With No One As Witness (80 page)

“I didn’t say. And I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”

“Well, it can’t be from pruning the rosebushes because the time to do that’s come and gone, hasn’t it. So it has to be from something else. What?”

Robson said nothing, but his hands were clearly visible now and what was on them wasn’t a cut at all but rather a scratch, several scratches, in fact. They’d been deep by the look of them and possibly infected, but they were healing now and the flesh was new and pink.

Barbara said, “I can’t sort out why you won’t answer me, Dr. Robson. What’s going on? Cat got your tongue?”

Robson licked his lips. He took off his glasses and polished them on a cloth that he removed from his pocket. He was nobody’s fool; he must have learned at least something from his years of dealing with the criminally insane.

“See,” Nkata said to the man, “way the constable and I look at it, we got only one thing tells us your report i’n’t a bucketful of cock, and that’s your word on the matter, unnerstan?”

“As I’ve said, if you don’t believe me—”

“An’ we realised—this is the constable and me—that we been running six ways to Sunday looking for someone who fits that profile. But what if—this’s what the constable and me’ve been thinking cos we do think on occasion, you know—the real bloke we’re looking for had a way to make us think we were looking for someone else? ’F we were—” He turned to Barbara. “What was that word, Barb?”

“Predisposed,” she said.

“Yeah. Predisposed. What if we were predisposed to think one way while the truth was the other? Seems to me, then, the killer could go on doing his thing, pretty safe knowing who we were looking for wasn’t anything in the world like him. It’d be clever, don’t you think?”

“Are you trying to suggest…?” Robson’s skin was shiny. But he wouldn’t remove his cardigan. He’d probably donned it before letting them into the flat, Barbara thought. He’d have wanted to cover his arms.

“Scratches,” Barbara said. “Always nasty. How’d you get yours, Dr. Robson?”

“Look,” he replied, “I’ve a cat that—”

“Would that be Mandy? The Siamese? Your mother’s cat? She was a bit thirsty when we were introduced this afternoon. I took care of that, by the way. You’re not to worry.”

Robson said nothing.

“The thing about Davey Benton that you didn’t expect was that he was a fighter,” Barbara went on. “And how would you know? How would anyone know because he didn’t look like a fighter, did he? He looked just like his brothers and sisters, which is to say he looked like…well, he looked like an angel, didn’t he? He looked fresh. Untouched. Nice boyflesh there for the taking. I can almost understand why a bloody sick bastard like you might’ve wanted to carry things further with this one and rape him, Dr. Robson.”

“You haven’t a shred of evidence to back up that statement,” Robson said. “And I suggest you take yourselves out of this flat straightaway.”

“Really?” Barbara nodded thoughtfully. “Winnie, the doctor would like us to leave.”

“Can’t do that, Barb. Not without his shoes.”

“Oh right. You left two footprints at the final crime scene, Dr. Robson.”

“One hundred thousand footprints wouldn’t mean a thing and all of us know it,” Robson told her. “How many people do you expect buy the same ordinary pair of shoes each year?”

“Millions, probably,” Barbara said. “But only one of them leaves his footprint at the scene of a murder where the victim—this is Davey, Dr. Robson—also has DNA evidence under his fingernails. Your DNA, I expect. From those nice scratches you’ve been protecting. Oh, and the cat’s, by the way. The cat’s DNA. That’s going to be a difficult one to talk your way out of at the end of the day.” She waited for a reaction from Robson and she got it in the movement of his Adam’s apple. “Cat hair on Davey’s body,” she said. “When we link that to little Mandy the squalling Siamese—God, that cat makes a bloody racket when she’s thirsty, doesn’t she—you’re done for, Dr. Robson.”

Robson was silent. Nice, Barbara thought. He had less and less to argue about. He’d hedged his bets with the profile and he’d given 2160 as his moniker when he’d moved on from Colossus to Barry Minshall at MABIL. But there was the phone number of Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane right on the letterhead of the stationery that covered his lying report: with 2160 the final four numbers that a credulous caller—like the Inspectors Plod whom Robson no doubt believed worked at the Met—could punch in to be connected to the place.

