With No One As Witness (3 page)

Hadiyyah, Barbara saw, was taking everything in with the expression of a novice, the first indication Barbara had that the little girl had never before been to Camden High Street, despite its proximity to their respective homes. Hadiyyah followed along, eyes the size of hubcaps, lips parted, face rapt. Barbara had to steer her in and out of the crowd, one hand on her shoulder, to make sure they didn’t become separated in the crush.

“Brilliant, brilliant,” Hadiyyah breathed, hands clasped to her chest. “Oh, Barbara, this is so much better than a surprise.”

“Glad you like it,” Barbara said.

“Will we go into the shops?”

“When I’ve seen to your education.”

She took her into the megastore, to classic rock ’n’ roll. “This,” Barbara told her, “is music. Now…Where to start you off…? Well, there’s no question, really, is there? Because at the end of the day, we have the Great One and then we have everyone else. So…” She scanned the section for the H’s and then the H’s themselves for the only H that counted. She examined the selections, flipping each over to read the songs while next to her Hadiyyah studied the photos of Buddy Holly on the CD covers.

“Bit odd looking,” she remarked.

“Bite your tongue. Here. This’ll do. It’s got ‘Raining in My Heart,’ which I guarantee will make you swoon and ‘Rave On,’ which’ll make you want to dance on the work top. This, kiddo, is rock ’n’ roll. People’ll be listening to Buddy Holly in one hundred years, I guarantee it. As for Nobuki—”

“Nobanzi,” Hadiyyah corrected her patiently.

“They’ll be gone next week. Gone and forgotten while the Great One will rave on into eternity. This, my girl, is music.”

Hadiyyah looked doubtful. “He wears awfully strange specs,” she noted.

“Well, yeah. But that was the style. He’s been dead forever. Plane crash. Bad weather. Trying to get home to the pregnant wife.” Too young, Barbara thought. Too much in a hurry.

“How sad.” Hadiyyah looked at the photo of Buddy Holly with awakened eyes.

Barbara paid for their purchase and peeled off its wrapper. She brought out the CD and replaced Nobanzi with Buddy Holly. She said, “Feast your ears on this,” and when the music started, she led Hadiyyah back out to the street.

As promised, Barbara took her into several of the shops where the here-today-passé-in-thirty-minutes fashions were crammed onto clothing racks and hung from the walls. Scores of teenagers were spending money as if news of Armageddon had just been broadcast, and there was a sameness to them that caused Barbara to look at her companion and pray Hadiyyah always maintained the air of artlessness that made her such a pleasure to be around. Barbara couldn’t imagine her transformed into a London teenager in a tearing hurry to arrive at adulthood, mobile phone pressed to her ear, lipstick and eye shadow colouring her face, blue jeans sculpting her little arse, and high-heeled boots destroying her feet. And she certainly couldn’t imagine the little girl’s father allowing her out in public so arrayed.

For her part, Hadiyyah took everything in like a child on her first trip to a fun fair, with Buddy Holly raining in her heart. It was only when they’d progressed upwards to Chalk Farm Road, where the crowds were if anything thicker, louder, and more decorated than in the shops below, that Hadiyyah removed her earphones and finally spoke.

“I want to come back here every week from now on,” she announced. “Will you come with me, Barbara? I could save all my money and we could have lunch and then we could go in all of the shops. We can’t today ’cause I ought to be home before Dad gets there. He’ll be cross if he knows where we’ve been.”

“Will he? Why?”

“Oh, ’cause I’m forbidden to come here,” Hadiyyah said pleasantly. “Dad says if he ever saw me out in Camden High Street, he’d wallop me properly till I couldn’t sit down. Your note didn’t say we were coming here, did it?”

Barbara gave an inward curse. She hadn’t considered the ramifications of what she’d intended as only an innocent jaunt to the music shop. She felt for a moment as if she’d corrupted the innocent, but she allowed herself to experience the relief of having written a note to Taymullah Azhar that had employed three words only—“Kiddo’s with me”—along with her signature. Now if she could just depend on Hadiyyah’s discretion…although from the little girl’s excitement—despite her intention of keeping her father in the dark as to her whereabouts while he was on his errand—Barbara had to admit it was highly unlikely that she’d be able to hide from Azhar the pleasure attendant on their adventure.

“I didn’t exactly tell him where we’d be,” Barbara admitted.

