With No One As Witness (58 page)

“I knew how long it would take. I told him when to phone again. He kept in touch that way. When I had things set up, I just waited for him to phone and I told him when and where to meet us. He went first, paid for the room in cash, and we met him there. Everything else happened as I said. We performed, and I left Davey with him.”

“Davey didn’t question this? Being left alone in a hotel room with a stranger?” That didn’t sound like the Davey Benton that his father had described, Lynley thought. There had to be a missing ingredient to the mixture Minshall was describing. “Was the boy drugged?” he asked.

“I have never drugged one of the boys,” Minshall said.

Lynley was used to the man’s way of dancing round by this time. He said, “And your clients?”

“I do not drug—”

“Plug it, Barry,” Barbara cut in. “You know exactly what the superintendent is asking.”

Minshall looked at what he’d done to his plastic cup: rendered it into shreds and confetti. He said, “We’re generally offered refreshments in the hotel room. The boys are free to take them or not.”

“What sort of refreshments?”

“Spirits.”

“Not drugs? Cannabis, cocaine, Ecstasy, the like.”

Minshall actually reared up in offence at this question, saying, “Of course not. We’re not drug addicts, Superintendent Lynley.”

“Just buggerers of children,” Havers said. Then, she shot Sorry, sir in a look to Lynley.

He said, “What did this man look like, Mr. Minshall?”

“Two-one-six-oh?” Minshall thought about it. “Ordinary,” he said. “He had a moustache and goatee. He wore a peaked cap, like a countryman. Spectacles as well.”

“And did you never put all this down as a disguise?” Lynley asked the magician. “The facial hair, the glasses, the cap?”

“At the time, I didn’t think…Look, by the time a man’s ready to stop fantasising about it and to make it real, he’s beyond disguises.”

“Not if he plans to kill someone,” Havers pointed out.

“How old was this man?” Lynley asked.

“I don’t know. Middle-aged? He must have been because he wasn’t in very good shape. He looked like someone who doesn’t take exercise.”

“Like someone who might easily get out of breath?”

“Possibly. But look, he didn’t have on a disguise. All right, I admit that some blokes wear them at first when they show up at MABIL—the wig, the beard, the turban, whatever—but by the time they’re ready…We’ve built trust between us. And no one does this without trust. Because for all they know, I could be a cop undercover. I could be anyone.”

“And so could they,” Havers said. “But you never thought about that one, did you, Bar? You just handed Davey Benton to a serial killer, waved good-bye, and drove off with the money in your pocket.” She turned to Lynley. “I’d say we have enough, wouldn’t you, sir?”

Lynley couldn’t disagree. For now, they had enough from Minshall. They’d want a list of the calls he’d received on his mobile, they’d want to get over to the Canterbury Hotel, and they’d want to arrange for another e-fit to see if the one from Square Four Gym matched whatever image Minshall came up with of his client. From his description of two-one-six-oh, though, the points of comparison seemed to be not with the e-fit they already had from the gym, but rather with the description they’d been given earlier by Muwaffaq Masoud of the man who’d come to purchase his van. There hadn’t been a moustache and a goatee, to be sure. But the age was right, the lack of physical fitness was right, and the bald head Masoud saw could easily have been hidden by the peaked cap Minshall was familiar with.

For the first time, Lynley considered an altogether new idea.

“Havers,” he said to the constable when they were out of the interview room again, “there’s another way to go with this. It’s one that we’ve not looked at yet.”

“Which is?” she asked, stowing her notebook in her bag.

“Two men,” he said. “One procures and the other kills. One procures to give the other the opportunity to kill. The dominant and the submissive partners.”

She thought about this. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” she said. “A twist on Fred and Rosemary, on Hindley and Brady.”

“More than that,” Lynley said.

“How?”

“It explains why we’ve got someone buying that van in Middlesex while someone else waits for him in a ‘minicab’ just outside Muwaffaq Masoud’s house.”

WHEN LYNLEY arrived home, it was quite late. He’d stopped in Victoria Street for a word with TO9 about MABIL, and he’d given the child-protection-team officers what information he had about the organisation. He told them about St. Lucy’s Church, near Gloucester Road underground station, and he asked what the possibilities were of closing the group down.

