callers. Cranks and crackpots loved the opportunity to make themselves important or to have a bit of revenge on a neighbour they were rowing with. What better way than to inform the police that one person or another “wants checking out.”
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br />   Lynley went from the incident room to his office, where he found a report from SO7 sitting on his desk. He had fished his spectacles from his jacket pocket and started to read it when the phone rang and Dorothea Harriman’s hushed voice told him that AC Hillier was heading in his direction.

  “He’s got someone with him,” Harriman said sotto voce. “I don’t know who it is, but he doesn’t look like a cop.”

  A moment later, Hillier entered the room. He said, “I’m told you’re holding someone.”

  Lynley removed his reading glasses. He glanced at Hillier’s companion before he replied: a thirtyish man wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a Stetson. Definitely, he thought, not a cop.

  He said to the man, “We’ve not met…?”

  Hillier said impatiently, “This is Mitchell Corsico, The Source. Our embedded reporter. What’s this about a suspect, Superintendent?”

  Lynley carefully set the report from SO7 facedown on his desk. He said, “Sir, if I could have a private word?”

  “That,” Hillier told him, “is not going to be necessary.”

  Corsico said hastily, with a glance from one man to the other, “Let me just step outside.”

  “I said—”

  “Thank you.” Lynley waited till the journalist had gone into the corridor before he went on to Hillier, “You said forty-eight hours before the journalist would come onboard. You’ve not given me that.”

  “Take it above my head, Superintendent. This is not down to me.”

  “Then who?”

  “The Directorate of Public Affairs made a proposal. I happen to think it’s a good one.”

  “I’ve got to protest. This is not only irregular, it’s also dangerous.”

  Hillier didn’t look pleased with this remark. “You listen to me,” he said. “The press can’t get much hotter. This story is dominating every paper and every news outlet on television as well. Unless we get lucky and some hothead Arab group decides to bomb Grosvenor Square, we don’t have a prayer of escaping scrutiny. Mitch is on our side—”

  “You can’t possibly think that,” Lynley countered. “And you assured me the reporter would come from a broadsheet, sir.”

  “And,” Hiller went on, “his idea has merit. His editor phoned the DPA with it and the DPA gave it the go-ahead.” He turned to the door and called out, “Mitch? Come back in here, please,” which Corsico did, Stetson shoved to the back of his head.

  Corsico echoed Lynley’s sentiments. He said, “Superintendent, God knows this is irregular, but you’re not to worry. I want to begin with a profile piece. To bring the public into the picture about the investigation through the people involved in it. I want to start with you. Who you are and what you’re doing here. Believe me, no detail about the investigation proper will be in the story if you don’t want it there.”

  “I’ve no time to be interviewed by anyone,” Lynley said.

  Corsico held up a hand. “Not to worry,” he said. “I’ve considerable information already—the assistant commissioner has seen to that—and all I ask of you is your permission to be the fly on your wall.”

  “I can’t give you that.”

  “I can,” Hillier told him. “Can and do. I have confidence in you, Mitch. I know you’re aware of how delicate this situation is. Come along and I’ll introduce you to the rest of the squad. You’ve not seen an incident room, have you? I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  With that, Hillier left with Corsico in tow. Incredulous, Lynley watched them go. He’d stood when the assistant commissioner and the journalist had entered the room, but now he sat. He wondered if everyone in the Directorate of Public Affairs had gone mad.

  Who to phone? he asked himself. How to protest? He thought about Webberly, wondering if the superintendent could intercede from his convalescence. He didn’t see how. Hillier was being used by the higher-ups now, and he didn’t appear able to question that. The only person who might put the brakes on this lunacy was the commissioner himself, but what would that gain in the long run save Lynley most likely being pulled from the case?

  Profiles of the investigators, he said to himself in derision. God in heaven, what would it be next? Glossy photos in Hello! or an appearance on some inane chat show?

  He took up the SO7 report, knowing only that the squad of investigators would be just about as happy with this development as he was. He put on his glasses to see what forensics had for him.

  Davey Benton’s fingernails had yielded skin beneath them, product of his desperate fight with his killer. The sexual assault had yielded semen. There would be DNA evidence from both of these results, the first DNA evidence to be gleaned from any one of the bodies.

  The corpse had also yielded an unusual hair—Lynley’s heart leapt when he read the word unusual and his thoughts went at once to Barry Minshall’s—and this was currently undergoing analysis. It did not, however, appear to be a human hair, so consideration would have to be given to whether it might have come from the location in which the body had been dumped.

