With No One As Witness (49 page)

Lynley demurred. Winter was long and she was lonely and he otherwise would have stopped long enough to give her a pleasant half hour or so. But the temperature in her flat was tropical and even if that hadn’t been the case, what he needed from her was a matter of a few minutes’ conversation, and he could afford no more time than that. He told her he’d come to inquire about the gentleman in the basement flat. Barry Minshall, by name. Did she know him?

“The odd man with the stocking hat, oh yes,” Mrs. Singh replied. “Has he been arrested?”

She asked the question as if the word finally were understood between them.

“Why do you ask that?” Lynley said.

“The young boys,” she said. “They came and they went from that basement flat. Day and night. I did phone the police three times about it. I believe you must investigate this man, I told them. Something clearly is not right. But I fear that they saw me as a meddlesome woman, getting into business that was not my own.”

Lynley showed her the picture of Davey Benton he’d had from the boy’s father. “Was this boy one of them?”

She studied it. She carried it to the window overlooking the street and she gazed from the picture to the ground below, as if trying to see Davey Benton in memory as he might have been: entering the front garden and going down the steps to the path to the basement flat. She said, “Yes. Yes. I have seen this boy. One day that man met him out there on the street. I saw this. He wore a cap, this boy. But I saw his face. I did.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Oh yes. I am certain. It is the headphones in this picture, you see. He had them as well, from a player of some kind. He was quite small and very pretty, just like this boy in the picture.”

“Did he and Minshall go into the basement flat?”

They went down the stairs and round the side of the house, she told him. She hadn’t seen them go into the flat, but one could assume…She had no idea how long they were there. She didn’t spend all of her time at the window, she explained with an apologetic laugh.

But what she’d said was enough, and Lynley thanked her for it. He turned down yet another offer of tea and descended the outer stairs to the basement flat once more. Havers met him at the door. She said, “Got him,” and led Lynley to the computer. On the screen was a list of the sites that Barry Minshall had visited. It didn’t take a degree in cryptology to read their titles and know what they were all about.

“Let’s get SOCO over here,” Lynley said.

“What about Minshall?”

“Let him languish till morning. I want him to think about us crawling round his flat, uncovering the slime trail of his existence.”

WINSTON NKATA WAS IN NO HURRY TO GET TO WORK THE next morning. He knew he was going to take good-humoured heat from his colleagues over his appearance on Crimewatch, and he didn’t feel like facing it yet. Nor did he really have to because Crimewatch had actually produced a possible break in the case, and he would be tracking that break down before he headed over the river for the day.

From the sitting room, his mother’s usual morning fare—BBC Breakfast—was doing its regular bit of recycling the news, traffic, weather, and special reports every thirty minutes on the telly. They’d reached the part where they were informing the public of what was on the front page of every national broadsheet and tabloid. From this, he was able to assess the temperature of the press regarding the serial killings.

According to BBC Breakfast, the tabloids were making the most of the Queen’s Wood body, which at least had driven Bram Savidge and his accusations of institutional racism off their front pages. But Savidge still had a spot relegated to him, and those reporters not attempting to unearth more data about the body in the woods appeared to be conducting interviews wherever they could find them with people bearing grievances against the police. Navina Cryer shared space with the Queen’s Wood body on the front of the Mirror, telling her tale of being ignored when she reported Jared Salvatore missing shortly after his disappearance. Cleopatra Lavery had managed to conduct a telephone interview from inside Holloway Prison with News of the World, and she had much to say on the subject of the criminal-justice system and what it had done to “her lovely Sean.” Savidge and his African wife had been interviewed at home by the Daily Mail, complete with half-page photos of the wife playing a musical instrument of some sort under the fond eye of her husband. And according to what he was able to pick up from the presenters’ comments on the telly as they nattered on about the other papers, Nkata could tell that the rest of the press were not going softly on the Met in the face of another boy’s murder. One killer and how many cops? was the rhetorical question being asked by the news media with lofty irony.

