With No One As Witness (38 page)

“Now that’s gratifying,” Barbara said.

“To an extent, yes.” He studied her. A little silence lingered between them during which Barbara looked away, picking at a fuzz ball that needed removing from the arm of her baggy pullover…along with all the other fuzz balls that adorned the garment. “Barbara,” Lynley finally said, “I wouldn’t have it this way.”

She looked up. “What?”

“I think you know. Have you ever considered you’d make better progress towards reinstatement if you worked with someone less…less objectionable to people in power?”

“Like who, for example? John Stewart? Now that would be chummy.”

“MacPherson, possibly. Or Philip Hale. Even out of here altogether, in one of the borough stations. Because as long as you’re in my sphere—not to mention in Hillier’s—with Webberly no longer here to be a buffer for either one of us…” He made a gesture. It said, Finish the thought in a logical manner.

She didn’t need to. She heaved her bag higher on her shoulder and began to head back up to the incident room. She said, “That’s not how this is going to play out. At the end of the day, I know what’s important and what isn’t.”

“Which means?”

She paused at the door to the corridor. She offered him the response he’d given her. “I think you know, sir. Have a good night. I’ve got work to do before I can go home.”

IN HIS MIND, HE PUT A BODY BEFORE HIM: LYING ON THE floor, crucified by restraints and the board. It was a soundless but not a lifeless body and when its senses returned, what it knew was that it was in the presence of a power it could not hope to escape. So fear descended in the guise of anger, and in the presence of that fear, Fu’s heart grew large. Blood engorged His muscles, and He rose above Himself. It was the kind of ecstasy that only came from being a god.

Having had it that way, He wanted it again. Once He had experienced the sensation of who He actually was, bursting from the chrysalis of who He only appeared to be, it could not be laid aside. It was forever.

He had attempted to hold on to the feeling for as long as possible once the first boy died. Time and again, He had put Himself into darkness and there He slowly relived each moment that had taken Him from selection to judgement, and from there to admission, onward to punishment, and then to release. But still the sheer exultation of the experience had faded, as all things do. To recapture it, He had no choice but to make another selection, to perform once again.

He told Himself that He was not like the others who had gone before Him: swine like Brady, Sutcliffe, and West. They had all been cheap thrill seekers, cold-blooded killers who preyed on the vulnerable for no other reason than to shore themselves up. They shouted their insignificance to the world through acts the world was not likely to forget.

But for Fu things were different. Not for Him were innocent children at play, streetwalkers chosen at random off the pavement, female hitchhikers taking a fatal decision to climb into a car with a man and his wife…

In the sphere of those killers, the possession, the terror, and the slaughter were all. But Fu trod a different path to theirs, and that was what made His current state far more difficult to cope with. Had He been willing to join the swine, He knew that He would be resting easier now: He’d have only to scour the streets and within hours…ecstasy once again. Because that wasn’t who He was, Fu sought the darkness as an aid to relief.

Once He was there, though, He discerned intrusion. He drew a breath and held it, His senses alert. He listened. He thought of impossibility. But there was no mistaking what His body told Him.

He dispelled the gloom. He looked for the evidence. The light was dim as He preferred it, but enough to show Him that there were no obvious signs of intrusion into this place. Yet still He knew. He had learned to trust the nerve endings at the nape of His neck, and they were murmuring caution.

A book lay discarded on the floor near a chair. A magazine had its cover wrinkled. A stack of newspapers crisscrossed one on top of the other. Words. Words. Words upon words. All of them chattered, all accused. A maggot, they chorused. Here, here.

The reliquary, Fu realised. That was what he wanted. For only through the reliquary would it be possible for the maggot to speak once more. And what he would say…

Don’t tell me you’ve not bought brown sauce, cow. What else have you got to think about all day?

Dear, please. The boy—

Are you trying to tell me …? Get your arse down to the shops for that sauce. And leave the boy. I said leave him. Something wrong with your ears as well as your brain?

Now, dearest…

As if the tone and the words could somehow make a difference to the walking lightly and the loose-boweled fear. Both of which would return if He lost possession of the reliquary or its contents.