The news he received in return was grim. A meeting of like-minded people to discuss their like-mindedness did not constitute a breach of the law. Was there something else going on besides talk in the basement of St. Lucy’s Church? If not, Vice had too few officers and too many other ongoing illicit activities with which they had to contend.

“But these are paedophiles,” Lynley countered in frustration upon hearing this assessment from his colleague.

“May be,” was the reply. “But the CPS aren’t going to drag anyone into court based on his conversation, Tommy.” Still, TO9 would send someone undercover to a meeting of MABIL when their burdens were lighter round the Yard. Barring a complaint or hard evidence of criminal activities, that was the best TO9 could do.

So Lynley was feeling gloomy when he drove into Eaton Terrace. He parked in the garage in the mews and trudged down the cobblestone alley and round the corner to his home. The day had left him with the distinct sensation of being unclean: from his skin right through to his spirit.

Inside the house, the ground floor was mostly dark, with a dim light shining at the foot of the stairway. He climbed up and went to their bedroom to see if his wife had gone to bed. But the bed was undisturbed, so he went on, first to the library and ultimately to the nursery. There he found her. She’d bought a rocking chair for the room, he saw, and she was sitting in it, asleep, with an oddly shaped pillow in her lap. He recognised it from one of their many trips to Mothercare in the past few months. It was meant to be used when nursing a baby. The infant rested on it beneath the mother’s breast.

Helen stirred as he crossed the room to her. She said, as if they’d only just been speaking moments before, “So I decided to practise. Well, I suppose it’s more like seeing what it will feel like. Not the actual feeding, but just having him here. It’s odd when you think about it, I mean when you actually stretch the thought out.”

“What is?” The rocking chair was beneath the window, and he leaned against the sill. He watched her fondly.

“That we have actually created a little human being. Our own Jasper Felix, happily floating round inside me, waiting for his introduction to the world.”

Lynley shuddered at the latter part of her thought: introducing their son to a world that often seemed filled with violence and was indeed a place of great uncertainty.

Helen must have seen this because she said, “What is it?”

“Bad day,” he told her.

She extended her hand to him and he took it. Her skin was cool, and he could smell the scent of citrus upon her. She said, “I had a phone call from a man called Mitchell Corsico, Tommy. He said he was from The Source.”

“God,” Lynley groaned. “I’m sorry. He is from The Source.” He explained how he was attempting to thwart Hillier’s plan by keeping Corsico occupied with the minutiae of his own personal life. “Dee should have warned you he might be in touch. I didn’t think he’d be quite that fast. She was intent upon giving him an earful to keep him away from the incident room.”

“Ah.” Helen stretched and yawned. “Well, I did assume there was something going on when he called me Countess. He’d spoken to my father as well, as things turn out. I’ve no idea how he tracked him down.”

“What did he want to know?”

She began to get to her feet. Lynley helped her rise. She set the pillow into the baby’s cot and put a stuffed elephant on top of it. “Daughter of an earl, married to an earl. Obviously, he loathed me. I tried to amuse him with my astounding mindlessness and my sad, fading It-girl proclivities, but he didn’t seem as charmed as I would have liked. Lots of questions about why a blue blood—this is you, darling—would become a cop. I told him I hadn’t the slightest idea as I’d much prefer it if you were available to lunch with me daily in Knightsbridge. He asked to come and visit me here at home, a photographer in tow. I drew the line at that. I hope that was the right thing to do.”

“It was.”

“I’m glad. Of course, it was hard to resist the idea of posing artfully on the drawing-room sofa for The Source, but I managed it.” She slipped her arm round his waist and they headed for the door. “What else?” she asked him.

“Hmmm?” He kissed the top of her head.

“Your bad day.”

“God. It’s nothing I want to talk about now.”

“Have you had dinner?”

“No appetite,” he said. “All I want is to collapse. Preferably on something soft and relatively pliant.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “I know just what you need.” She took his hand and led him towards the bedroom.

He said, “Helen, I couldn’t manage it tonight. I’m done for, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

She laughed. “I never thought I’d hear that from you, but fear not. I have something else in mind.” She told him to sit on the bed, and she went to the bathroom. He heard the snick of a match. He saw its flare. A moment later, water began to run in the tub, and she returned to him. “Do nothing,” she said. “Avoid thinking, if you can. Just be,” and she began to undress him.