She said, “Two-one-six-oh, Dr. Robson. We’ve had Barry Minshall—but I think you know him as Snow—locked up for a bit in the Holmes Street station. We took this over and let him study it for a while.” She removed the photo of Robson and his mother that she’d found in Esther Robson’s flat. “Our Barry—that’s your Snow, remember—turned it this way and that but he always came up with the same conclusion. This is the bloke he handed Davey Benton over to, he tells us. At the Canterbury Hotel. In Lexham Gardens where the registration card’s going to hold interesting fingerprints and the clerk will be only too happy—”

“You damn well listen to me. I didn’t—”

“Oh right. I damn well expect you didn’t.”

“You’ve got to see—”

“Shut up,” Barbara said. She shoved herself away from the table in disgust. She walked out of the room and left Winston Nkata the pleasure of reciting the caution before they arrested the piece of filth.

HE WATCHED first from across the street. Rain had fallen while He’d made His way across town, and now the lights from the hospital shone against the pavement. They made streaks of gold and when He squinted, He could almost think it was Christmas again: gold and then the red of tail lights on the cars as they passed by.

Not that Father Christmas’ll be coming to visit the likes of you, you know.

He groaned. He did the tongue thing again, pressure against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. Safe again, gone again. He could breathe as normal because normal is as normal does.

The reporters were gone, He saw. And wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t that a mark of the meant-to-bes? The story was still a sensational one, but now it could be covered from a distance. Profiles of all the principals, if you will. Because what, after all, needed to be said about a body in a bed? Here we are in front of St. Thomas’ Hospital on day number whateveritwas and the victim still lies within, so back to you in the studio for the weather report, which is far more interesting to the general public than this nonsense, so why don’t you give me a bloody new assignment please. Or words to that effect.

But for Him, it was endlessly fascinating. Events had conspired to illustrate over and over again that supremacy was more than a chance of birth. It was also a miracle of timing, embraced by the willingness to seize the moment. And He was the god of moments. In fact, it was He who made moments. This was the quality—one among many—that made Him different from everyone else.

Think you’re special? That it, little sod?

He used his tongue. Whoosh and whoosh. Release the pressure to check and—

You get away from him, Charlene. Jesus, it’s time he learned his lesson because special is as special God damn does and what the hell has ever been special about…I said step away. Who wants some of this? Bugger the both of you. Get out of my sight.

But in His sight was the future. It lay before Him in the streak of gold from the hospital lights. And in what the lights meant, which was broken. Broken. One of them was broken. One of them was destroyed. One of them was a shell that had cracked at first and now lay smashed in a hundred pieces. And He’d been the one to crush that egg beneath the heel of His shoe. He and no other. Look at me now. Look. At. Me. Now. He wanted to crow, but there was danger in this. And equal danger in remaining silent.

Attention? That it? You want attention? Develop some personality, and that’ll give you attention, if that’s what you want.

Lightly, He hit His fist against His forehead. He forced the air against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. If He didn’t take care, the maggot would eat away His brains.

At night in bed, He’d started plugging orifices against the invasion of the worm—cotton in ears and nostrils, plasters across His arsehole and at the end of His prong—but He still had to breathe and that was where He failed in His prophylactic measures. The worm got in with the air He took into His lungs. From His lungs, it crawled into His bloodstream where it swam like a deadly virus to His skull and munched and whispered and munched.

Perfect adversaries, He thought. You and I and who would’ve thought it when all of this started? The maggot chose to feast upon the weak, but He…Ah, He’d chosen an opponent worthy of the struggle for supremacy.

And that’s what you think you’ve been doing, little bugger?

Maggots ate. That was simply what maggots did. They operated solely on instinct and their instinct was to eat until they metamorphosed into flies. Blowflies, bluebottles, horseflies, houseflies. It didn’t matter. He merely had to wait out the period of eating, and then the maggot would leave Him in peace.

Except there was always the chance that this particular maggot was an aberration, wasn’t there, a creature that would never sprout wings in which case, He did have to rid Himself of it.