Yet He could see that the reliquary stood where He had left it, in its hiding place that was no place of hiding at all. And when He carefully removed the top, He found that the contents seemed to be undisturbed. Even the contents within the contents—carefully buried, preserved, and treasured—were as He’d left them. Or so they appeared.

He went to the pile of crisscrossed papers. He loomed above them, but they spoke only what He could see: a man in African garb. A headline declared the man “Foster Dad in Anguish,” and the story that accompanied the headline told the rest: all the deaths round London and they’d finally sussed out that there was a serial killer at work.

Fu felt Himself relax. He felt His hands warm, and the sickness within Him began to recede as He fingered fondly through the stack of tabloids. Perhaps, He thought, they would suffice.

He sat. He drew the entire stack closer, like Father Christmas embracing a child. How odd it was, He thought, that only with the last boy—the lying, denying, and accusing Sean who had forfeited redemption and release because he’d stubbornly refused to admit his guilt—had the police realised they were dealing with something superior to and larger than what they were used to. He had been giving them clues all along, but they’d refused to see. Now, though, they knew. Not His purpose, of course, but the fact of Him as a single and singular force of justice. Always a step ahead of those who sought Him. Supreme and supreme.

He lifted the most recent copy of the Evening Standard and set it aside. He went down the stack till He found the Mirror, which featured a photo of the tunnel in which He’d left the last body. He laid His hands on the photograph of the scene, and He dropped His gaze to encompass the other pictures on the page: cops because who else could they be? And one of them named so that now He knew who wished to thwart Him, who fruitlessly directed everyone else to turn Him from the course He followed. Lynley, detective superintendent. The name would be easy enough to remember.

Fu closed His eyes and conjured up the image of Himself and this Lynley in confrontation. But not the sort in which He faced him alone. Instead, the image displayed a moment of redemption in which the detective watched, helpless to do anything to stop the cycle of punishment and salvation as it played out before his eyes. That would indeed be something, Fu thought. That would be a statement that no one—no Brady, no Sutcliffe, no West, no anyone else—had ever been able to make.

Fu took in the pleasure of the thought, in the hope it would bring Him close to the heady sensation—what He called the very yesness—of those final moments of the act of redemption. Wanting the swelling of success to possess Him, wanting the knowledge of fully being to fill Him, wanting wanting wanting to feel the emotional and sensual explosion that occurred at the impact of desire and accomplishment…Please.

But nothing happened.

He opened His eyes, every nerve alive. The maggot had been here, defiling this place, and that was why He could not recapture any of the moments in which He’d been most fully alive.

He could not afford the despair that threatened, so He turned it to anger, and the anger itself He lasered on the maggot. Keep out of here, wanker. Keep out. Keep away.

But His nerves still tingled, telling a tale that revealed He would never have peace in this way. Peace could now be generated only by the act that brought another soul to its redemption.

The boy and the act itself, He thought.

What was needed was what would be.

RAIN FELL for the next five days, a heavy midwinter rain of the sort that generally made one despair of ever seeing the sun again. By the sixth morning, the worst of the storm had passed, but the glowering sky heralded the arrival of yet another as the day wore on.

Lynley didn’t go directly into the Yard as he normally would have done. Instead, he drove in the opposite direction, working his way over to the A4, heading out of Central London. Helen had suggested this journey to him. She’d gazed at him over a glass of breakfast orange juice and said, “Tommy, have you considered going out to Osterley? I think it’s what you need.”

He’d said in reply, “Is my self-doubt becoming that obvious?”

“I wouldn’t call it self-doubt. And I think you’re being too hard on yourself if that’s what you’re calling it, by the way.”

“What would you call it, then?”

Helen thought about this, head cocked to one side as she observed him. She hadn’t yet dressed for the day, hadn’t even bothered to comb her hair, and Lynley found he liked her tousled like this. She looked…She looked wifely, he thought, that was the word, although he’d have cut out his tongue before telling her that. She said, “I’d call it a ripple on the surface of your peace of mind, courtesy of the tabloids and the assistant commissioner of police. David Hillier wants you to fail, Tommy. You ought to know that by now. Even as he blusters on about bringing in a result, you’re the last person on earth he wants to do that.”

