With No One As Witness (32 page)

Wendy’s Cloud was not easy to find, as it possessed no signage. After reading a directional board and asking round, Barbara finally located it: a simple stall within one of the permanent shops in the market. The shop sold candles and candleholders, greeting cards, jewellery, and handmade stationery. Wendy’s Cloud had massage and aromatherapy oils, incense, soap, and bath crystals on offer.

The eponymous owner of the establishment sat in a beanbag chair, hidden from view behind the counter. Barbara thought at first she was keeping an eye out for light-fingered customers, but when she called, “Excuse me, c’n I have a word?,” it turned out that Wendy was nodding off on a substance that was probably not for sale on her stall. Her eyelids hung well below half-staff. She didn’t so much stagger as claw her way to her feet, using one of the legs of the counter and resting her chin for a moment among the bath crystals.

Barbara cursed inwardly. With her stringy grey hair and Indian bedspread caftan, Wendy didn’t look like a promising wellspring of information. Instead, she looked like a refugee from the hip generation. Only the love beads round her neck were missing.

Nonetheless, Barbara introduced herself, showed her identification, and attempted to stimulate the aging woman’s brain by mentioning New Scotland Yard and the words serial and killer in rapid succession. She went on to talk about ambergris oil, and she asked hopefully about Wendy’s record keeping. For a moment, she thought that only a quick trip to a long, cold shower would bring Wendy round, but just at the point when she was considering where she might find water with which to douse the woman, Wendy finally spoke.

“Cash ’n’ carry,” was what she said. She followed this with, “Sorry.”

Barbara took her comments to mean that she did not keep a record of purchases made. Wendy nodded. She went on to add that when she had only one bottle of an oil left in stock, she ordered another. If, of course, she remembered to look over the stock at the end of the day when she closed. Fact was, she often forgot to do that and it was only when a customer asked for something specifically that she sometimes realised she needed to place another order.

This sounded relatively hopeful. Barbara asked her if she could recall anyone asking for ambergris oil recently.

Wendy frowned. Then her eyeballs went heavenward into her head, as she apparently disappeared into the recesses of her own mind to sort this one out.

“Hello?” Barbara called. “Hey. Wendy. You still with me?”

“Don’t bother with her, luv,” someone said from nearby. “She’s been doping up for thirty-odd years. Not much furniture left in her attic, if you know what I mean.”

Barbara glanced round and saw that the speaker was sitting at the till of the larger shop in which Wendy kept her stall. As Wendy herself disappeared in the direction of the beanbag chair once more, Barbara joined the other woman who introduced herself as Wendy’s long-suffering sister, Pet. Short for Petula, she explained. She’d been allowing Wendy to keep her stall in the shop forever, but whether she showed up on a given day was something open to chance.

Barbara asked what happened on a day when Wendy didn’t appear. What if someone wanted to buy goods from her then? Did Pet—Barbara hoped—make the sale for her sister?

Pet shook her head, grey like Wendy’s but permed to such a point that it resembled steel wool. No, dearie, she’d long ago learned her lesson about enabling the abuser, hadn’t she. Wendy was welcome to her space in the shop as long as she paid for it, but if she wanted to make money and keep herself out of the gutter in which she’d apparently resided for a decade or two prior to Wendy’s Cloud, she had to suit up, show up, open up, and make the sales. Her baby sister wasn’t about to do it for her.

“So you wouldn’t know if someone’s been purchasing ambergris oil from her?” Barbara said.

She wouldn’t, Pet told her. People came and went all the time in Camden Lock Market. Weekends, as the constable might know, were mad round here. Tourists, teenagers, dating couples, families with small children looking for an inexpensive means of entertainment, regular customers, pickpockets, shoplifters, thieves…One could hardly be expected to remember who purchased what from one’s own shop, let alone who was making a purchase from one’s sister’s establishment. No, truth of the matter was that if anyone could tell the constable who had made a purchase from Wendy’s Cloud, it would be Wendy herself. The unfortunate circumstance was, however, that Wendy spent most of her time in the cloud…if the constable knew what Petula meant.

Barbara did. Further, she knew there was nothing more to be gained from this useless trip across town. She bade Pet farewell, leaving her mobile number in the unlikely event that Wendy happened to descend to earth long enough to recall something pertinent, and then she decamped.

