With No One As Witness (39 page)

She smiled serenely and patted his shoulder. “Cup of tea and a biscuit it is. And for you?” This last was directed to Lynley, who told her he’d do nicely with nothing. She disappeared into an adjoining room.

Webberly wheeled himself over to a window, where he raised the blinds and looked out at the day. “Bloody weather,” he growled. “I’m that ready for Spain, Tommy. The thought of it…That’s what’s keeping me going.”

“Taking your pension, then?” Lynley tried to make the question light, not a reflection of what he felt at the thought of the superintendent’s permanent removal from the force.

He didn’t fool Webberly with his tone, however. The superintendent gave him a look, cast over his shoulder from his perusal of the day. “David behaving badly, is he? You’ve got to come up with a strategy for coping with him. That’s all I can tell you.”

Lynley joined him at the window. There, they both looked morosely out at the grey day and what the window offered of it, which was a distant view of bare branches, the supplicant winter arms of trees in Osterley Park. Closer in, they had the carpark to gaze upon.

“For myself, I can do it,” Lynley said.

“That’s all anyone asks of you.”

“It’s the others I’m worried about. Barbara and Winston mostly. I’ve not done either of them any favours, taking on your position. It was madness to think I could.”

Webberly was silent. Lynley knew that the other man would see his point. Havers’ boat of dreams at the Yard would doubtless continue to take on water as long as she maintained her association with him. As for Nkata…Lynley knew that any other officer elevated to the rank of acting superintendent would have done a better job of keeping Winston out of Hillier’s clutches. Instead, Havers was looking more professionally doomed every day, while Nkata knew he was being used as a token and might end up carrying round a load of bitterness that could blight his career for years. No matter how he looked at the matter, Lynley felt it was all down to him that Nkata and Havers were in the positions they were in at the moment.

“Tommy,” Webberly said, as if Lynley had spoken all this, “you don’t have that power.”

“Don’t I? You did. You do. I ought to be able—”

“Stop. I’m not talking about the power to be a buffer between David and his targets. I’m talking about the power to change him, to un-David him. Which is what you’d like to do, if you’ll admit it. But he has his own set of demons, just like you. And there’s not a thing in the world that you can do to remove them from him.”

“So how do you cope with him?”

Webberly rested his arms on the windowsill. He was looking, Lynley saw, much older these days. His thin hair—once the faded sand of the redhead going grey—had now reached that destination, while the flesh under his eyes was baggy and the skin beneath his chin was wattled. Seeing this, Lynley was reminded of Ulysses’ rumination, faced with knowledge of his mortality: “Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.” He wanted to recite it to Webberly. Anything, he thought, to postpone the inevitable.

“It’s down to the knighthood, I reckon,” Webberly said. “You think David wears it comfortably. I believe he wears it like a suit of armour, which as we both know, has comfort as the least of its purposes. He wanted it, and he didn’t want it. He schemed to get it, and now he has to live with that.”

“The scheming? But that’s what he does best.”

“Too right. So think about having that on your gravestone. Tommy, you know all this. And if you can let the knowledge just get past that nasty temper of yours, you’ll be able to deal with him.”

There it was, Lynley thought. The dominant truth of his life. He could hear his father comment upon it, though the man had been dead nearly twenty years: Temper, Tommy. You’re allowing passion not only to blind you but to rule you, son.

What had it been at the time? A football match and a wild disagreement with a referee? A call in rugby he hadn’t liked? A row with his sister over a board game? What? And what did it matter now?

But that had been his father’s point. That, full stop. The black passion of the moment did not matter once the moment passed. He merely failed to see that fact, over and over again, resulting in everyone else having to pay for his fatal flaw. He was Othello without the excuse of Iago; he was Hamlet sans ghost. Helen was right. Hillier set traps and he walked right into them.

It was all he could do not to groan aloud. Webberly looked at him. “There’s a learning curve involved with the job,” the superintendent said kindly. “Why don’t you let yourself travel it?”

“Easier said than done when at the other end of the curve is someone waiting with a battle-axe.”

Webberly shrugged. “You can’t stop David from arming himself. Who you have to become is the person who can dodge the blows.”

The canary therapist came back into the room, tea in one hand and paper napkin in the other. On this rested a lone ginger biscuit, the superintendent’s reward for managing the parallel bars. “Here you go, luvvie,” she said to Webberly. “Nice hot cuppa with milk and sugar…I’ve made it just the way you like it.”