Lynley knew she was right. He said, “Which makes me wonder why he put me in this position in the first place.”

“Acting superintendent or heading this investigation?”

“Both.”

“It’s all to do with Malcolm Webberly, of course. Hillier told you himself that he knows what Malcolm would have wanted him to do, so he’s doing it. It’s his…his homage to him, for want of a better word. It’s his way of doing his part to ensure Malcolm’s recovery. But his own will—Hillier’s, I mean—gets in the way of his intention of helping Malcolm. So while you have the elevation to acting superintendent and you have the assignment to head this investigation, you also have Hillier’s bad wishes to go along with both.”

Lynley considered this. There was good sense to it. But that was Helen. Scratch the surface of her habitual insouciance and she was both sensible and intuitive to her core. “I’d no idea you’d become so adept at instant psychoanalysis,” he told her.

“Oh.” Lightly, she saluted him with her teacup. “It all comes of watching chat shows, darling.”

“Really? I’d never have thought of you as a covert chat-show viewer.”

“You flatter me. I’m becoming quite fond of the American ones. You know the sort: Someone sits on a sofa, pouring out his heart to the host and half a billion viewers, after which he’s given advice and sent off to slay dragons. It’s confession, catharsis, resolution, and renewal all in a tidy fifty-minute package. I adore the way they solve life’s problems on American television, Tommy. It’s rather the way Americans do most things, isn’t it? That gunslinger approach: Draw the gun, blast away, and the difficulty’s gone. Supposedly.”

“You aren’t recommending I shoot Hillier, are you?”

“Only as a last resort. In the meantime, I suggest a trip to Osterley.”

So he took up her suggestion. It was an ungodly hour for visiting a convalescent hospital, but he reckoned his police identification would be enough to get him inside.

It was. Most of the patients were still at their breakfasts, but Malcolm Webberly’s bed was empty. However, a helpful orderly directed him to the physiotherapy room. There, Lynley found Detective Superintendent Webberly working his way between two parallel bars.

Lynley watched him from the doorway. The fact that the superintendent was alive was miraculous. He’d survived a laundry list of injuries, all of them brought about by a hit-and-run driver. He’d endured the removal of his spleen and a good portion of his liver, a fractured skull and the removal of a blood clot on his brain, nearly six weeks of drug-induced coma, a broken hip, a broken arm, five broken ribs, and a heart attack in the midst of his slow recovery from everything else. He was nothing if not a warrior in the battle to regain his strength. He was also the one man at New Scotland Yard with whom Lynley had long felt he could be unguarded.

Webberly inched along the bars, encouraged by the therapist, who insisted upon calling him luv despite the scowls Webberly sent in her direction. She was approximately the size of a canary, and Lynley wondered how she would approach supporting the burly superintendent should he begin to topple. But it appeared that Webberly had no intention of doing anything other than making his way to the end of the apparatus. When he’d managed that, he said without looking in Lynley’s direction, “You’d think they’d let me have a bloody cigar on occasion, wouldn’t you, Tommy? Their idea of a celebration round here is an enema administered to the sound of Mozart.”

“How are you, sir?” Lynley asked, coming farther into the room. “Have you lost a few stone?”

“Are you saying I needed to?” Webberly looked shrewdly in his direction. He was pale and unshaven and he looked quite tentative about the titanium acting the part of his new hip. He wore a tracksuit instead of hospital garb. The words “Top Cop” decorated its jacket.

“Just a casual observation,” Lynley said. “To me you were always a picture needing no revision.”

“What cock.” Webberly grunted as he reached the end of the bars and made the turn that was necessary for his descent to the wheelchair, which the therapist brought to him. “Wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you.”

“Cup of tea, luv?” Webberly’s therapist asked him once he’d lowered himself to his chair. “Nice ginger biscuit? You did very well.”

“She thinks I’m a performing dog,” Webberly informed Lynley. He said to the woman, “Bring the whole damn tin of biscuits, thank you.”