With No One As Witness

by Elizabeth George

  He swung round. “D’you think I actually believed you’d consider me for anything other than bum wiper of this lot? Jack! Get in here.”

  Jack arrived at the door, saying, “What’s going on?”

  “Just want to make sure you know Ulrike’s grassing to the cops about us. I’ve had my sit down with her, and I expect you’re next on the list.”

  Jack looked from Neil to Ulrike, and then his gaze dropped to the desk and the fact sheet upon it. He said an eloquent, “Shit, Ulrike.”

  Neil said, “She’s found a second calling.” He adjusted the chair he’d been sitting in and gestured to it. “Your turn,” he said to Jack.

  “That’ll do,” Ulrike told him. “Go back to work, Jack. Neil’s giving in to his predilection for temper tantrums.”

  “While Ulrike’s spent a good long time giving in to—”

  “I said that’ll do!” It was time to wrest control from the snake. Pulling rank was the only way, even if it meant he would make good his threat and put the board of trustees into the picture about her carrying on with Griff. She said, “If you want to keep your job, I suggest you get back to it. Both of you.”

  “Hey!” Jack protested. “I only came in here—”

  “Yes, I know,” Ulrike said calmly. “I’m speaking largely to Neil. And what I’m saying remains the same, Neil. Do what you intend to do, but in the meantime drop the solicitor.”

  “I’ll see you in hell first.”

  “Which makes me rather wonder what you’re hiding.”

  Jack looked from her to Neil and back again. He said, “Holy shit,” and left them together.

  “I won’t forget this,” was Neil’s final comment.

  “I don’t expect you will,” was hers.

  NKATA HATED the moment, the activity, and himself: sitting at Hillier’s side before a newly energised collection of journalists. There was nothing like the drama of trauma to get them motivated. Nothing like bringing that trauma home and giving it a human face to make them momentarily sympathetic to the Met.

  He knew this was what AC Hillier was thinking as he fielded their questions after having made his statement. Now they had the press where they wanted them, the AC’s demeanor seemed to suggest. They were going to think twice before they went after the Met while an officer’s wife was fighting for her life in hospital.

  Except she wasn’t fighting for her life. She wasn’t fighting for anything because she wasn’t any longer.

  He was immobile. He wasn’t attending to what was being said, but he knew that this was fine with Hillier. All he needed to look was fierce and ready. Nothing more would be asked of him. He hated himself for complying.

  Lynley had insisted. Nkata had got him out of the AC’s office by grabbing him round the shoulders in an embrace of insistence but also one of devotion. He’d known in that instant that he would do anything for this man. And that had startled him because for years he’d told himself that the only important fact of his life was to succeed. Do the job, and let everything else slide right off you because it is not important what anyone thinks. It is only important what you know and who you are.

  Lynley had seemed to understand this about him without their ever having spoken about it. He’d continued to understand it even in the midst of what he was going through.

  Nkata had taken him from Hillier’s office. As they left, he’d heard the AC punching numbers on the telephone. He reckoned Hillier was trying to reach building security to escort Lynley from the premises, so he made for a spot they’d not be likely to look: the library on the twelfth floor of the building, with its sweeping views of the city and the silence into which Lynley had told him the worst.

  And the worst was actually more than the superintendent’s wife being dead. The worst was what they were asking of him.

  He’d said dully, staring out at the view, “The machines can keep her breathing for months. Long enough to deliver a viable…” He stopped. He rubbed his eyes. Looking like hell was such a common expression, Nkata had thought as he’d stood there. But this was real hell, he realised. This wasn’t looking like. This was living in. “There’s no way to measure the exact amount of brain damage to the baby. It’s there. They can be…what was it…ninety-five percent certain of that because she’d gone without sufficient oxygen for twenty minutes or more and if that destroyed her brain, it only stands to reason…”

  “Man, it’s…You don’t have to…” Nkata hadn’t known what else to say.

  “There’s no test, Winston. Just the choice. Keep her on the machines for two months—although three would be ideal…well, at least as ideal as anything could be at this point—and then go in for the baby. Cut her open, take the baby, and then bury the body. Because there is no her any longer. Just the body. The breathing corpse, if you will, from which they could cut the living—albeit permanently damaged—child. You’ll have to make this decision, they say. Think about it, they say. No real hurry, of course, because it’s not as if a decision either way is going to affect the corpse.”

  Nkata knew they probably hadn’t used the word corpse. He could see that Lynley himself was using it because it was the brutal truth of the matter. And he also could see what a story it would make and was already making: the earl’s wife dead, her body reduced to incubator and incubator’s inhabitant, the eventual birth—could they even call it a birth?—featured on the front page of every tabloid in town once it happened, because what a story it was, and then the follow-ups ever after, perhaps one a year in a deal that would have to be made with the press: Give us our privacy to cope with this situation now and occasionally we’ll tell you how the child is doing, perhaps allow a photo to be taken, only leave us alone, please leave us alone.

  All Nkata could say was, “Oh,” a sound that escaped him in a groan.

  Lynley looked at him. “I made her the sacrificial lamb. How do I live with that?”

