With No One As Witness (82 page)

“You strangled him with your bare hands,” Nkata pointed out. “How was that supposed to—”

“I didn’t know how else to get him silent. He was only struggling at first, but then he began to scream and I didn’t know how else to quieten him. And then as things were…were building for me…I didn’t realise why he’d gone so silent and limp. I thought he was cooperating.”

“Cooperating.” Barbara couldn’t help herself. “With sodomy. Rape. A thirteen-year-old. You thought he was cooperating. So you finished the job, only you found you were plugging away at a corpse.”

Robson’s eyes reddened. “My whole life,” he’d said, “I tried to ignore…I told myself it didn’t matter: my uncle, the wrestling and the touching. My mother wanting to sleep with her little man and the arousal that was natural to any boy only how could it have been natural when she was making it happen? So I ignored it and I eventually married, but I didn’t want her, you see, the woman, fully formed and making demands of me. I thought pictures would help. Videos. Dodgy things that no one would know about.”

“Kiddy porn,” Barbara said.

“I could get aroused. Easily at first. But then later…”

“Takes more,” Nkata said. “Always takes more, like a drug. How’d you get on to MABIL?”

“Through the Internet. A chat room. I went at first just to see, just to be round men who felt as I felt. I’d borne the burden so long. This obscene need. I thought it would cure me if I went and saw the sorts of men who…who actually engage in it.” He brought a tissue out of his pocket and used it to scrub at his face. “But they were just like me, you see. That was the hell of it. They were like me, only happier. At peace. They’d arrived at a spot where they’d come to believe there is no sin in bodily pleasure.”

“Bodily pleasure with little boys,” Barbara said. “And why would that be? The no sin part of it.”

“Because the boys learn to want it as well.”

“Do they now. And how is it that blokes like you measure the wanting, Dr. Robson?”

“I can see you don’t believe…that you think I’m—”

“A monster? A freak? A genetic mutant who needs to be wiped from the surface of the earth along with the rest of your ilk? Why the hell would I think that?” Finally, it was all too much for her.

“Barb,” Nkata said.

He was so like Lynley, she thought. Capable of keeping cool when that was called for, the one thing she’d never been able to do because she’d always associated keeping cool with letting your insides get eaten by the horror you felt when you had to deal with monsters like this.

“Tell us about the rest,” Nkata said to Robson.

“There’s nothing more to tell. I waited as long as I could, far into the night. I carried the…his body into the woods. It was three…four in the morning? There was no one anywhere.”

“The burning, the mutilation. Tell us about that.”

“I wanted to make it look like the others. Once I saw I’d accidentally killed him, that was the only thing I could think. Make it look like the others so you would conclude the same killer was at work on Davey as on them.”

“Hang on. Are you trying to claim you didn’t kill the other boys?” Barbara asked.

Robson frowned. “You haven’t thought…You haven’t been sitting there thinking I’m the serial killer? How on earth can that be? How could I even have had access to those other boys?”

“You tell us.”

“I did tell you. From the profile, I told you.”

They were silent. He made the leap to what the silence implied.

“My God, the profile’s real. Why would I ever have made that up?”

“Most obvious reason in the world,” Nkata said. “Lays a nice trail away from yourself.”

“But I didn’t even know those boys, those dead boys. I didn’t know them. You must believe—”

“What about Muwaffaq Masoud?” Nkata asked. “You know him?”

“Muwaf…? I’ve never…Who is he?”

“Someone who might be able to pick you out of an identity parade,” Nkata said. “Been a while since he’s seen the bloke who bought a van off him, but I ’xpect having the man in front of him might do to jog his memory a bit.”

Robson turned to his solicitor then. He said, “They can’t…Can they do this? I’ve cooperated. I’ve told them everything.”

“So you say, Dr. Robson,” Barbara put in. “But we’ve found liars and killers’re cut from similar cloth, so don’t mind us for not taking your word as gospel.”

“You’ve got to listen to me,” Robson protested. “The one boy, yes. But it was an accident. I didn’t intend it to happen. The others, though…I am not a murderer. You’re looking for someone…Read the profile. Read the profile. I am not the person you’re looking for. I know you’re under pressure to bring this case to a close, and now that the superintendent’s wife has been assaulted—”

“The superintendent’s wife is dead,” Nkata reminded him. “You forget that for some reason?”

