With No One As Witness (78 page)

“Discretion is as discretion does. Which is to say that sometimes discretion doesn’t at all. Doesn’t do, I mean. Or perhaps ‘doesn’t work’ is a better way of putting it. It’s one of those ‘best-laid plans of mice and men’ kind of things, if you know what I mean. Which in itself is to say that when there’s a plan to cast stones, it’s always a good idea that the thrower live in a house of bricks. Do you want me to be any more direct, Ulrike, or do you get my meaning? Where’s Griff, by the way? He’s been flying under the radar for a bit, hasn’t he? Is that on your advice?”

So now they’d come to it, Ulrike thought. They were at a take-off-the-gloves moment. Perhaps it was time. Her personal life was none of his business, but he was going to be made to see that the reverse was not the case.

She said, “Get rid of the solicitor, Neil. I don’t know why you’ve hired him, and I don’t want to know. But I’m telling you to get rid of him straightaway and speak to the police.”

Neil changed colour, but the way he adjusted his body told her he was not blushing with embarrassment or shame. He said, “Am I hearing you…?”

“Yes. You are.”

“What the hell… Ulrike, you can’t tell me…You of all people…”

“I want you to cooperate with the police. I want you to tell them where you were for every date they question you about. If you’d like to make it easier on yourself, you can begin with telling me and I’ll convey the information to them.” She picked up her pen and held it poised above the paper on which she’d created her three-column data sheet. She said, “We’ll start with last September. The tenth, to be precise.”

He stood. “Let me see that.” He reached for the paper. She put her arm across it. “Is your name on that as well?” he asked her. “Or is the bonking-Griff alibi going to serve as your answer to any question they ask you? And anyway, how does it all work, Ulrike, you fucking a suspect on the one hand and acting the role of copper’s nark on the other?”

“My life—” she began, but he cut in.

“Your life. Your life.” His voice was a scoff. “All Colossus all the time. That’s how it’s supposed to look, right? Butter wouldn’t melt, and in the meantime, you don’t even know when a kid goes missing. Have the cops cottoned on to that? Have the board of trustees? Because I think they’d be rather interested, don’t you?”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I’m stating a fact. Take it however you like. In the meantime, don’t tell me how to react when the cops start trawling through my life.”

“Are you aware of how insubordinate—”

“Bugger off.” He reached for the door. He jerked it open. He shouted, “Veness! Get in here, will you?”

Ulrike stood then. Neil was crimson with fury and she knew she matched him colour for colour, but this was intolerable. She said, “Don’t you dare start ordering round other employees. If this is an example of how you take or don’t take direction from a superior, then believe me, it’s going to be noted. It’s already noted.”

He swung round. “D’you think I actually believed you’d consider me for anything other than bum wiper of this lot? Jack! Get in here.”

Jack arrived at the door, saying, “What’s going on?”

“Just want to make sure you know Ulrike’s grassing to the cops about us. I’ve had my sit down with her, and I expect you’re next on the list.”

Jack looked from Neil to Ulrike, and then his gaze dropped to the desk and the fact sheet upon it. He said an eloquent, “Shit, Ulrike.”

Neil said, “She’s found a second calling.” He adjusted the chair he’d been sitting in and gestured to it. “Your turn,” he said to Jack.

“That’ll do,” Ulrike told him. “Go back to work, Jack. Neil’s giving in to his predilection for temper tantrums.”

“While Ulrike’s spent a good long time giving in to—”

“I said that’ll do!” It was time to wrest control from the snake. Pulling rank was the only way, even if it meant he would make good his threat and put the board of trustees into the picture about her carrying on with Griff. She said, “If you want to keep your job, I suggest you get back to it. Both of you.”

“Hey!” Jack protested. “I only came in here—”

“Yes, I know,” Ulrike said calmly. “I’m speaking largely to Neil. And what I’m saying remains the same, Neil. Do what you intend to do, but in the meantime drop the solicitor.”

“I’ll see you in hell first.”

“Which makes me rather wonder what you’re hiding.”

Jack looked from her to Neil and back again. He said, “Holy shit,” and left them together.

