With No One As Witness (75 page)

Nkata wouldn’t take the bait this time. He got to his feet. “This isn’t going to be part of my day,” he told the reporter. He slid a pen into his jacket pocket, preparatory to heading for Lynley’s office to get back to what he’d intended to do.

Corsico got to his feet as well, perhaps with the intention of following. But that was when Dorothea Harriman came into the room, looked round for someone, and chose Nkata.

She said, “Is Detective Constable Havers—?”

“Not here,” Nkata said. “What’s wrong?”

Harriman gave a glance to Corsico before she took Nkata by the arm. She said meaningfully to the reporter, “If you don’t mind… Some things are personal,” and she waited until he retreated to the other side of the room. Then she said, “Simon St. James just phoned. The superintendent’s left the hospital. He’s meant to go home and rest, but Mr. St. James thinks he may head here at some point today. He’s not sure when.”

“He’s coming back to work?” Nkata couldn’t believe this was the case.

Harriman shook her head. “If he comes here, Mr. St. James thinks he’ll go to the assistant commissioner’s office. He thinks someone needs to…” She hesitated, her voice uncertain. She raised a hand to her lips and said in a more determined tone, “He thinks someone needs to be ready to look after him when he gets here, Detective Sergeant.”

BARBARA HAVERS cooled her heels in the interview room at the Holmes Street station while the solicitor serving the interests of Barry Minshall was rounded up. A sympathetic special constable in reception had taken one look at her and said, “Black or white?,” when she’d first entered the station. Now she sat with the coffee—white—in front of her, her hands curved round a mug that was shaped into the caricatured visage of the Prince of Wales.

She drank without tasting much of the brew. Her tongue said hot, bitter. That was it. She stared at her hands, saw how white her knuckles were, and tried to loosen her grip on the mug. She didn’t have the information she wanted and she didn’t like being in the dark.

She’d phoned Simon and Deborah St. James at the most reasonable hour she could manage. She’d ended up listening to their answer machine, so she reckoned they’d either never left the hospital on the previous night or had returned there before dawn to wait for further news about Helen. Deborah’s father wasn’t in, either. Barbara told herself he was walking the dog. She’d rung off on the answer machine without leaving a message. They had better things to do than phone her with news, which she might be able to get in another way.

But ringing the hospital was even worse. Mobile phones could not be used inside, so she was left having to speak to someone in charge of general information, which was no information at all. Lady Asherton’s condition was unchanged, she was told. What did that mean? she asked. And what about the baby she was carrying? There was no reply to this. A pause, a shuffling of papers, and then, Terribly sorry, but the hospital was not allowed…Barbara had hung up on the sympathetic voice, mostly because it was sympathetic.

She told herself that work was the anodyne, so she gathered her things and left her bungalow. At the front of the house, however, she saw that lights were on in the ground-floor flat. She didn’t pause to ask the shoulds of herself. At the sight of movement behind the curtains covering the French windows, she changed direction and crossed to them. She knocked without thinking, merely knowing that she needed something and that something was real human contact, no matter how brief.

Taymullah Azhar answered, manila folder in one hand and briefcase in the other. Behind him somewhere in the flat, water ran and Hadiyyah sang, off-key but what did it really matter: “Sometimes we’ll sigh, sometimes we’ll cry…” Buddy Holly, Barbara realised. She was singing “True Love Ways.” It made her want to weep.

Azhar said, “Barbara. How good to see you. I’m so very glad…Is something wrong?” He set down his briefcase and put the manila folder on top of it. By the time he’d turned back to her, Barbara had got a better grip on herself. He wouldn’t necessarily know yet, she thought. If he hadn’t looked at a newspaper and if he hadn’t turned on the radio or seen the television reports…

She couldn’t bring herself to talk about Helen. She said, “Working hard. Bad night. Not much sleep.” She remembered the peace offering she’d bought—it seemed like another lifetime to her—and she dug round in her shoulder bag till she found it: the five-pound-note trick meant for Hadiyyah. Astound your friends. Amaze your relations. “I picked this up for Hadiyyah. Thought she might like to try it out. It’ll take a five-pound note to do it. If you’ve got one…She won’t hurt it or anything. At least not when she gets good. So in the beginning I s’pose she could use something else. For practice. You know.”

