With No One As Witness (16 page)

The need to comfort won out. Nkata fished a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and pressed it on her. He said, “They should’ve listened and they di’n’t, Navina. I can’t ’xplain why. I’m that sorry ’bout it.”

“Can’t you ’xplain?” she asked bitterly. “What’m I to them? Cow up the spout, done to by the kid got caught wif two nicked credit cards and tha’s what they remember ’bout him, innit? Snatched a purse once’r twice. Wif some blokes, tried to carjack a Mercedes one night. Some rude boy, so we don’t plan on lookin for him nowhere, so get out of here, girl, and stop pollutin our precious atmosphere, thank you. Well I loved him, I did, and we meant to have a life together and he was makin that life. He was learning cookin and he meant to be a real chef. You ask round about that. You see what they say.”

Cooking. Chef. Nkata took out the slender leather diary he used as a notebook, and he jotted the words down in pencil. He didn’t have the heart to press Navina for more information. From what she’d already said, he reckoned there was going to be a treasure trove of facts about Jared Salvatore at the Peckham police station.

He said, “You be all right, Navina? You got someone I c’n ring for you?”

She said, “My mum,” and for the first time she seemed sixteen and also what she probably was at heart, which was afraid, like so many of the girls who grew up in an environment where no one was safe and everyone was suspect.

Her mum worked in the kitchen at St. Giles Hospital, and when Nkata spoke to her by phone, she said she’d be home at once. “She i’n’t startin, is she?” the woman asked anxiously and then said, “Thank Jesus for that, at least,” when Nkata told her it was something of a different nature entirely but her presence would be a great comfort to the girl.

He left Navina in anticipation of her mother’s arrival, and he went from Clifton Estate to Peckham police station, which was only a short distance along the High Street. In reception, a white special constable was working behind the counter, and he spent just a shade longer than seemed necessary at his tasks before he acknowledged Nkata. Then he said, “Help you?,” with a face that managed to be perfectly blank.

Nkata took a certain pleasure in saying, “DS Nkata,” as he showed his warrant card to the man. He explained why he’d come. As soon as he mentioned the Salvatore family name, it seemed he would need no further introduction. Finding someone at the station who didn’t know the Salvatores would have been more challenging than finding someone who’d mixed with them at one time or another. Aside from Felipe doing time in Pentonville, there was another brother languishing in remand on a charge of assault. The mother had a record going back to her adolescence and the other boys in the family were apparently doing what they could to better it before they reached their twenties. So the real question was, who in the station did DS Nkata want to talk to, because just about anyone could give him an earful.

Nkata said that whoever had taken Navina Cryer’s missing-persons report about Jared Salvatore would do. This, of course, brought up the delicate question of why no one had bothered to file such a report, but he didn’t want to travel that road. Surely someone had listened to the girl if not formally recording what she’d said. That was the person he wanted to find.

Constable Joshua Silver turned out to be the man. He came to fetch Nkata from reception and ushered him into an office shared by seven other officers, where space was at a minimum and noise was at a maximum. He had something of a cubby hole carved out between a bank of perpetually ringing phones and a row of ancient filing cabinets, and he guided Nkata to this. Yes, he admitted, he’d been the person to whom Navina Cryer had spoken. Not the first time she’d come to the station, when she hadn’t apparently got beyond reception, but the second and third times. Yes, he’d written down the information she’d offered, but truth to tell, he hadn’t taken her seriously. The Salvatore yobbo was thirteen years old. Silver reckoned the boy’d done a runner, what with the girl on her way to popping. There was nothing in his past that suggested he’d be apt to hang round waiting for any blessed events to be occurring.

“Kid’s been in trouble since he was eight years old,” the constable said. “He came up before the magistrate first when he was nine—bag snatching from an old lady, this was—and the last time we hauled his bum through the door, it was for breaking into a Dixon’s. Planned to sell the takings in one of the street markets, our Jared.”

“You knew him personally?”

“As good as anyone round here, yeah.”

Nkata handed over a photo of the body that Felipe Salvatore had named as that of his brother. Constable Silver examined it and nodded his confirmation of Felipe’s identification. It was Jared, all right. The almond eyes, the squashed-tip nose. All the Salvatore kids had them, gift of the racial mix of their parents.

