With No One As Witness (54 page)

“I’ve no time to be interviewed by anyone,” Lynley said.

Corsico held up a hand. “Not to worry,” he said. “I’ve considerable information already—the assistant commissioner has seen to that—and all I ask of you is your permission to be the fly on your wall.”

“I can’t give you that.”

“I can,” Hillier told him. “Can and do. I have confidence in you, Mitch. I know you’re aware of how delicate this situation is. Come along and I’ll introduce you to the rest of the squad. You’ve not seen an incident room, have you? I think you’ll find it interesting.”

With that, Hillier left with Corsico in tow. Incredulous, Lynley watched them go. He’d stood when the assistant commissioner and the journalist had entered the room, but now he sat. He wondered if everyone in the Directorate of Public Affairs had gone mad.

Who to phone? he asked himself. How to protest? He thought about Webberly, wondering if the superintendent could intercede from his convalescence. He didn’t see how. Hillier was being used by the higher-ups now, and he didn’t appear able to question that. The only person who might put the brakes on this lunacy was the commissioner himself, but what would that gain in the long run save Lynley most likely being pulled from the case?

Profiles of the investigators, he said to himself in derision. God in heaven, what would it be next? Glossy photos in Hello! or an appearance on some inane chat show?

He took up the SO7 report, knowing only that the squad of investigators would be just about as happy with this development as he was. He put on his glasses to see what forensics had for him.

Davey Benton’s fingernails had yielded skin beneath them, product of his desperate fight with his killer. The sexual assault had yielded semen. There would be DNA evidence from both of these results, the first DNA evidence to be gleaned from any one of the bodies.

The corpse had also yielded an unusual hair—Lynley’s heart leapt when he read the word unusual and his thoughts went at once to Barry Minshall’s—and this was currently undergoing analysis. It did not, however, appear to be a human hair, so consideration would have to be given to whether it might have come from the location in which the body had been dumped.

Finally, the shoe prints at the site in Queen’s Wood had been identified. They were from a Church’s, size nine. The style was called Shannon.

Lynley read this last bit gloomily. That narrowed the point of purchase down to every high street in London.

He punched in the extension for Dorothea Harriman. Would she get a set of this latest SO7 paperwork over to Simon St. James? he asked her.

Ever efficient, she’d already done so, adding that he had a phone call coming in from the Holmes Street station. Did he want to take it? And, by the way, was she meant to ignore this Mitchell Corsico bloke when he asked questions about what it was like to have an aristo for a guv? Because, she confessed, when it came to having an aristo for a guv, she’d been thinking that there was a way to hoist the assistant commissioner upon…“his own whatever,” was how she put it.

“Petard,” Lynley said, and he saw her point. That was the answer, and it was simplicity itself, requiring no higher-up to do anything at all. “Dee, you’re a genius. Yes. Feel free to give him grist by the bushel. That should keep him occupied for days on end, so ladle it on. Mention Cornwall. The family pile. A row of servants playing Manderley under the direction of a brooding housekeeper. Phone my mother and ask her to arrange to have my brother look suitably drug addled should Corsico appear on her doorstep. Phone my sister and warn her to bolt her doors lest he show up in Yorkshire and want to examine her dirty linen. Can you think of anything else?”

“Eton and Oxford? A rowing blue?”

“Hmm. Yes. Rugby would have been better, wouldn’t it? More laddish. But let’s stay with the facts, the better to keep him occupied and away from the incident room. We can’t rewrite history no matter how much we’d like to.”

“Shall I call you his lordship? The earl? What?”

“Don’t go too far or he’ll see what we’re doing. He doesn’t seem stupid.”

“Right.”

“Now for Holmes Street station. Put them through, if you will.”

Harriman did so. In a moment, Lynley found himself talking not to one of the officers or specials but rather to Barry Minshall’s solicitor. His message was brief and welcome.

His client, James Barty said, had thought things over. He was ready to talk to the detectives.