  Nkata knew what he was talking about. Although he didn’t quite believe his own words, he said, “Man, you did not do that. You never think that. You are not responsible.” Because for Lynley to believe that this tragedy was down to him, a chain would be forged and its links would lead inexorably to Nkata himself, and he couldn’t stand that, he knew he couldn’t. For he also knew that part of the superintendent’s plan had been to occupy Mitchell Corsico so thoroughly with a story about himself that he would be kept away from everyone else and from Nkata especially, who had perhaps the most attention-grabbing past of everyone involved in the serial-killing investigation.

  Lynley seemed to know what he was thinking because he’d replied with, “It’s down to me. Not to you, Winston.”

  And then he’d left. He’d said, “Do your bit. Something has to come out of all this. Don’t take my side. It’s over. All right?”

  Nkata responded with, “I can’t—” but Lynley cut him off.

  “Don’t bloody make me responsible for anything else, for God’s sake. Promise me, Winston.”

  So here he was at Hillier’s side, playing the part.

  Dimly he could hear the press briefing drawing to a conclusion. The only indication Hillier gave of his own inner state was in the direction he sent Mitchell Corsico afterwards. The reporter would return to the press pool, to his paper, to his editor’s side, to wherever he wanted to go or to be. But he wouldn’t be writing any further profiles of anyone in the investigation.

  Corsico protested with, “But you can’t be thinking the story on the superintendent had anything to do with what’s happened to his wife. Jesus God, there was no way this bloke could have found her. No way. I made certain of that. You know I made certain. That story was vetted by everyone but the pope.”

  “You’ve had my last word on the matter,” Hillier said.

  Other than that, he spoke nothing about Lynley and what had happened in his office. He merely nodded at Nkata and said, “Get on with it,” and went on his way. Solitary, this time. No minion accompanied him.

  Nkata returned to the incident
room. He saw he had a message to phone Barb Havers on her mobile, and he made a mental note to do it. But first he tried to remember what he’d been engaged in so much earlier when Dorothea Harriman had given him the word about Lynley’s possible arrival in Victoria Street.

  The profile, he thought. He’d intended to have another look at the profile of the killer in the hope that something therein would relate to one of the suspects…if they were indeed suspects at all because the only thing that appeared to connect them to the killings was proximity to some of the victims, which was seeming more and more like nothing to build anything upon at all, not sand beneath the foundation but ice, ready to crack under the burden of proof.

  He took himself to Lynley’s office. On the superintendent’s desk, there stood a photograph of his wife, Lynley at her side. They were both perched on a sun-drenched balustrade somewhere. His arm was round her, her head rested on his shoulder, they both were laughing into the camera while in the background a blue sea glittered. Honeymoon, Nkata thought. He realised they’d been married less than a year.

  He averted his eyes. He made himself look through the stack of paperwork on Lynley’s desk. He read Lynley’s notes. He read a recent report by Havers. And at last he found it, identifiable by the cover-sheet stationery from Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He slid the report out from the stack in which Lynley had placed it. He carried it to the conference table, sat, and tried to clear his mind.

  “Superintendent,” a neat sample of cursive on the covering stationery said, “while you may not be a believer, I hope you’ll find this information helpful.” No signature, but the profiler himself must have written it. No other person would have a reason to.

  Before he turned to the report beneath the stationery, Nkata gave thought to where the hospital was located. He admitted to himself that he was thinking of Stoney, even now. It always came down to his brother in the end. He wondered if a place like Fischer could have helped his brother, eased his anger, cured his madness, removed the urge to strike out and even to kill…

  Nkata realised he was reading the heading on the creamy paper over and over. He frowned. He focussed. He read again. He’d been taught that there were no coincidences at the end of the day and he’d just, after all, seen Lynley’s notes and Havers’ report. He reached for the phone.

  Barbara Havers burst into the office. She said, “Didn’t you get my message? Bloody hell, Winnie. I phoned. I asked you to ring me back. I’ve got…What the hell’s going on round here?”

  Nkata handed the report to her. “Read this,” he said. “Take your time.”

  WITH REASON, everyone not only wanted a part of him but also needed a part of him. Lynley accepted this even as he knew he could do next to nothing to accommodate anyone. He could barely accommodate himself.

  When he returned to the hospital, he was aware of virtually nothing. He found his family and hers where he’d left them, along with Deborah and St. James. Holding the fort came ridiculously into his mind. There was no fort to hold and nothing to hold it for.

  Helen’s sister Daphne had arrived from Italy. Her sister Iris was due from America, anticipated at any moment, although no one knew when that moment might be. Cybil and Pen were tending to their parents, while his own siblings sat with their mother, no stranger to hospitals, certainly no stranger to sudden and violent death.

  The room they’d been allotted was small, and they crowded it, perched uncomfortably on whatever chairs and settees had been scavenged, sent to this particular place to shield them from the other families of other patients because of their numbers, because of the sensitivity of the situation, and because of who they were. Not who they were by class but who they were by occupation: the family of a cop whose wife had been shot in the street. Lynley was aware of the irony of it all: being granted this privacy because of his career and not because of his birth. It seemed to him that this was the only moment in his life that was honestly defined by his chosen occupation. The rest of the time, he’d always been the earl, that odd bloke who’d eschewed life in the country and mingling among his own kind for work of the commonest sort. Tell us why, Superintendent Lynley. He couldn’t have done so, especially now.

