With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  “Convince us,” Barbara Havers said.

  Minshall thought for a moment and finally said, “Turn the recorder on. I saw him the night he died.”

  “Where?”

  “I took him to a…” He hesitated, then went for more water. “It’s called the Canterbury Hotel. I had a client there and we went to perform.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘perform’?” Havers asked. “What kind of client?” In addition to the tape that Lynley was making, she was taking notes, and she looked up from her writing.

  “Magic. We were doing a private show for a single client. At the end of it, I left Davey there. With him.”

  “With whom?” Lynley asked.

  “With the client. That was the last I saw of him.”

  “And what was this client’s name?”

  Minshall’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know.” And as if he expected them to walk out of the interview room, he went on hastily. “I knew him only by numbers. Two-one-six-oh. He never told me his name. And he didn’t know mine. He knew me only as Snow.” He gestured at his hair. “It seemed appropriate.”

  “How did you meet this individual?” Lynley asked.

  Minshall took another sip of water. His solicitor asked him if he wanted a conference. The magician shook his head. “Through MABIL,” he said.

  “Mabel who?” Havers asked.

  “M-A-B-I-L,” he corrected. “It’s not a person. It’s an organisation.”

  “An acronym standing for…?” Lynley waited for the answer.

  Minshall gave it in a tired voice. “Men and Boys in Love.”

  “Bloody hell,” Havers muttered as she wrote in her notebook. She gave the acronym a vicious underscoring that sounded like the scrape of rough sandpaper on wood. “Let us guess what that’s all about.”

  “Where does this organisation meet?” Lynley asked.

  “In a church basement. Twice a month. It’s a deconsecrated place called St. Lucy’s, off the Cromwell Road. Down the street from Gloucester Road station. I don’t know the exact address, but it’s not hard to find.”

  “The scent of sulphur’s no doubt a big hint when you get in the area,” Havers pointed out.

  Lynley shot her a look. He felt the same aversion to the man and his story, but now that Minshall was finally talking, he wanted him to continue talking. He said, “Tell us about MABIL.”

  Minshall said, “It’s a support group. It offers a safe haven for…” He seemed to search for a word that would elucidate the purpose of the organisation at the same time as it depicted its members in a positive light. An impossible task, Lynley thought, although he let the man attempt it anyway. “It offers a place where like-minded individuals can meet, talk, and learn they’re not alone. It’s for men who believe there is no sin and should be no social condemnation in loving young boys and wanting to introduce them to male-male sexuality in a safe environment.”

  “In a church?” Havers sounded as if she couldn’t restrain herself. “Like some sort of human sacrifice? On the altar, I expect?”

  Minshall took off his glasses and shot her a withering look as he polished them on the leg of his trousers. He said, “Why don’t you put a cork in it, Constable? It’s people like you who head witch-hunts.”

  “You listen to me, you piece of—”

  “That’ll do, Havers,” Lynley said. And to Minshall, “Go on.”

  The magician gave Havers another look, then shifted his body as if to dismiss her. He said, “There are no young boys who are members of the association. MABIL does nothing but provide support.”

  “For…?” Lynley prompted.

  He returned his dark glasses to his nose. “For men who’re…conflicted about their desires. Those who’ve already made the leap help along those who want to make it. This help is offered in a loving environment, with tolerance for all and judgement of none.”

  Lynley could see Havers getting ready to make another remark. He cut her off with, “And two-one-six-oh?”

  “I saw him straightaway, the first time he showed up. He was new to it all. He could barely look anyone in the eye. I felt sorry for the bloke and offered to help him. It’s what I do.”

  “Meaning?”

  And here Minshall stalled. He was silent for a moment and then asked for time with his solicitor. For his part, James Barty had been sitting there sucking on his lower teeth so hard that it looked as if he’d swallowed his lip. He burst out with, “Yes. Yes. Yes,” and Lynley switched the recorder off. He nodded Havers towards the door, and they stepped out into the corridor of the Holmes Street station.

  Havers said, “He’s had all bloody night to cook this up, sir.”

