With No One As Witness (79 page)

The room they’d been allotted was small, and they crowded it, perched uncomfortably on whatever chairs and settees had been scavenged, sent to this particular place to shield them from the other families of other patients because of their numbers, because of the sensitivity of the situation, and because of who they were. Not who they were by class but who they were by occupation: the family of a cop whose wife had been shot in the street. Lynley was aware of the irony of it all: being granted this privacy because of his career and not because of his birth. It seemed to him that this was the only moment in his life that was honestly defined by his chosen occupation. The rest of the time, he’d always been the earl, that odd bloke who’d eschewed life in the country and mingling among his own kind for work of the commonest sort. Tell us why, Superintendent Lynley. He couldn’t have done so, especially now.

Daphne, the latest arrival, came to him. Gianfranco, she told him, had wanted to be there as well. But that would have meant leaving the children with—

“Daph, it’s fine,” Lynley said. “Helen wouldn’t have wanted…thank you for coming.”

Her eyes—dark like Helen’s, and it came to him how much Helen looked like her eldest sister—grew bright, but she did not weep. She said, “They’ve told me about…”

“Yes,” he replied.

“What’re you…?”

He shook his head. She touched his arm. “Dear heart,” she said.

He went to his mother. His sister, Judith, made a spot for him on the settee. He said, “Go to the house, if you’d like. There’s no need for you to stay here hour after hour, Mother. The spare room’s available. Denton’s in New York, so he won’t be there to do a meal for you, but you can…in the kitchen…I know there’s something. We’ve been fending for ourselves, so in the fridge there’re cartons—”

“I’m fine,” Lady Asherton murmured. “We’re all fine, Tommy. We don’t need a thing. We’ve been to the café. And Peter’s been fetching coffee for everyone.”

Lynley glanced at his younger brother. He saw that Peter still could not look at him for longer than a second. He understood. Eyes upon eyes. Seeing and acknowledging. He himself could barely stand the contact.

“When does Iris get here?” Lynley asked. “Does anyone know?”

His mother shook her head. “She’s in the middle of nowhere over there. I don’t know how many flights she’s had to take or even if she’s taken them yet. All she said to Penelope was that she was on her way and she’d be here as soon as possible. But how does one get here from Montana? I’m not even sure where Montana is.”

“North,” Lynley said.

“It’s going to take her forever.”

“Well. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

His mother reached for his hand. Hers was warm but quite dry, which seemed to him an unlikely combination. And it was soft as well, which was also strange because she loved to garden and she played tennis every day the Cornwall weather allowed it, every season of the year, so why were her hands still soft? And God in heaven, what did that matter?

St. James came over to him while Deborah watched from across the room. Lynley’s old friend said, “The police have been, Tommy.” He glanced at Lynley’s mother and then said, “Do you want to…?”

Lynley rose. He led the way out of the room to the corridor. “By the worst means the worst” came to him from somewhere. A song? he wondered. No, it couldn’t be that.

“What is it?” he asked.

“They’ve determined where he went after he shot her. Not where he came from, although they’re working on that, but where he went. Where they went, Tommy.”

“They?”

“It appears there may have been two. Males, they think. An elderly woman was walking her dog along the north end of West Eaton Place. She’d just come round the corner from Chesham Street. Do you know where I mean?”

“What did she see?”

“From a distance. Two individuals were running round the corner from Eaton Terrace. They seemed to have seen her and they ducked into West Eaton Place Mews. A Range Rover was parked alongside a brick wall there. It took a dent in the bonnet. Belgravia think these blokes—individuals, whoever they were—jumped onto the Range Rover and leapt into the garden beyond that brick wall. Do you know where I’m talking about, Tommy?”

“Yes.” Beyond the brick wall a line of gardens—each one defined by yet another brick wall—comprised the back of the houses on Cadogan Lane, itself another mews that was one of hundreds in the area, once housing stables for the sumptuous dwellings nearby, now housing homes converted from garages that themselves had been converted from the stables. It was a complicated area of streets and mewses. Anyone could fade into the woodwork there. Or make good an escape. Or anything.

St. James said, “It’s not what it sounds like, Tommy.”

“Why is that?” Lynley asked.