“I hate tea,” Webberly informed her as he took the cup and the biscuit.

“Oh, go on with you,” she replied. “You’re being quite naughty this morning. Is that because of your visitor?” She patted his shoulder. “Well, it’s good to see you showing some life. But stop pulling my leg, luv, or I’ll give you what for.”

“You’re the reason I’m trying to get the hell out of here, woman,” Webberly told her.

“That,” she said placidly, “is my whole objective.” She wagged her fingers and headed out of the room, scooping up a medical chart on her way.

“You’ve got Hillier, I’ve got her,” Webberly groused as he bit into his biscuit.

“But at least she offers refreshments,” Lynley said.

Nothing was resolved in the visit to Osterley, but Helen’s prescription did work as she’d thought it would. When Lynley left the superintendent back in his room, he felt ready for another round of his professional life.

What that round brought was information from a number of sources. He met the squad in the incident room, where phones were ringing and constables were typing information into the computers. Stewart was compiling action reports from one of his teams, and—mirabile dictu, as things turned out—Barbara Havers had, in his absence, apparently managed to take direction from the DI without episode. When Lynley called the group together, the first thing he learned was that, upon Stewart’s orders, Havers had traveled across the river to Colossus for another set-to with Ulrike Ellis.

“It’s amazing how quickly she was able to locate information on Jared Salvatore once she twigged we had the book from reception with his name blazed all over it,” Havers reported, “and she’s managed to unearth all sorts of useful details on Anton Reid. She’s onboard now, sir, cooperation incarnate. She’s provided the name of every kid who’s dropped out of Colossus for the last twelve months, and I’ve been seeing if we can match any of them with the rest of the bodies.”

“What about the other two boys’ personal connections to anyone at Colossus?”

“Jared and Anton? Griffin Strong was their assessment leader, surprise, surprise. Anton Reid also did some time on Greenham’s computer course.”

“What about Kilfoyle and Veness? Any relationship between the boys and them?”

Havers consulted her report which—perhaps as evidence of her dubious intention of being a model cop from this moment forward—appeared to be typed for once. “Both of them knew Jared Salvatore. Evidently, he was quite the whiz at creating recipes. He couldn’t read, so he couldn’t follow cookbooks, but he’d manage to whip up something without instructions and serve it round, with the staff at Colossus doing the guinea-pig thing. Everyone knew him, as things turn out. My mistake earlier”—she shot a look round the room as if anticipating a reaction from someone to her admission—“was asking only Ulrike Ellis and Griff Strong about Jared. When they said he wasn’t one of theirs, I believed them because they’d admitted to Kimmo Thorne right up front. Sorry.”

“What are Kilfoyle and Veness saying about Anton Reid, then?”

“Kilfoyle says he doesn’t remember Anton. Veness is vague about it. Thinks he may, he says. Neil Greenham remembers him well enough.”

“As to Greenham, Tommy,” John Stewart weighed in, “he’s got a real temper, according to the head teacher up in Kilburn where he taught. He lost it with kids a few times and he shoved one against the blackboard once. He heard about that from the parents straightaway and he apologised for it, but that doesn’t mean he was genuine about the apology.”

“So much for his theories on discipline,” Havers noted.

“Have we laid on surveillance for these blokes?” Lynley asked.

“We’re stretched too thin, Tommy. Hillier’s not authorising any more men till we’ve got a result.”

“God damn—”

“But we’ve done some snooping, so we’ve got an idea of their nighttime activities.”

“Which are?”

Stewart gave the nod to his team three officers. So far, very little looked suspicious. After his day at Colossus, Jack Veness evidently went regularly to the Miller and Grindstone, his local in Bermondsey, where he also had a second job behind the bar at the weekends. He drank, smoked, and made the occasional call from a phone box outside—

“That sounds promising,” someone pointed out.

—but that was it. Then he went home or to a take-away curry shop near Bermondsey Square. Griffin Strong, on the other hand, seemed to alternate between his silk-screening business in Quaker Street and his home. He also, however, appeared to have a liking for a Bengali restaurant in Brick Lane, where he went to dine alone occasionally.

