CHAPTER SEVEN

WHEN SHE GOT BACK TO CHALK FARM AT THE END OF the day, Barbara Havers was feeling almost jaunty. Not only had the interview with Charlie Burov-aka Blinker-seemed like a moment of actual progress, but being out of the incident room and engaged in the human end of the investigation in Lynley’s company made her feel as though regaining her rank was not a pipe dream after all. She was, in fact, blithely humming “It’s So Easy” when she hiked homeward from the spot she’d found to park the Mini. Even when rain began to fall and was driven into her face by the wind, she was not bothered. She merely stepped up her pace-and the tempo of her tune-and hurried towards Eton Villas.

She glanced quickly at the ground-floor flat when she went up the drive. Lights were on inside Azhar’s digs, and through the French windows she could see Hadiyyah sitting at a table with her head bent over an open notebook.

Homework, Barbara thought. Hadiyyah was a dutiful pupil. She stood for a moment and watched the little girl. As she did so, Azhar came into the room and walked by the table. Hadiyyah looked up and followed him longingly with her gaze. He didn’t acknowledge her, and she didn’t speak, merely ducking her head again to her work.

Barbara felt a sharp twinge at the sight of this, struck by an unexpected anger whose source she didn’t want to examine. She went along the path to her bungalow. Inside, she flipped on the lights, tossed her shoulder bag on the table, and dug out a tin of All Day Breakfast, which she dumped unceremoniously into a pan. She popped bread into the toaster and from the fridge took a Stella Artois, making a mental note to cut back on the drinking since this was yet another night when she was not supposed to be imbibing at all. But she felt like celebrating the interview with Blinker.

As her meal was doing what it could to prepare itself without her participation, she went as usual for the television remote, which again as usual she couldn’t find. She was searching for it when she noticed that her answer machine was blinking. She punched it to play as she continued her search.

Hadiyyah’s voice came to her, tense and low, sounding as if she was trying to keep someone else from hearing her. “I got gated, Barbara,” she said. “This’s the first chance I had to ring you ’cause I’m not meant even to use the phone. Dad said I’m gated ‘till further notice’ an’ I don’t think it’s fair at all.”

“Damn,” Barbara muttered, studying the grey box from which her little friend’s voice came.

“Dad said it’s owing to my arguing with him. I di’n’t really want to give back the Buddy Holly CD, see. Then when he said I had to, I said could I just leave it for you with a note. And he said no, I had to do it in person. And I said I di’n’t think that was fair. And he said I was to do what he told me and since I ‘clearly di’n’t want to do it’ he’d make sure it was done properly, which’s why he came with me. And then I said he was mean, mean, mean and I hated him. And he…” A silence as if she were listening to something nearby. She hurried on. “I’m not meant to argue with him ever is what he said and he gated me. So I can’t use the phone and I can’t watch telly and I can’t do anything but go to school and come home and it’s not fair.” She began to cry. “Gotta go. ’Bye,” she managed to say with a hiccup. Then the message was over.

Barbara sighed. She had not expected this of Taymullah Azhar. He had broken rules himself: leaving an arranged marriage and two small children to take up with an English girl with whom he’d fallen in love. He’d been ousted from his family as a result, forever a pariah to his own kin. Of all the people on earth, he was the last person she would have anticipated being so inflexible and unforgiving.

She was going to have to have a talk with him. Punishments, she thought, should match their crimes. But she knew she would have to come up with an approach that didn’t seem like actually talking to him, by which of course she really meant giving him a piece of her mind. No, she was going to have to dress it in the guise of a natural part of a conversation, which meant she was going to have to develop a subject of conversation that would allow the topics of Hadiyyah, lying, being gated, and unreasonable parents to arise naturally. At the moment, though, the very thought of all that verbal manoeuvring made Barbara’s head feel like a balloon too full of air. She made a mental note to seek out a reasonable excuse to talk to Azhar, and she uncapped her Stella Artois.

There was a good chance, she thought, that she would need to consume two bottles of lager tonight.


FU MADE THE necessary preparations. These did not take long because He had laid the groundwork well. Once the chosen boy had proved himself worthy, He had watched him until He knew all his routines and movements. So when the time was right, He was able to make a quick choice of the environs in which He would finally act. He chose the gym.

