With No One As Witness (14 page)

She was looking beyond him, her gaze fixed on the kitchen. And he knew. Just like that—as if fingers had snapped in front of his face and he suddenly returned to consciousness, he knew. He didn’t have to turn. He only had to wonder how long Daniel had been standing in the doorway and how much he had heard.

Aside from having given Yasmin Edwards a wealth of information that she did not need and that he was not authorised to give to anyone, he’d frightened her son, and he knew that without looking, just as he knew he’d long outstayed whatever welcome he might have had in Doddington Grove Estate.

“Done enough?” Yasmin Edwards whispered fiercely, moving her gaze from her son to Nkata. “Said enough? Seen enough?”

Nkata tore his gaze from her, moving it to take in Daniel. He was standing in the doorway with a piece of toast in his hand, one leg crossed over the other and squeezing as if he needed the toilet. His eyes were big, and what Nkata felt was sorrow that he’d had to see or hear his mum in anything resembling an altercation with a man. He said to Daniel, “I d’n’t want you to hear that, man. No need and I’m sorry. You just be careful on the street. There’s a killer going after boys your age. I don’t want him going after you.”

Daniel nodded. He looked solemn. He said, “’Kay.” And then when Nkata turned to leave, “You come round again or what?”

Nkata didn’t answer him directly. He said, “You just keep safe, okay?” And as he stepped out of the flat, he ventured a final look at Daniel Edwards’ mother. His expression said to her, What did I tell you, Yasmin? Daniel needs a man.

Her expression responded just as clearly, Whatever you’re thinking, that man i’n’t you.

FIVE MORE DAYS PASSED. THEY COMPRISED WHAT EVERY investigation into murder comprised, cubed by the fact that the squad was dealing with multiple killings. So the hours that stacked upon hours, which worked their way into long days, longer nights, and meals grabbed on the run, ended up being devoted to 80 percent slog. This involved endless phone calls, record checks, fact gathering, statements taking, and reports making. Another 15 percent went to coalescing all the data and trying to make some sense of it. Three percent went to revisiting every piece of information dozens of times to make sure nothing had been misunderstood, misplaced, or missed altogether, and 2 percent went to the occasional feeling that progress was actually being made. Staying power was necessary for the first 80 percent. Caffeine worked well for the rest.

During this time, the Press Bureau did its promised part to keep the media informed, and at these events AC Hillier continued to require DS Winston Nkata—and frequently Lynley as well—to serve as window dressing for the Met’s display of Your Taxes at Work. Despite the maddening nature of the press conferences, Lynley had to admit that, so far, Hillier’s performances in front of the journalists appeared to be paying off, since the press had not begun baying yet. But that didn’t make the time spent with them any less onerous.

“My efforts might best be devoted to other pursuits, sir,” he informed Hillier as diplomatically as possible after his third appearance on the dais.

“This is part of the job,” was Hillier’s reply. “Cope.”

There was little enough to report to the journalists. DI John Stewart having divided his allocation of officers into teams, they were working with a military precision that could not be anything but pleasing to the man. Team one had completed their study of the alibis given by the possible suspects they’d dug up after looking into releases from mental hospitals and prisons. They’d done the same for sex offenders set free within the last six months. They’d documented who was working in open conditions prior to discharge, and they’d added homeless shelters to their list, to see if anyone behaving suspiciously had been hanging about on any of the murder nights. So far they’d uncovered nothing.

In the meantime, team two had taken over beating the bushes in an effort to roust out witnesses…to anything. Gunnersbury Park still looked like their best bet for this, and DI Stewart was, as he put it, damn well determined to find something in that direction. Surely, he had lectured the team, someone had to have seen a vehicle parked on Gunnersbury Road in the early hours of the morning when victim number one had been left inside, for it remained that the only two means of access into the park after hours were over the wall—which at eight feet high seemed an unlikely route for someone carrying a body—or through one of the two boarded-up sections of that wall on Gunnersbury Road. But so far, a canvassing of houses across the street had given team two nothing, and interviews with nearly all the lorry drivers who would have been on that route hadn’t unearthed anything either. Nor had conversations—still ongoing—with taxi and minicab companies.

