With No One As Witness (18 page)

The boy had come to them first, hoping they would buy from him, Mr. Grabinksi—“Call me Ray”—informed them. But he asked a price they weren’t willing to pay, and when no one else in the market was willing to pay it either, Kimmo had returned to them with another offer: to sell from the stall himself and to give them a portion of the takings.

They’d liked the boy—“He was that cheeky,” Elaine confided—so they gave him a quarter of one of the tables along the side of the stall, and there he did his business. He sold silver pieces—some plate, some sterling—with a speciality in photo frames.

“We’ve been told he got into some trouble with that,” Lynley said. “Evidently he sold something that shouldn’t have been on sale in the first place.”

“Having been lifted off someone else,” Havers put in.

Oh, they knew nothing about that, both Grabinskis hastened to say. As far as they were concerned, it was someone wanting to get Kimmo in trouble who told that tale to the local rozzers. Doubtless, in fact, it was their chief competitor in the market: one Reginald Lewis, to whom Kimmo had also gone trying to sell his silver before returning to them. Reg Lewis was that jealous of anyone wanting to set up business round early morning Bermondsey, wasn’t he? He’d tried to keep the Grabinskis out twenty-two years back when they first started, he’d done the same to Maurice Fletcher and to Jackie Hoon when they started up.

“So there was no truth to Kimmo’s goods being stolen?” Havers asked, looking up from her notebook. “Because, when you think of it, how else would a kid like Kimmo be coming across valuable pieces of silver for sale?”

They had assumed he was selling off family pieces, Elaine Grabinski said. They did ask him and that’s what he told them: He was helping out his gran by offering the family silver to the public.

To Lynley it looked like a case of the Grabinskis believing what they had wanted to believe because they liked the boy, rather than a case of Kimmo being a sophisticated liar who pulled the wool over the eyes of an elderly couple. They had to have known at some level that he wasn’t the legitimate article, but at that same level, they had to have not cared.

“We told the police we’d speak up for the boy if it came to court,” Ray Grabinski asserted. “But once they carted poor Kimmo off, we didn’t hear ’nother word about him. Till we saw the News of the World, that is.”

“An’ you ask Reg Lewis ’bout that, you lot,” Elaine Grabinski said, returning to the epergne with renewed vigour. She added ominously, “What I wouldn’t put past him fits in a teaspoon,” and her husband said, “Now, pet,” and patted her shoulder.

Reg Lewis turned out to be only slightly less antique than his wares. He wore bright tartan braces beneath his jacket and they held up a pair of ancient plus fours. His spectacles were as thick as the bottom of whisky tumblers. Overlarge hearing aids protruded from his ears. He fit the profile of their serial killer as well as a sheep fit the profile of a genius.

He “weren’t s’prised none” when the cops had come calling for Kimmo, he told them. Something was off with the bugger first time Reg Lewis laid eyes on the creature. Dressed half man, half woman he did, with them tights of his or whatever they were, and those poncey ankle boots and the like. So when the cops showed up with a list of stolen property in their mitts, he—Reg Lewis, mind you—was not gobsmacked that they found what they were looking for in the possession of one Kimmo Thorne. Carted him off then and there, they did, and good riddance it was. Besmirching the reputation of the market, he was, flogging pinched silver. And not any pinched silver, mind you, but pinched silver that he’d been too thick to notice had personal and immediately identifiable engraving upon it.

What happened to Kimmo after that, Reg Lewis didn’t know and didn’t much care. The only good thing the little nancy boy did at the end of the day was not drag the Grabinskis down with him. And weren’t those two blind as bats in the daylight? Anyone with sense would’ve known that boy was up to no good when he first showed his mug in the market. Reg warned the Grabinskis off him, he did, but would they listen to someone with their best interests at heart? Not bloody likely. Yet who turned out to be right at the end of the day, eh? And who never heard a word of you-were-right-Reg-and-we-apologise-for-our-nastiness from anyone, eh?

Reg Lewis had nothing more to add. Kimmo had vanished that day with the coppers. Perhaps he’d done a stretch in borstal. Perhaps he’d had the fear of God put into him at the police station. All Reg knew was that the boy hadn’t brought any more stolen silver to sell in Bermondsey Market, which was fine by Reg. Cops over in Borough High Street could fill anyone in on the rest, couldn’t they.