“Because an au pair on Cadogan Lane also reported a break-in, shortly after Helen…shortly after. Within the hour. She’s being interviewed. She was home when the break-in occurred.”

“What do they know?”

“Just about the break-in at the moment. But if it’s related—and good God, it has to be related—and if whoever broke in went out of the front of the house, then there’s further good news. Because one of the larger houses along Cadogan Lane has two CCTV cameras mounted on the front of it.”

Lynley looked at St. James. He wanted desperately to care about this because he knew what it meant: If the au pair’s housebreaker had gone in that direction, there was a chance the closed-circuit television cameras had caught him on film. And if he’d been caught on film, that was a step in the direction of bringing him to whatever justice there was, which was little enough, and what did it matter at the end of the day?

Lynley nodded, however. It was expected of him.

St. James said, “The house with the au pair?”

“Hmm. Yes.”

“It’s quite a distance from where the Range Rover was, in the mews, Tommy.”

Lynley struggled to think what this meant. He could come up with nothing.

St. James went on. “There’re perhaps eight—maybe fewer, but still a number of them—gardens along the route. Which means whoever went over the wall where the Range Rover stood had to continue going over walls. So Belgravia are doing a search of every one of the gardens. There’ll be evidence.”

“I see,” Lynley said.

“Tommy, they’re going to come up with something. It’s not going to take long.”

“Yes,” Lynley said.

“Are you all right?”

Lynley considered this question. He looked at St. James. All right. What did it really mean?

The door opened, and Deborah joined them. “You must go home now,” Lynley said to her. “There’s nothing you can do.”

He knew what he sounded like. He knew she would misread him, hearing the blame, which was there but not directed towards her. Seeing her merely reminded him that she’d been with Helen last, heard her talk last, laughed with her last. And it was the last of it that he couldn’t stand, just as earlier he’d not been able to tolerate the first of anything else.

She said, “If you like. If it’ll help you, Tommy.”

“It will,” he said.

She nodded and went to collect her things. Lynley said to St. James, “I’m going to her now. Do you want to come? I know you’ve not seen…”

“Yes,” St. James said. “I’d like to, Tommy.”

So they went to Helen, dwarfed in her bed by everything that kept her working as a womb. She looked waxen to him, Helen yes but even more Helen no and never again. While within her, damaged beyond hope or repair but who knew how much—

“They want me to decide,” Lynley said. He took his wife’s lifeless hand. He curled her flaccid fingers into his palm. “I can’t stand it, Simon.”

WINSTON DROVE, and for this Barbara Havers was grateful. After a day in which she’d determinedly not thought about what was happening at St. Thomas’ Hospital, she felt she’d been punched in the gut with the news about Helen Lynley. She’d known it was going to be a grim prognosis. But she’d told herself that people survived being shot all the time, and medicine being as advanced as it was meant Helen’s chances had to be good. But there was no current advance in medicine that compensated for a brain deprived of oxygen. A surgeon didn’t just go in and repair that damage like the Messiah laying hands on a leper. There was literally no coming back once the word vegetative was applied to a situation. So Barbara hunched against the door in Winston Nkata’s car and clenched her teeth so hard together that her jaw was pulsing and sore by the time they reached their destination in the darkness.

Funny, Barbara thought as Nkata parked the car with his usual quasi-scientific precision, she’d never thought of the City as a place people lived. They worked here, true. They went to events at the Barbican. Tourists came here to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral, but after hours the place was supposed to be a ghost town.

That was not the case at the corner of Fann and Fortune Streets. Here Peabody Estate welcomed home its residents at the end of their working day, a pleasant, upmarket area with blocks of flats that faced a perfectly groomed garden of winter-pruned rosebushes, shrubbery, and lawn across the street.

They’d phoned first. They’d decided they would go in the back door on this one, no storm-trooping but rather a collegial approach. There were facts to check and they’d come to check them.

The first thing Hamish Robson said to them when he answered the door was, “How is Superintendent Lynley’s wife? I’ve seen the news. They’ve apparently got a witness. Did you know? There’s some sort of film footage as well, although I don’t know from where. They say they may have an image to broadcast…”

He’d come to the door wearing rubber gloves, which seemed odd till he ushered them into the kitchen where he was doing the washing up. He appeared to be something of a gourmet cook, because there were pots and pans on the work top in amazing abundance, and crockery, cutlery, and glassware for at least four people, already standing wetly in the dish drainer. Suds galore mounded in the sink. The place looked like a set for a Fairy Liquid commercial.