They were left with the red van seen in the area of St. George’s Gardens. But when Swansea delivered a list of such vehicles registered to owners in the Greater London area, the total was an impossible 79,387. Even Hamish Robson’s profile of the killer—suggesting that they limit their interest to those vehicle owners who were male, single, and between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five—didn’t make that number remotely manageable.

The entire situation made Lynley long for the cinematic version of the detective’s life: a brief period of slog, a slightly longer period of cogitation, and then great scenes of action in which the hero chased the villain over land, over sea, through back alleys, and beneath elevated railway tracks, finally clobbering him into submission and securing his exhausted confession. But that wasn’t how it was.

It was after yet another appearance in front of the press that three hopeful developments occurred within moments of each other, however.

Lynley returned to his office in time to pick up the phone and receive a call from SO7. The analysis of the black residue on all of the bodies and on the bicycle had coughed up a valuable piece of information. The van they were looking for was likely a Ford Transit. The residue came from the disintegration of a type of optional rubber lining that had been offered for use on the floor of this vehicle between ten and fifteen years ago. The Ford Transit detail was going to go some way towards narrowing down the list they’d received from Swansea, although they wouldn’t know by how much until they fed the data into the computer.

When Lynley returned to the incident room with this news, he was greeted by the second development. They’d had a positive identification on the body left in the Bayswater carpark. Winston Nkata had taken a jaunt to Pentonville Prison to show photographs of their killer’s second victim to Felipe Salvatore—doing time for armed robbery and assault—and Salvatore had sobbed like a five-year-old when he declared the dead boy to be his little brother Jared whom he’d reported missing the first time he’d skipped a regular visit to the clink. As for any other members of Jared’s family…They were proving more difficult to locate, a fact apparently having to do with the cocaine addiction and peripatetic nature of the dead boy’s mother.

The final development also came from Winston Nkata, who’d spent two mornings on Kipling Estate, attempting to unearth someone whom they knew only as Blinker. His perseverance—not to mention his good manners—had finally paid off: One Charlie Burov, aka Blinker, had been located and was willing to talk to someone about his relationship with Kimmo Thorne, the St. George’s Gardens victim. He didn’t want to meet up on the housing estate where he dossed at his sister’s, though. Instead he would meet someone—not in uniform, he’d apparently stressed—inside Southwark Cathedral, five pews from the back on the left-hand side, at precisely 3:20 in the afternoon.

Lynley grasped the opportunity to get out of the building for a few hours. He phoned the assistant commissioner with an update that offered fodder for the next press conference, and he himself effected an escape to Southwark Cathedral. He tapped DC Havers to go along. He told Nkata to check Jared Salvatore’s name with Vice in the last police borough in which he’d lived, and after that to get on to the present location of the boy’s family. Then he set off with Havers in the direction of Westminster Bridge.

It was a straightforward affair to get to Southwark Cathedral once the general confusion round Tenison Way was mastered. Fifteen minutes after setting off from Victoria Street, Lynley and the detective constable were in the nave of the church.

Voices came from the direction of the chancel, where a group of what appeared to be students stood round someone pointing out details on the tester above the pulpit. Three out-of-season tourists were flipping through postcards at a bookstall directly across from the entrance, but no one appeared to be waiting for a meeting with anyone. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that, like most medieval cathedrals, Southwark had no regular pews, so there was no fifth-row-from-the-back-and-on-the-left seating where Charlie Burov, aka Blinker, might have slouched in anticipation of their arrival.

“So much for his churchgoing proclivities,” Lynley murmured. As Havers looked round, sighed, and muttered a curse, he added, “Mind the mouth, Constable. Lightning is never a dear commodity when it comes to the Lord.”

“He might’ve at least sussed out the place first,” she groused.

“In the best of all worlds.” Lynley finally spied a spindly, black-garbed figure near the baptismal font, who was darting looks in their general direction. “Ah. Over there, Havers. That could be our man.”

He didn’t run off as they approached him, although he cast a nervous glance towards the group at the pulpit and then another towards the people at the bookstall. When Lynley asked politely if he was Mr. Burov, the boy said, “’S Blinker. You the fuzz, then?” out of the side of his mouth like a character in a bad film noir.

