With No One As Witness (41 page)

“Thank you,” Lynley said to Deborah.

“D’you like the idea?” she asked him.

“I like anything with the promise of peace,” he said. “Even if it’s only momentary. Now if we can only resolve—”

His mobile chirped. As he reached for it in the breast pocket of his coat, Havers’ mobile went off as well.

The rest of them watched as the information was passed from New Scotland Yard to Lynley and Havers simultaneously. It wasn’t good news.

Queen’s Wood. In North London.

Someone had found yet another body.

HELEN WENT DOWN TO THE CAR WITH THEM. SHE stopped Lynley, saying only, “Tommy darling, please listen to me,” before he got inside. She cast a look towards Havers, who was already buckling herself into the passenger seat, and then said quietly to Lynley, “You’ll solve it, Tommy. Please don’t be so hard on yourself.”

He let out a breath. How well she knew him. He said just as quietly, “How can I be otherwise? Another one, Helen.”

“You must remember: You’re only one man.”

“I’m not. I’m more than thirty men and women, and we’ve done bloody sod all to stop him. He’s one man.”

“That’s not true.”

“Which part?”

“You know which part. You’re doing this the only way possible.”

“While boys—young boys, Helen, children barely into their teens—are dying out here in the street. No matter what they’ve done, no matter what their crimes, if they’ve even committed any, they don’t deserve this. I feel as if we’re all asleep at the wheel without knowing it.”

“I know,” she said.

Lynley could see the love and concern on his wife’s face. He was momentarily comforted by it. Still, as he got into the car, he said bitterly, “Please God don’t think so well of me, Helen.”

“I can’t think anything else. Go carefully please.” And then to Havers, “Barbara, will you see that he has a meal sometime today? You know him. He’s likely not to eat.”

Havers nodded. “I’ll find him a decent fry-up somewhere. Lots of grease. That’ll set him up proper.”

Helen smiled. She touched Lynley’s cheek and then stepped away from the car. Lynley could see her through the rearview mirror, still standing in place as they drove away.

They made fairly good time by using Park Lane and the Edgware Road, heading northwest initially. They skirted Regent’s Park on its north side, shooting towards Kentish Town. They were approaching Queen’s Wood from Highgate station when the day’s promised rain finally began to fall. Lynley cursed. Rain and a crime scene: a recipe for forensic nightmares.

Queen’s Wood was an anomaly in London: a bona fide woodland that had once been a park like any other park but had long ago been left to grow, thrive, or fail as it might. The result was acres of unbridled nature in the middle of urban sprawl. Houses and the occasional block of flats backed onto it, but within ten feet of the fences and walls of their back gardens, the woods burst out of the earth in an eruption of beech trees, bracken, shrubs, and ferns, all struggling with each other to survive just as they would in the countryside.

There were no lawns. No park benches. No duck ponds. No swans floating serenely on a lake or river. There were, instead, ill-marked paths, overfull rubbish bins sprouting everything from take-away containers to nappies, the odd signpost pointing vaguely to a route to Highgate station, and a hillside down which the woodland dropped towards a bank of allotments to the west.

The easiest access to Queen’s Wood lay beyond Muswell Hill Road. There, Wood Lane veered to the northeast, bisecting the southern portion of the park. The local police made a strong presence at the scene, having blocked off the end of the street with sawhorses where four police constables kitted out in rain gear held back the curious who were bobbing round beneath their umbrellas like a collection of mobile mushrooms.

Lynley showed his ID to one of the constables, who signaled to the others to move the roadblock long enough for the Bentley to pass. Before he did so, Lynley said to the man, “Don’t let anyone other than SOCO inside. Anyone. I don’t care who they are or what they tell you. No one passes who isn’t police with proper police ID.”

The constable nodded. The flash of camera lights told Lynley that the press was already hot on the story.

The first stretch of Wood Lane comprised housing: an amalgamation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings that consisted of conversions, apartments, and single homes. Perhaps two hundred yards along, however, the buildings stopped abruptly and on either side of the street the woods spread out, completely unfenced, utterly accessible, looking in this weather both brooding and dangerous.

