With No One As Witness (89 page)

The van was waiting for the arrival of SOCO. The environs of the ice-rink carpark were waiting for full daylight. That left his house in Granville Square. Nkata suggested they check it out. Barb was reluctant “to leave the bloody sod,” but she agreed to do so. They met DI Stewart on the way out. He already had his clipboard in hand, and the parting in his razor-cut hair might have been put there with a straight edge. There were still comb marks in it as well.

He nodded at them both. He directed his comments to Barb. “Well done, Havers. Doubtless you’ll be reinstated now. Back to rank. For what it’s worth, I approve. How is he?”

Nkata knew the DI wasn’t referring to Kilfoyle. Barb answered the question. “In casualty. For now. I expect they’ll release him in a few hours. I phoned his mum. She’ll fetch him. Or his sister will. They’re both here in London.”

“And otherwise?”

Barb shook her head. “He’s not saying much.”

Stewart nodded and looked bleakly at the police building. Barb’s face altered and Nkata could see she was thinking she could almost like the bloke for the instant in which he’d actually evidenced a modicum of compassion. “Poor bloody sod,” Stewart murmured. And then to them in his usual tone, “Carry on. Have something to eat. I’ll see you later.”

A meal was not of interest to them. They made their way instead to Granville Square. By the time they got there, it had come to life. A crime-scene van parked out front hailed SOCO’s presence within, and curious neighbours gathered on the pavement. Nkata flashed his ID at the constable at the front door, explained why Barb didn’t have hers, and got them both inside.

Within, more of the pieces of the killer’s personality became revealed. In the basement, a neat stack of newspapers and tabloids displayed stories that chronicled Kilfoyle’s exploits, and an A to Z sitting on a nearby table x-marked-the-spots he’d carefully selected to deposit bodies. Upstairs, the kitchen contained a wide variety of knives—all being tagged and bagged by SOCO—while over the chairs in the sitting room lay the same sort of tatting-edged mats that had been used to fashion a flimsy and respectful codpiece for Kimmo Thorne. Everywhere, tidiness reigned. The place was, in fact, a testament to tidiness. Only in one room were there signs—other than with the newspapers and the A to Z—that an extremely unsteady mind was at work: In a bedroom upstairs, a dated wedding picture had been defaced, with the shaggy-haired groom disemboweled by means of pen and ink and the same mark upon his forehead as had been made as the signature of the letter Kilfoyle had sent to New Scotland Yard. In the wardrobe as well, a disturbed hand had slit every male garment down its centre.

“Didn’t care for Dad much by the looks of things, did he?” Barb remarked.

A voice spoke from the doorway. “Thought you two might want to see this before we cart it off.” One of the white-suited forensic-team members stood there, an urn in his hands. It was a funeral urn by the look and the size of it, suitable for containing human ashes.

“What’ve you got?” Nkata asked.

“His souvenirs, I’ll wager.” He carried the urn to the chest of drawers on which the wedding picture stood. He tipped off its top. They looked inside.

Human dust formed the majority of the contents, along with several ash-covered lumps. Barb was the one who twigged what they were.

“The navels,” she said. “Whose ashes d’you expect those are? Dad’s?”

“Could be the Queen Mum’s for all I care,” Nkata remarked. “We got the bastard.”

The families could be given the news now. There would be no satisfactory justice for them; there never was. But there would be a conclusion.

Nkata drove Barb back to St. Thomas’ Hospital to arrange for her car to be towed away and put into running order again. There, they parted, and when they did, neither of them looked at the hospital itself.

Nkata headed towards New Scotland Yard. It was nine in the morning by then, and traffic was slow. He was negotiating Parliament Square when his mobile rang. He reckoned it was Barb, all attempts at coping with her car a failure. But a glance told him the number was not one he knew, so he said, “Nkata,” and nothing else.

“You arrested him, then. It was on the news this morning. Radio One.” A woman’s voice spoke, familiar, but not one he’d heard on the phone before.

“Who’s this?”

“I’m glad it’s over. And I know you meant good towards him. Towards us. I know that, Winston.”

Winston. “Yas?” he said.

