“Yes,” Lynley said.
“Are you all right?”
Lynley considered this question. He looked at St. James. All right. What did it really mean?
The door opened, and Deborah joined them. “You must go home now,” Lynley said to her. “There’s nothing you can do.”
He knew what he sounded like. He knew she would misread him, hearing the blame, which was there but not directed towards her. Seeing her merely reminded him that she’d been with Helen last, heard her talk last, laughed with her last. And it was the last of it that he couldn’t stand, just as earlier he’d not been able to tolerate the first of anything else.
She said, “If you like. If it’ll help you, Tommy.”
“It will,” he said.
She nodded and went to collect her things. Lynley said to St. James, “I’m going to her now. Do you want to come? I know you’ve not seen…”
“Yes,” St. James said. “I’d like to, Tommy.”
So they went to Helen, dwarfed in her bed by everything that kept her working as a womb. She looked waxen to him, Helen yes but even more Helen no and never again. While within her, damaged beyond hope or repair but who knew how much—
“They want me to decide,” Lynley said. He took his wife’s lifeless hand. He curled her flaccid fingers into his palm. “I can’t stand it, Simon.”
WINSTON DROVE, and for this Barbara Havers was grateful. After a day in which she’d determinedly not thought about what was happening at St. Thomas’ Hospital, she felt she’d been punched in the gut with the news about Helen Lynley. She’d known it was going to be a grim prognosis. But she’d told herself that people survived being shot all the time, and medicine being as advanced as it was meant Helen’s chances had to be good. But there was no current advance in medicine that compensated for a brain deprived of oxygen. A surgeon didn’t just go in and repair that damage like the Messiah laying hands on a leper. There was literally no coming back once the word vegetative was applied to a situation. So Barbara hunched against the door in Winston Nkata’s car and clenched her teeth so hard together that her jaw was pulsing and sore by the time they reached their destination in the darkness.
Funny, Barbara thought as Nkata parked the car with his usual quasi-scientific precision, she’d never thought of the City as a place people lived. They worked here, true. They went to events at the Barbican. Tourists came here to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral, but after hours the place was supposed to be a ghost town.
That was not the case at the corner of Fann and Fortune Streets. Here Peabody Estate welcomed home its residents at the end of their working day, a pleasant, upmarket area with blocks of flats that faced a perfectly groomed garden of winter-pruned rosebushes, shrubbery, and lawn across the street.
They’d phoned first. They’d decided they would go in the back door on this one, no storm-trooping but rather a collegial approach. There were facts to check and they’d come to check them.
The first thing Hamish Robson said to them when he answered the door was, “How is Superintendent Lynley’s wife? I’ve seen the news. They’ve apparently got a witness. Did you know? There’s some sort of film footage as well, although I don’t know from where. They say they may have an image to broadcast…”
He’d come to the door wearing rubber gloves, which seemed odd till he ushered them into the kitchen where he was doing the washing up. He appeared to be something of a gourmet cook, because there were pots and pans on the work top in amazing abundance, and crockery, cutlery, and glassware for at least four people, already standing wetly in the dish drainer. Suds galore mounded in the sink. The place looked like a set for a Fairy Liquid commercial.
“She’s brain dead.” Winnie was the one to tell him. Barbara could not bring herself to use the term. “They got her hooked up to machines because she’s pregnant. You know she was pregnant, Dr. Robson?”
Robson had plunged his hands into the sink, but he took them out and rested them on the edge of it. “I’m so sorry.” He sounded sincere. Perhaps he was at some level. Some people were good at creating compartments for the various parts of themselves. “How is the superintendent? He and I had made an arrangement to meet the day…the day this all occurred. He never turned up.”
“He’s trying to cope,” Winston said.
“How can I help?”
Barbara brought out the profile of the serial killer that Robson had provided for them. She said, “Can we…?” and indicated a neat chrome-and-glass table that defined a dining area just beyond the kitchen.
“Of course,” Robson said.
