With No One As Witness (19 page)

“I’ve no doubt of that. But the assistant commissioner was out of order. I want you to clear out. Immediately.”

Behind his glasses, Robson’s eyes assessed. Lynley could feel the evaluation going on. He could read the profiler’s conclusion as well: subject experiencing understandable stress. True enough, Lynley thought. Each time the serial killer struck, the bar would be raised. Robson hadn’t seen stress yet, compared to what he’d see if the killer snuffed out someone else before the police got to him.

Robson said, “I can’t pretend to know what’s going on between you and AC Hillier. But now that I’m here, I might be of use to you if I have a look. I’ll keep my distance. There’s no risk I’ll contaminate your crime scene. I’ll wear what you need me to wear: gloves, overalls, cap, whatever. Now I’m here, use me. I can help you if you’ll let me.”

“Sir…?” Havers spoke.

Lynley saw that from the opposite end of the tunnel, a trolley had been wheeled, the body bag upon it ready to be used. A SOCO team member stood with paper bags prepared for the victim’s hands. All that was required was a nod from Lynley and part of the problem engendered by Robson’s presence would be taken care of: There would be nothing for him to see.

Havers said, “Ready?”

Robson said quietly, “I’m already here. Forget how and why. Forget Hillier altogether. For God’s sake, use me.”

The man’s voice was as kind as it was insistent, and Lynley knew there was truth in what he said. He could hold rigidly to the arrangement he’d negotiated with Hillier or he could use the moment and refuse to let it mean anything else than simply that: seizing an opportunity in front of him, one that presented a chance to have a bit more insight into the mind of a killer.

Abruptly, he said to the team members waiting to bag the body, “Hang on for a moment.” And then to Robson, “Have a look, then.”

Robson nodded, murmured, “Good man,” and approached the paintless car. He went no closer than four feet from it and when he wanted to examine the hands, he did not touch them but rather asked DI Hogarth to do it. For his part, Hogarth shook his head in disbelief but cooperated. Having Scotland Yard there at all was bad enough; having a civilian on the scene was unthinkable. He lifted the hands with an expression that said the world had gone mad.

After several minutes of contemplation, Robson returned to Lynley’s side. He said first what Lynley and Havers had themselves said, “So young. God. This can’t be easy for any of you. No matter what you’ve seen in your careers.”

“It isn’t,” Lynley said.

Havers came to join them. By the car, the preparations began for transferring the body onto the trolley, to remove it for postmortem examination.

Robson said, “There’s a change. Things are escalating now. You can see he’s treated the body completely differently: no covering of the genitals, no respectful positioning. There’s no regret at all, no psychic restitution. Instead, there’s a real need to humiliate the boy: legs spread out, genitalia exposed, seated with the rubbish deposited by vagrants. His interaction with this boy prior to death was unlike his interactions with the others. With them, something occurred to stir him to regret. With this boy, that didn’t happen. Rather, its opposite did. Not regret, then, but pleasure. And pride in the accomplishment as well. He’s confident now. He’s sure he won’t be caught.”

Havers said, “How can he think that? He’s put this kid on a public street, for God’s sake.”

“That’s just the point.” Robson gestured to the far end of the tunnel, where Shand Street opened up to the small businesses that lined it in a few dozen yards of South London redevelopment that took the form of modern brick buildings with decorative security gates in front of them. “He’s placed the body where he could easily have been seen doing so.”

“Couldn’t you argue the same of the other locations?” Lynley asked.

“You could do, but consider this. In the other locations, there was far less risk for him. He could have used something no witness would question as he transported the body from his vehicle to the dump site: a wheelbarrow, for example, a large duffel bag, a street sweeper’s trolley. Anything that wouldn’t seem out of place in that particular area. All he had to do was get the body from his vehicle to the dump site itself, and under cover of darkness, using that reasonable means of transport, he’d be fairly safe. But here, he’s out in the open the moment he puts the body into that derelict car. And he didn’t just dump it there, Superintendent. It only looks dumped. But make no mistake. He arranged it. And he was confident he wouldn’t be caught at his work.”

“Cocky bastard,” Havers muttered.