ULRIKE ELLIS TOLD HERSELF THAT THERE WAS NO REASON to feel guilty. She was sorry for the death of Davey Benton, as she would have been sorry for the death of any child whose corpse had been found like so much discarded rubbish in the woods. But the truth was that Davey Benton was not a Colossus client, and she celebrated the lifting of suspicion that had to go along with the revelation that an adult from Colossus was not involved in his killing.

Of course, the police had not said as much when she phoned. This was her own conclusion. But the detective inspector to whom she’d spoken had said, “Very well, madam,” in a way that suggested he was crossing something important off his list, and that could only mean a cloud had been lifted, that cloud being the suspicion of an entire murder squad at New Scotland Yard.

She’d phoned there earlier and requested the name of the boy whose body had been found in Queen’s Wood. She’d phoned once again with the delighted—although she’d tried very hard not to show it—information that they had no record of a Davey Benton registered as a client at Colossus. In between the two calls, she’d trolled the records. She’d looked through the hard copies of files, and she’d scrolled through everything Colossus kept stored on its computers. She’d gone through the index cards they kept, filled out by kids expressing an interest in Colossus at outreach programmes the organisation had offered throughout London in the last year. And she’d phoned Social Services with the boy’s name, to be told they had no record of him and had never recommended him for Colossus’s intervention.

At the end of all this, she felt relief. The horror of the serial killings was not about Colossus after all. Not that she’d ever thought for a moment that it actually was…

A phone call from that unattractive female constable with the broken teeth and bad hair provided a blip on the screen of Ulrike’s liberation from anxiety, however. The police were now working on some other connection. Had Colossus ever provided entertainment for clients? the detective constable wanted to know. For a special occasion, perhaps?

When Ulrike asked the woman—Havers, she was called—what sort of entertainment, she said, “Like a magic show, f’r instance. You lot ever do something like that?”

Ulrike said, as helpfully as she could manage, that she would have to research this detail. For the kids did indeed go on outings—that was part of the assessment course—although the outings were of the physically adventurous kind like boating, hiking, biking, or camping. Still, there was always a chance, and Ulrike wished to leave no stone of possibility unturned. So if she could get back to Constable Havers…?

She set about finding out. Another troll through the records was called for. She also queried Jack Veness because if anyone knew what was going on in every nook and cranny at Colossus, it would be Jack, who’d been there before Ulrike’s arrival on the scene.

Jack said, “Magic?,” and raised one of his scraggly ginger eyebrows. “Like pulling rabbits out of hats or something? What’re the cops on to now?” He went on to tell her that he’d never heard of magic shows being performed at Colossus or any of the assessment groups going out to see such a show either. He said, “This lot,” with a jerk of his head towards the inner reaches of the building where the kids were busy with their assessment courses or other classes, “they’re not the sort to go for magic in a big way, are they, Ulrike?”

Of course they weren’t and she didn’t need telling that by Jack Veness. She also didn’t need to see Jack smirk, either at the thought of their kids sitting in a breathlessly spellbound semicircle to watch a magician perform or at the thought of her—Ulrike Ellis, the supposed head of the organisation—even considering that their hard-core clients might enjoy such entertainment. He needed putting in his place every few days, did Jack. She did the honours.

She said, “Do you find the search for a killer amusing, Jack? And if you do, why might that be?”

That wiped the smirk from his face. It was replaced with hostility. He said, “Why don’t you chill, Ulrike?”

She said, “Watch yourself,” and went on her way.

Her way was to dig for further information to offer the cops. But when she phoned with the message that no one at Colossus had brought in a magician or taken a group to see a magician, they seemed unimpressed. The constable who took her call merely echoed his miserable colleague, like someone reading from a script. He said, “Very well, madam,” and told her he’d pass the information along.

She said, “You do see this has to mean—” but he’d already rung off, and she knew what that signified: It was going to take even more to get the cops off the metaphorical back of Colossus, and she was going to have to dig for it.