She laid the report on the table and pulled out a chair. She said, “Join us?”
Robson said, “You don’t mind if I carry on with the washing up?”
Barbara exchanged a glance with Nkata, who’d joined her at the table. He gave an infinitesimal shrug. She said, “Why not. We can talk from here.”
She sat. Winston did likewise. She gave the ball to him. “We took some second and third looks at this profile,” he told Robson, who went back to washing a pot he brought forth from the suds. He was wearing a cardigan and he hadn’t bothered to roll the sleeves up, so where the gloves ended, the wet began, weighing down the wool of his sweater. “I had a look at some of the guv’s handwritten notes ’s well. We got some conflicting information. We wanted to sort that with you.”
“What kind of conflicting information?” Robson’s face was shiny, but Barbara put that down to the steamy water.
“Le’ me put it this way,” Nkata said. “Why’d you come up with the age of the serial killer as twenty-five to thirty-five?”
“Statistically speaking—” Robson began, but Nkata interrupted.
“Beyond statistics. I mean, the Wests wouldn’t’ve fitted that part of a statistical description. And tha’s just for starters.”
“It’s never going to be foolproof, Sergeant,” Robson told him. “But if you’ve doubts about my analysis, I suggest you bring in someone else to do another. Bring in an American, an FBI profiler. I’d bet the results—the report you get—is going to be nearly the same.”
“But this report here—” Nkata gestured to it, and Barbara slid it across the table to him. “I mean, come down to it, all we got is your word that it’s even authentic. I’n’t that right?”
Robson’s glasses winked in the overhead lights as he looked from Nkata to Barbara. “What reason would I have to tell you anything but the truth of what I saw in the police reports?”
“That,” Nkata said, with a lift of his finger to stress the point, “is one very good question, innit.”
Robson went back to his washing up. The pot he was scrubbing didn’t appear to need the attention he was giving to it.
Barbara said to him, “Why don’t you come over here to the table, Dr. Robson? It’ll be a little easier to talk.”
He said, “The washing up…”
“Right. Got it. Only there’s a hell of a lot of washing up, isn’t there? For just one bloke? What’d you fix up for dinner?”
“I admit to not washing up every night.”
“Those pots don’t look used to me. Take off the gloves and join us, please.” Barbara turned to Nkata. “You ever see a bloke wear rubber gloves to do the washing up, Winnie? Ladies do, sometimes. I do, being a lady myself. Got to keep the manicure manicured. But blokes? Why d’you think…? Ah. Thanks, Dr. Robson. It’s cozier like this.”
“I’m protecting a cut,” Robson said. “There’s no law against that, is there?”
“He’s got a cut,” Barbara said to Nkata. “How’d you get that, Dr. Robson?”
“What?”
“The cut. Let’s have a look at it, by the way. DS Nkata here is something of an expert on cuts, as you can probably tell by his mug. He got his…How’d you get that impressive scar, Sergeant?”
“Knife fight,” Nkata told her. “Well, I used the knife. Other bloke had a razor.”
“Ouch in a lifeboat,” Barbara said, and again to Robson, �
�How’d you say you got yours?”
“I didn’t say. And I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”
“Well, it can’t be from pruning the rosebushes because the time to do that’s come and gone, hasn’t it. So it has to be from something else. What?”
Robson said nothing, but his hands were clearly visible now and what was on them wasn’t a cut at all but rather a scratch, several scratches, in fact. They’d been deep by the look of them and possibly infected, but they were healing now and the flesh was new and pink.
Barbara said, “I can’t sort out why you won’t answer me, Dr. Robson. What’s going on? Cat got your tongue?”
Robson licked his lips. He took off his glasses and polished them on a cloth that he removed from his pocket. He was nobody’s fool; he must have learned at least something from his years of dealing with the criminally insane.
“See,” Nkata said to the man, “way the constable and I look at it, we got only one thing tells us your report i’n’t a bucketful of cock, and that’s your word on the matter, unnerstan?”