“Dad’s Filipino. Mum’s black. A crackhead.” Silver looked up quickly as he said this last, as if he’d suddenly realised he might have given offence.

“I sorted that.” Nkata took the picture back. He asked about the cooking that Jared was supposedly learning.

Silver knew nothing about this and declared it the product of either Navina Cryer’s wishful thinking or Jared Salvatore’s outright prevaricating. All he knew was that Jared had been turned over to Youth Offenders, where a social worker had tried—and obviously failed—to make something of him.

“Youth Offenders over here,” Nkata said, “could they’ve arranged some training for the boy? D’they get jobs for kids?”

“When pigs fly,” Silver said. “Our Jared frying fish in your local Little Chef? Don’t know I’d’ve eaten a meal that bloke put on a plate if I was starving.” Silver took a staple remover from the top of his desk and used it to dig some grime from beneath his thumbnail as he concluded, “Here’s the real truth about scum like the Salvatores, Sergeant. Most of them end up where they’re heading all along, and it was going to be no different for Jared, which was something Navina Cryer couldn’t accept. Felipe’s locked up already; Matteo’s in remand. Jared was third in line of the kids, so he was next in line for the nick. Do-gooders over at Youth Offenders might’ve done their best to stop that from happening, but they had everything set against it from the start.”

“Everything being…?” Nkata inquired.

Silver eyed him over the staple remover and flicked the detritus from beneath his thumbnail onto the floor. “No offence meant, but you’re the exception, man. You’re not the rule. And I expect you had some advantages along the way. But there’re times when people don’t add up to much, and this is one of those times. You start out bad, you end up worse. That’s just how it is.”

Not if someone takes an interest, was what Nkata wanted to reply. Nothing was written in stone.

But he said nothing. He had the information he’d come for. He had no greater understanding of why Jared Salvatore’s disappearance had gone largely unremarked by the police, but he needed no greater understanding. As Constable Silver himself had put it: That’s just how it was.

WHEN SHE GOT BACK TO CHALK FARM AT THE END OF the day, Barbara Havers was feeling almost jaunty. Not only had the interview with Charlie Burov—aka Blinker—seemed like a moment of actual progress, but being out of the incident room and engaged in the human end of the investigation in Lynley’s company made her feel as though regaining her rank was not a pipe dream after all. She was, in fact, blithely humming “It’s So Easy” when she hiked homeward from the spot she’d found to park the Mini. Even when rain began to fall and was driven into her face by the wind, she was not bothered. She merely stepped up her pace—and the tempo of her tune—and hurried towards Eton Villas.

She glanced quickly at the ground-floor flat when she went up the drive. Lights were on inside Azhar’s digs, and through the French windows she could see Hadiyyah sitting at a table with her head bent over an open notebook.

Homework, Barbara thought. Hadiyyah was a dutiful pupil. She stood for a moment and watched the little girl. As she did so, Azhar came into the room and walked by the table. Hadiyyah looked up and followed him longingly with her gaze. He didn’t acknowledge her, and she didn’t speak, merely ducking her head again to her work.

Barbara felt a sharp twinge at the sight of this, struck by an unexpected anger whose source she didn’t want to examine. She went along the path to her bungalow. Inside, she flipped on the lights, tossed her shoulder bag on the table, and dug out a tin of All Day Breakfast, which she dumped unceremoniously into a pan. She popped bread into the toaster and from the fridge took a Stella Artois, making a mental note to cut back on the drinking since this was yet another night when she was not supposed to be imbibing at all. But she felt like celebrating the interview with Blinker.

As her meal was doing what it could to prepare itself without her participation, she went as usual for the television remote, which again as usual she couldn’t find. She was searching for it when she noticed that her answer machine was blinking. She punched it to play as she continued her search.

Hadiyyah’s voice came to her, tense and low, sounding as if she was trying to keep someone else from hearing her. “I got gated, Barbara,” she said. “This’s the first chance I had to ring you ’cause I’m not meant even to use the phone. Dad said I’m gated ‘till further notice’ an’ I don’t think it’s fair at all.”

“Damn,” Barbara muttered, studying the grey box from which her little friend’s voice came.