Which was why Crimewatch and the manner in which the programme depicted the Met’s endeavours in the investigation had been so crucial. Which was also why AC Hillier had attempted to usurp the director’s job prior to the broadcast on the previous evening.

He wanted a split-screen effect, he’d told the men in the studio. DS Nkata would be identifying the dead boys by name and by photograph during the course of the programme, and having a head shot of Nkata speaking on one side of the screen while he identified photos of the victims of the serial killer on the other side of the screen would drive home to the viewers—by means of DS Nkata’s sombre demeanour—how seriously the Met was taking the situation and the pursuit of this killer. That, of course, was utter cock. What Hillier wanted front and centre was what he and the Directorate of Public Affairs had wanted front and centre from the first: a black face attached to a rank senior to that of detective constable.

The assistant commissioner didn’t get his way. They didn’t go for anything fancy on Crimewatch, he’d been told. Just video footage if it was available, e-fits, photographs, dramatic reconstructions, and interviews with investigators. The people in makeup would buff away the shine on the face of anyone in front of the camera, and the sound blokes would clip a microphone onto the lapel of a jacket so it looked like something other than an insect about to crawl onto the presenter’s chin, but Steven Spielberg this group was not. This was a low-budget operation, thank you very much. So who was going to say what to whom and in what order, please?

Hillier wasn’t happy, but he could do nothing about it. He made sure that DS Winston Nkata was introduced by name, however, and he made doubly certain he repeated that name during the course of the broadcast. Other than that, he explained the nature of the crimes, gave the relevant dates, showed the locations where the bodies had been found, and sketched out a few details of the ongoing investigation in a manner that suggested he and Nkata were working it shoulder to shoulder. That plus the e-fit of the Square Four Gym mystery man, the reconstruction of Kimmo Thorne’s abduction, and Nkata’s recitation of the names of the dead boys comprised the programme’s entirety.

The endeavour bore fruit. This, at least, made the whole enterprise worthwhile. It even made the prospect of having the piss taken out of him by his fellow officers somewhat bearable since Nkata intended to enter the incident room with solid information later that morning.

He finished his breakfast as the BBC was doing yet another traffic round-up. He ducked out of the flat to his mum’s “Mind how you go, Jewel” and his dad’s chin nod and soft “Proud of you, son,” and he made his way along the outdoor corridor and down the stairs as he buttoned his overcoat against the chill. Across the grounds of Loughborough Estate, he met no one save a mum shepherding three small children in the general direction of the primary school. He made it to his car and began to climb inside, only to see that the right front tyre had been slashed.

He sighed. It was not just flat, of course. That could have been ascribed to anything: from a slow leak to a nail picked up in a street somewhere and dislodged after the damage was done. That sort of disagreeable start to his day would have been an irritant, but it wouldn’t have had the cachet that a knifing had. A knifing suggested that the car’s owner ought to watch his back, not only right now when he had to break out the jack and the spare but also anytime he was on the estate.

Nkata looked round automatically before he set to changing the tyre. Naturally, there was no one about. This damage had been done on the previous night, sometime after he’d arrived home post Crimewatch. Whoever had done this didn’t have the bottle to face him squarely. At the end of the day, while he was a cop to them and consequently the enemy, he was also an alumnus of the Brixton Warriors, among whom he’d spilt his own blood and the blood of others.

Fifteen minutes later and he was on his way. His route took him past the Brixton police station, whose interview rooms he knew only too well from his adolescence, and he made a right turn into Acre Lane, with little traffic moving in the direction he was traveling.

This was towards Clapham, for it was from Clapham that the phone call had come at the end of Crimewatch. The caller was Ronald X. Ritucci—“It’s for Xavier,” he’d said—and he thought he had some information that might help the police in their investigation of the death of “that kid with the bicycle in the gardens.” He and his wife had been watching the show without thinking how it might relate to them when Gail—“that’s the wife”—pointed out that the night they’d been burgled corresponded to the night of that boy’s death. And he—Ronald X.—had had a glimpse of the little thug just before he leapt out of the first-floor bedroom window of their house. He’d definitely worn makeup. So if the police were interested…

They were. Someone would call in the morning.