“As I’ve said, if you don’t believe me—”
“An’ we realised—this is the constable and me—that we been running six ways to Sunday looking for someone who fits that profile. But what if—this’s what the constable and me’ve been thinking cos we do think on occasion, you know—the real bloke we’re looking for had a way to make us think we were looking for someone else? ’F we were—” He turned to Barbara. “What was that word, Barb?”
“Predisposed,” she said.
“Yeah. Predisposed. What if we were predisposed to think one way while the truth was the other? Seems to me, then, the killer could go on doing his thing, pretty safe knowing who we were looking for wasn’t anything in the world like him. It’d be clever, don’t you think?”
“Are you trying to suggest…?” Robson’s skin was shiny. But he wouldn’t remove his cardigan. He’d probably donned it before letting them into the flat, Barbara thought. He’d have wanted to cover his arms.
“Scratches,” Barbara said. “Always nasty. How’d you get yours, Dr. Robson?”
“Look,” he replied, “I’ve a cat that—”
“Would that be Mandy? The Siamese? Your mother’s cat? She was a bit thirsty when we were introduced this afternoon. I took care of that, by the way. You’re not to worry.”
Robson said nothing.
“The thing about Davey Benton that you didn’t expect was that he was a fighter,” Barbara went on. “And how would you know? How would anyone know because he didn’t look like a fighter, did he? He looked just like his brothers and sisters, which is to say he looked like…well, he looked like an angel, didn’t he? He looked fresh. Untouched. Nice boyflesh there for the taking. I can almost understand why a bloody sick bastard like you might’ve wanted to carry things further with this one and rape him, Dr. Robson.”
“You haven’t a shred of evidence to back up that statement,” Robson said. “And I suggest you take yourselves out of this flat straightaway.”
“Really?” Barbara nodded thoughtfully. “Winnie, the doctor would like us to leave.”
“Can’t do that, Barb. Not without his shoes.”
“Oh right. You left two footprints at the final crime scene, Dr. Robson.”
“One hundred thousand footprints wouldn’t mean a thing and all of us know it,” Robson told her. “How many people do you expect buy the same ordinary pair of shoes each year?”
“Millions, probably,” Barbara said. “But only one of them leaves his footprint at the scene of a murder where the victim—this is Davey, Dr. Robson—also has DNA evidence under his fingernails. Your DNA, I expect. From those nice scratches you’ve been protecting. Oh, and the cat’s, by the way. The cat’s DNA. That’s going to be a difficult one to talk your way out of at the end of the day.” She waited for a reaction from Robson and she got it in the movement of his Adam’s apple. “Cat hair on Davey’s body,” she said. “When we link that to little Mandy the squalling Siamese—God, that cat makes a bloody racket when she’s thirsty, doesn’t she—you’re done for, Dr. Robson.”
Robson was silent. Nice, Barbara thought. He had less and less to argue about. He’d hedged his bets with the profile and he’d given 2160 as his moniker when he’d moved on from Colossus to Barry Minshall at MABIL. But there was the phone number of Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane right on the letterhead of the stationery that covered his lying report: with 2160 the final four numbers that a credulous caller—like the Inspectors Plod whom Robson no doubt believed worked at the Met—could punch in to be connected to the place.
She said, “Two-one-six-oh, Dr. Robson. We’ve had Barry Minshall—but I think you know him as Snow—locked up for a bit in the Holmes Street station. We took this over and let him study it for a while.” She removed the photo of Robson and his mother that she’d found in Esther Robson’s flat. “Our Barry—that’s your Snow, remember—turned it this way and that but he always came up with the same conclusion. This is the bloke he handed Davey Benton over to, he tells us. At the Canterbury Hotel. In Lexham Gardens where the registration card’s going to hold interesting fingerprints and the clerk will be only too happy—”
“You damn well listen to me. I didn’t—”
“Oh right. I damn well expect you didn’t.”