  “MABIL?”

  “That and the two-one-six-oh rubbish. D’you think for a moment there’s going to be a MABIL at this St. Lucy’s when we send Vice over there to sit in on their next ‘meeting’? Not bloody likely, sir. And Bar will have the perfect comeback for that, won’t he? Let me give it to you in advance: ‘MABIL has members who’re cops, you know. The Met’s grapevine must’ve put those blokes in the picture, and they passed the word along. You know how it works: telephone, telegraph, tell-a-cop. They’ve gone to ground now. Too bad you can’t find them…’ And arrest their arses from here to Sunday,” she added. “Sodding paedophiles.”

  Lynley observed her, righteous indignation personified. He felt it as well, but he also knew they had to keep the information flowing from the magician. The only way to sort out the truth from his lies was through encouraging him to talk for a length of time and listening for the snares he would ultimately set himself, which was the fate of all liars.

  He said, “You know the drill, Havers. We need to give him the rope.”

  “I know, I know.” She looked towards the door and the man behind it. “But he makes my skin crawl. He’s in there with Barty coming up with a way to justify the seduction of thirteen-year-old boys, and you and I know it. What are we supposed to do about that? Sit there and seethe?”

  “Yes,” Lynley said. “Because Mr. Minshall’s about to discover he can’t have it both ways. He can’t claim he rejected Davey Benton as too young to experience the love that dare not et cetera, while at the same time he provided the boy to a killer. I expect he’s sorting out that little difficulty with Mr. Barty as we speak.”

  “So you believe there’s a MABIL? That Minshall himself didn’t murder that kid and all the others?”

  Like Havers, Lynley looked towards the door of the interview room. “I think it’s very likely,” he said. “And there’s part of it all that makes sense, Barbara.”

  “Which part is that?”

  “The part that explains why we’ve now got a dead boy with no connection to Colossus.”

  She was with him, as usual, making the leap with, “Because the killer had to find new ground once we showed up in Elephant and Castle?”

  “From everything we know, he’s not stupid,” Lynley said. “Once we got on to Colossus, he had to find a new source of victims, didn’t he. And MABIL exactly fills the bill, Havers, because no one would even suspect him there, especially not Minshall, who’s just waiting to take him under his wing, eager and ready to hand over the victims, apparently believing—or at least telling himself that he believes—in the sanctity of the whole damned project.”

  “We need a description of two-one-six-oh,” Havers said, with a nod at the interview room.

  “And more,” Lynley told her as the door opened and James Barty bade them enter once again.

  Minshall had finished his water and was setting to the destruction of the plastic cup that had held it. He said he wanted to clarify things. Lynley told him that they were ready to listen to whatever the magician wished to tell them, and he activated the tape recorder as Havers sat and scraped her chair noisily against the lino.

  “My first time was at the hands of my paediatrician,” Minshall said quietly, his head lowered to direct his gaze—ostensibly, since he was wearing his dark glasses—on his hands as they t
ore apart his plastic cup. “He called it ‘seeing to’ my condition. I was a kid, so what did I know? Groping round between the legs to make sure my ‘condition’ didn’t cause sexual problems in the future, like impotence or premature ejaculation. He eventually raped me right there in his surgery, but I kept quiet. I was that scared.” Minshall looked up. “I never wanted other boys’ first time to be like that. Do you understand? I wanted it to come out of a loving and trusting relationship so that when it happened to them, they’d be ready for it. They’d want it as well. They’d understand what was happening and what it meant. I wanted it to be a positive experience, so I empowered them.”

  “How?” Lynley kept his voice calm and reasonable, although what he wanted to do was howl. How they excelled when they had to justify, he thought. Paedophiles lived in a parallel universe to the rest of mankind, and one could do virtually nothing to blast them out of it, so immovably had they placed themselves there through years of rationalisation.

  “Through openness,” Barry Minshall said. “Through honesty.”

  Lynley heard Havers restrain herself. He saw how tight her grip was on her pencil as she took notes.