“Yes. He’s proud of what he’s been able to accomplish. I expect he’s somewhere nearby even now, watching all the activity he’s managed to provoke and enjoying every bit of it.”

“What d’you make of the missing incision? The fact that he didn’t mark the forehead. Can we conclude he’s backing off now?”

Robson shook his head. “I expect the missing incision merely means that, for him, this killing was different to the others.”

“Different in what way?”

“Superintendent Lynley?” It was Hogarth, who’d been supervising the transfer of the body from the car to the trolley. He’d stopped the action prior to the body bag being zipped round the corpse. “You might want a look at this.”

They went back to him. He was gesturing to the boy’s midsection. There, what had been obscured before by the body’s slumped position in the seat was visible now that it was stretched on the trolley. While the incision from sternum to navel had indeed not been made on this most recent victim, the navel itself had been removed. Their killer had taken another souvenir.

That he’d done so after death was evident in the lack of blood from the wound. That he’d done so in anger—or possibly in haste—was evident in the slash across the stomach. Deep and uneven, it provided access to the navel, which a pair of secateurs or scissors had then removed.

“Souvenir,” Lynley said.

“Psychopath,” Robson added. “I suggest you post surveillance at all the previous crime scenes, Superintendent. He’s likely to return to any one of them.”

FU WAS CAREFUL WITH THE RELIQUARY. HE CARRIED IT before Him like a priest with a chalice and set it down on a tabletop. Gently, He removed the lid. A vaguely putrescent odour wafted upward, but He found that the smell did not bother Him nearly as much as it had done at first. The scent of decay would fade soon enough. But the achievement would be there forever.

He looked down upon the relics, satisfied. There were two of them now, nestling like shells in a rain cloud. With the slightest of shakes, the cloud subsumed them, and that was the beauty of where He’d placed them. The relics were gone, but still they were there, like something hidden within the altar of a church. In fact, the activity of reverently moving the reliquary from one place to another was indeed just like being in a church, but without the social restrictions that churchgoing always placed upon members of the congregation.

You’ll sit up straight. You’ll stop the fidgeting. D’you need a lesson in how to behave? When you’re told to kneel, you do it, boy. Put your palms together. God damn it. Pray.

Fu blinked. The voice. At once distant and present, telling him a maggot had slunk into his head. In through His ear and onward to His brain. He’d been less than careful, and the thought of church had given it entry at last. A snicker initially. Then an outright laugh. Then the echo of pray, pray and pray.

And, Finally looking for a job, are you? Where d’you expect to find one, stupid git? And you get out of the way, Charlene, or do you want some of this for yourself?

It was yammer and yammer. It was shout and shout. It sometimes went on for hours at a time. He’d thought He’d finally rid Himself of the worm, but thinking of church had been His mistake.

I want you out of this house, you hear? Sleep in a doorway if that’s what it takes. Or don’t you have the bottle for that?

You drove her there, blast you. You did her in.

Fu squeezed His eyes shut. He reached out blindly. His hands found an object, and His fingers felt buttons. He pushed them indiscriminately until sound roared forth.

He found Himself staring at the television set, where a picture came into focus as the voice of the maggot faded away. It took Him a moment to understand what He was looking at: The morning news was assaulting His ears.

Fu gazed at the screen. Things began to make sense. A female reporter with wind-tousled hair stood in front of a police barricade. Behind her, the black arch of the Shand Street tunnel gaped like the upper jaw of Hades, and deep within that piss-scented cavern, temporary lights illuminated the back end of the abandoned Mazda.

Fu relaxed into the sight of that car, released and released. It was, He thought, unfortunate that the barrier had been set up at the south end of the tunnel. From this position, the body could not be seen. And He’d taken such pains to make the message clear: The boy doomed himself, don’t you see? Not to retribution, from which there had never once been a realistic hope of escape, but from release. Until the end, the boy had both protested and denied.