But that was not why He had begun. And that was not why He was here just now, across the street from the hospital, a shadow waiting to be dispersed by light. He was here because there was a coronation that needed to happen, and it would happen soon. He would see to that.

He crossed the street. This was chancy, but He was ready and willing to take that chance. To show Himself was to make a mark of preeminence upon a time and a place, and that was what He wanted to do: to begin the process of carving history from the stone of now.

He walked inside. He did not seek His adversary, nor did He even try to locate the room in which He knew he would be found. He could walk directly to it if He’d wanted to, but that was not His purpose in coming here.

At this hour of night breaking into morning, there were few enough people in the hospital corridors and those who were present did not even see Him. From this He knew that He was invisible to people in the way that gods were invisible. Moving among ordinary men and knowing that He could smite them at any moment illustrated irrefutably to Him what He was and would always be.

He breathed. He smiled. It was soundless in His skull.

Supremacy is as supremacy does.

LYNLEY REMAINED WITH HER THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT and long into the day that followed. He used the time largely to disengage her face—so pale upon the pillow—from what she was now, from the body to which she had been reduced. In this, he tried to tell himself that it was not Helen he was looking upon. Helen was gone. In that instant in which everything had been transformed for them both, she had fled. The Helen of her had soared from the framework of bone, muscle, blood, and tissue, leaving behind not the soul, which defined her, but the substance, which described her. And that substance alone was not and could never be Helen.

But he couldn’t make a go of that because when he tried, what came to him were images, for he had known her simply far too long. She’d been eighteen years old and not his in any way but rather the chosen mate of his friend. Meet Helen Clyde, St. James had told him. I’m going to marry her, Tommy.

D’you think I’ll do for a wife? she had asked. I haven’t a single wifely talent. And she’d smiled a smile that had engaged his heart, but rather in friendship than in love.

Love had come later, years and years later, and in between the friendship and the love what had bloomed was tragedy, change, and sorrow, altering all three of them unrecognisably. Madcap Helen no more, St. James no longer the fervent batsman in front of the wicket, and himself knowing he’d been the cause. For which sin there was no forgiveness. One did not alter lives and simply walk away from the damage.

He’d been told once that things are at any given moment just as they are supposed to be. There are no mistakes in God’s world, he’d been told. But he could not believe that. Then or now.

He saw her in Corfu, a towel spread beneath her on the beach and her head thrown back so that the sun could strike her face. Let’s move to a sunny climate, she’d said. Or at least let’s disappear into the tropics for a year.

Or thirty or forty?

Yes. Brilliant. We’ll Lord Lucan it. With less cause, of course. What do you think?

That you’d miss London. The shoe sales if nothing else.

Hmm, there is that, she said. I am a lifelong victim of my feet. The perfect target for male designers with ankle fetishes, I’m the first to admit it. But have they no shoes in the tropics, Tommy?

Not the sort you’re used to, I’m afraid.

The silly stuff of her that made him smile, the very maddening Helen of her.

Can’t cook, can’t sew, can’t clean, can’t decorate. Honestly, Tommy, why do you want me?

But why did one person ever want another? Because I smile with you, because I laugh at your banter, which you and I both know very well is designed just for that…to make me laugh. And the why of that is that you understand and have done from the first: who I am, what I am, what haunts me most and how to banish it. That’s why, Helen.

And there she was in Cornwall, standing before a portrait in the gallery, his mother at her side. They were looking upon a grandfather with too many greats in front of him to know exactly how far back he was in time. But that didn’t matter because her concern was centred on genetics and she was saying to his mother, D’you think there’s any chance that terrible nose could pop up again somewhere along the line?

It’s rather ghastly, isn’t it? his mother murmured.

At least it shades his chest from the sun. Tommy, why didn’t you point this picture out to me before you proposed? I’ve never seen it before.

We kept it hidden in the attic.

That was very wise.

The Helen of her. The Helen.

You cannot know someone for seventeen years and not have a swarm of memories, he thought. And it was the memories that he felt might kill him. Not that they existed but that there would be no more of them from this point forward and that there were others he’d already forgotten.