She tried to come up with a way to do it that was not so obvious it might garner future employee problems or even a group action against her. She knew an effective leader had to be unworried about the opinions of others, but that leader also had to be a political animal who knew how to twist an action taken into a reasonable step in the right direction, no matter what that action was. But she could not come up with a way to make her next move look like anything other than a declaration of her distrust. The very effort it took to plan out an approach actually made her teeth start aching till she wondered if she’d gone too long without a visit to the dentist. She searched in her desk for a packet of paracetamol, and she swallowed two with a gulp of cold coffee that had been sitting next to her telephone for God only knew how long. Then she went in search of…she decided to call it exoneration. Not for herself, but for the others. She told herself that whatever she uncovered she would report back to the cops. There was no doubt in her mind that Colossus did not harbour a killer. But she knew she had to seem reasonable to the cops, especially in light of having lied to them earlier about Jared Salvatore’s being one of their clients. She had to appear cooperative. She had to demonstrate change. She had to get them away from Colossus.

She sidestepped Jack Veness for the moment and went in search of Griff. She saw through the window of the assessment room that he was in session with his new group of kids, and the flip chart he was using indicated that they were evaluating their last activity. She made a gesture when she caught his eye. May I talk to you? it said. He gave her five fingers and a half smile that communicated his mistaken belief about the topic she wished to pursue. No matter, she thought. Let him think she meant to cajole him back to her bed. That might make him less wary of talking to her, which was all to the good. She nodded and went to look for Neil Greenham.

She found Robbie Kilfoyle instead, in the practice kitchen, setting up for a cookery class. He was taking bowls and pans out of the classroom cupboards, working off a list provided him by the instructor. Ulrike decided to start with him. What the hell did she really know about Robbie anyway aside from the fact that he’d been in trouble with the law long ago? Peeping Tom, the CRB check upon him had revealed. She’d taken him on anyway as a volunteer. God knew they needed him, and volunteers had never been leaking out of the woodwork. People change, she’d assured herself at the time. But now she looked at him more critically, and she realised he had a baseball cap on…just like the e-fit of the serial killer.

God, God, God, she thought. If she had been the one to bring a killer into their midst…

But if she knew what the e-fit of the possible killer looked like because she’d seen it in the Evening Standard and on Crimewatch as well, didn’t it stand to reason that Robbie Kilfoyle also knew? And if he knew and was the killer, why in God’s name would he show up here, wearing that EuroDisney hat? Unless, of course, he was wearing it because he knew how odd it would appear if he stopped wearing it immediately after Crimewatch was broadcast. Or perhaps he truly was the killer and so cocky about not getting caught that he’d decided to be in her face and everyone else’s with the EuroDisney cap on his head, like a red rag waving in front of a bull…Or even still, perhaps he was incredibly stupid…or didn’t watch television or read the newspapers or…God…God…

“Something wrong, Ulrike?”

His question forced her to bring herself round. The ache in her teeth had moved to her chest. Her heart again. She needed a thorough checkup, stem to stern or whatever.

She said, “Sorry. Was I staring?”

“Well…yeah.” He placed mixing bowls on the work top, spacing them out to accommodate the kids in the class. “They’re doing Yorkshire pud,” he told her, with a nod to the list he’d posted for himself on a corkboard right above the sink. “My mum used to make it every Sunday. What about you?”

Ulrike took the opening. “I never had it till we got to England. Mum didn’t make it in South Africa. I don’t know why.”

“No roast beef?”

“I can’t recall, actually. Probably not. Can I help you there?”

He looked round. He seemed wary of her offer. She could well understand, as she’d never made it before. She’d never even talked to him—really talked to him—aside from at the beginning when she’d taken him on at Colossus. She made a mental note to talk to everyone at least once every day henceforth.

He said, “There’s not much to do, but I guess I could cope with some conversation.”

She went to the corkboard and looked at his list. Eggs and flour. Oil. Pans. Salt. Yorkshire pudding certainly did not require genius to put together. She made a second mental note to talk to the instructor about challenging the kids a bit more.

She riffled through her mind to think of something she knew about Robbie, other than the fact he was a former prowler. “How’s the job going?” she asked him.