Reg Lewis said everything but “good riddance to bad rubbish,” and if he’d read about or heard about Kimmo Thorne’s murder, he made no mention of the fact. But it was clear that the boy had done nothing to enhance the reputation of the market in Reg’s eyes. More than that, as he had pointed out, they would have to suss out from the local police.

They were on their way to do so—wending their way through the market, back to Lynley’s car—when his mobile rang.

The message was terse, its meaning unmistakable: He was wanted immediately on Shand Street, where a tunnel beneath the railway took the narrow little thoroughfare to Crucifix Lane. They had another body.

Lynley flipped off the phone and looked at Havers. “Crucifix Lane,” he said. “Do you know where it is?”

A vendor at a nearby stall answered the question. Right up Tower Bridge Road, he told them. Less than half a mile from where they stood.

A RAILWAY VIADUCT shooting out from London Bridge station comprised the north perimeter of Crucifix Lane. Bricks formed it, so deeply stained with more than a century of soot and grime that whatever their original colour had been, it was now a distant memory. What remained in that memory’s place was a bleak wall done up in variations of carbonaceous sediment.

Into this structure’s supporting arches had been built various places of business: lockups for hire, warehouses, wine cellars, car-repair establishments. But one of the arches created a tunnel through which ran a single lane that was Shand Street. The north part of this street served as the address of several small businesses closed at this hour of the morning and the south part of it—the longer part—curved under the railway viaduct and disappeared into the darkness. The tunnel here was some sixty yards long, a place of deep shadows whose cavernous roof was bandaged with corrugated steel plates from which water dripped, soundless against the consistent rumble of early morning trains heading into and out of London. More water ran down the walls, seeping from the rusty iron gutters at a height of eight feet, collecting in greasy pools below. The scent of urine made the tunnel’s air rank. Broken lights made its atmosphere chilling.

When Lynley and Havers arrived, they found the tunnel completely sealed off at either end, with a constable at the Crucifix Lane end who—clipboard in hand—was restricting entrance. He had apparently met his match in the early representatives of the news media, however, those hungry journalists who monitored every police station’s patch in the hope of being first with a breaking story. Five of them had already assembled at the police barrier, and they were shouting questions into the tunnel. Three photographers accompanied them, creating strobe-like lighting as they shot above and around the constable who was trying vainly to control them. As Lynley and Havers showed their identification, the first of the television news vans pulled up, disgorging camera and soundmen onto the pavement as well. A media officer was needed desperately.

“…serial killer?” Lynley heard one of the journalists call out as he crossed the barrier with Havers behind him.

“…kid? Adult? Male? Female?”

“Hang on, mate. Give us bloody something.”

Lynley ignored them, Havers muttered, “Vultures,” and they moved in the direction of a low-slung, paintless, and abandoned sports car sitting midway through the tunnel. Here, they learned, the body had been discovered by a taxi driver on his way from Bermondsey to Heathrow, from which he would spend the day driving transatlantic fares into London for an exorbitant price made more exorbitant by the perennial tailback on the east side of the Hammersmith Flyover. That driver was long gone, his statement taken. In his place the SOCO team already worked, and a DI from the Borough High Street station waited for Lynley and Havers to join him. He was called Hogarth, he said, and his DCI had given the word to make no moves till someone from Scotland Yard checked out the crime scene. It was clear he wasn’t happy about that.

Lynley couldn’t be troubled with unruffling the DI’s feathers. If this was indeed another victim of their serial killer, there would be far greater concerns than someone’s not liking having his patch invaded by New Scotland Yard.

He said to Hogarth, “What have we got?” as he donned a pair of latex gloves handed over by one of the scenes-of-crime officers.

“Black kid,” Hogarth replied. “Boy. Young. Twelve or thirteen? Hard to tell. Doesn’t fit the MO of the serial, you ask me. Don’t know why you lot got a call.”

Lynley knew. The victim was black. Hillier was covering his well-tailored backside in advance of his next press briefing. “Let’s see him,” he said, and he stepped past Hogarth. Havers followed.