  Finally, the shoe prints at the site in Queen’s Wood had been identified. They were from a Church’s, size nine. The style was called Shannon.

  Lynley read this last bit gloomily. That narrowed the point of purchase down to every high street in London.

  He punched in the extension for Dorothea Harriman. Would she get a set of this latest SO7 paperwork over to Simon St. James? he asked her.

  Ever efficient, she’d already done so, adding that he had a phone call coming in from the Holmes Street station. Did he want to take it? And, by the way, was she meant to ignore this Mitchell Corsico bloke when he asked questions about what it was like to have an aristo for a guv? Because, she confessed, when it came to having an aristo for a guv, she’d been thinking that there was a way to hoist the assistant commissioner upon…“his own whatever,” was how she put it.

  “Petard,” Lynley said, and he saw her point. That was the answer, and it was simplicity itself, requiring no higher-up to do anything at all. “Dee, you’re a genius. Yes. Feel free to give him grist by the bushel. That should keep him occupied for days on end, so ladle it on. Mention Cornwall. The family pile. A row of servants playing Manderley under the direction of a brooding housekeeper. Phone my mother and ask her to arrange to have my brother look suitably drug addled should Corsico appear on her doorstep. Phone my sister and warn her to bolt her doors lest he show up in Yorkshire and want to examine her dirty linen. Can you think of anything else?”

  “Eton and Oxford? A rowing blue?”

  “Hmm. Yes. Rugby would have been better, wouldn’t it? More laddish. But let’s stay with the facts, the better to keep him occupied and away from the incident room. We can’t rewrite history no matter how much we’d like to.”

  “Shall I call you his lordship? The earl? What?”

  “Don’t go too far or he’ll see what we’re doing. He doesn’t seem stupid.”

  “Right.”

  “Now for Holmes Street station. Put them through, if you will.”

  Harriman did so. In a moment, Lynley found himself talking not to one of the officers or specials but rather to Barry Minshall’s solicitor. His message was brief and welcome.

  His client, James Barty said, had thought things over. He was ready to talk to the detectives.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ULRIKE ELLIS TOLD HERSELF THAT THERE WAS NO REASON to feel guilty. She was sorry for the death of Davey Benton, as she would have been sorry for the death of any child whose corpse had been found like so much discarded rubbish in the woods. But the truth was that Davey Benton was not a Colossus client, and she celebrated the lifting of suspicion that had to go along with the revelation that an adult from Colossus was not involved in his killing.

  Of course, the police had not said as much when she phoned. This was her own conclusion. But the detective inspector to whom she’d spoken had said, “Very well, madam,” in a way that suggested he was crossing something important off his list, and th
at could only mean a cloud had been lifted, that cloud being the suspicion of an entire murder squad at New Scotland Yard.

  She’d phoned there earlier and requested the name of the boy whose body had been found in Queen’s Wood. She’d phoned once again with the delighted—although she’d tried very hard not to show it—information that they had no record of a Davey Benton registered as a client at Colossus. In between the two calls, she’d trolled the records. She’d looked through the hard copies of files, and she’d scrolled through everything Colossus kept stored on its computers. She’d gone through the index cards they kept, filled out by kids expressing an interest in Colossus at outreach programmes the organisation had offered throughout London in the last year. And she’d phoned Social Services with the boy’s name, to be told they had no record of him and had never recommended him for Colossus’s intervention.

  At the end of all this, she felt relief. The horror of the serial killings was not about Colossus after all. Not that she’d ever thought for a moment that it actually was…

  A phone call from that unattractive female constable with the broken teeth and bad hair provided a blip on the screen of Ulrike’s liberation from anxiety, however. The police were now working on some other connection. Had Colossus ever provided entertainment for clients? the detective constable wanted to know. For a special occasion, perhaps?

  When Ulrike asked the woman—Havers, she was called—what sort of entertainment, she said, “Like a magic show, f’r instance. You lot ever do something like that?”

  Ulrike said, as helpfully as she could manage, that she would have to research this detail. For the kids did indeed go on outings—that was part of the assessment course—although the outings were of the physically adventurous kind like boating, hiking, biking, or camping. Still, there was always a chance, and Ulrike wished to leave no stone of possibility unturned. So if she could get back to Constable Havers…?

  She set about finding out. Another troll through the records was called for. She also queried Jack Veness because if anyone knew what was going on in every nook and cranny at Colossus, it would be Jack, who’d been there before Ulrike’s arrival on the scene.