He felt confident. He’d found a place where He’d been able to park without difficulty each time he’d been in the vicinity. It was in a street where on one side a stained brick wall formed the boundary of a school-yard and on the other a cricket ground lay in darkness. The street wasn’t particularly close to the gym, but Fu didn’t expect that to present much trouble because, more important than anything else, the place He parked was on the route the boy would have to take to get to his home.

When he emerged from the gym, Fu was waiting although He made it seem as though their meeting were a coincidence.

“Hey,” Fu said, all pleased surprise. “Is that…What’re you doing here?”

The boy was three steps ahead of Him, shoulders hunched, as they always were, head hanging down. When he turned, Fu waited for recognition to dawn. It did quickly enough to satisfy.

The boy looked left and right, but it didn’t seem so much because he wanted to escape what was coming, as to see if anyone else was there to witness the circumstance of such a person being in such a place where that person patently didn’t belong. But there was no one nearby, for the gym’s entrance was on the side of the building, not the front on the main route more used by pedestrians.

The boy jerked his head in that age-old male adolescent form of hello. His short dreadlocks bounced round his dark face. “Hey. What’re you doing round here?”

Fu offered the excuse He’d planned. “Trying to make peace with my dad and getting nowhere, as usual.” It meant nothing at all in the general scheme of life, but Fu knew it would mean everything to the boy. It told a tale of brotherhood in twelve brief words, obvious enough to be understood by a thirteen-year-old, subtle enough to suggest that a bond of the unspoken might actually exist between them. “Heading back to the banger. What about you? D’you live round here?”

“Up past the station. Finchley Road and Frognal.”

“I’m parked in that direction. I’ll give you a lift if you like.”

He moved along, keeping His pace somewhere between a stroll and a brisk, wintertime walk. Like a regular mate, He lit a cigarette, offered one to the boy, and confided that He’d parked a bit of a distance from where He’d met His dad because He’d known He’d want to clear His head afterwards with a walk. “Never works out with the two of us talking,” Fu said. “Mum says she only wants us to relate to each other but I keep telling her you can’t relate to a bloke who walked out before you were born.” He felt the boy’s eyes on Him, but they suggested interest and not suspicion.

“I met my dad once. Works on German cars over in North Kensington, he does. I went to see him.”

“Waste of time?”

“Bloody waste.” The boy kicked a squashed Fanta can that lay in their path.

“Loser?”

“Bugger.”

“Wanker?”

“Yeah. No one else’ll prob’ly touch it.”

Fu gave a bark of laughter. “Motor’s just over that way,” He said. “Come on.” He crossed over the road, careful not to watch to see if the boy was following. He took His keys from His pocket and jangled them in His hand, the better to telegraph the nearness of the van should his companion begin to feel uneasy. He said, “Heard you’ve been doing well, by the way.”

The boy shrugged. Fu could tell he was pleased by the compliment, though.

“What’re you on to now?”

“Doing a design.”

“What sort?”

There was no reply. Fu glanced the boy’s way, thinking He might have pushed too far, invading what was delicate territory for some reason. And the boy did look embarrassed and reluctant to speak, but when he finally replied, Fu understood his hesitation: the discomfiture of a teenager afraid of being labelled uncool. He said, “For a church thing meets in a shop down Finchley Road.”

“That sounds good.” But it didn’t, really. The idea of the boy’s being attached to a church group gave Fu pause because the disenfranchised were what He wanted. A moment later, however, the boy clarified the level-or lack thereof-of both his virtue and his connection with others. “Rev Savidge’s got me in care at his house.”

“The…vicar is it?…of the church group?”

“Him and his wife. Oni. She’s from Ghana.”

“From Ghana? Recently?”

The boy shrugged. It seemed a habit with him. “Don’ know. It’s where his own people’re from. Rev Savidge’s people. It’s where they came from before they got sent to Jamaica on a slave ship. Oni, she’s called. Rev Savidge’s wife. Oni.”

Ah. The second and third time he’d said her name. Here, then, was a real something to be mined, several nuggets at once. Fu said, “Oni. That’s a brilliant name.”

“Yeah. She’s a star.”

“Like to live with them, then? Reverend Savidge and Oni?”

