With No One As Witness (48 page)

He didn’t get the message, or he chose to ignore it. He said, “Ulrike.”

She looked up again. “What else?” She knew she sounded impatient because she was impatient. She tried to temper that with a smile and a gesture to her paperwork.

He observed this solemnly, then raised his gaze to her. “Sorry. I thought you might want to know about Dennis Butcher.”

“Who?”

“Dennis Butcher. He was doing Learn to Earn when he dis…”—Neil made an obvious correction in course—“when he stopped coming. Jack Veness told me the cops called while you were at the board meeting. That body found over in Quaker Street…? It was Dennis.”

Ulrike breathed only one word in reply. “God.”

“And now there’s another today. So I was wondering…”

“What? What were you wondering?”

“If you’ve considered…”

His significant pauses were maddening. “What?” she said. “What? What? I’ve got a load of work to do, so if you’ve something you need to say, Neil, then say it.”

“Yes. Of course. I was just thinking it’s time we called in all the kids and warned them, isn’t it? If victims are being chosen from Colossus, it seems that our only recourse—”

“Nothing indicates that victims are being chosen from Colossus,” Ulrike said, despite what she herself had been thinking a moment before Neil Greenham interrupted her. “These kids live their lives on the edge. They take and sell drugs, they’re involved with street muggings, burglaries, robberies, prostitution. They meet and mingle with the wrong sort of people every single day, so if they end up dead, it’s because of that and not because they’ve spent time with us.”

He was looking at her curiously. He let a silence hang between them, during which Ulrike heard Griff’s voice coming from the shared office of the assessment leaders. She wanted to be rid of Neil. She wanted to look at her lists and make some decisions.

Neil finally said, “If that’s what you think…”

“It’s what I think,” she lied. “So if there’s nothing else…?”

Again that silence and that look. Speculative. Suggestive. Wondering how best to use her obduracy to his own advantage. “Well,” he said, “I suppose that’s all. I’ll be off, then.” Still he looked at her. She wanted to slap him.

“Safe trip to the doctor tomorrow,” she told him evenly.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll make sure it is, won’t I.”

That said, he left her. When he was gone, she rested her forehead in her fingers. God. God. Dennis Butcher, she thought. Five of them now. And until Kimmo Thorne, she hadn’t even been aware of what was happening under her very nose. Because the only thing her nose could even begin to smell was the scent of Griff Strong’s aftershave.

And then he was there too. Not hesitating at the door as Neil had done, but barging right in.

He said, “Ulrike, you’ve heard about Dennis Butcher?”

Ulrike knotted her eyebrows. Did he actually sound pleased? “Neil told me just now.”

“Did he?” Griff sat on the only chair in the room besides her own. He wore that ivory fisherman’s sweater that set off his dark hair and the blue jeans that emphasised the Michelangelo shape of his thighs. How typical. “I’m glad you know,” he added. “It can’t be what we thought, then, can it?”

We? she thought. What we thought? She said, “About what?”

“What?”

“What did we think? About what?”

“That it’s to do with me. With someone wanting to set me up by killing these boys. Dennis Butcher didn’t go through assessment with me, Ulrike. He belonged to one of the other leaders.” Griff offered a smile. “It’s a relief. With the cops breathing down my neck…Well, I didn’t want that and I can’t think you did either.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“The police? Breathing down someone’s neck? Are you suggesting I’ve been involved in the deaths of these kids? Or that the police will think I’ve been involved?”

“Jesus, no. I just meant…You and I…” He made that gesture of his that was meant to seem boyish, the hand through the hair. It tousled nicely. He no doubt had it cut to do so. “I can’t think you want it getting about that you and I…Some things are best left private. So…” He flashed her that smile again. He looked over the top of her desk to the dates and the calendar. “What’re you up to? How’d the board meeting go, by the way?”

“You’d better leave,” she told him.

He looked confused. “Why?”

“Because I’ve work to do. Your day may have ended, but mine has not.”

“What’s wrong?” The boyish hand-to-hair again. She’d once thought it charming. She’d once seen it as an invitation to touch his hair herself. She’d reached to do so and she’d actually grown wet at the contact: her humble fingers, his glorious locks, prelude to both the kiss and the hungry pressure of his body against hers.