“Good choice,” Havers muttered as she and Lynley alighted from the car. “He has a way, hasn’t he? You’ve got to give him that.” She turned up the collar of her donkey jacket against the rain. “Like a set from a thriller film, this is.”

Lynley didn’t disagree. In the summer, the area was probably a paradise, a natural oasis that afforded an escape from the prison of concrete, stone, brick, and tarmac that had long ago enveloped the rest of the native environment. But in the winter, it was a melancholy spot in which everything was in the process of decay. Layers of decomposing leaves covered the ground and sent forth the odour of peat. Beeches toppled by storms over the years lay in various stages of rot right where they had fallen, while branches severed from trees by the wind punctuated the slope, growing moss and lichen.

Activity centred on the south side of Wood Lane, where the park dipped down towards the allotments and then up again towards Priory Gardens, which was the street beyond them. A large square of translucent plastic suspended from poles formed a rough shelter for an area perhaps fifty yards to the west of the allotments. There, an enormous beech had been torn from the ground more recently than the others, for where its roots had been there was still a hollow that time, earth, wind, small creatures, ferns, and bracken had not yet filled in.

The killer had placed the body in this hollow. At the moment, a forensic pathologist was attending it while a SOCO team worked with silent efficiency in the immediate area. Beneath a tall beech some thirty yards away, an adolescent boy was watching the activity, one trainer-shod foot up on the trunk behind him to prop him up and a rucksack at his feet. A ginger-haired man in a trench coat stood with him, and he jerked his head at Lynley and Havers in a signal to come over and join him.

Ginger Hair introduced himself as DI Widdison from the Archway police station. His companion, he said, was Ruff.

“Ruff?” Lynley glanced at the boy, who glowered at him from beneath the hood of a sweatshirt that was covered by an outsize anorak.

“No surname at present.” Widdison walked five paces away from the boy and took Lynley and Havers with him. “Found the body,” he said. “He’s a tough little bugger, but it’s shaken him up. Sicked up on his way to get help.”

“Where did he go for that?” Lynley asked.

Widdison tossed a nonexistent ball back in the direction of Wood Lane. “Walden Lodge. Eight or ten flats in there. He leaned on the bells till someone let him inside to use the phone.”

“What was he doing here, anyway?” Havers asked.

“Tagging,” Widdison told her. “Course, he doesn’t want us to know that, but he was shaken up and gave us his tag by mistake, which is why he doesn’t want to give us his real name now. We’ve been trying to catch him for some eight months. He’s put ‘Ruff’ on every available surface round here: signs, dustbins, trees. Silver.”

“Silver?”

“His tagging colour. Silver. He’s got the cans of paint in that rucksack of his. Didn’t have the presence of mind to chuck them before he phoned us.”

Lynley said, “What’s he given you?”

“Sod all. You can talk to him if you’d like, but I don’t think he saw a thing. I don’t think there was anything to see.” He tilted his head in the direction of the intense circle of work surrounding the body. “I’ll be over there when you’re ready.” He strode off.

Lynley and Havers returned to the boy, Havers digging into her bag. Lynley said to her, “I expect he’s right, Barbara. I don’t imagine taking notes—”

“Not going for the notes, sir,” she replied, and she offered the boy her crumpled packet of Players when they joined him.

Ruff looked from the cigarettes to her, back to the cigarettes. He finally mumbled, “Cheers,” and took one, which she lit for him with a plastic lighter.

“Anyone about when you found the body?” Lynley asked the boy once he’d had time to suck hungrily on the cigarette. His fingers were dirty, with grime crusted beneath the nails and the cuticles. His face was spotty but otherwise pale.

Ruff shook his head. “Someone in the ’lotments, is all,” he said. “Old bloke turning the earth with a shovel like he’s looking for something. I seen him when I come down through Priory Gardens. On the path. Tha’s all, innit.”

“Were you by yourself tagging?” Lynley asked.

The boy’s eyes flashed. “Hey, I di’n’t say—”

“Sorry. Did you come into the park by yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“See anything unusual? A car or van that didn’t look right, up on Wood Lane? Perhaps when you went to phone for help?”

“I di’n’t see fuck,” Ruff said. “Anyways, there’s lots ’f cars parked up there all the time in daytime. Cos people come into town from outside and they take the tube rest of the way, don’t they? Cos tube’s just over there. Highgate station. Look, I tol’ the dibble all this. They ack like I did summat. An’ they won’t let me go.”