The shoulders again, that casual lift of them that hid what the boy no doubt was feeling, not to mention what he was wanting. “All right,” he said. “Better than with my mum anyway.” And before Fu could press, asking the boy questions that would reveal his mum’s imprisonment, thereby allowing Fu to forge yet another false bond with him, the boy said, “So where’s your car, then?” in a restless manner, which could be interpreted as a very bad sign.

Thankfully, though, they were nearly upon it, parked in the shadows of an enormous plane tree. “Right there,” Fu said, and He gave a look round to make sure the street was as deserted as it had been on His every recce of the site. It was. Perfect. He tossed his cigarette into the street, and when the boy had done the same, He unlocked the passenger door. “Hop in,” He said. “You hungry? I’ve some takeaway in that bag on the floor.”

Roast beef, although it should have been lamb. Lamb would have been richer with appropriate associations.

Fu shut the door when the boy was inside and going for the bag of food as required of him. He tucked right in. Happily, he didn’t notice that his door had no interior handle and that his seat belt had been removed. Fu joined him, heaving Himself into the driver’s seat and thrusting the ignition key into its home. He started the van, but He did not put it into gear, nor did He release its hand brake. He said to the boy, “Grab us something to drink, okay? I’ve a cooler back there. Behind my seat. I could do with a lager. There’s Cokes if you want one. Or have a beer yourself if you’d rather.”

“Cheers.” The boy twisted in his seat. He peered into the back where, because the van was carefully panelled and thoroughly insulated, it was conveniently dark as the devil’s bum. He said, “Behind where?” as required of him.

Fu said, “Hang on. I’ve got a torch here somewhere,” and He made much of searching round His seat till He put His hands on the torch in its special hidden spot. He said, “Got it. Have some light, then,” and He flicked it on.

Focused on the cooler and the promise of beer within it, the boy didn’t notice the rest of the van’s interior: the body board firmly in its brackets, the wrist and ankle restraints curled to either side on the floor, the stove from the vehicle’s former days, the roll of tape, the washing line, and the knife. Especially that. The boy saw none of this because like the others who’d preceded him, he was just a male adolescent with the male adolescent’s appetites for the illicit and in this moment the illicit was represented by beer. In another moment, an earlier moment, the illicit had been represented by crime. It was that for which he now stood doomed to punishment.

Turned in his seat and bending to the back of the van, the boy reached towards the cooler. This exposed his torso. It was a movement designed to aid what followed.

Fu turned the torch and pressed it into the boy. Two hundred thousand volts scrambled his nervous system.

The rest was easy.


LYNLEY WAS STANDING at the work top in the kitchen, downing a cup of the strongest coffee he’d been able to manage at half past four in the morning, when his wife joined him. In the doorway, Helen blinked against the overhead lights as she tied the belt of her dressing gown round her. She looked extremely weary.

“Bad night?” he asked her and added with a smile, “All that worry over christening clothes?”

“Stop,” she grumbled. “I dreamed our Jasper Felix was doing backflips in my stomach.”

She came to him and slipped her arms round his waist, yawning as she rested her head against his shoulder. “What are you doing dressed at this hour? The Press Bureau haven’t taken to offering predawn press briefings, have they? You know what I mean: See how diligently we work at the Met; we’re up before the sun on the scent of malefactors.”

“Hillier would ask for that if he thought of it,” Lynley replied. “Wait another week. It’ll occur to him.”

“Misbehaving, is he?”

“Just being Hillier. He’s parading Winston in front of the press like Rod Hull. Except poor Emu doesn’t get to speak.”

Helen looked up at him. “You’re angry about this, aren’t you? It’s not like you not to be philosophical. Is this about Barbara? Winston’s getting the promotion instead of her?”

“That was rotten of Hillier, but I should have seen it coming,” Lynley said. “He’d love to get rid of her.”

“Still?”

“Always. I’ve never known quite how to protect her, Helen. Even doing the superintendent bit temporarily, I feel at a loss. I haven’t a quarter of Webberly’s skill at this sort of thing.”

She released herself from his embrace and went to the cupboard where she took out a mug, which she filled with skimmed milk and put into the microwave to heat. She said, “Malcolm Webberly has the advantage of being Sir David’s brother-in-law, darling. That would have counted for something when they knocked heads on an issue, wouldn’t it?”