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Hadiyyah said. “’Cause if he knew…I don’t much fancy being walloped, Barbara. Do you?”

“D’you think he’d actually—”

“Oh look, look,” Hadiyyah cried. “What’s this place called, then? And it smells so heavenly. Are they cooking somewhere? C’n we go in?”

“This place” was Camden Lock Market, which they had come up to in their journey homeward. It stood on the edge of the Grand Union Canal, and the fragrance of the food stalls within it had reached them all the way on the pavement. Within, and mixing with the noise of rap music emanating from one of the shops, one could just discern the barking of food vendors hawking everything from stuffed jacket potatoes to chicken tikka masala.

“Barbara, c’n we go inside this place?” Hadiyyah asked again. “Oh, it’s so special. And Dad’ll never know. We won’t be walloped. I promise, Barbara.”

Barbara looked down at her shining face and knew she couldn’t deny her the simple pleasure of a wander through the market. How much trouble could it cause, indeed, if they were to take half an hour more and poke about among the candles, the incense, the T-shirts, and the scarves? She could distract Hadiyyah from the drug paraphernalia and the body-piercing stalls if they came upon them. As to the rest of what Camden Lock Market offered, it was all fairly innocent.

Barbara smiled at her little companion. “What the hell,” she said with a shrug. “Let’s go.”

They’d taken only two steps in their intended direction when Barbara’s mobile phone rang, however. Barbara said, “Hang on,” to Hadiyyah and read the incoming number. When she saw who it was, she knew the news was unlikely to be good.

“THE GAME’S AFOOT.” It was Acting Superintendent Thomas Lynley’s voice, and it bore an underlying note of tension the source of which he made clear when he added, “Get over to Hillier’s office as quickly as you can.”

“Hillier?” Barbara studied the mobile like an alien object while Hadiyyah waited patiently at her side, toeing a crack in the pavement and watching the mass of humanity part round them as it heaved its way towards one market or another. “AC Hillier can’t have asked for me.”

“You’ve got an hour,” Lynley told her.

“But, sir—”

“He wanted thirty minutes, but we negotiated. Where are you?”

“Camden Lock Market.”

“Can you get here in an hour?”

“I’ll do my best.” Barbara snapped the phone off and shoved it into her bag. She said, “Kiddo, we’ve got to save this for another day. Something’s up at the Yard.”

“Something bad?” Hadiyyah asked.

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

Barbara hoped for no. She hoped that what was up was an end to her period of punishment. She’d been suffering the mortification of demotion for months now, and she couldn’t help anticipating an end to what she considered her professional ostracism every time Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier’s name came up in conversation.

And now she was wanted. Wanted in AC Hillier’s office. Wanted there by Hillier himself and by Lynley, who, Barbara knew, had been manoeuvring to get her back to her rank almost as soon as she’d had it stripped from her.

She and Hadiyyah virtually trotted all the way back to Eton Villas. They parted where the flagstone path divided at the corner of the house. Hadiyyah gave a wave before she skipped over to the ground-floor flat, where Barbara could see that the sticky note she’d left for the little girl’s father had been removed from the door. She concluded that Azhar had returned with the surprise for his daughter, so she went to her bungalow for a hasty change of clothes.

The first decision she had to make—and quickly, because the hour Lynley had spoken of on the mobile was now forty-five minutes after her dash from the markets on Chalk Farm Road—was what to wear. Her choice needed to be professional without being an obvious ploy to win Hillier’s approval. Trousers and a matching jacket would do the first without teetering too close to the second. So trousers and matching jacket it would be.

She found them where she’d last left them, in a ball behind the television set. She couldn’t recall exactly how they’d got there, and she shook them out to survey the damage. Ah the beauty of polyester, she thought. One could be the victim of stampeding buffalo and still not bear a wrinkle to show it.

She set about changing into an ensemble of sorts. This was less about making a fashion statement and more about throwing on the trousers and rooting for a blouse without too many obvious creases in it. She decided on the least offensive shoes she owned—a pair of scuffed brogues that she donned in place of the red high-top trainers she preferred—and within five minutes she was able to grab two Chocotastic Pop-Tarts. She shoved them into her shoulder bag on her way out of the door.

