With No One As Witness (69 page)

“Police.” Barbara showed him her ID. “DC Barbara Havers. Could I have a word?”

“This’s about the boy in the woods? I’ve already told them what little I know.”

“Yeah. Got it. But another set of ears…? You never know what’s going to turn up.”

“Very well,” he said. “Come in if you must. Pearlie?”—this in the direction of the kitchen—“Come, darling.”

The dog trotted out, bright eyed and friendly, as if she hadn’t been a nasty little killing machine only moments before. She jumped into her master’s arms and stuck her nose in the breast pocket of his tattersall shirt. He chuckled and dug in another pocket for her treat, which she swallowed without chewing.

Berkeley Pears was a type, there was no doubt of it, Barbara thought. He probably wore patent-leather shoes and an overcoat with a velvet collar when he left his digs. You saw his kind occasionally on the tube. They carried furled umbrellas, which they used as walking sticks, they read the Financial Times as if it meant something to them, and they never looked up till they reached their destination.

He showed her into his sitting room: three-piece suite in position, coffee table arranged with copies of Country Life and a Treasures of the Uffizi art book, modern lamps with metal shades at precise angles suitable for reading. Nothing was out of place in here, and Barbara assumed nothing dared to be…although three noticeable yellowish stains on the carpet gave testimony to at least one of Pearl’s less than salubrious canine activities.

Pears said, “I wouldn’t’ve seen a thing, you understand, if it hadn’t been for Pearl. And you’d think I’d get a thank-you for that, but all I’ve heard is, ‘The dog must go.’ As if cats are less of a bother”—he said cats the way others said cockroaches—“when all the time that creature in number five howls morning and night like it’s being skewered. Siamese. Well. What else would you expect? She leaves the little beast for weeks, while I’ve never left Pearl for so much as an hour. Not an hour, mind you, but does that count? No. One night when she barks and I can’t quieten her quick enough and that is it. Someone complains—as if they don’t all have contraband animals, the lot of them—and I get a visit from management. No animals allowed. The dog must go. Well, we intend to fight them to the very death, I tell you. Pearl goes, I go.”

That, Barbara thought, might have been the master plan. She wedged her way into the conversation. “What did you see that night, Mr. Pears? What happened?”

Pears took the sofa, where he cradled the terrier like a baby and scratched her chest. He indicated the chair for Barbara. He said, “I assumed it was a break-in at first. Pearl began…One can only describe it as hysterical. She was simply hysterical. She woke me from a perfectly sound sleep and frightened me to bits. She was flinging herself—believe me, there is no other word for it—at the balcony doors and barking like nothing I’ve ever heard from her before or since. So you can see why…”

“What did you do?”

He looked marginally embarrassed. “I rather…well, I armed myself. With a carving knife, which was all I had. I went to the doors and tried to see out, but there was nothing. I opened them, and that’s what caused the trouble because Pearl went outside on the balcony and continued barking like a she-devil and I couldn’t get a grip on her and keep hold of the knife, so it all took a bit of time.”

“And in the woods?”

“There was a light. A few flashes. It’s all I saw. Here. Let me show you.”

The balcony opened off the sitting room, its large sliding window covered by a set of blinds. Pears raised these and opened the door. Pearl scrambled from his arms onto the balcony and commenced barking, much as described. She yapped at an ear-piercing volume. Barbara could understand why the other residents had complained. A cat was nothing in comparison with this.

Pears grabbed the Jack Russell and held her snout. She managed to bark anyway. He said, “The light was over there, through those trees and down the hill. It has to have been when the body…well, you know. And Pearl knew it. She could sense it. That’s the only explanation. Pearl. Darling. That is enough.”

Pears stepped back inside the flat with the dog and waited for Barbara to do likewise. For her part, though, Barbara remained on the balcony. The woods began to dip down the hillside directly behind Walden Lodge, she saw, but that would be something one would not know from looking at the lodge from the street. The trees grew in abundance here, offering what would be a thick screen in summer but what was now a crosshatching of branches bare in midwinter. Directly below them and right up to the brick wall that defined the edge of the lodge’s property, shrubbery grew unrestrained, making access from Walden Lodge into the woods a virtual impossibility. A killer would have had to thrash through everything from holly to bracken in order to get from here to the spot where the body had been dumped, and no killer worth his salt—let alone a bloke who’d so far managed to eliminate six youths and leave virtually no evidence behind when he dumped their bodies—would have attempted that. He would have deposited a treasure trove of useful clues in his wake. And he hadn’t done so.