Azhar looked from the magic trick in its plastic covering back to Barbara. He smiled and said, “You are very good. To Hadiyyah. And for Hadiyyah. This is not something I have told you, Barbara, and I apologise for that. Let me get her now so that you—”

“No!” The intensity of her word surprised both of them. They stared at each other in some confusion. Barbara knew she’d puzzled her neighbour. But she also knew she couldn’t explain to Azhar how the kindness of his words had seemed like a blow from which she felt in sudden danger. Not from what the words implied but from what her reaction to them told her about herself.

She said, “Sorry. Listen, I’ve got to go. About a dozen things on my plate and I’m juggling them all at once.”

“This case,” he said.

“Yeah. What a way to earn a living, eh?”

He observed her, dark eyes set in skin the colour of pecans, expression grave. He said, “Barbara—”

She cut him off. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?” Despite her need to escape the kindness in his tone, though, she reached out and clasped his arm. Through the sleeve of his neat white shirt she could feel the warmth of him and his wiry strength. “I’m dead chuffed you’re back,” she said, the words coming thickly. “See you later.”

“Of course,” he replied.

She turned to go, but she knew he was watching. She coughed and her nose began to run. She was God damn falling apart, she thought.

And then the blasted Mini wouldn’t start. It hiccuped and sighed. It spoke to her of arteries hardening with oil too long unchanged in its system, and she saw that from the French windows Azhar was still observing her. He took two steps outside and in her direction. She prayed and the god of transport listened. The engine finally sprang to life with a roar and she reversed down the drive and into the street.

Now she waited in the interview room for Barry Minshall to give her the word: Yes was all she required of him. Yes and she was out of there. Yes and she was making an arrest.

The door finally opened. She pushed her Prince of Wales mug to one side. James Barty preceded his client into the room.

Minshall wore his dark glasses, but the rest of him was strictly incarceration-issue garb. He needed to get used to it, Barbara thought. Barry would be going away for a good many years.

“Mr. Minshall and I are still waiting to hear from the CPS,” his solicitor said by way of prefatory remarks. “The magistrate’s hearing was—”

“Mr. Minshall and you,” Barbara said, “ought to be thanking your stars we still need him hanging round this end of town. When he gets to remand, he’s likely to find the company not quite as accommodating as it is here.”

“We’ve been cooperative thus far,” Barty said. “But you can’t expect that cooperation to extend into infinity, Constable.”

“I don’t have deals to offer and you know it,” Barbara told him. “TO9 is dealing with Mr. Minshall’s situation. Your hope”—and this to Minshall himself—“is that those boys in the Polaroids we found in your flat enjoyed their experience at your hands so much that they wouldn’t dream of testifying against you or anyone else. But I wouldn’t count on that. And anyway, face it, Bar. Even if those boys don’t want to be put through a trial, you’ve still supplied a thirteen-year-old to a killer and you’re going down for that one. If I were in your position, I’d want it known to the CPS and everyone else concerned that I started cooperating the moment the rozzers asked my name.”

“It’s only your belief that Mr. Minshall supplied a boy to someone who murdered him,” Barty said. “That has never been our position.”

“Right,” Barbara said. “Have it any way you want, but the laundry gets wet no matter what order you put it into the machine.” From her bag she brought out the framed photograph she’d taken from flat number 5 in Walden Lodge. She laid it on the table at which they were sitting, and she slid it across to Minshall.

He lowered his head. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark glasses, but she noted his breathing and it seemed to her he was making an effort to keep it steady. She wanted to believe this meant something important, but she didn’t want to get ahead of herself. She let the moments stretch out between them while inside she repeated two words: Come on. Come on. Come on.

Finally, he shook his head, and she said to him, “Take off your glasses.”

Barty said, “You know that my client’s condition makes it—”

“Shut up. Barry, take off your glasses.”

“My eyesight—”

“Take off your bloody glasses!”

He did so.