So that the entire adventure would not be a waste, Barbara made two additional stops. The first was at a stall along one of the passageways. Her collection of motto-bearing T-shirts always in need of expansion, she inspected the offerings at Pig & Co. She rejected “Princess in Training” and “My Mum and Dad Went to Camden Lock Market and All I Got Was a Lousy T-shirt,” and she settled on “I Brake for Alien Life Forms,” which was printed below a caricature of the prime minister caught beneath the wheels of a London taxi.

She made her purchase and decided a quick meal was in order. A pause at a stall selling jacket potatoes took care of this. She chose a filling of coleslaw, prawns, and sweet corn—one had to make sure one’s basic food groups were being addressed at all times—and she took it, along with a plastic fork, back outside the market where she ate as she engaged in the hike back to her car.

This took her in the direction of her own home, northwest along Chalk Farm Road. She’d got barely 100 yards from the entrance to Camden Lock Market, however, when her mobile chimed deep in her shoulder bag, forcing her to pause, to balance her jacket potato on the top of a rubbish bin at the first street corner, and to dig the mobile out. Perhaps Wendy had come round and given her sister some useful information that Pet wished to pass along…. One lived in hope.

Barbara said, “Havers,” encouragingly, and she looked up in time to see a van drive past and park illegally at the side entrance to the Stables Market, an old housing for artillery horses that had long since been put to commercial use just along the street from Camden Lock. She watched it idly as Lynley spoke.

“Where are you, Constable?”

“Camden Lock as commanded,” Barbara said. “No result, I’m afraid.” Ahead of her, a man clambered out of the van. He was oddly garbed, even by cold-weather standards, in a red elfinlike stocking cap, sunglasses, fingerless gloves, and a bulky black coat dangling to his ankles. Too bulky a coat, Barbara thought, and she watched him curiously. It was the sort of coat one could hide explosives under. She gave a closer inspection to his van as he came round to the back of it. It was purple—odd enough colour, that was—with white lettering on the side. Barbara positioned herself for a better look at it. In her ear, Lynley continued to speak.

“So get on that directly,” he was saying. “You may be right about Colossus after all.”

“Sorry,” Barbara said hastily. “Lost you for a moment, sir. Bad reception. Bloody mobiles. Try again?”

Lynley said that someone on DI Stewart’s team two had come up with some information on Griffin Strong. Evidently, Mr. Strong hadn’t been as forthcoming as he might have been on the subject of leaving Social Services prior to his employment at Colossus. A child had died in care while Strong was his social worker at his last posting, in Stockwell. It was time to dig round Strong a little deeper. Lynley gave her the man’s home address and told her to begin there. He lived in a housing estate on Hopetown Street. East One, Lynley told her. It would be a bit of a drive to get there. He could send someone else, but as Havers had been the one who was most insistent about Colossus…

Did he sound regretful? Barbara wondered. Making amends? Suddenly realising that his bad day didn’t have to become everyone else’s as well?

It didn’t matter. She’d take what she could get. She told him a maddening zigzag down to Whitechapel would be just the ticket. She’d get right on it, she said. She was, in fact, trotting back to her car even as they spoke.

“Fine,” Lynley said. “See to it, then.” He rang off before Barbara could tell him what she’d been considering as she watched the purple van ahead of her and the man at its rear, unloading a few boxes from inside.

Purple, Barbara had been thinking. Darkness, illumination provided only by a streetlamp some yards away, and a woman half asleep at a window above.

She walked over to the van and gave it a look. Lettering on the side indicated that the vehicle was operated by Mr. Magic, with a London phone number. That would be the man in the overcoat, Barbara thought, because in addition to concealing explosives, the garment was surely suitable for hiding everything from doves to Dobermans.

As she’d been sauntering over, jacket potato in hand, the man had used his foot to slam home the rear doors of the van. He’d left his hazard lights on, no doubt hopeful that this would prevent an enthusiastic traffic warden from ticketing him. He saw Barbara and said, “Excuse me. Could I ask you…I’ll just be a minute inside. Taking this”—nodding at the two boxes he had in his arms—“to the stall. Would you keep an eye out? They’re heartless round here when it comes to parking.”

“Sure,” Barbara said. “You’re Mr. Magic?”