Fu had expected to wake from the night with a sense of disquiet, born of the boy’s refusal to admit his shame. True, He hadn’t felt any such sense at the moment of his death, experiencing instead the momentary loosing of the vice that had His brain in its grasp, tighter and tighter with each passing day. But He had assumed He’d feel it later on, when clarity and personal honesty demanded that He evaluate His choice of subject. Yet upon waking He hadn’t felt anything remotely like unease at all. Instead, until the arrival of the maggot, well-being had continued to suffuse Him, like the sense of repletion after a good meal.

“…not releasing any other information at the moment,” the reporter was saying earnestly. “We know there’s a body, we’ve heard—and let me stress that we’ve only heard, and it has not been confirmed—that it’s the body of a boy, and we’ve been told that officers have arrived from the Met police squad already investigating the last murder in St. George’s Gardens. But as to whether this latest killing is related to the earlier murders…We’re going to have to wait for word on that.”

As she spoke, several individuals came out of the tunnel behind her: plainclothes cops by the look of them. A dumpy woman with pudding-basin hair took some direction from a blond officer in an overcoat that had the look of old money about it. She nodded once and headed out of sight, whereupon the officer stood in conversation with a bloke in a mustard anorak and another with concave shoulders and a crumpled mac.

The reporter said, “I’ll just see if I can have a word…,” and advanced as close to the barricade as she could get. But every other reporter had the same idea, and so much jostling and shouting ensued that no one got an answer to anything. The cops ignored the lot of them, but the telly cameraman zoomed in anyway. Fu got a good look at His adversaries. The dumpy woman was gone, but He had time to study Overcoat, Anorak, and Crumpled Mac. He knew He was more than a match for them.

“Five and counting,” He murmured to the television. “Don’t touch that dial.”

Nearby, He had a cup of tea that He’d made upon waking, and He saluted the television with it before He replaced it on a nearby table. Around Him, the house creaked as its pipes supplied the old radiators with water to heat the rooms, and He heard in those creaks an announcement of the maggot’s imminent return.

Look at this, He would instruct as He pointed to the television where the police discussed Him and His handiwork. I leave the message, and they must read. Every step of it planned in exquisite detail.

The stertorous breathing behind Him, then. That eternal signal of the maggot’s presence. Not in His head now, but here in this room.

What’re you doing, boy?

Fu didn’t need to have even a look. The shirt would be white, as it always was, but worn at both the collar and cuffs. The trousers would be charcoal or brown, the tie knotted perfectly and the cardigan buttoned. He’d have polished his shoes, polished his specs, and polished his round bald head as well.

The question again: What’re you doing? with the threat implicit in the tone.

Fu made no reply since the answer was obvious: He was watching the news and experiencing the unfolding of His personal history. He was making His mark, and wasn’t that exactly what He’d been instructed to do?

You best answer me when I speak to you. I asked what’re you doing and I want a reply.

And then, Where the hell were you brought up? Get that teacup off the bloody wood. You want to polish the furniture in your spare time since you’ve got so much of it? What’re you thinking about anyway? Or are you out of practice in that department?

Fu fixed His attention on the television. He could wait him out. He knew what came next because some things were written: bran in warm milk, soaked into slop, a glass of fibre dissolved in juice, those prayers sent heavenward for a quick movement of the bowels so he wouldn’t have to experience said movement in a public place like the gents’ loo at school. And if movement was achieved, a triumphant notation on the calendar hanging inside the cupboard door. R for regular when regular was the last thing a maggot could ever hope to be.

But something was different this morning. Fu could feel him charging, a horseman directly from Revelations.

Saying, Where are they? What’ve you bloody done…I told you to keep your filthy mitts off. Didn’t I say? Didn’t I expressly tell you? You turn off that God damn telly and look at me when I’m talking to you.

He wanted the remote. Fu would not hand it over.

You defying me, Charlene? You defying me?

What if He was? Fu thought. What if she was? What if they were? What if He did? What if everyone did? Amazingly, He found Himself unafraid, wary nevermore, utterly at ease, even a bit amused. The maggot’s power was nothing in comparison with His own now that He’d finally taken it up, and the beauty of it all was that the maggot had no idea who or what he was dealing with. Fu felt such a presence in His veins, such capability, such sureness and knowledge. He rose from the chair, and He allowed His body to come into its fullness, undisguised. He said, “I wanted and I took. That’s what it was.”