“Now look at me.” Barbara waited till she could see his eyes, grey to the point of altogether colourless. She wanted to read the truth in them, but even more than that she wanted just to see them and to have him know that she was seeing them. “At this precise moment, no one’s saying you handed over any boys in order to get them killed.” She felt her throat trying to close on the words, but she forced herself to say them anyway because if the only way to get him to move in her direction was to lie, cheat, and flatter, she would lie and cheat and flatter with the best of them. “You didn’t do that to Davey Benton and you didn’t do that to anyone else. When you left Davey with this…this bloke, you expected the game to be played the way it had always been played. Seduction, sodomy, I don’t know what—”

“They didn’t tell me what—”

“But,” she broke in because the last thing she could bear was to hear him justify, protest, deny, or excuse. She just wanted the truth and she was determined to have it from him before she left the room. “You didn’t mean him to die. To be used, yes. To have some bloke touch him up, rape him even—”

“No! They were never—”

“Barry,” his solicitor said. “You needn’t—”

“Shut up. Barry, you offered those boys for cash to your slimeball mates at MABIL, but the deal was always sex, not murder. Maybe you had the boys yourself first or maybe you just popped your cork by having all those other blokes depending on you to supply them with new flesh. The point is, you didn’t mean anyone to die. But that’s what happened and you’re either going to tell me that the bloke in this picture is the one who called himself two-one-six-oh or I’m going to walk out of this room and let you go down for everything from paedophilia to pandering to murder. That’s it. You’re going down, Barry, and you can’t escape it. It’s up to you how far you want to sink.”

She had her eyes locked on his and his skittered wildly in their sockets. She wanted to ask him how he’d come to be the man he was—what forces in his own past had brought him to this—but it didn’t matter. Abused in childhood. Molested. Raped and sodomised. Whatever had turned him into the malevolent procurer he was, all that was water under the bridge. Boys were dead and a reckoning was called for.

“Look at the picture, Barry,” she said.

He moved his gaze to it another time and he looked at it long and hard. He finally said, “I can’t be sure. This is old, isn’t it? There’s no goatee. Not even a moustache. He’s got…his hair is different.”

“There’s more of it, yes. But look at the rest of him. Look at his eyes.”

He put his glasses back on. He picked up the picture. “Who’s he with?” he asked.

“His mum,” Barbara said.

“Where’d you get the picture?”

“From her flat. Inside Walden Lodge. Just up the hill from where Davey Benton’s body was found. Is this the man, Barry? Is this two-one-six-oh? Is this the bloke you gave Davey to at the Canterbury Hotel?”

Minshall set the photograph down. “I don’t…”

“Barry,” she said, “take a nice, long look.”

He did so. Again. And Barbara switched from Come on to prayer.

He finally spoke. “I think it is,” he said.

She let out her breath. I think it is wouldn’t cut the mustard. I think it is wouldn’t get a conviction. But it was enough to spawn an identity parade, and that was good enough for her.

HIS MOTHER had finally arrived at midnight. She’d taken one look at him and opened her arms. She didn’t ask how Helen was because someone had managed to catch her en route from Cornwall and tell her. He could see that from her face and from the way his brother hung back from greeting him, gnawing on his thumbnail instead. All Peter managed to say was, “We rang Judith straightaway. She’ll be here by noon, Tommy.”

There should have been comfort in this—his family and Helen’s family gathering at the hospital so that he did not have to face this alone—but comfort was inconceivable. As was seeing to any simple biological need, from sleeping to eating. It all seemed unnecessary when his being was focussed on a single pinpoint of light in the midnight of his mind.

In the hospital bed, Helen was insignificant in comparison to the machinery round her. They had told him the names, but he recalled only their individual functions: for breathing, to monitor the heart, for hydration, to measure oxygen in the blood, to maintain watch over the foetus. Aside from the whir of these instruments, there was no other sound in the room. And outside the room, the corridor was hushed, as if the hospital itself and every person within it already knew.

He didn’t weep. He didn’t pace. He made no attempt to drive his fist through the wall. So perhaps that was why his mother ultimately insisted he had to go home for a while when the next day dawned and found them all still milling round the hospital corridors. A bath, a shower, a meal, anything, she told him. We’ll stay right here, Tommy. Peter and I and everyone else. You must make an attempt to take care of yourself. Please go home. Someone can go with you if you like.