“Dad said it’s owing to my arguing with him. I di’n’t really want to give back the Buddy Holly CD, see. Then when he said I had to, I said could I just leave it for you with a note. And he said no, I had to do it in person. And I said I di’n’t think that was fair. And he said I was to do what he told me and since I ‘clearly di’n’t want to do it’ he’d make sure it was done properly, which’s why he came with me. And then I said he was mean, mean, mean and I hated him. And he…” A silence as if she were listening to something nearby. She hurried on. “I’m not meant to argue with him ever is what he said and he gated me. So I can’t use the phone and I can’t watch telly and I can’t do anything but go to school and come home and it’s not fair.” She began to cry. “Gotta go. ’Bye,” she managed to say with a hiccup. Then the message was over.

Barbara sighed. She had not expected this of Taymullah Azhar. He had broken rules himself: leaving an arranged marriage and two small children to take up with an English girl with whom he’d fallen in love. He’d been ousted from his family as a result, forever a pariah to his own kin. Of all the people on earth, he was the last person she would have anticipated being so inflexible and unforgiving.

She was going to have to have a talk with him. Punishments, she thought, should match their crimes. But she knew she would have to come up with an approach that didn’t seem like actually talking to him, by which of course she really meant giving him a piece of her mind. No, she was going to have to dress it in the guise of a natural part of a conversation, which meant she was going to have to develop a subject of conversation that would allow the topics of Hadiyyah, lying, being gated, and unreasonable parents to arise naturally. At the moment, though, the very thought of all that verbal manoeuvring made Barbara’s head feel like a balloon too full of air. She made a mental note to seek out a reasonable excuse to talk to Azhar, and she uncapped her Stella Artois.

There was a good chance, she thought, that she would need to consume two bottles of lager tonight.

FU MADE THE necessary preparations. These did not take long because He had laid the groundwork well. Once the chosen boy had proved himself worthy, He had watched him until He knew all his routines and movements. So when the time was right, He was able to make a quick choice of the environs in which He would finally act. He chose the gym.

He felt confident. He’d found a place where He’d been able to park without difficulty each time he’d been in the vicinity. It was in a street where on one side a stained brick wall formed the boundary of a school-yard and on the other a cricket ground lay in darkness. The street wasn’t particularly close to the gym, but Fu didn’t expect that to present much trouble because, more important than anything else, the place He parked was on the route the boy would have to take to get to his home.

When he emerged from the gym, Fu was waiting although He made it seem as though their meeting were a coincidence.

“Hey,” Fu said, all pleased surprise. “Is that…What’re you doing here?”

The boy was three steps ahead of Him, shoulders hunched, as they always were, head hanging down. When he turned, Fu waited for recognition to dawn. It did quickly enough to satisfy.

The boy looked left and right, but it didn’t seem so much because he wanted to escape what was coming, as to see if anyone else was there to witness the circumstance of such a person being in such a place where that person patently didn’t belong. But there was no one nearby, for the gym’s entrance was on the side of the building, not the front on the main route more used by pedestrians.

The boy jerked his head in that age-old male adolescent form of hello. His short dreadlocks bounced round his dark face. “Hey. What’re you doing round here?”

Fu offered the excuse He’d planned. “Trying to make peace with my dad and getting nowhere, as usual.” It meant nothing at all in the general scheme of life, but Fu knew it would mean everything to the boy. It told a tale of brotherhood in twelve brief words, obvious enough to be understood by a thirteen-year-old, subtle enough to suggest that a bond of the unspoken might actually exist between them. “Heading back to the banger. What about you? D’you live round here?”

“Up past the station. Finchley Road and Frognal.”

“I’m parked in that direction. I’ll give you a lift if you like.”

He moved along, keeping His pace somewhere between a stroll and a brisk, wintertime walk. Like a regular mate, He lit a cigarette, offered one to the boy, and confided that He’d parked a bit of a distance from where He’d met His dad because He’d known He’d want to clear His head afterwards with a walk. “Never works out with the two of us talking,” Fu said. “Mum says she only wants us to relate to each other but I keep telling her you can’t relate to a bloke who walked out before you were born.” He felt the boy’s eyes on Him, but they suggested interest and not suspicion.