“You’re not suggesting…” He turned to Amy Stranne. “Get me away from them,” he said. “I won’t speak to them further. They’re trying to make me something I’m not.”

“That’s what they all say, Dr. Robson,” Barbara told him. “In a pinch, blokes like you always whistle the exact same tune.”

TWO MEMBERS of the board of trustees came to see her, which told Ulrike that trouble was not just brewing, it was steaming in the carafe. The president of the board, dressed to the nines with everything but the requisite gold chain to illustrate his authority, had the board secretary in tow. Patrick Bensley was doing the talking, while his cohort tried to look like someone more substantial than an entrepreneur’s socialite wife, her recent face-lift on tight display.

It didn’t take long for Ulrike to understand that Neil Greenham had made good on the threats he’d uttered the last time they’d spoken. She’d reached that conclusion when Jack Veness told her that Mr. Bensley and Mrs. Richie were unexpectedly in reception, asking for a word with the Colossus director. What took her longer was sorting out exactly which one of the threats Neil had acted upon. Was she to be taken to task for her affair with Griffin Strong or for something else?

She’d seen Griff only briefly in the past few days. He’d kept himself busy with his new group of assessment kids and when he wasn’t involved with them, he was out of the way and busily engaged in outreach work, silk-screening work, or the sort of social work he’d been asked to do a thousand times since signing on at Colossus. He’d always been too busy to see to that latter aspect of his job before now. It was astounding how tragedies managed to illustrate for people exactly how much time they’d in fact had for preventing tragedies in the first place. In Griff’s case, it was taking the time to connect with his assessment clients and their families outside the regular Colossus hours. He was good about that now, or so he claimed. Truth was, he could have been bonking Emma the Brick Lane Bengali hostess every time he was gone from Colossus, for all Ulrike knew. Or cared, for that matter. She had larger concerns now. And wasn’t that an additionally intriguing twist in life? A man one would have sacrificed nearly everything for turned out to have the value of a dust mote when one’s head finally cleared.

But the clearing had come at too great a cost. And it turned out that was why Mr. Bensley and Mrs. Richie had come to call. Which visit in and of itself wouldn’t have been so bad had she not already been visited that day by the police.

This time it was Belgravia, not New Scotland Yard. They turned up in the form of an unfriendly detective inspector called Jansen with a constable in attendance, who remained nameless and wordless throughout the interview. Jansen had produced a photograph for Ulrike to inspect.

In the picture, which was grainy but not impossible to make out, two individuals were caught in the act of apparently jogging down a narrow street. The identical houses along it—all of them only two and three floors tall—suggested the action had occurred in a mews. The subjects of the photo were in an affluent part of town, as well: There was no rubbish or litter visible, no graffiti, no dead plants in decrepit window boxes.

Ulrike reckoned she was meant to say whether she recognised the individuals who were rushing by the CCTV camera that had produced their photo. So she studied them.

The taller of the two—and he seemed to be male—had sussed out the presence of the camera and wisely averted his face. He wore a hat pulled low over his head. He had his jacket collar turned up, wore gloves, and was otherwise dressed completely in black. He might as well have been a shadow.

The smaller one had not had the same foresight. His image, while not crisp, was still clear enough for Ulrike to be able to say with certainty—and no small measure of relief—that she didn’t know him. There was nothing about him that was recognisable to her, and she knew she would have been able to name him had they been acquainted because he had masses of unforgettably crinkly hair and enormous splotches—like monstrous, unrestrained freckles—on his face. He looked to be round thirteen years old, perhaps younger. And he was a mixed-race boy, she decided. White, black, and something in between.

She handed the picture back to Jansen. “I don’t know him,” she said. “The boy. Either one of them, although I can’t say for sure because of how the taller one is hidden. He saw the CCTV camera, I expect. Where was it?”

“There were three,” Jansen told her. “Two on a house, one across the street from it. This is from one of the cameras on the house.”

“Why’re you looking…?”

“A woman was gunned down on her doorstep. It may be down to these two.”