“I knew it before but I d’in’t want to look at what that meant, unnerstan? I still don’t. Want to look at it, I mean.”

He considered this, considered the fact she’d phoned at all. “C’n you give it a glance, you think?”

She was silent.

“A glance’s not much, innit. Just a flick when you move the eyes. Tha’s all. Not looking at nothin, really, Yas. Just sneaking a look. Tha’s it. Tha’s all.”

“I don’t know,” was what she finally said.

Which was better than things had been before. “When you do know, you ring me, then,” he told her. “Waitin’s not a trouble to me.”

LYNLEY RECKONED that one of the reasons they forced him to stay in Casualty was their worry that he would do something to Kilfoyle if they released him. And the truth was that he would have done something, although not what they obviously thought he would do. Instead, he would merely have asked a question of the man: Why? And perhaps that question would have led to others: Why Helen and not me? And why in the way he had done it, with a boy in his company? What sort of statement did that make? Power? Indifference? Sadism? Pleasure? To destroy as many lives as possible in as many ways as possible in one swift blow because he knew the end was coming? Was that why? He’d be famous now, infamous, notorious, with all the attendant bells and whistles. He’d be up there with the best of the best, those names like Hindley that would forever light the firmament of iniquity. Avid followers of crime would flock to his trial and writers would document him in their books and he would thus never fade from public memory like an ordinary man or, for that matter, like an innocent woman and her unborn child, both dead now and soon to become yesterday’s news.

Obviously, those in power had believed that Lynley would spring to the attack if he came face-to-face with the monster again. But springing to the attack suggested a life force within, driving one forward. That was gone from him now.

They said they would release him to a relative and, since they had his clothing tucked away somewhere, he was forced to wait until a member of his family arrived. They had no doubt suggested in their phone call to Eaton Terrace that that person take as long as possible in making the trip to the hospital, so it was midmorning when his mother came to fetch him. She had Peter with her. A taxi, she said, was just outside.

“What’s happened?” She looked older to him than she had days earlier. He understood from this that the experience in living chaos, which they all were enduring, was taking a toll on her as well. He hadn’t thought of that before. He wondered what it meant that he thought of it now.

Beyond their mother, Lynley’s brother stood, lanky and ill at ease, as always. They’d been close once, but that was years in the past, with cocaine and alcohol and fraternal abandonment leering like spectres in the space between them. Too much disease ran through his family, Lynley thought, part of it of the body, the rest of it of the mind.

Peter said, “You all right, Tommy?,” and Lynley saw his brother’s hand reach out, then drop uselessly to his side. “They wouldn’t tell us on the phone…just to fetch you, they said. We thought…They said you’d come from near the river. But up here…What river? What were you—”

His brother was afraid, Lynley thought. Another possible loss in his life and Peter did not know how he’d cope with that if he had no crutch to lean upon: up the nose, in a vein, out of the bottle, whatever. Peter didn’t want that, but it was always out there, beckoning to him.

Lynley said, “I’m all right, Peter. I didn’t try anything. I won’t try anything,” although he knew that latter statement was neither a promise nor a lie.

Peter chewed on the inside of his lip, a habit from his childhood. He gave a nervous nod.

Lynley explained what had happened in two simple sentences: He’d had an encounter with the killer. Barbara Havers had taken care of matters.

“Remarkable woman,” Lady Asherton said.

“She is,” Lynley replied.

He discovered that Ulrike Ellis had been released to the police several hours earlier to make her statement. She was shaken, he learned, but otherwise unharmed. Kilfoyle had done nothing save stun her, gag her, and restrain her. That was bad enough but so far from what it could have been that it was ludicrous to suggest she would not recover.

In the taxi, he sank into a corner, his mother next to him and his brother perched on the jump seat opposite. He said to Peter, “Tell him Scotland Yard,” and his mother protested with, “You’re to come straight home.”

He shook his head. “Tell him,” and nodded towards the driver.

Peter leaned to the opening in the shield between driver and passengers. He said, “Victoria Street. New Scotland Yard. And after that, Eaton Terrace.”

The driver swerved into the street with the flow of traffic and headed in the direction of Westminster.

“We should have stayed with you, at the hospital,” Lady Asherton murmured.