Lynley introduced himself and Havers while he gave the boy a quick appraisal. Blinker appeared to be round twenty years old with a face that would have been completely nondescript had not head shaving and body piercing been in vogue. As it was, studs erupted from his face like a visitation of smallpox in silver and when he spoke, which was with some difficulty, it was to reveal half a dozen additional studs lined up along the edge of his tongue. Lynley didn’t want to think about the difficulty they presented the boy in eating. Hearing the difficulty they presented him in speaking was bad enough.

“This might not be the best place to have our conversation,” Lynley noted. “Is there somewhere nearby…”

Blinker agreed to a coffee. They managed to find a suitable café not far from St. Mary Overy Dock, and Blinker slid onto a chair at one of the grubby, Formica-topped tables where he studied the menu, and said, “C’n I get a spag bol, then?”

Lynley eased a malodorous ashtray towards Havers and said to the boy, “Be my guest,” although he shuddered at the thought of personally ingesting any kind of food—not to mention any kind of pasta—served up in a place where one’s shoes adhered to the lino and the menus looked in need of disinfectant.

Blinker apparently took Lynley’s reply as licence for liberality, for when the waitress came for their order he added gammon steak, two eggs, chips, and mushrooms along with a tuna and sweet-corn sandwich to the spaghetti. Havers ordered an orange juice, Lynley a coffee. Blinker grabbed the plastic salt shaker and began rolling it between his palms.

He didn’t want to talk until he’d “had a nosh,” he told them. So they waited in silence for the first of his plates to arrive, Havers taking the opportunity for another smoke, Lynley nursing his coffee and steeling himself to the spectacle of the boy working food past his tongue studs.

He’d apparently had plenty of practice, as things turned out. When the first plate was deposited in front of him, Blinker made quick work of the gammon steak and its companions, with minimum fuss and—blessedly—even less display. When he’d sopped up the remaining egg yolk and gammon grease with a triangle of toast, he said, “Better, that,” and appeared ready to give himself over for conversation and a cigarette, which he cadged from Havers while he waited for the pasta’s arrival on the scene.

He was “that torn up” about Kimmo, he told them. But he’d warned his mate—he’d warned him a hundred million times—about taking it up the chute from blokes he didn’t know. Kimmo always claimed the risk was worth it, though. And he always made them use a spunk bag…even if, admittedly, he didn’t always turn round at the vital moment to make sure it was on.

“I tol’ him it wa’n’t about some bloke infectin’ him, for God’s sake,” Blinker said. “It was about ’xactly what happened to him anyways. I never wanted him out there alone. Never. When Kimmo was on the streets, I was on the streets wif him. Tha’s the way it was s’posed to be.”

“Ah,” Lynley said. “I’m getting the picture. You were Kimmo Thorne’s pimp, then?”

“Hey. It wa’n’t like that.” Blinker sounded affronted.

“So you weren’t his pimp?” Barbara Havers put in. “What would you call it when it was home with its mother?”

“I was his mate,” Blinker said. “I kept watch for any nasty sort of business ’at might be going on, like some bloke wif more on his mind than a bit ’f fun wif Kimmo. We worked together, like a team. It wa’n’t my fault, was it, Kimmo being the one they fancied?”

Lynley wanted to say that Blinker’s appearance might have had something to do with who was being fancied by the punters, but he let the subject go. He said, “The night Kimmo disappeared, he didn’t start out with you, then?”

“I di’n’t even know he was going out, did I. We’d done Leicester Square the night before, see, and we’d found a party wanting some entertainment over in Hollen Street, so we did a bit of business wif them. We had enough dosh off that that we di’n’t need to be out again and Kimmo said his gran wanted him home for a night anyways.”

“Was that normal?” Lynley asked.

“Nah. So I should’ve known summat was up when he said it, but I didn’t cos it was fine wif me not to go out. I had the telly…and other things to do.”

“Such as?” Havers asked. When Blinker didn’t respond, merely looking in the direction of the kitchen for his spaghetti Bolognese to put in an appearance, she said, “What else were you two into besides prostitution, Charlie?”