“That might have something to do with your not giving them your name,” Havers told the boy. “If they want to talk to you again, they won’t know where to find you.”

Ruff looked at her suspiciously, a bloke trying to suss out a trick from among her words. She said reassuringly, “We’re from Scotland Yard. We’re not going to drag you to the nick for spraying your name about. We’ve bigger fish to fry.”

He sniffed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and relented. He was called Elliott Augustus Greenberry, he finally admitted, eyeing them sharply, as if watching for incredulous expressions to cross their faces. “Double ell, double tee, double ee, double ar. An’ don’ tell me how fuckin stupid, it is. I know, don’ I. Look, c’n I go now?”

“In a moment,” Lynley said. “Did you recognise the boy?”

Ruff brushed a greasy lock of hair off his face, tucking it into the hood of the sweatshirt. “Wha,’ him, you mean? The…it?”

“The dead boy, yes,” Lynley said. “Do you know him?”

“I never,” Ruff said. “Nobody I ever seen. Could be he’s from round here somewheres, like up on the street over there behind the ’lotments, but I don’t know him. Like I said, I don’t know fuck. C’n I go?”

“Once we have your address,” Havers said.

“Why?”

“Because we’ll want you to sign a statement eventually, and we need to know where to find you, don’t we.”

“But I said I di’n’t—”

“It’s routine, Elliott,” Lynley said.

The boy scowled but cooperated, and they released him. He shed the anorak, handed it over, and took off down the slope, west towards the path that would lead him up again to Priory Gardens.

“Anything from him?” DI Widdison said when Lynley and Havers joined him.

“Nothing,” Lynley said, handing over the anorak, which Widdison passed to a sodden constable, who donned it gratefully. “Aman digging in the allotments.”

“That’s what he told me as well,” Widdison said. “We’ve got a door-to-door going on up there now.”

“And along Wood Lane?”

“The same. I’m reckoning our best bet is Walden Lodge.” Once again, Widdison indicated a modern and solid-looking block of flats that squatted at the edge of the woods. It was the last building on Wood Lane before the park, and on every side it presented balconies. Most of them were empty save for the occasional barbecue and garden furniture covered for the winter, but on four of them, watchers stood. One of them held up binoculars. “I can’t think the killer brought the body down here without a torch,” Widdison said. “Someone up there might have seen that.”

“Unless he brought it just after dawn,” Havers pointed out.

“Too risky,” Widdison said. “Commuters park on the lane and use the underground to get into town from here. He’d have to know that and plan accordingly. But he’d still run the risk of being seen by someone who decided to make the journey earlier than usual.”

“He does his homework, though,” Havers pointed out. “We know that from where he’s left the rest of them.”

Widdison looked unconvinced. He took them under the shelter and over to the body. It lay on its side but was otherwise dumped carelessly in the hollow created by the unearthed roots of the fallen beech. Its head was tucked into its chest; its arms windmilled out like someone frozen in the act of giving a signal.

This boy, Lynley saw, seemed younger than the others, although not by much. He was white as well: blond and extremely fair skinned, small and not particularly developed. At first glance, Lynley concluded—with relief—that he wasn’t one of theirs at all, that he and Havers needn’t have come this distance across London on someone’s whim. But when he squatted to have a better look, he saw the postmortem incision running down the boy’s chest and disappearing into the fold of his waist, while on his forehead, a crude symbol had been drawn in blood, brother to the symbol found on Kimmo Thorne.

Lynley glanced at the forensic pathologist, who was speaking into the microphone of a handheld tape recorder. “I’d like a look at his hands,” he said.

The man nodded. “I’ve done my bit. We’re ready to bag him,” and one of the team came forward to do so. They’d start by bagging the hands in paper, preserving any trace evidence from the killer that might be under the boy’s fingernails. From there they’d do the rest and when they moved the body, Lynley reckoned he’d get a better look at it.

That turned out to be the case. Rigor was present, but enough of the surface of the hands became visible when the body was lifted out of the hollow for Lynley to see that the palms were blackened from having been burnt. The navel was missing as well, chopped crudely out of the body.