She said, “Five of our boys are dead, Griff. Possibly six, because there’s another been found this morning. That’s what’s wrong.”

“But there’s no connection.”

“How can you say that? Five boys dead and what they all have in common besides trouble with the law is enrollment here.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I know that. I meant this Dennis Butcher thing. There’s no connection. He wasn’t one of mine. I didn’t even know him. So you and I…well, no one’s going to need to know.”

She stared at him. She wondered how she had failed to see…What was it about physical beauty? she asked herself. Did it make the beholder stupid as well as blind and deaf?

She said, “Yes. Well.” And added, “Have a nice evening, won’t you,” and picked up her pen and bent her head to her work.

He said her name once more, but she didn’t respond. And she didn’t look up as he left the office.

But his message remained with her after he was gone. These murders had nothing to do with him. She thought about this. Couldn’t it also be the case that they had nothing to do with Colossus? And if that was the case, wasn’t it true that by attempting to root out a killer from the organisation, Ulrike was turning a spotlight upon all of them, encouraging the police to dig deeper into everyone’s background and movements? And if she did that, wasn’t she also thereby asking the police to ignore everything that could point to the real killer, who would go on killing as the fancy took him?

The truth was that there had to be yet another connection among the boys, and it had to be a connection beyond Colossus. The police had so far failed to see this, but they would. They definitely would. Just so long as she held them off and kept their noses out of Elephant and Castle.

NOT A SOUL was on the pavement when Lynley made the turn into Lady Margaret Road in Kentish Town. He parked in the first available space he came to, in front of an RC church on the corner, and he walked up the street in search of Havers. He found her smoking in front of Barry Minshall’s home. She said, “He called for the duty solicitor straightaway once I got him to the station,” and handed over a photo in a plastic evidence bag.

Lynley looked at it. It was much as Havers had picturesquely described it on the phone to him. Sodomy and fellatio. The boy appeared to be about ten.

Lynley felt ill. The child could be anyone, anywhere, anytime, and the men taking their pleasure from him were completely unidentifiable. But that would be the point, wouldn’t it. Satisfying the urge was all there was to monsters. To them, it was merely a case of hunter and prey. He gave the picture back to Havers and waited for his stomach to settle before he gazed at the house.

Number 16 Lady Margaret Road was a sad affair, a brick-and-masonry building of three floors and a basement with every inch of its masonry and wood in need of paint. It had no formal house number attached to its door or to the squared-off columns that defined its front porch. Rather, 16 had been scrawled in marking pen on one of these pillars, along with the letters A, B, C, and D and the appropriate up and down arrows indicating where those respective flats could be found: in the basement or in the house proper. One of London’s great plane trees stood along the pavement, filling the small front garden with a covering of dead and decomposing leaves as thick as a mattress. The leaves obscured everything: from the sagging, low front wall of brick to the narrow path leading up to the steps, to the steps themselves: five of them which climbed to a blue front door. Two panels of translucent glass ran vertically up the middle half of this, one of them badly cracked and asking to be broken altogether. There was no knob, only a dead bolt surrounded by wood worn down by thousands of hands having pushed the door inward.

Minshall lived in flat A, which was in the basement. Its means of access was down a flight of steps, round the side of the house, and along a narrow passage where rainwater pooled and mould grew at the base of the building. Just outside the door was a cage holding birds. Doves. They cooed softly at the human presence.

Lynley had the warrants; Havers had the keys. She handed them over and let him do the honours. They stepped inside into utter darkness.

Finding a light was a matter of stumbling through what seemed to be a sitting room that had been thoroughly turned over by a burglar. But when Havers said, “Got a light here, sir,” and switched on a dim bulb on a desk, Lynley saw that the condition of the place was due only to slovenly housekeeping.

“What d’you reckon that smell is?” Havers asked.

“Unwashed male, dodgy plumbing, semen, and poor ventilation.” Lynley donned latex gloves; she did the same. “That boy was here,” he said. “I can feel it.”

“The one in the picture?”

“Davey Benton. What’s Minshall claiming?”