Lynley grumbled, neither agreement nor dissent. He watched his wife take her warmed milk from the microwave and stir a spoonful of Horlicks into it. He finished off his coffee and was rinsing out the cup when the front doorbell buzzed.

Helen turned from the work top, saying, “Who on earth…?” as she looked towards the wall clock.

“That’ll be Havers.”

“You are going to work, then? Really? At this hour?”

“Going to Bermondsey.” He left the kitchen and she followed, Horlicks in hand. “The market.”

Tell me it’s not to shop,” she said. “Bargains are bargains, and you know I’d never turn away from one myself, but surely one ought to draw the line at bargains reached before the sun comes up.”

Lynley chuckled. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us? The odd piece of priceless porcelain for twenty-five pounds? The Peter Paul Rubens hidden beneath two centuries of grime, with nineteenth-century household cats painted over it by a six-year-old?” He crossed the marble tiles of the entrance and opened the door to find Barbara Havers leaning against the iron railing, a knitted cap pulled low on her brow and a donkey jacket wrapped round her stubby body.

Havers said to Helen, “If you’re seeing him off at this hour, the honeymoon has definitely gone on too long.”

“My restless dreams are seeing him off,” Helen said. “That and general anxiety over the future, according to my husband.”

“Haven’t decided on the christening clobber yet?”

Helen looked at Lynley. “Did you actually tell her, Tommy?”

“Was it confidential?”

“No. Just inane. The situation, that is, not your telling it.” And then to Barbara, “We may have a small fire in the nursery. It will, unfortunately, burn both sets of clothes beyond use and recognition. What do you think?”

“Sounds just the ticket to me,” Havers said. “Why go for family compromise when you can have arson?”

“Our very thought.”

“Better and better,” Lynley said. He put his arm round his wife’s shoulders and kissed the side of her head. “Lock up behind me,” he instructed her. “And go back to bed.”

Helen spoke to her small bump. “Do not haunt my dreams again, young man. Mind your mummy.” And then to Lynley and Barbara, “And you mind how you go,” before she shut the door behind them.

Lynley waited to hear the bolts shoot into place. Next to him, Barbara Havers was lighting a cigarette. He eyed her with disapproval, saying, “At half past four in the morning? Even in my worst days, Havers, I couldn’t have managed that.”

“Are you aware there’s nothing more sanctimonious than a reformed smoker, sir?”

“I don’t believe it,” he replied, leading them down the street in the direction of the mews, where his car was garaged. “There must be something else.”

“Nothing,” she said. “There’ve been studies done on it. Even your basic Mary Magdalenes living now as nuns don’t rate a sausage compared to your former weed fiends.”

“It must be our concern for the health of our fellows.”

“More like your desire to inflict your misery on everyone else. Give it up, sir. I know you want to rip this out of my hand and smoke it to the nub. How long have you gone without at this point?”

“So long I can’t even remember, actually.”

“Oh, bloody right,” she said to the sky.

They set off in the blessing of early morning London: There was virtually no other vehicle on the streets. Because of this, they zipped through Sloane Square with all traffic lights in their favour, and in less than five minutes they saw the lights of Chelsea Bridge and the tall brick smokestacks of Battersea Power Station rising into the charcoal sky across the Thames.

Lynley chose a route along the embankment that kept them on the wrong side of the river as long as possible, where he was more familiar with the turf. Here too there were very few vehicles, just the odd cab heading into the centre of town for the day’s work and the occasional lorry getting a head start on deliveries. Thus they wended their way to the massive grey fortress that was the Tower of London before crossing over, and from there it was no difficult feat to find Bermondsey Market, not overly far along Tower Bridge Road.

Using the illumination of tall streetlamps, as well as torches, fairy lights strung round the occasional stall, and other localised lights of dubious origin and weak wattage, vendors were in the final stages of setting up for business. Their day would begin shortly-for the market opened at five in the morning and was a thing of memory by two in the afternoon-so they were intent upon the assembly of the poles and tables that defined their stalls. Around them in the darkness waited boxes of countless treasures, which were stacked on carts that had been wheeled into position from vans and cars along the nearby streets.

Already, there were people waiting to be the first to browse through everything from hairbrushes to high-button shoes. No one officially held them back, but it was clear from watching the vendors at work that customers would not be welcome until the goods were fully displayed beneath the predawn sky.