  Daphne, the latest arrival, came to him. Gianfranco, she told him, had wanted to be there as well. But that would have meant leaving the children with—

  “Daph, it’s fine,” Lynley said. “Helen wouldn’t have wanted…thank you for coming.”

  Her eyes—dark like Helen’s, and it came to him how much Helen looked like her eldest sister—grew bright, but she did not weep. She said, “They’ve told me about…”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “What’re you…?”

  He shook his head. She touched his arm. “Dear heart,” she said.

  He went to his mother. His sister, Judith, made a spot for him on the settee. He said, “Go to the house, if you’d like. There’s no need for you to stay here hour after hour, Mother. The spare room’s available. Denton’s in New York, so he won’t be there to do a meal for you, but you can…in the kitchen…I know there’s something. We’ve been fending for ourselves, so in the fridge there’re cartons—”

  “I’m fine,” Lady Asherton murmured. “We’re all fine, Tommy. We don’t need a thing. We’ve been to the café. And Peter’s been fetching coffee for everyone.”

  Lynley glanced at his younger brother. He saw that Peter still could not look at him for longer than a second. He understood. Eyes upon eyes. Seeing and acknowledging. He himself could barely stand the contact.

  “When does Iris get here?” Lynley asked. “Does anyone know?”

  His mother shook her head. “She’s in the middle of nowhere over there. I don’t know how many flights she’s had to take or even if she’s taken them yet. All she said to Penelope was that she was on her way and she’d be here as soon as possible. But how does one get here from Montana? I’m not even sure where Montana is.”

  “North,” Lynley said.

  “It’s going to take her forever.”

  “Well. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  His mother reached for his hand. Hers was warm but quite dry, which seemed to him an unlikely combination. And it was soft as well, which was also strange because she loved to garden and she played tennis every day the Cornwall weather allowed it, every season of the year, so why were her hands still soft? And God in heaven, what did that matter?

  St. James came over to him while Deborah watched from across the room. Lynley’s old friend said, “The police have been, Tommy.” He glanced at Lynley’s mother and then said, “Do you want to…?”

  Lynley rose. He led the way out of the room to the corridor. “By the worst means the worst” came to him from somewhere. A song? he wondered. No, it couldn’t be that.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “They’ve determined where he went after he shot her. Not where he came from, although they’re working on that, but where he went. Where they went, Tommy.”

  “They?”

  “It appears there may have been two. Males, they think. An elderly woman was walking her dog along the north end of West Eaton Place. She’d just come round the corner from Chesham Street. Do you know where I mean?”

  “What did she see?”

  “From a distance. Two individuals were running round the corner from Eaton Terrace. They seemed to have seen her and they ducked into West Eaton Place Mews. A Range Rover was parked alongside a brick wall there. It took a dent in the bonnet. Belgravia think these blokes—individuals, whoever they were—jumped onto the Range Rover and leapt into the garden beyond that brick wall. Do you know where I’m talking about, Tommy?”

  “Yes.” Beyond the brick wall a line of gardens—each one defined by yet another brick wall—comprised the back of the houses on Cadogan Lane, itself another mews that was one of hundreds in the area, once housing stables for the sumptuous dwellings nearby, now housing homes converted from garages that themselves had been convert
ed from the stables. It was a complicated area of streets and mewses. Anyone could fade into the woodwork there. Or make good an escape. Or anything.

  St. James said, “It’s not what it sounds like, Tommy.”

  “Why is that?” Lynley asked.

  “Because an au pair on Cadogan Lane also reported a break-in, shortly after Helen…shortly after. Within the hour. She’s being interviewed. She was home when the break-in occurred.”

  “What do they know?”

  “Just about the break-in at the moment. But if it’s related—and good God, it has to be related—and if whoever broke in went out of the front of the house, then there’s further good news. Because one of the larger houses along Cadogan Lane has two CCTV cameras mounted on the front of it.”

  Lynley looked at St. James. He wanted desperately to care about this because he knew what it meant: If the au pair’s housebreaker had gone in that direction, there was a chance the closed-circuit television cameras had caught him on film. And if he’d been caught on film, that was a step in the direction of bringing him to whatever justice there was, which was little enough, and what did it matter at the end of the day?

  Lynley nodded, however. It was expected of him.

  St. James said, “The house with the au pair?”

  “Hmm. Yes.”

  “It’s quite a distance from where the Range Rover was, in the mews, Tommy.”

  Lynley struggled to think what this meant. He could come up with nothing.

  St. James went on. “There’re perhaps eight—maybe fewer, but still a number of them—gardens along the route. Which means whoever went over the wall where the Range Rover stood had to continue going over walls. So Belgravia are doing a search of every one of the gardens. There’ll be evidence.”

  “I see,” Lynley said.

  “Tommy, they’re going to come up with something. It’s not going to take long.”