Barbara stood there thoughtfully, surveying the scene. She considered everything that Berkeley Pears had told her. Nothing he’d reported was out of place, but there was one detail that she didn’t quite understand.

She reentered the flat, pulling the balcony door closed behind her. She said to Pears, “There was a cry of some sort heard sometime after midnight from one of the flats. We’ve had that information from the interviews we’ve done with all the residents in this building. You’ve not mentioned it.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t hear it.”

“What about Pearl?”

“What about her?”

“If she heard the disturbance in the woods at this distance—”

“I suggest she sensed it rather than heard it,” Pears corrected.

“All right. We’ll say she sensed it. But then why didn’t she sense something wrong in the building round midnight when someone cried out?”

“Possibly because no one did.”

“Yet someone heard it. Round midnight. What d’you make of that?”

“A desire to help the police, a dream, a mistake. Something that didn’t happen. Because if it did, and if it was out of the ordinary, Pearl would have reacted. Good grief, you saw how she was with you.”

“That’s how she always is when there’s a knock at the door?”

“Under some conditions.”

“What would those be?”

“If she doesn’t know who’s on the other side.”

“And if she does know? If she hears a voice or smells a scent and recognises it?”

“Then she makes no noise. Which was why, you see, her barking at three forty-five in the morning was so unusual.”

“Because if she doesn’t bark, it means she knows what she’s seeing, hearing, or smelling?”

“That’s right,” Pears said. “But I don’t actually see what this has to do with anything, Constable Havers.”

“That’s okay in the scheme of things, Mr. Pears,” Barbara said. “Fact is, I do.”

ULTIMATELY, ULRIKE DECIDED TO SOLDIER ON. SHE HAD little choice. Upon her return from Brick Lane, Jack Veness had handed her the telephone message from Patrick Bensley, president of the board of trustees. With a knowing smirk, he’d said, “Have a good meeting with the prez, did you?,” as he’d passed her the slip of paper, and she’d said, “Yes, it went very well,” before lowering her gaze to see upon the phone message the name of the man whom she’d claimed she was leaving Colossus to meet.

She didn’t try to pretend anything. She was too caught up in trying to decide what to do with the information she had from Arabella Strong to quickstep into giving Jack a reason why Mr. Bensley had phoned her while she was supposedly meeting him. So she merely folded the message into her pocket and leveled a look at Jack. She said, “Anything else?,” and endured yet another insufferable smirk. Nothing at all, he told her.

So she decided she had to continue, no matter what it looked like to the police and no matter how they might react if she handed over information to them. She still had the hope that the Met would respond in a quid pro quo fashion, defined by keeping any mention of Colossus away from the press. But it didn’t really matter whether they did or did not because, regardless, now she had to finish what she’d started. That was the only way she was going to be able to excuse her journey to Griffin Strong’s house should the board of trustees get wind of it from someone.

As far as Griff himself went—as far as Arabella’s vow to lie for him went—Ulrike didn’t want to dwell on this, and Jack’s reactions gave her a reason not to. They moved him directly to the top of her list.

She didn’t bother with an excuse when she left Colossus a second time late in the day. Instead, she took up her bicycle and headed along the New Kent Road. Jack lived in Grange Walk, which opened off Tower Bridge Road, less than ten minutes by bicycle from Elephant and Castle. It was a narrow one-way street across from Bermondsey Square. One side of it comprised a newish housing estate, while the other bore a terrace of homes that had probably stood in the spot since the eighteenth century.

Jack had rooms in one of these houses: number 8, a building distinguished by its fanciful shutters. Painted blue to match the rest of the woodwork on the sooty building, they had heart-shaped openings at the top to let in the light when they were closed and secured. They were open now, and the windows that they would otherwise cover were hung with lace curtains looking several layers thick.