“No,” Lynley said. “You did what I asked.” He looked out of the window. “I’ll want to bury them at Howenstow. I think that’s what she would have wanted. We never discussed it. There was no need. But I’d like—”

He felt his mother’s hand take his. “Of course,” she said.

“I don’t know when yet. I didn’t think to ask when they’d release the…her body. There are all sorts of details…”

“We’ll handle things, Tommy,” his brother said. “All of them. Let us.”

Lynley looked at him. Peter was leaning forward, closer to him than he’d been in ages. Slowly he nodded his agreement. “Some of them, then,” he said. “Thank you.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence. When the taxi made the turn from Victoria Street into Broadway, Lady Asherton spoke again. She said, “Will you let one of us come in with you, Tommy?”

“There’s no need,” he told her. “I’ll be all right, Mum.”

He waited till they drove off before he entered. Then he went inside, not to Victoria Block but to Tower Block. He made his way to Hillier’s office.

Judi MacIntosh looked up from her work. Like his mother, she seemed to be able to read him, and it appeared that what she read was accurate, for he had not come for a confrontation. She said, “Superintendent, I…All of us here…I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” She held her hands at her throat, as if beseeching him to relieve her of saying anything more.

He said, “Thank you,” and he wondered how many more times he would have to thank people in the coming months. Indeed, he wondered what he was even thanking them for. His breeding called for this expression of gratitude when he wanted instead to raise his head and shriek into the eternal night that was falling round him. He despised good breeding. But even despising it, he relied upon it again when he said, “Would you tell him I’m here? I’d like a word. It won’t take long.”

She nodded. Rather than phone into Hillier’s office, however, she went through the door. She closed it softly behind her. A minute passed. Another. They were probably phoning someone to come up. Nkata again. Perhaps John Stewart. Someone capable of restraining him. Someone to escort him from the premises.

Judi MacIntosh returned. “Do go in,” she said.

Hillier wasn’t in his usual position, behind the desk. He wasn’t standing at one of the windows. Instead, he’d come across the carpet to meet Lynley halfway. He said quietly, “Thomas, you must go home and get some rest. You can’t continue—”

“I know.” Lynley couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept. He’d been running on anxiety and adrenaline for so long he no longer remembered what it felt like to be doing otherwise. He removed his warrant card and every other vestige of police identification that he had upon him. He extended them to the assistant commissioner.

Hillier looked at them but did not take them. “I won’t accept this,” he said. “You’ve not been thinking straight. You’re not thinking straight now. I can’t allow you to make a decision like this—”

“Believe me, sir,” Lynley cut in, “I’ve made far more difficult decisions.” He passed Hillier then and went to his desk. He lay his identification upon it.

“Thomas,” Hillier said, “don’t do this. Take some time off. Take compassionate leave. With everything that’s happened, you can’t be in a position to decide your future or anyone else’s.”

Lynley felt the hollowness of a laugh rising in him. He could decide. He had decided.

He wanted to say that he didn’t know any longer how to be, let alone who to be. He wanted to explain he was good for no one and nothing now and he did not know if things would ever be any different. Instead what he said was, “For my part of what went between us, sir, I am most deeply regretful.”

“Thomas…” The tone of Hillier’s voice—was it pained? It actually sounded so—stopped him at the door. He turned. Hillier said, “Where will you go?”

“To Cornwall,” he said. “I’m taking them home.”

Hillier nodded then. He said something more as Lynley opened the door. He couldn’t have been certain what the words were, but later he would think they’d been “Go with God.”

Outside, in the anteroom, Barbara Havers was waiting. She looked done in, and it came to Lynley that at this point she’d been working more than twenty-four hours straight. She said, “Sir…”

“I’m fine, Barbara. You needn’t have come up.”

“I’m to take you somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Just…They’re suggesting I drive you home. I’ve a car on loan, so you won’t have to cram yourself into my heap.”

“That’s fine, then,” Lynley said. “Let’s go.”

He felt her hand on his elbow, guiding him from the office to the lift. She spoke to him as they went along, and he gathered from her words that there was evidence aplenty to link Kilfoyle to the deaths of the Colossus boys.