That was all he told her, but Ulrike made the leap. She’d seen the newspapers. The wife of the Scotland Yard superintendent, who’d come to Colossus to speak to Ulrike about the deaths of Kimmo Thorne and Jared Salvatore, had been shot on her doorstep in Belgravia. The hue and cry over this had been deafening, broadsheets and tabloids especially. The crime had been inconceivable to the inhabitants of that part of town, and they’d been making their feelings known in every venue they could find.

“He isn’t one of ours, this boy,” Ulrike replied to DI Jansen. “I’ve never seen him before.”

“Are you sure about the other?”

He had to be joking, Ulrike thought. No one would be able to recognise the taller man. If it even was a man. Still, she took another look at the picture. “I am sorry,” she said. “There’s just no way—”

“We’d like to show this round the place, if you don’t mind,” Jansen told her.

Ulrike didn’t like what this implied—that she was somehow out of the loop at Colossus—but she had no choice. Before the officers left to flash the photo round, she asked them about the superintendent’s wife. How was she?

Jansen shook his head. “Bad,” he said.

“I’m sorry. Will you—” She nodded at the photo. “Do you expect to catch him?”

Jansen looked down at it, a slim slip of paper in his large chafed hands. “The kid? That’ll be no problem,” he replied. “This is in the Evening Standard’s latest right now. It’ll make the front of every paper tomorrow morning and it’ll be on the news tonight and again tomorrow. We’ll get him, and I expect it’ll happen soon. And when we get him, he’ll talk and then we’ll have the other. Absolutely no bloody doubt about it.”

“I’m…That’s good,” she said. “Poor woman.”

And she did mean that. No one—no matter how rich, how privileged, how titled, how fortunate, or how anything else—deserved to be gunned down in the street. But even as she told herself this and assured herself that the milk of human kindness and compassion had not utterly drained out of her when it came to the upper class of this rigid society in which she lived, Ulrike still felt relieved that Colossus could not be attached to this new crime.

Only now, here were Mr. Bensley and Mrs. Richie and they were sitting with her in her office—another chair having been procured from the reception area—intent upon talking about the one subject she had done everything in her power to keep from them.

Bensley was the one to introduce it. He said, “Tell us about the dead boys, Ulrike.”

She could hardly act the innocent with a “What boys would this be?” sort of reply. There was nothing for it but to tell them that five boys from Colossus had been murdered from September onward, their bodies left in various parts of London.

“Why weren’t we informed?” Bensley asked. “Why did this information have to come to us from someone else?”

“From Neil, you mean.” Ulrike could not keep herself from saying it. She was caught between the desire to let them know she was perfectly aware of her Judas’s identity and the equal need to defend herself. She went on with, “I didn’t know myself till after Kimmo Thorne was murdered. He was the fourth victim. The police came round then.”

“But otherwise…?” Bensley did one of those tie-adjustment moves, of the kind meant to illustrate an incredulity that might otherwise strangle him. Mrs. Richie accompanied this with a click of her teeth. “How is it you didn’t know the other boys were dead?”

“Or even missing,” Mrs. Richie added.

“We’re not organised to keep attendance tabs on the clients,” Ulrike told them, as if they hadn’t had this explained to them a thousand times or more. “Once a boy or girl gets beyond the assessment course, they’re free to come and go as they like. They can participate in what we have to offer or they can drop out. We want them to stay because they want to be here. Only those who’re here as a probationary measure are monitored.” And even then, Colossus didn’t tattle on the kids straightaway. There was a certain amount of leeway given even to them, once they had completed the assessment course.

“That,” Bensley said, “is what we expected you to say.”

Or were told to expect, Ulrike thought. Neil had done his best: She’ll make excuses, but the fact remains: the director of Colossus damn well ought to know what’s going on with the kids Colossus is meant to be helping, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, how much work are we talking about: to look in on the courses and ask the instructors who’s there and who’s fallen by the wayside? And wouldn’t it be wise for the director of Colossus to place a phone call and try to locate a child who’s dropped out of a programme designed—and funded, let’s not forget that—to prevent him from dropping out in the first place? Oh, he’d done his very best, had Neil. Ulrike had to give him high marks for that.