  “I talk to them about their sexual urges. I allow them to see what they feel is natural and nothing to be hidden or ashamed of. I show them what all children need to be shown: that sexuality in all of its manifestations is something God given, to be celebrated rather than hidden away. There are actual tribes, you know, where children are initiated into sex as a rite of passage, guided there by a trusted adult. This is part of their culture, and if we ever manage to loose the chains of our Victorian past, it will be part of ours as well.”

  “That’s what MABIL aims at, eh?” Havers asked.

  Minshall didn’t directly answer her. “When they come to see me in my flat,” he said, “I prepare them for magic. To assist me. This takes some weeks. When they’re ready, we perform for an audience of one: my client. From MABIL. What you need to know is that no boy has ever refused to go with the man to whom he was given at the end of our performance. They’ve been eager for it, in fact. They’ve been ready. They’ve been, as I’ve said, empowered.”

  “Davey Benton—” Havers began, and from the heat in her voice, Lynley knew he had to stop her.

  He said, “Where did these ‘performances’ occur, Mr. Minshall? At St. Lucy’s?”

  Minshall shook his head. “They were private, as I said.”

  “At the Canterbury Hotel, then. Where you last saw Davey. Where is this place?”

  “Lexham Gardens. Off the Cromwell Road. One of our members runs it. Not for this. Not for men and boys together. It’s a legitimate hotel.”

  “I’ll bet,” Havers murmured.

  “Take us through what happened,” Lynley said. “At this performance. It was in a room?”

  “A regular room. The client is always asked to book himself into the Canterbury in advance. He meets us in the lobby and we go upstairs. We do the show—the boy and I—and I get paid.”

  “For supplying the boy?”

  Minshall wasn’t about to admit to pandering. He said, “For the magic show at which the boy assisted.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I leave the boy. The client will take him home…afterwards.”

  “All those boys whose pictures we found in your flat…?” Havers asked the question.

  “Former assistants,” Minshall said.

  “You mean you handed every one of them over to be done by some bloke in a hotel room?”

  “No boy went unwillingly. No boy stayed against his will at the end of the performance. No boy later came to me with a complaint about how he’d been handled.”

  “Handled,” Havers said. “Handled, Barry?”

  Lynley said, “Mr. Minshall, Davey Benton was murdered by the man you handed him over to. You understand that, don’t you?”

  He shook his head. “I know only that Davey was murdered, Superintendent. There’s nothing that tells me my client did it. Until I hear from him otherwise, I remain convinced that Davey Benton went off on his own later that night, once he was driven home.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘until you hear otherwise’?” Havers asked. “Are you expecting a serial killer to phone you up and say ‘Thanks, mate. Let’s have a second go of the same so I can kill another’?”

  “You’re saying my client killed Davey. I’m not. And yes, I’m expecting a second request from him,” Minshall said. “There usually is one. And a third and a fourth if the boy and the man haven’t reached a separate agreement on the side.”

  “What sort of agreement?” Lynley asked.

  Minshall took his time about coming up with an answer. He glanced at James Barty, perhaps trying to recall how much the solicitor had advised him to say. He went on carefully. “MABIL,” he said “is about love, Men and Boys in Love. Most children are eager for that, for love. Most people are eager for that, in fact. This isn’t about—this has never been about—molestation.”

  “Just pandering,” Havers said, obviously able to restrain herself no longer.

  “No boy,” Minshall plunged doggedly on, “has ever felt used or abused from an interaction I bring about through MABIL. We want to love them. And we do love them.”

  “And what do you tell yourself when they turn up dead?” Havers asked. “That you loved the life right out of them?”

  Minshall gave his answer to Lynley, as if believing Lynley’s silence implied tacit approval of his enterprise. “You have no proof that my client…” He decided to make a different point. “Davey Benton wasn’t meant to die. He was ready to have—”

  “Davey Benton fought his killer,” Lynley cut in. “In spite of what you thought about him, Mr. Minshall, he wasn’t bent, he wasn’t ready, he wasn’t willing, and he wasn’t eager. So if he went with his killer at the end of your ‘performance,’ I doubt he did it willingly.”