He made a wry face. “Barry Minshall, actually. I won’t be a tick. Cheers.” He went in the side entrance to the Stables—one of at least four markets in the immediate area—and Barbara took the opportunity to walk round his van. It wasn’t a Ford Transit, but that didn’t matter because she wasn’t considering it as the one they were looking for. She knew how long the odds were that an officer on the case would providentially in the street run into the serial killer she happened to be seeking. But the idea of the van’s colour intrigued her with all it suggested about misinformation wearing the guise of truth.

Barry Minshall returned, expressing his thanks. Barbara took the opportunity to ask him what he sold on his stall. He spoke of magic tricks, videos, and gag items. He made no mention of any kind of oil. Barbara listened, wondering about the sunglasses he wore, considering the weather, but after her interlude with Wendy, she knew the sky was the limit on what one could expect to see in the area.

She took herself off to her car, thoughtful. Someone had said a red van, so they’d been thinking in red throughout the investigation. But red was only part of a larger spectrum of colour, wasn’t it? Why not something closer to blue? It was definitely something they needed to consider.

WHEN DS WINSTON NKATA went up to Plugged Inn to the Lord, he went prepared: In advance he did the requisite digging round in the background of Reverend Bram Savidge. The information he found was enough to arm him to meet the man, who’d been called the Champion of Finchley Road by both the Sunday Times magazine and the Mail on Sunday in special reports about his ministry.

A press conference was in full swing when Nkata entered the shopfront-church cum soup kitchen. The poor and the homeless usually served by the kitchen during the day had formed themselves into a dispirited queue outside along the pavement. Most of them had sunk onto their haunches with the sort of inevitable patience evidenced by people who’d lived too long on the edge of society.

Nkata felt a twinge as he passed them. It was only a twist of circumstance, he thought, the stalwart love of his parents, and the long-ago intervention of one concerned cop that had kept him from a life among them. He experienced the same constriction in his chest that he always experienced when he had to carry out one duty or another among his own people. He wondered if he’d ever get over it: the feeling that somehow he’d betrayed them by following a course that most of them did not understand.

He’d seen the same reaction in the eyes of Sol Oliver when he’d walked into his ramshackle car repair shop less than an hour earlier. It was part of a shantytown of buildings comprising the narrow street of Munro Mews in North Kensington, heavily marked by taggers and graffiti artists, blackened with generations of soot and the residue of a fire, which had gutted the structure next door. The mews itself backed onto Golberne Road, where Nkata had left his Escort. There, traffic trundled through a neighbourhood of dingy shops and grubby market stalls, between cracked pavements and gutters littered with rubbish.

Sol Oliver had been working on an antique Volkswagen Beetle when Nkata came upon him. Hearing his name, the mechanic lifted himself from a contemplation of the car’s minuscule engine. His gaze had taken in Nkata from head to toe and, when shown the DS’s warrant card, whatever Sol Oliver had suspected about Nkata settled his features into a permanent expression of distrust.

Yeah, he’d been put in the picture about Sean Lavery, Oliver told him in short order, although he didn’t sound particularly distressed about the news. Reverend Savidge had phoned with the information. He didn’t have anything to tell the cops about Sean in the days leading up to his death. He hadn’t seen his son in months.

“When was the last time?” Nkata asked.

Oliver looked at a calendar on the wall as if to stimulate his memory. It was hanging below a veritable hammock of cobwebs and above a grimy coffeemaker. A mug sat next to this, painted in a child’s hand with footballs and the single word “Daddy.”

“End of August,” Oliver said.

“You sure?” Nkata asked.

“Why? You think I killed him or summick?” Oliver set down the crescent wrench he was holding. He wiped his hands on a limp blue rag that was bruised with stains. “Look, man, I di’n’t even know the kid. I d’n’t even want to know him. I got a family now and what went on wif me and his mum was just what happens. I tol’ the kid I’m sorry Cleo’s doing time, but no way could I take him in, no matter what he wanted. Tha’s how it is. Not like we were married or nuffink.”

Nkata did his best to keep his face dispassionate, although the last thing he actually felt was disinterest. Oliver epitomised what was wrong with their men: Plant the seed because the woman was willing; walk away from the consequences with a shrug. Indifference became the legacy that was passed along from father to son.