As in most London markets, the vendors occupied the same general area every time Bermondsey was open for business. So Lynley and Havers began at the north end and worked their way south, asking for someone who could talk to them about Kimmo Thorne. The fact that they were police did not garner them the quick cooperation they had hoped for under circumstances that involved the death of one of the vendors’ own. But this they knew was likely due to Bermondsey’s reputation for being a clearing ground for stolen property, a place where the trade part of “in the trade” frequently meant breaking and entering.

They’d spent more than an hour quizzing vendors when a seller of ersatz Victorian dressing-table sets (“This’s guaranteed one hunderd p’rcent the genuine article, sir and madam”) recognised Kimmo’s name, and after declaring both the name and the person in possession of it, “an odd l’tle sod, you ask me,” he directed Lynley and Havers to an elderly couple at a silver stall. “You talk to the Grabinskis over there,” he said, using his chin to indicate the direction. “They’ll be able to tell you what’s what with Kimmo. Dead sorry about wha’ happened to the l’tle sod. Read about it in the News of the World.”

So, evidently, had the Grabinskis, who turned out to be a couple whose only son had died years in the past but at something near the same age as Kimmo Thorne. They’d quite taken to the boy, they explained, not so much because he reminded them physically of their dear Mike but because he had something of Mike’s enterprising nature. This quality the Grabinskis both admired in Kimmo and deeply missed in their departed son, so when Kimmo had turned up on occasion with the odd something or other or a bagful of somethings he wanted to sell, they shared their stall with him and he gave them a portion of his profit.

Not that they’d ever asked him for it, Mrs. Grabinski said hastily. Her name was Elaine and she wore sage green Wellingtons with red wool kneesocks gaily turned over their tops. She was polishing an impressive epergne, and the moment Lynley had said Kimmo Thorne’s name, she’d said, “Kimmo? Who’s come to ask about Kimmo, then? ’Bout time, innit,” and she made herself available to help them. As did her husband, who was hanging a display of silver teapots on strings that dangled from one of the horizontal poles of the stall.

The boy had come to them first, hoping they would buy from him, Mr. Grabinksi-“Call me Ray”-informed them. But he asked a price they weren’t willing to pay, and when no one else in the market was willing to pay it either, Kimmo had returned to them with another offer: to sell from the stall himself and to give them a portion of the takings.

They’d liked the boy-“He was that cheeky,” Elaine confided-so they gave him a quarter of one of the tables along the side of the stall, and there he did his business. He sold silver pieces-some plate, some sterling-with a speciality in photo frames.

“We’ve been told he got into some trouble with that,” Lynley said. “Evidently he sold something that shouldn’t have been on sale in the first place.”

“Having been lifted off someone else,” Havers put in.

Oh, they knew nothing about that, both Grabinskis hastened to say. As far as they were concerned, it was someone wanting to get Kimmo in trouble who told that tale to the local rozzers. Doubtless, in fact, it was their chief competitor in the market: one Reginald Lewis, to whom Kimmo had also gone trying to sell his silver before returning to them. Reg Lewis was that jealous of anyone wanting to set up business round early morning Bermondsey, wasn’t he? He’d tried to keep the Grabinskis out twenty-two years back when they first started, he’d done the same to Maurice Fletcher and to Jackie Hoon when they started up.

“So there was no truth to Kimmo’s goods being stolen?” Havers asked, looking up from her notebook. “Because, when you think of it, how else would a kid like Kimmo be coming across valuable pieces of silver for sale?”

They had assumed he was selling off family pieces, Elaine Grabinski said. They did ask him and that’s what he told them: He was helping out his gran by offering the family silver to the public.

To Lynley it looked like a case of the Grabinskis believing what they had wanted to believe because they liked the boy, rather than a case of Kimmo being a sophisticated liar who pulled the wool over the eyes of an elderly couple. They had to have known at some level that he wasn’t the legitimate article, but at that same level, they had to have not cared.

“We told the police we’d speak up for the boy if it came to court,” Ray Grabinski asserted. “But once they carted poor Kimmo off, we didn’t hear ’nother word about him. Till we saw the News of the World, that is.”