“I won’t forget this,” was Neil’s final comment.

“I don’t expect you will,” was hers.

NKATA HATED the moment, the activity, and himself: sitting at Hillier’s side before a newly energised collection of journalists. There was nothing like the drama of trauma to get them motivated. Nothing like bringing that trauma home and giving it a human face to make them momentarily sympathetic to the Met.

He knew this was what AC Hillier was thinking as he fielded their questions after having made his statement. Now they had the press where they wanted them, the AC’s demeanor seemed to suggest. They were going to think twice before they went after the Met while an officer’s wife was fighting for her life in hospital.

Except she wasn’t fighting for her life. She wasn’t fighting for anything because she wasn’t any longer.

He was immobile. He wasn’t attending to what was being said, but he knew that this was fine with Hillier. All he needed to look was fierce and ready. Nothing more would be asked of him. He hated himself for complying.

Lynley had insisted. Nkata had got him out of the AC’s office by grabbing him round the shoulders in an embrace of insistence but also one of devotion. He’d known in that instant that he would do anything for this man. And that had startled him because for years he’d told himself that the only important fact of his life was to succeed. Do the job, and let everything else slide right off you because it is not important what anyone thinks. It is only important what you know and who you are.

Lynley had seemed to understand this about him without their ever having spoken about it. He’d continued to understand it even in the midst of what he was going through.

Nkata had taken him from Hillier’s office. As they left, he’d heard the AC punching numbers on the telephone. He reckoned Hillier was trying to reach building security to escort Lynley from the premises, so he made for a spot they’d not be likely to look: the library on the twelfth floor of the building, with its sweeping views of the city and the silence into which Lynley had told him the worst.

And the worst was actually more than the superintendent’s wife being dead. The worst was what they were asking of him.

He’d said dully, staring out at the view, “The machines can keep her breathing for months. Long enough to deliver a viable…” He stopped. He rubbed his eyes. Looking like hell was such a common expression, Nkata had thought as he’d stood there. But this was real hell, he realised. This wasn’t looking like. This was living in. “There’s no way to measure the exact amount of brain damage to the baby. It’s there. They can be…what was it…ninety-five percent certain of that because she’d gone without sufficient oxygen for twenty minutes or more and if that destroyed her brain, it only stands to reason…”

“Man, it’s…You don’t have to…” Nkata hadn’t known what else to say.

“There’s no test, Winston. Just the choice. Keep her on the machines for two months—although three would be ideal…well, at least as ideal as anything could be at this point—and then go in for the baby. Cut her open, take the baby, and then bury the body. Because there is no her any longer. Just the body. The breathing corpse, if you will, from which they could cut the living—albeit permanently damaged—child. You’ll have to make this decision, they say. Think about it, they say. No real hurry, of course, because it’s not as if a decision either way is going to affect the corpse.”

Nkata knew they probably hadn’t used the word corpse. He could see that Lynley himself was using it because it was the brutal truth of the matter. And he also could see what a story it would make and was already making: the earl’s wife dead, her body reduced to incubator and incubator’s inhabitant, the eventual birth—could they even call it a birth?—featured on the front page of every tabloid in town once it happened, because what a story it was, and then the follow-ups ever after, perhaps one a year in a deal that would have to be made with the press: Give us our privacy to cope with this situation now and occasionally we’ll tell you how the child is doing, perhaps allow a photo to be taken, only leave us alone, please leave us alone.

All Nkata could say was, “Oh,” a sound that escaped him in a groan.

Lynley looked at him. “I made her the sacrificial lamb. How do I live with that?”

Nkata knew what he was talking about. Although he didn’t quite believe his own words, he said, “Man, you did not do that. You never think that. You are not responsible.” Because for Lynley to believe that this tragedy was down to him, a chain would be forged and its links would lead inexorably to Nkata himself, and he couldn’t stand that, he knew he couldn’t. For he also knew that part of the superintendent’s plan had been to occupy Mitchell Corsico so thoroughly with a story about himself that he would be kept away from everyone else and from Nkata especially, who had perhaps the most attention-grabbing past of everyone involved in the serial-killing investigation.