“She’s brain dead.” Winnie was the one to tell him. Barbara could not bring herself to use the term. “They got her hooked up to machines because she’s pregnant. You know she was pregnant, Dr. Robson?”

Robson had plunged his hands into the sink, but he took them out and rested them on the edge of it. “I’m so sorry.” He sounded sincere. Perhaps he was at some level. Some people were good at creating compartments for the various parts of themselves. “How is the superintendent? He and I had made an arrangement to meet the day…the day this all occurred. He never turned up.”

“He’s trying to cope,” Winston said.

“How can I help?”

Barbara brought out the profile of the serial killer that Robson had provided for them. She said, “Can we…?” and indicated a neat chrome-and-glass table that defined a dining area just beyond the kitchen.

“Of course,” Robson said.

She laid the report on the table and pulled out a chair. She said, “Join us?”

Robson said, “You don’t mind if I carry on with the washing up?”

Barbara exchanged a glance with Nkata, who’d joined her at the table. He gave an infinitesimal shrug. She said, “Why not. We can talk from here.”

She sat. Winston did likewise. She gave the ball to him. “We took some second and third looks at this profile,” he told Robson, who went back to washing a pot he brought forth from the suds. He was wearing a cardigan and he hadn’t bothered to roll the sleeves up, so where the gloves ended, the wet began, weighing down the wool of his sweater. “I had a look at some of the guv’s handwritten notes ’s well. We got some conflicting information. We wanted to sort that with you.”

“What kind of conflicting information?” Robson’s face was shiny, but Barbara put that down to the steamy water.

“Le’ me put it this way,” Nkata said. “Why’d you come up with the age of the serial killer as twenty-five to thirty-five?”

“Statistically speaking—” Robson began, but Nkata interrupted.

“Beyond statistics. I mean, the Wests wouldn’t’ve fitted that part of a statistical description. And tha’s just for starters.”

“It’s never going to be foolproof, Sergeant,” Robson told him. “But if you’ve doubts about my analysis, I suggest you bring in someone else to do another. Bring in an American, an FBI profiler. I’d bet the results—the report you get—is going to be nearly the same.”

“But this report here—” Nkata gestured to it, and Barbara slid it across the table to him. “I mean, come down to it, all we got is your word that it’s even authentic. I’n’t that right?”

Robson’s glasses winked in the overhead lights as he looked from Nkata to Barbara. “What reason would I have to tell you anything but the truth of what I saw in the police reports?”

“That,” Nkata said, with a lift of his finger to stress the point, “is one very good question, innit.”

Robson went back to his washing up. The pot he was scrubbing didn’t appear to need the attention he was giving to it.

Barbara said to him, “Why don’t you come over here to the table, Dr. Robson? It’ll be a little easier to talk.”

He said, “The washing up…”

“Right. Got it. Only there’s a hell of a lot of washing up, isn’t there? For just one bloke? What’d you fix up for dinner?”

“I admit to not washing up every night.”

“Those pots don’t look used to me. Take off the gloves and join us, please.” Barbara turned to Nkata. “You ever see a bloke wear rubber gloves to do the washing up, Winnie? Ladies do, sometimes. I do, being a lady myself. Got to keep the manicure manicured. But blokes? Why d’you think…? Ah. Thanks, Dr. Robson. It’s cozier like this.”

“I’m protecting a cut,” Robson said. “There’s no law against that, is there?”

“He’s got a cut,” Barbara said to Nkata. “How’d you get that, Dr. Robson?”

“What?”

“The cut. Let’s have a look at it, by the way. DS Nkata here is something of an expert on cuts, as you can probably tell by his mug. He got his…How’d you get that impressive scar, Sergeant?”

“Knife fight,” Nkata told her. “Well, I used the knife. Other bloke had a razor.”

“Ouch in a lifeboat,” Barbara said, and again to Robson, “How’d you say you got yours?”