The body had been deposited unceremoniously in the abandoned car, where the driver’s seat had over time disintegrated down to metal frame and springs. There, with its legs splayed out and its head lolling to one side, it joined Coke bottles, Styrofoam cups, carrier bags of rubbish, McDonald’s take-away containers, and a single rubber glove that lay on what had once been the rim of the car’s back window. The boy’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at what remained of the car’s rusted steering column, short dreadlocks springing out of his head. With smooth walnut skin and perfectly balanced features, he had been quite lovely. He was also naked.

“Hell,” Havers murmured at Lynley’s side.

“Young,” Lynley said. “He looks younger than the last. Christ, Barbara. Why in God’s name…“ He didn’t finish, letting the unanswerable go unasked. He felt Havers’ glance graze him.

She said with a prescience that came from working with him for years, “There’re no guarantees. No matter what you do. Or what you decide. Or how. Or with whom.”

“You’re right,” he said. “There are never guarantees. But he’s still somebody’s son. All of them were that. We can’t forget it.”

“Think he’s one of ours?”

Lynley took a closer look at the boy, and upon a first glance, he found himself agreeing with Hogarth. While the victim was naked as had been Kimmo Thorne, his body clearly had been dumped without ceremony and not laid out like all the others. He had no piece of tatting as a modesty wrap on his genitalia, and there was no distinguishing mark on his forehead, both additional features of Kimmo Thorne’s body. His abdomen did not appear to be incised, but perhaps more important, the position of the body itself suggested haste and a lack of planning that were uncharacteristic of the other murders.

As the SOCO team moved round him with their evidence bags and collection kits, Lynley made a closer inspection. This proved to tell him a more complete tale. He said, “Have a look at this, Barbara,” as he gently lifted one of the boy’s hands. The flesh was deeply burned, and the marks of a restraint dug into the wrist.

There was much about any serial killing that was known only by its perpetrator, held back by the police for the dual reason of protecting the victims’ families from unnecessarily heartbreaking knowledge and of winnowing out false confessions from the attention seekers who plagued any investigation. In this particular case, there was much that still remained police knowledge only, and both the burns and the restraints were part of that knowledge.

Havers said, “That’s a pretty good indication of what’s what, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Lynley straightened up and glanced over to Hogarth. “He’s one of ours,” he said. “Where’s the pathologist?”

“Been and gone,” Hogarth replied. “Photographer and videographer as well. We’ve just been waiting for you lot before we clear him out of here.”

The rebuke was implied. Lynley ignored it. He asked for the time of death, for any witnesses, for the taxi driver’s statement.

“Pathologist’s given us a time of death between ten and midnight,” Hogarth said. “No witnesses to anything so far as we can tell, but that’s not surprising, is it. Not a place you’d find anyone with brains after dark.”

“As for the taxi driver?”

Hogarth consulted an envelope that he took from his jacket pocket. It evidently did duty as his notepad. He read off the name of the driver, his address, and the number of his mobile phone. He’d had no fare with him, the DI added, and the Shand Street tunnel was part of his regular route to work. “Goes past between five and half past every morning,” Hogarth told them. “Said this”—with a nod at the abandoned car—“has been here for months. Complained about it more’n once, he said. Banged on about how it’s asking for trouble when Traffic Division can’t seem to get round to—” Hogarth’s attention went from Lynley to the Crucifix Lane end of the tunnel. He frowned. “Who’s this? You lot expecting a colleague?”

Lynley turned. A figure was coming along the tunnel towards them, backlit from the lights for the television cameras that were rolling in the street. There was something familiar about the shape of him: big and bulky, with a slight stoop to the shoulders.

Havers was saying cautiously, “Sir, isn’t that…” when Lynley himself realised who it was. He drew in a breath so sharp that he felt its pressure beat within his eyes. The interloper on the crime scene was Hillier’s profiler, Hamish Robson, and there could be only one way he’d gained access to the tunnel.

Lynley didn’t hesitate before striding towards the man. He took Robson by the arm without preamble. “You need to leave at once,” he said. “I don’t know how you managed to cross that barrier, but you’ve no business here, Dr. Robson.”

Robson was clearly surprised by the greeting. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the barrier through which he’d just come. He said, “I had a phone call from Assistant—”