Lynley seemed to know what he was thinking because he’d replied with, “It’s down to me. Not to you, Winston.”

And then he’d left. He’d said, “Do your bit. Something has to come out of all this. Don’t take my side. It’s over. All right?”

Nkata responded with, “I can’t—” but Lynley cut him off.

“Don’t bloody make me responsible for anything else, for God’s sake. Promise me, Winston.”

So here he was at Hillier’s side, playing the part.

Dimly he could hear the press briefing drawing to a conclusion. The only indication Hillier gave of his own inner state was in the direction he sent Mitchell Corsico afterwards. The reporter would return to the press pool, to his paper, to his editor’s side, to wherever he wanted to go or to be. But he wouldn’t be writing any further profiles of anyone in the investigation.

Corsico protested with, “But you can’t be thinking the story on the superintendent had anything to do with what’s happened to his wife. Jesus God, there was no way this bloke could have found her. No way. I made certain of that. You know I made certain. That story was vetted by everyone but the pope.”

“You’ve had my last word on the matter,” Hillier said.

Other than that, he spoke nothing about Lynley and what had happened in his office. He merely nodded at Nkata and said, “Get on with it,” and went on his way. Solitary, this time. No minion accompanied him.

Nkata returned to the incident room. He saw he had a message to phone Barb Havers on her mobile, and he made a mental note to do it. But first he tried to remember what he’d been engaged in so much earlier when Dorothea Harriman had given him the word about Lynley’s possible arrival in Victoria Street.

The profile, he thought. He’d intended to have another look at the profile of the killer in the hope that something therein would relate to one of the suspects…if they were indeed suspects at all because the only thing that appeared to connect them to the killings was proximity to some of the victims, which was seeming more and more like nothing to build anything upon at all, not sand beneath the foundation but ice, ready to crack under the burden of proof.

He took himself to Lynley’s office. On the superintendent’s desk, there stood a photograph of his wife, Lynley at her side. They were both perched on a sun-drenched balustrade somewhere. His arm was round her, her head rested on his shoulder, they both were laughing into the camera while in the background a blue sea glittered. Honeymoon, Nkata thought. He realised they’d been married less than a year.

He averted his eyes. He made himself look through the stack of paperwork on Lynley’s desk. He read Lynley’s notes. He read a recent report by Havers. And at last he found it, identifiable by the cover-sheet stationery from Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He slid the report out from the stack in which Lynley had placed it. He carried it to the conference table, sat, and tried to clear his mind.

“Superintendent,” a neat sample of cursive on the covering stationery said, “while you may not be a believer, I hope you’ll find this information helpful.” No signature, but the profiler himself must have written it. No other person would have a reason to.

Before he turned to the report beneath the stationery, Nkata gave thought to where the hospital was located. He admitted to himself that he was thinking of Stoney, even now. It always came down to his brother in the end. He wondered if a place like Fischer could have helped his brother, eased his anger, cured his madness, removed the urge to strike out and even to kill…

Nkata realised he was reading the heading on the creamy paper over and over. He frowned. He focussed. He read again. He’d been taught that there were no coincidences at the end of the day and he’d just, after all, seen Lynley’s notes and Havers’ report. He reached for the phone.

Barbara Havers burst into the office. She said, “Didn’t you get my message? Bloody hell, Winnie. I phoned. I asked you to ring me back. I’ve got…What the hell’s going on round here?”

Nkata handed the report to her. “Read this,” he said. “Take your time.”

WITH REASON, everyone not only wanted a part of him but also needed a part of him. Lynley accepted this even as he knew he could do next to nothing to accommodate anyone. He could barely accommodate himself.

When he returned to the hospital, he was aware of virtually nothing. He found his family and hers where he’d left them, along with Deborah and St. James. Holding the fort came ridiculously into his mind. There was no fort to hold and nothing to hold it for.

Helen’s sister Daphne had arrived from Italy. Her sister Iris was due from America, anticipated at any moment, although no one knew when that moment might be. Cybil and Pen were tending to their parents, while his own siblings sat with their mother, no stranger to hospitals, certainly no stranger to sudden and violent death.