There was a ceremonial quality to how she did it, in part because she removed his clothes without haste. She set his shoes carefully to one side, and she folded trousers, jacket, and shirt. When he was nude, she led him into the bathroom, where the bathtub’s water was fragrant and the candles she’d lit cast a soothing glow that was doubled by the mirrors and arced against the walls.

He stepped into the water, sank down, and stretched out until he was covered to his shoulders. She fixed a towelling pillow for his head, and she said, “Close your eyes. Just relax. Don’t do a thing. Try not to think. The scent should help you. Concentrate on that.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Helen’s special potion.”

He heard her moving round the bath: the door swinging shut, the sound of garments dropping to the floor. Then she was next to the tub and her hand was dipping into the water. He opened his eyes. She’d changed into a soft towelling dressing gown, its olive colour warm against her skin. She held a natural sponge and she was applying a bathing gel to it.

She began to wash him. He murmured, “I’ve not asked about your day.”

“Shhh,” she replied.

“No. Tell me. It’ll give me something to think about that’s not Hillier or the case.”

“All right,” she said, but her voice was low and she ran the sponge the length of his arm with a gentle pressure that made him close his eyes once again. “I had a day of hope.”

“I’m glad someone did.”

“After much research, Deborah and I have targeted eight shops for the christening clothes. We’ve a date tomorrow, devoted entirely to the excursion.”

“Excellent,” he said. “An end to conflict.”

“That’s what we think. May we use the Bentley, by the way? There may be more packages than can fit in my car.”

“We’re talking about a baby’s clothes, Helen. An infant’s clothes. How much room can they take up?”

“Yes. Of course. But there may be other things, Tommy…”

He chuckled. She took his other arm. “You can resist anything but temptation,” he told her.

“In a good cause.”

“What else would it be?” But he told her to take the Bentley and to enjoy the excursion. He himself settled in to enjoy her ministration to his body.

She did his neck and kneaded the muscles of his shoulders. She told him to lean forward so that she could see to his back. She washed his chest and she used her fingers to press at points on his face in a way that seemed to drain all tension from him. Then she did the same on his feet till he felt like warm putty. She saved his legs for last.

The sponge glided up them, up them, up them. And then it was not the sponge at all but her hand, and she made him groan.

“Yes?” she murmured.

“Oh yes. Yes.”

“More? Harder? How?”

“Just do what you’re doing.” He caught his breath. “God, Helen. You’re a very naughty girl.”

“I can stop if you like.”

“Not on your life.” He opened his eyes and met hers to see she was smiling gently and watching him. “Take off the robe,” he said.

“Visual stimulation? You hardly need it.”

“Not that sort,” he replied. “Just take off the robe.” And when she did so, he shifted so that she could join him in the water. She put a foot on either side of him and he reached for her hands to help her down. “Tell Jasper Felix to move over,” he said.

“I think,” she replied, “that he’ll be happy to.”

BARBARA HAVERS TURNED ON THE TELEVISION TO ACCOMPANY her morning ritual of Pop-Tarts, a fag, and coffee. It was cold as the dickens in her bungalow, and she went to the window to see if snow had fallen during the night. It hadn’t, but a sheen of ice on the concrete path from the front of the house gleamed with black menace in the security light that hung from the roof. She returned to her crumpled bed and considered dropping back into it while the electric fire did something to ward off the chill, but she knew she couldn’t spare the time, so she ripped the top blanket off and wrapped it round herself before she shivered her way to the kitchen and put the kettle on.

Behind her, The Big Breakfast was regaling its viewers with the latest celebrity gossip. This mostly involved who was currently who else’s partner—always a burning question for the British public, it seemed—and who had thrown over whom for whom else.

Barbara scowled and poured boiling water into the coffee press. She bent over the sink and tapped her finger against the fag that dangled from her lips, dislodging ash in the vicinity of the drain. God, they were obsessed, she thought. Partner this, partner that. Did anyone stay alone for five minutes…other than she herself, of course? It seemed that the national pastime was moving from one relationship to the next with as little downtime in between as possible. A single woman was an accepted failure as a human being, and everywhere you looked, the message blasted you between the eyes.