As for Kilfoyle and Greenham, team three were gathering information telling them that Kilfoyle spent many of his evenings in the Othello Bar of the London Ryan Hotel, which was at the base of the Gwynne Place Steps. These led up to Granville Square. Otherwise, he was at home in the square.

“Living with whom?” Lynley asked. “Do we know?”

“Deed poll says the property belongs to Victor Kilfoyle. His dad, I reckon.”

“What about Greenham?”

“The only thing he’s done of interest is take Mummy to the Royal Opera House. And he apparently has a lady friend he meets on the side. We know they’ve done cheap Chinese in Lisle Street and a gallery opening in Upper Brook Street. Other than that, he’s at home with Mummy.” Stewart smiled. “In Gunnersbury, by the way.”

“Is anyone surprised by that?” Lynley commented. He glanced at Havers. She was doing her best, he saw, not to crow I was right, and he had to give her marks for that. She’d made the connection between employees at Colossus and the dump sites of bodies from the start.

Nkata joined them then, fresh from a meeting with Hillier. They were set to film Crimewatch, he reported, and he scowled at the good-natured comments about a star being born, which rose when he made this announcement. They’d be using the e-fit of the interloper seen at Square Four Gym, he informed them, which had been developed in concert with the bodybuilder who’d seen their potential suspect. To this, they would add the photographs of all identified victims as well as a dramatic reconstruction of what they now presumed to be Kimmo Thorne’s manner of encountering his killer: a red Ford Transit stopping a bicycle rider with stolen goods in his possession, the van’s driver helping to load the bicycle and the goods into the vehicle.

“We’ve something to add to that as well,” Stewart put in when Nkata was done. He sounded pleased. “CCTV footage. I won’t say we’ve hit gold, but we’ve had a little luck at last with a CCTV camera mounted on one of the buildings near St. George’s Gardens: the image of a van driving down the street.”

“Time and date?”

“Matching up with Kimmo Thorne’s death.”

“Christ in heaven, John, why’s it taken this long to get to it?”

“We had it early on,” Stewart said, “but it wasn’t clear. We needed an enhancement, and that took time. But the wait was worth it. You’d better have a look and give the word on how you want it used. Crimewatch might get some mileage from it.”

“I’ll look at it straightway,” Lynley told him. “What about surveillance at the body sites. Anything?”

Nothing, as it turned out. If their killer was considering a nocturnal visit to the shrine of his criminal accomplishment—as contended in Hamish Robson’s remarks about him—he had not yet done so. Which brought up the profile itself. Barbara Havers said she’d had another look at it, and she wanted to point out part of Robson’s description: the section which claimed the killer probably lived with a dominant parent. They had two suspects so far with parents in the home: Kilfoyle and Greenham. One with Dad, one with Mum. And wasn’t it dodgy that Greenham was taking Mum to the Royal Opera House but the woman friend only got cheap Chinese and a gratis gallery opening? What did that mean?

It was worth looking at, Lynley told her, and he said, “Who’s got the information on who Veness lives with?”

John Stewart responded. “There’s a landlady. Mary Alice Atkins-Ward. A distant relation.”

“Do we tighten up on Kilfoyle and Greenham, then?” a DC asked, pencil at the ready.

“Let me look at the CCTV film first.” Lynley told them to get back to their assigned actions. He himself followed John Stewart to a video recorder. He signaled Nkata to accompany them. He saw Havers glower at this but chose to ignore it.

He had high hopes of the CCTV footage. The e-fit had provided little enough inspiration. To him, it looked like Everyman and No Man. The suspect had worn a cap of some sort—didn’t they all?—and while upon an initial glimpse of it, Barbara Havers had pointed out gleefully that Robbie Kilfoyle wore a EuroDisney cap, that was hardly a damning piece of evidence. For Lynley’s money, the e-fit was on the borderline of worthless, and he reckoned Crimewatch would prove him right on that.

Stewart snatched up the remote for the video recorder and switched on the television. Onto the corner of the screen, the time and date popped up along with a section of mews beyond which the wall of St. George’s Gardens curved. As they watched, the front of a van pulled into the picture at the end of the mews, which appeared to be some thirty yards from the CCTV camera guarding the mews itself. The vehicle stopped, lights out, and a figure emerged. He carried a tool and disappeared round the curve of the wall, presumably to apply his implement to something out of sight of the camera. This would, Lynley thought, be the padlock on the chain that held the gate closed at night.