There was no bell, so Ulrike used the door knocker, which was shaped like an old-time cine-camera. To compensate for the noise from Tower Bridge Road, she applied some force to the knocking. When no one answered, she bent to the brass letter box in the middle of the door and lifted it to peer inside the house. She saw an old lady lowering herself carefully down the stairs, two-stepping it sideways and with both hands on the railing.

The woman evidently saw Ulrike peering in, for she shouted, “I do beg your pardon!,” and she followed this with, “I believe this is a private residence, whoever you are!,” which prompted Ulrike to drop the hinged lid on the letter box and wait, chagrined, for the door to open.

When it did, she found herself confronted by a crumpled and very peeved face. This was framed by tight white curls and, along with her thin-framed body, they shook with indignation. Or so it seemed at first, until Ulrike dropped her gaze and saw the zimmer frame to which the old lady held. Then she realised it wasn’t so much anger as it was palsy or Parkinson’s or something else that was causing the tremors.

She apologised hastily and introduced herself. She mentioned Colossus. She said Jack’s name. Could she have a word with Mrs….? She hesitated. Who the hell was this woman? she wondered. She should have sussed that one out before barreling over here.

Mary Alice Atkins-Ward, the old lady said. And it was Miss and proud to be so, thank you very much. She sounded stiff—a pensioner who remembered the old days when people had manners defined by courteous queues at bus stops and gentlemen giving up seats to ladies on the underground. She held the door open and manoeuvred herself back from it so that Ulrike could enter. Ulrike did so gratefully.

She found herself immediately in a narrow corridor much taken up by the stairway. The walls were jammed with photos, and as Miss A-W—which was how Ulrike began thinking of her—led the way into a sitting room overlooking the street, Ulrike took a peek at these. They were, she found, all photos taken from television shows: BBC1 costume dramas mostly, although there were also a smattering of gritty police programmes as well.

She said in as friendly a fashion as she could, “You’re a fan of the telly?”

Miss A-W cast a scornful look over her shoulder as she crossed the sitting room and deposited herself in a ladder-backed wooden rocking chair sans a single softening cushion. “What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

“The photos in the corridor?” Ulrike had never felt so out of step with someone.

“Those? I wrote them, you ninny,” was Miss A-W’s retort.

“Wrote?”

“Wrote. I’m a screenwriter, for heaven’s sake. Those are my productions. Now what do you want?” She offered nothing: no food, no drink, no fondly reminiscent conversation. She was a tough old bird, Ulrike concluded. It was going to be no easy feat to pull the wool here.

Nonetheless, she had to try. There was no alternative. She told the woman that she wanted to have a few words about her tenant.

“What tenant?” Miss A-W asked.

“Jack Veness?” Ulrike prompted her. “He works at Colossus. I’m his…well, his supervisor, I suppose.”

“He’s not my tenant. He’s my great-nephew. Worthless little bugger, but he had to live somewhere once his mum chucked him out. He helps with the housework and the shopping.” She adjusted herself in her chair. “See here, I’m going to have a cigarette, missy. I hope you’re not one of those flag-waving ASHers. If you are, too bad. My house, my lungs, my life. Hand me that book of matches, please. No, no, you ninny. Not over there. They’re right in front of you.”

Ulrike found them among the clutter on a coffee table. The book was from a Park Lane hotel where, Ulrike imagined, Miss A-W had doubtless terrified the staff into handing matches over by the gross.

She waited till the old lady had extracted a cigarette from the pocket of her cardigan. She smoked unfiltered—no surprise there—and she held the burning fag like an old-time film star. She picked a piece of tobacco from her tongue, examined it, and flicked it over her shoulder.

“So, what’s this about Jack?” she asked.

“We’re considering him for promotion,” Ulrike replied with what she hoped was an ingratiating smile. “And before someone’s promoted, we talk to those people who know him best.”

“Why do you suppose I know him any better than you do?”

“Well, he does live here…It’s just a starting point, you understand.”

Miss A-W was watching Ulrike with the sharpest eyes she had ever seen. This was a lady who’d been through it, she reckoned. Lied to, cheated on, stolen from, whatever. It must have come from working in British television, notorious home of the thoroughly unscrupulous. Only Hollywood was meant to be worse.