“You’ve got to see—”
“Shut up,” Barbara said. She shoved herself away from the table in disgust. She walked out of the room and left Winston Nkata the pleasure of reciting the caution before they arrested the piece of filth.
HE WATCHED first from across the street. Rain had fallen while He’d made His way across town, and now the lights from the hospital shone against the pavement. They made streaks of gold and when He squinted, He could almost think it was Christmas again: gold and then the red of tail lights on the cars as they passed by.
Not that Father Christmas’ll be coming to visit the likes of you, you know.
He groaned. He did the tongue thing again, pressure against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. Safe again, gone again. He could breathe as normal because normal is as normal does.
The reporters were gone, He saw. And wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t that a mark of the meant-to-bes? The story was still a sensational one, but now it could be covered from a distance. Profiles of all the principals, if you will. Because what, after all, needed to be said about a body in a bed? Here we are in front of St. Thomas’ Hospital on day number whateveritwas and the victim still lies within, so back to you in the studio for the weather report, which is far more interesting to the general public than this nonsense, so why don’t you give me a bloody new assignment please. Or words to that effect.
But for Him, it was endlessly fascinating. Events had conspired to illustrate over and over again that supremacy was more than a chance of birth. It was also a miracle of timing, embraced by the willingness to seize the moment. And He was the god of moments. In fact, it was He who made moments. This was the quality—one among many—that made Him different from everyone else.
Think you’re special? That it, little sod?
He used his tongue. Whoosh and whoosh. Release the pressure to check and—
You get away from him, Charlene. Jesus, it’s time he learned his lesson because special is as special God damn does and what the hell has ever been special about…I said step away. Who wants some of this? Bugger the both of you. Get out of my sight.
But in His sight was the future. It lay before Him in the streak of gold from the hospital lights. And in what the lights meant, which was broken. Broken. One of them was broken. One of them was destroyed. One of them was a shell that had cracked at first and now lay smashed in a hundred pieces. And He’d been the one to crush that egg beneath the heel of His shoe. He and no other. Look at me now. Look. At. Me. Now. He wanted to crow, but there was danger in this. And equal danger in remaining silent.
Attention? That it? You want attention? Develop some personality, and th
at’ll give you attention, if that’s what you want.
Lightly, He hit His fist against His forehead. He forced the air against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. If He didn’t take care, the maggot would eat away His brains.
At night in bed, He’d started plugging orifices against the invasion of the worm—cotton in ears and nostrils, plasters across His arsehole and at the end of His prong—but He still had to breathe and that was where He failed in His prophylactic measures. The worm got in with the air He took into His lungs. From His lungs, it crawled into His bloodstream where it swam like a deadly virus to His skull and munched and whispered and munched.
Perfect adversaries, He thought. You and I and who would’ve thought it when all of this started? The maggot chose to feast upon the weak, but He…Ah, He’d chosen an opponent worthy of the struggle for supremacy.
And that’s what you think you’ve been doing, little bugger?
Maggots ate. That was simply what maggots did. They operated solely on instinct and their instinct was to eat until they metamorphosed into flies. Blowflies, bluebottles, horseflies, houseflies. It didn’t matter. He merely had to wait out the period of eating, and then the maggot would leave Him in peace.
Except there was always the chance that this particular maggot was an aberration, wasn’t there, a creature that would never sprout wings in which case, He did have to rid Himself of it.
But that was not why He had begun. And that was not why He was here just now, across the street from the hospital, a shadow waiting to be dispersed by light. He was here because there was a coronation that needed to happen, and it would happen soon. He would see to that.
He crossed the street. This was chancy, but He was ready and willing to take that chance. To show Himself was to make a mark of preeminence upon a time and a place, and that was what He wanted to do: to begin the process of carving history from the stone of now.
He walked inside. He did not seek His adversary, nor did He even try to locate the room in which He knew he would be found. He could walk directly to it if He’d wanted to, but that was not His purpose in coming here.
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