  Minshall said hollowly, “He was alive when I left them together. I swear it. I’ve never harmed a hair on a single boy’s head. No client of mine has done that either.”

  Lynley had heard enough of Barry Minshall, his clients, MABIL, and the great project of love in which the magician apparently saw himself involved. He said, “What did this man look like? How did you contact each other?”

  “He isn’t—”

  “Mr. Minshall, just now I don’t care if he is or isn’t a killer. I mean to find him and I mean to question him. Now how did you contact each other?”

  “He phoned me.”

  “Land line? Mobile?”

  “Mobile. When he was ready, he phoned. I never had his number.”

  “How did he know when you had all the arrangements in place, then?”

  “I knew how long it would take. I told him when to phone again. He kept in touch that way. When I had things set up, I just waited for him to phone and I told him when and where to meet us. He went first, paid for the room in cash, and we met him there. Everything else happened as I said. We performed, and I left Davey with him.”

  “Davey didn’t question this? Being left alone in a hotel room with a stranger?” That didn’t sound like the Davey Benton that his father had described, Lynley thought. There had to be a missing ingredient to the mixture Minshall was describing. “Was the boy drugged?” he asked.

  “I have never drugged one of the boys,” Minshall said.

  Lynley was used to the man’s way of dancing round by this time. He said, “And your clients?”

  “I do not drug—”

  “Plug it, Barry,” Barbara cut in. “You know exactly what the superintendent is asking.”

  Minshall looked at what he’d done to his plastic cup: rendered it into shreds and confetti. He said, “We’re generally offered refreshments in the hotel room. The boys are free to take them or not.”

  “What sort of refreshments?”

  “Spirits.”

  “Not drugs? Cannabis, cocaine, Ecstasy, the like.”

  Minshall actually reared up in offence
at this question, saying, “Of course not. We’re not drug addicts, Superintendent Lynley.”

  “Just buggerers of children,” Havers said. Then, she shot Sorry, sir in a look to Lynley.

  He said, “What did this man look like, Mr. Minshall?”

  “Two-one-six-oh?” Minshall thought about it. “Ordinary,” he said. “He had a moustache and goatee. He wore a peaked cap, like a countryman. Spectacles as well.”

  “And did you never put all this down as a disguise?” Lynley asked the magician. “The facial hair, the glasses, the cap?”

  “At the time, I didn’t think…Look, by the time a man’s ready to stop fantasising about it and to make it real, he’s beyond disguises.”

  “Not if he plans to kill someone,” Havers pointed out.

  “How old was this man?” Lynley asked.

  “I don’t know. Middle-aged? He must have been because he wasn’t in very good shape. He looked like someone who doesn’t take exercise.”

  “Like someone who might easily get out of breath?”

  “Possibly. But look, he didn’t have on a disguise. All right, I admit that some blokes wear them at first when they show up at MABIL—the wig, the beard, the turban, whatever—but by the time they’re ready…We’ve built trust between us. And no one does this without trust. Because for all they know, I could be a cop undercover. I could be anyone.”

  “And so could they,” Havers said. “But you never thought about that one, did you, Bar? You just handed Davey Benton to a serial killer, waved good-bye, and drove off with the money in your pocket.” She turned to Lynley. “I’d say we have enough, wouldn’t you, sir?”

  Lynley couldn’t disagree. For now, they had enough from Minshall. They’d want a list of the calls he’d received on his mobile, they’d want to get over to the Canterbury Hotel, and they’d want to arrange for another e-fit to see if the one from Square Four Gym matched whatever image Minshall came up with of his client. From his description of two-one-six-oh, though, the points of comparison seemed to be not with the e-fit they already had from the gym, but rather with the description they’d been given earlier by Muwaffaq Masoud of the man who’d come to purchase his van. There hadn’t been a moustache and a goatee, to be sure. But the age was right, the lack of physical fitness was right, and the bald head Masoud saw could easily have been hidden by the peaked cap Minshall was familiar with.