With No One As Witness (34 page)

“Where is it, exactly?” Barbara sat and dug her notebook from her shoulder bag. She flipped it open to take down the address.

Arabella gave it to her—it was in Quaker Street—and watched as Barbara wrote this down. She said, “This is about that boy, isn’t it? The one who was murdered? Griff told me about him. Kimmo Thorne, he was called. And about the other boy who’s gone missing. Sean.”

“Sean’s dead as well. His foster dad’s identified him.”

Arabella glanced at her baby, as if in reaction to this. “I’m sorry. Griff’s devastated about Kimmo. He’ll feel the same when he hears about Sean.”

“Not the first time someone died on his watch, I understand.”

Arabella smoothed Tatiana’s hairless head, her expression soft, before she replied. “As I said, he’s devastated. And he had nothing to do with either boy’s death. With any death. At Colossus or otherwise.”

“It makes him look a bit careless, though, if you know what I mean.”

“As it happens, I don’t.”

“Careless with other people’s lives. Or bloody unlucky. Which do you reckon it is?”

Arabella stood. She went to a metal bookshelf at one side of the room and took up a packet of cigarettes. She lit one jerkily and just as jerkily inhaled. Virginia Slims, Barbara saw. That figured. Mental imaging, or something. And Arabella needed it: She had her work cut out for her, getting back into shape. She was pretty enough—good skin, nice eyes, dark, silky hair—but she looked as if she’d gained a few stone too many during her pregnancy. Eating for two, she’d probably told herself.

“If it’s alibis you’re after—that is what your sort look for, isn’t it?—then Griff’s got one. Her name is Ulrike Ellis. If you’ve been to Colossus, you’ve met her.”

This was a truly interesting turn. Not the fact of Ulrike and Griff, which Barbara had already assumed was a probability, but the fact that Arabella knew about Ulrike and Griff. And didn’t appear upset about them. What was that all about?

Arabella seemed to read her mind. “My husband’s weak,” she said. “But all men are weak. When a woman marries, she marries knowing this and she decides in advance what she’s going to accept when it eventually crops up. She never knows how the weakness is going to manifest itself, but I suppose that’s part of the…the journey of discovery. Will it be drink, food, gambling, excessive work, other women, pornography, football hooliganism, addiction to sports, addiction to drugs? In Griff’s case, it turned out to be an inability to say no to women. But that’s hardly a surprise, considering how they throw themselves at him.”

“Tough to be married to someone so…” Barbara looked for the right word.

“Beautiful? Godlike?” Arabella offered. “Apollo? Narcissus? Whoever? No, it’s not difficult at all. Griff and I plan to stay married to each other. We’re both from broken homes, and we don’t intend that for Tatiana. As it happens, I’ve been able to put it all in perspective. There are worse things than a man who gives in to women’s advances. Griff’s been through this before, Constable. Doubtless, he’ll go through it again.”

Hearing this, Barbara wanted to shake the bewilderment out of her head. She was used to the idea of women fighting for their men or women seeking revenge after an infidelity or women harming themselves—or others, for that matter—when faced with an adulterous spouse. But this? Calm analysis, acceptance, and c’est la vie? Barbara couldn’t decide if Arabella Strong was mature, philosophical, desperate, or simply mad as a hatter.

She said, “So how’s Ulrike his alibi?”

“Compare the dates of the murders with his absences from home. He’ll have been with her.”

“All night?”

“Enough of it.”

And wasn’t that just bloody convenient? Barbara wondered how many phone calls had been placed among the three of them to cook this one up. She also wondered how much of Arabella’s placid acceptance was placid acceptance and how much was actually the result of the vulnerability a woman felt once she had a child to care for. Arabella needed her man to bring home the bacon if she herself wanted to stay home and care for Tatiana.

Barbara flipped her notebook closed and thanked Arabella for her time and her willingness to speak openly about her husband. She knew that if anything more was to be gained from this journey to East London, it wasn’t going to turn up here.

Back at her car, she dug out the A to Z and looked up Quaker Street. Luck was with her for once. She found it was just south of the railway tracks leading to Liverpool Street Station. It appeared to be a short one-way thoroughfare that connected Brick Lane to Commercial Street. She could walk there and work off at least one mouthful of her morning’s Pop-Tart. The jacket potato she’d inhaled at Camden Lock would have to wait.