“He’s plugged it. I thought we’d get him on the CCTV cameras in the market, but the cops in Holmes Street told me they’re just for show. No film inside them. There’s a bloke there—he’s called John Miller—who could probably ID a photo of Davey, though. If he’ll talk at all.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“I think he’s bent himself. Towards underage boys. I got the impression if he fingers Minshall, Minshall fingers him. Scratch mine, scratch yours.”

“Wonderful,” Lynley murmured grimly. He worked his way across the room and found another light by a sagging sofa. He switched it on and turned to look at what they had.

“Pay dirt in a saucepan,” Havers said.

He couldn’t disagree. A computer that doubtless had an Internet connection. A video player with racks of tapes beneath it. Magazines with graphic pictures of sex, others filled with S&M photos. Unwashed crockery. The paraphernalia of magic. They picked through this at different parts of the room till Havers said, “Sir? Do you make of these what I make of these? They were on the floor beneath the desk.”

She was holding up what appeared to be several tea towels. They were stiffened in spots, as if they’d been used while sitting at the computer, for matters having nothing to do with drying plates and glasses.

“He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” Lynley moved into what was a sleeping alcove, where a bed bore sheets of much the same appearance and condition as the tea towels. The place was a treasure trove of DNA evidence. If Minshall had engaged in his frolics with anyone other than his computer and the palm of his hand, there was going to be enough indication of that here to send him away for decades, if the anyone in question was an underage boy.

On the floor next to the bed was yet another magazine, limp with someone’s continual inspection of it. Lynley picked it up and leafed through it quickly. Raw photos of women, nude, legs splayed. Come-hither looks, wet lips, fingers stimulating, entering, caressing. It was sex reduced to base release and nothing else. It depressed Lynley to his core.

“Sir, I’ve got something.”

Lynley returned to the sitting room, where Havers had been going through the desk. She’d found a stack of Polaroid pictures, which she handed over.

They were not pornography. Instead, in each of them a different young boy was kitted out in magician’s togs: cape, top hat, black trousers and shirt. Occasionally a wand under the arm for effect. They were all engaged in what seemed to be the same trick: something with scarves and a dove. There were thirteen of them altogether: white boys, black boys, mixed-race boys. Davey Benton was not among them. As for the others, the parents and relatives of the dead boys would have to look them over.

“What’s he said about that photo in his van?” Lynley asked when he had flipped through the Polaroids a second time.

“Doesn’t know how it got there,” Havers said. “Wasn’t him put it there. He’s completely innocent. It’s some mistake. Yadda yadda more yadda.”

“He could be telling the truth.”

“You’re joking.”

Lynley looked round the flat. “So far there’s no child pornography in here.”

“So far,” Havers said. She indicated the VCR and its accompanying cassettes. “You can’t tell me those videos are by Disney, sir.”

“I’ll give you that. But tell me: Why would he have a photo in his van and none where it’s infinitely safer for him to have it: here inside his flat? And why would all indication of what he’s been up to sexually be referenced to women?”

“Because he won’t take a trip to the nick for that. And he’s smart enough to know it,” she replied. “As for the rest, give me ten minutes to find it on that computer. If it takes that long.”

Lynley told her to have at it. He went down a corridor beyond the sitting room and found a grimy bathroom and beyond it a kitchen. More of the same in both of the locations. A SOCO team would have to delve into it. There were going to be fingerprints galore, in addition to trace evidence deposited by anyone who’d been inside the place.

He left Havers to the computer and went back outside, following the path to the front of the house. There, he climbed the steps to the porch and rang each of the bells for the flats within. Only one yielded an answer. Flat C on the first floor was occupied, and the voice of an Indian woman told him to come up. She would be happy to talk to the police as long as he had identification that he would be willing to slide under her door when he got there.

This sufficed to gain him entry to a flat with a view of the street. A sari-clad middle-aged woman admitted him, handing back his warrant card with a formal little bow. “One cannot be too careful, I find,” she told him. “It is the way of the world.” She introduced herself as Mrs. Singh. She was a widow, she revealed, of no children, straitened circumstances, and little opportunity to marry again. “Alas, my child-bearing years are over. I would serve only to care for someone else’s children now. Would you have tea with me, sir?”