That someone was Nkata, and he found the Ritucci home not far to the south of Clapham Common. It was in a street of similar post-Edwardian houses, distinguished from so many of those north of the river by being detached dwellings in a city where land was at a premium.

When he rang the bell, he heard the sound of a child clattering along a corridor to the door. The inside bolt was messed about a bit, unsuccessfully, while a little voice called out, “Mummy! The doorbell! Did you hear?”

In a moment, a man said, “Gillian, get away from there. If I’ve told you once about answering the door, I’ve told you a thousand…” He jerked it open. A small girl in patent-leather tap shoes, tights, and a ballerina’s tutu peered round his leg, one arm clinging to his thigh.

Nkata had his identification ready. The man didn’t look at it. “Saw you on the telly,” he said. “I’m Ronald X. Ritucci. Come in. D’you mind the kitchen? Gail’s still feeding the baby. Au pair’s down with flu, unfortunately.”

Nkata said he didn’t mind, and he followed Ritucci, after the man had closed, bolted, and tested the security of the front door. They went to a modernised kitchen at the back of the house, where a glassed-in nook held a pine table and matching chairs. There a harried-looking woman in a business suit was trying to spoon something into the mouth of a child perhaps one year old. This would be Gail, making a heroic attempt in the absence of her au pair to do the mother thing before she dashed off to work.

She said, like her husband, “You were on the television.”

The child Gillian put in a clear, bell-like observation. “He’s a black man, Daddy, isn’t he?”

Ritucci looked mortified, as if the identification of Nkata’s race were akin to mentioning a social disease that polite individuals would know to ignore. He said, “Gillian! That’s quite enough.” And to Nkata, “Tea, then? I can brew you a cup in a tick. No problem.”

Nkata told him no thanks. He’d just had his own breakfast and wanted nothing. He nodded towards one of the pine chairs and said, “C’n I…”

“Of course,” Gail Ritucci said.

Gillian said, “What did you eat, then? I had boiled egg ’n’ soldiers.”

Her father said to her, “Gillian, what did I just say?”

Nkata said to the child, “Eggs but no soldiers. My mum thinks I’m too old for them, but I ’xpect she’d make them if I asked nice enough. I had sausage ’s well. Some mushrooms and tomatoes.”

“All that?” the child asked.

“I’m a growing boy.”

“C’n I sit on your lap?”

This was apparently the limit. The parents said Gillian’s name in simultaneous horror, and the father swept her into his arms and out of the room. The mother shoved a spoonful of porridge into the gaping mouth of the toddler and said to Nkata, “She’s…It’s not you, Sergeant. We’re trying to teach her about strangers.”

Nkata said, “Mums and dads can’t ever be too careful in that department,” and geared up his pen to take down notes.

Ritucci returned almost immediately, having deposited his older child somewhere in the house, out of sight. Like his wife, he apologised, and Nkata found himself wishing there were actually something he could do to make them more comfortable.

He reminded them that they’d phoned the Crimewatch number. They’d reported a boy wearing makeup who’d burgled them…?

Gail Ritucci was the one who told the first part of the story, handing over the spoon and the porridge to her husband who took up feeding their other child. They’d been out for the evening, she explained, having dinner in Fulham with old friends and their children. When they got back to Clapham, they found themselves behind a van in their street. It was moving slowly, and at first they’d thought it was looking for a space to park. But when it passed one space and then another, they became uneasy.

“We’d got a notice about break-ins in the neighbourhood,” she said and turned to her husband. “When was that, Ron?”

He paused in his feeding of the toddler, spoon poised in the air. “Early autumn?” he said.

“I think that’s right.” She went back to Nkata. “So when the van crept along, it looked suspicious. I took down its number plates.”

“Well done,” Nkata told her.

She said, “Then we got home and the alarm was going off. Ron ran upstairs and saw the boy just as he went out of the window and onto the roof. Of course, we phoned the police at once, but he was long gone by the time they got here.”

“Took them two hours,” her husband said grimly. “Makes you wonder.”