“WE’RE HAVING a devil of a time with all the phone calls, Tommy,” John Stewart said. The DI had laid a neatly clipped document precisely in front of him. As he spoke, he lined up the corners of it within the curve of the conference table. He straightened his tie, checked his fingernails, and gazed round the room as if to assess its condition, reminding Lynley as he always did, that Stewart’s wife had probably had more than one reason for ending their marriage. “We’ve got parents clamouring from all over the country,” he went on. “Two hundred with missing kids at this point. We need more help on the phones.”

They were in Lynley’s office, trying to work out a change in the deployment of the personnel. They didn’t have enough manpower, and Stewart was right. But Hillier had refused to give them more without the magical production of a “result.” Lynley thought he’d had that with the identification of yet another body: fourteen-year-old Anton Reid, who’d been the first victim of their killer, his body left in Gunnersbury Park. A mixed-race boy, Anton had disappeared from Furzedown on the eighth of September. He’d been a gang member with arrests for malicious mischief, trespassing, petty theft, and assault, all of which had been relayed to New Scotland Yard earlier in the day by the Mitcham Road police station, who’d admitted having written Anton off as yet another runaway when his parents first reported him missing. The newspapers were going to be in a filthy uproar over that piece of data, Hillier had told Lynley at some considerable volume on the phone when he was given the news. So when the hell did the superintendent intend to have something to present to the press office other than a bleeding identity for another sodding body?

“Get on it,” had been the AC’s parting remark. “I don’t expect you lot need me down there wiping your arses. Or do you?”

Lynley had held his tongue and his temper. He’d called Stewart into his office and there they sat, sorting through the action reports.

Finally and definitively, there was nothing from Vice on any of the identified boys beyond Kimmo Thorne. Aside from Kimmo, none of them were engaged in illicit sex as rent boys, transvestites, or streetwalkers. And despite their otherwise chequered histories, none of them could be associated with either the sale or the purchase of drugs.

The interview with the taxi driver who’d discovered Sean Lavery’s body in the Shand Street tunnel had given them nothing. A background check on the man had shown a perfectly clean record without even a parking ticket to mar his reputation.

The Mazda in the tunnel could be associated with no one even tangentially involved in the investigation. With its number plates missing, its engine gone, and its body torched, there was no way to tell whose it was, and no witness could attest to how it had ended up in the tunnel in the first place or even how long it had been there. “That’s a real nonstarter” was how Stewart put it. “We’re better off using the manpower elsewhere. I suggest we have a rethink on those blokes surveilling the crime scenes as well.”

“Nothing there?”

“Sod all.”

“Christ, how can no one not have seen anything worth reporting?” Lynley knew his question would be taken as rhetorical, and it was. He also knew the answer. Big city. People on the underground and in the street all avoiding each other’s eyes. The public’s philosophy of see nothing, hear nothing, leave me alone was the very plague of their jobs as cops. “You’d think someone would at least have seen a car being torched. Or a car on fire, for the love of God.”

“As to that…” Stewart flipped through his neatly assembled paperwork. “We’ve had a wee bit of joy from background. To the point, Robbie Kilfoyle and Jack Veness. Two of the blokes from Colossus.”

Both of the Colossus men, as things turned out, had juvenile records. Kilfoyle’s stuff was relatively minor. Stewart offered a list of truancy problems, vandalism reported by neighbours, and looking in windows where he didn’t belong, saying, “All meagre pickings. Except for the fact that he was dishonourably discharged from the army.”

“For?”

“Continually going AWOL.”

“How does that relate?”

“I was thinking of the profile. Disciplinary problems, failure to obey orders. It seems to fit.”

“If you stretch it,” Lynley said. Before Stewart could take offence, he added, “What else? More on Kilfoyle?”

“He’s got a job delivering sandwiches by bicycle round lunchtime. With an organisation called…” He referred to his notes. “Mr. Sandwich. That’s how he ended up at Colossus, by the way. He delivered there, got to know them, and started working as a volunteer after his sandwich hours. He’s been there for the last few years.”

“Where is this place?” Lynley asked.

“Mr. Sandwich? It’s on Gabriel’s Wharf.” And when Lynley looked up at this, Stewart smiled. “Right you are. Home of Crystal Moon.”

“Well done, John. What about Veness?”

“Even more joy. He’s a former Colossus boy. Been there since he was thirteen years old. A little arsonist, he was. Started out with small fires in the neighbourhood, but he escalated things to torching vehicles and then a whole squat. Got caught for that one, did some time in borstal, hooked up with Colossus afterwards. He’s their shining example now. Trot him out to their fund-raisers, they do. He gives the official spiel on how Colossus saved his life after which the hat’s passed round or whatever.”