Outside, there remained the question of transport: car, bus, or underground. All of them were risky: A bus would have to lumber through the clogged artery of Chalk Farm Road, a car meant engaging in creative rat running, and as for the underground…the underground line serving Chalk Farm was the notoriously unreliable Northern line. On the best of days, the wait alone could be twenty minutes.

Barbara opted for the car. She fashioned herself a route that would have done justice to Daedalus, and she managed to get herself down to Westminster only eleven and a half minutes behind schedule. Still, she knew that Hillier was not going to be chuffed with anything other than punctuality, so she blasted round the corner when she got to Victoria Street, and once she’d parked, she headed for the lifts at a run.

She stopped on the floor where Lynley had his temporary office, in the hope that he might have held off Hillier for the extra eleven and a half minutes it had taken her to get there. He hadn’t done, or so his empty office suggested. Dorothea Harriman, the departmental secretary, confirmed Barbara’s conclusion.

“He’s up with the assistant commissioner, Detective Constable,” she said. “He said you’re to go up and join them. D’you know the hem’s coming out of your trousers?”

“Is it? Damn,” Barbara said.

“I’ve a needle if you want it.”

“No time, Dee. D’you have a safety pin?”

Dorothea went to her desk. Barbara knew how unlikely it was that the other woman would have a pin. Indeed, Dee was always turned out so perfectly that it was tough to imagine her even in possession of a needle. She said, “No pin, Detective Constable. Sorry. But there’s always this.” She held up a stapler.

Barbara said, “Go for it. But be quick. I’m late.”

“I know. You’re missing a button from your cuff as well,” Dorothea noted. “And there’s…Detective Constable, you’ve got…Is this slut’s wool on your backside?”

“Oh damn, damn,” Barbara said. “Never mind. He’ll have to take me as I am.”

Which wasn’t likely to be with open arms, she thought as she crossed over to Tower Block and took the lift up to Hillier’s office. He’d been wanting to sack her for at least four years, and only the intervention of others had kept him from it.

Hillier’s secretary—who always referred to herself as Judi-with-an-i-MacIntosh—told Barbara to go straight in. Sir David, she said, was waiting for her. Had been waiting with Acting Superintendent Lynley for a good many minutes, she added. She smiled insincerely and pointed to the door.

Inside, Barbara found Hillier and Lynley concluding a conference call with someone who was on Hillier’s speakerphone talking about “preparing to engage in damage limitation.”

“I expect we’ll want a press conference, then,” Hillier said. “And soon, so we don’t end up seeming as if we’re doing it just to appease Fleet Street. When can you manage it?”

“We’ll be sorting that out directly. How closely do you want to be involved?”

“Very. And with an appropriate companion at hand.”

“Fine. I’ll be in touch then, David.”

David and damage limitation, Barbara thought. The speaker was obviously a muckety-muck from the DPA.

Hillier ended the conversation. He looked at Lynley, said, “Well?” and then noticed Barbara, just inside the door. He said, “Where the hell have you been, Constable?”

So much, Barbara thought, for having a chance to polish anyone’s apples. She said, “Sorry, sir,” as Lynley turned in his chair. “Traffic was deadly.”

“Life is deadly,” Hillier said. “But that doesn’t stop any of us from living it.”

Absolute monarch of the flaming non sequitur, Barbara thought. She glanced at Lynley, who raised a warning index finger approximately half an inch. She said, “Yes, sir,” and she joined the two officers at the conference table where Lynley was sitting and where Hillier had moved when he’d ended his phone call. She eased a chair out and slid onto it as unobtrusively as possible.

The table, she saw with a glance, held four sets of photographs. In them, four bodies lay. From where she sat, they appeared to be young adolescent boys, arranged on their backs, with their hands folded high on their chests in the manner of effigies on tombs. They would have looked like boys asleep had they not been cyanotic of face and necklaced with the mark of ligatures.

Barbara pursed her lips. “Holy hell,” she said. “When did they…?”

“Over the past three months,” Hillier said.

“Three months? But why hasn’t anyone…?” Barbara looked from Hillier to Lynley. Lynley, she saw, looked deeply concerned; Hillier, always the most political of animals, looked wary. “I haven’t heard a whisper about this. Or read a word in the papers. Or seen any reports on the telly. Four deaths. The same MO. All victims young. All victims male.”

“Please try to sound a little less like an hysterical newsreader on cable television,” Hillier said.