“His living situation?”

“Veness…” Stewart referred to his notes. “He’s got a room over in Bermondsey. He’s not far from the market, as it happens. Kimmo Thorne flogging stolen silver and all that, if you recall. As for Kilfoyle…He’s got digs in Granville Square. Islington.”

“Smart part of town for a sandwich-delivery boy,” Lynley remarked. “Check on it. Get on to the other bloke, Neil Greenham, as well. According to Barbara’s report—”

“She actually made a report?” Stewart asked. “What miracle brought that about?”

“—he taught at a primary school in North London,” Lynley plunged on. “Had a disagreement of some sort with his superior. About discipline, apparently. It resulted in his resignation. Have someone get on to that.”

“Will do.” Stewart made a note.

A knock on the door brought Barbara Havers into the office then. Close on her heels was Winston Nkata with whom she was in terse conversation. She looked excited. Nkata looked interested. Lynley grew momentarily heartened by the idea that progress might actually be about to occur.

Havers said, “It’s Colossus. Got to be. Listen to this. Griffin Strong’s silk-screening business just happens to be in Quaker Street. Sound familiar? It did to me. Turns out he’s got a smallish factory in one of the warehouses, and when I asked round in the area to suss out which one, an old bloke on the pavement shook his head, made some grave mutterings like the ghost of Christmas past, and pointed out the spot where—as he put it—the ‘devil made his presence known.’”

“Which meant?” Lynley asked.

“That one of the bodies was found not two doors down from our Mr. Strong’s secondary means of employment, guv. The third of the bodies, as it turned out. Which sounded too bloody coincidental to be coincidental, so I checked out the rest. And listen to this…” She stuck half of her arm into her enormous shoulder bag and, after some struggle, pulled out her tattered spiral notebook. She ran a hand through her hair—doing nothing to improve its overall dishevelled look—and went on. “Jack Veness: number eight Grange Walk, not even a mile from the Shand Street tunnel. Robbie Kilfoyle: sixteen Granville Square, sneezing distance from St. George’s Gardens. Ulrike Ellis: two-five-eight Gloucester Terrace, just round two corners from a multi-storey carpark. The multi-storey carpark, if you know what I mean. This has got to be a Colossus situation, start to finish. If the bodies themselves didn’t scream that at us, where the bodies were put bloody well does.”

“The Gunnersbury Park body?” John Stewart asked. He’d been listening with his head cocked, and his face wore an expression of paternal indulgence which Lynley knew that Havers would particularly loathe.

“I haven’t got to that one yet,” she admitted. “But odds are that body from Gunnersbury Park is someone else from Colossus. And bigger odds are that Gunnersbury Park is a hop and a jump from where a Colossus employee lives. So all we have to do is get the names and addresses of everyone who works there. Of volunteers as well. Because believe me, sir, someone inside’s trying to paint the place black.”

John Stewart shook his head. “I don’t like it, Tommy. A serial killer choosing his victims from within his immediate sphere? I can’t see how that plays with what we know about serial killers in general and this one in particular. We know this is an intelligent bloke we’re dealing with, and it’s damned lunacy to think he’d work there, volunteer there, or do anything else there. He’d know we’d twig it eventually, and then what? When we’re hot on his tail, what’s he going to do?”

Havers countered. “You can’t be thinking it’s some major coincidence that every body we’ve been able to identify just happens to be associated with Colossus.” Stewart shot her a look, and she added, “Sir,” as an afterthought. “With respect, that doesn’t make sense.” She pulled out another notebook from her battered shoulder bag. Lynley saw it was the signing-in register they’d taken surreptitiously from the reception desk at Colossus earlier. She opened it, riffling through a few pages as she said, “And listen to this. I had a look through this on my way back from the East End just now. You’re not going to believe…Bloody hell, what liars.” She leafed through the book and read aloud as she flipped through the pages, “Jared Salvatore, eleven A.M. Jared Salvatore, two-ten P.M. Jared Salvatore, nine-forty A.M. Jared Bloody Blooming Salvatore, three twenty-two P.M.” She slapped the notebook down on the conference table. It slithered across and knocked John Stewart’s neatly compiled notes to the floor. “Am I right that no cookery school in London knows the first thing about Jared Salvatore? Well, why would they when he was doing his cookery course at Colossus all along? Our killer’s right there inside that place. He’s picking and choosing. He’s setting things up like a pro, and he doesn’t expect us to catch him at any of it.”