“An’ you ask Reg Lewis ’bout that, you lot,” Elaine Grabinski said, returning to the epergne with renewed vigour. She added ominously, “What I wouldn’t put past him fits in a teaspoon,” and her husband said, “Now, pet,” and patted her shoulder.

Reg Lewis turned out to be only slightly less antique than his wares. He wore bright tartan braces beneath his jacket and they held up a pair of ancient plus fours. His spectacles were as thick as the bottom of whisky tumblers. Overlarge hearing aids protruded from his ears. He fit the profile of their serial killer as well as a sheep fit the profile of a genius.

He “weren’t s’prised none” when the cops had come calling for Kimmo, he told them. Something was off with the bugger first time Reg Lewis laid eyes on the creature. Dressed half man, half woman he did, with them tights of his or whatever they were, and those poncey ankle boots and the like. So when the cops showed up with a list of stolen property in their mitts, he-Reg Lewis, mind you-was not gobsmacked that they found what they were looking for in the possession of one Kimmo Thorne. Carted him off then and there, they did, and good riddance it was. Besmirching the reputation of the market, he was, flogging pinched silver. And not any pinched silver, mind you, but pinched silver that he’d been too thick to notice had personal and immediately identifiable engraving upon it.

What happened to Kimmo after that, Reg Lewis didn’t know and didn’t much care. The only good thing the little nancy boy did at the end of the day was not drag the Grabinskis down with him. And weren’t those two blind as bats in the daylight? Anyone with sense would’ve known that boy was up to no good when he first showed his mug in the market. Reg warned the Grabinskis off him, he did, but would they listen to someone with their best interests at heart? Not bloody likely. Yet who turned out to be right at the end of the day, eh? And who never heard a word of you-were-right-Reg-and-we-apologise-for-our-nastiness from anyone, eh?

Reg Lewis had nothing more to add. Kimmo had vanished that day with the coppers. Perhaps he’d done a stretch in borstal. Perhaps he’d had the fear of God put into him at the police station. All Reg knew was that the boy hadn’t brought any more stolen silver to sell in Bermondsey Market, which was fine by Reg. Cops over in Borough High Street could fill anyone in on the rest, couldn’t they.

Reg Lewis said everything but “good riddance to bad rubbish,” and if he’d read about or heard about Kimmo Thorne’s murder, he made no mention of the fact. But it was clear that the boy had done nothing to enhance the reputation of the market in Reg’s eyes. More than that, as he had pointed out, they would have to suss out from the local police.

They were on their way to do so-wending their way through the market, back to Lynley’s car-when his mobile rang.

The message was terse, its meaning unmistakable: He was wanted immediately on Shand Street, where a tunnel beneath the railway took the narrow little thoroughfare to Crucifix Lane. They had another body.

Lynley flipped off the phone and looked at Havers. “Crucifix Lane,” he said. “Do you know where it is?”

A vendor at a nearby stall answered the question. Right up Tower Bridge Road, he told them. Less than half a mile from where they stood.


A RAILWAY VIADUCT shooting out from London Bridge station comprised the north perimeter of Crucifix Lane. Bricks formed it, so deeply stained with more than a century of soot and grime that whatever their original colour had been, it was now a distant memory. What remained in that memory’s place was a bleak wall done up in variations of carbonaceous sediment.

Into this structure’s supporting arches had been built various places of business: lockups for hire, warehouses, wine cellars, car-repair establishments. But one of the arches created a tunnel through which ran a single lane that was Shand Street. The north part of this street served as the address of several small businesses closed at this hour of the morning and the south part of it-the longer part-curved under the railway viaduct and disappeared into the darkness. The tunnel here was some sixty yards long, a place of deep shadows whose cavernous roof was bandaged with corrugated steel plates from which water dripped, soundless against the consistent rumble of early morning trains heading into and out of London. More water ran down the walls, seeping from the rusty iron gutters at a height of eight feet, collecting in greasy pools below. The scent of urine made the tunnel’s air rank. Broken lights made its atmosphere chilling.

When Lynley and Havers arrived, they found the tunnel completely sealed off at either end, with a constable at the Crucifix Lane end who-clipboard in hand-was restricting entrance. He had apparently met his match in the early representatives of the news media, however, those hungry journalists who monitored every police station’s patch in the hope of being first with a breaking story. Five of them had already assembled at the police barrier, and they were shouting questions into the tunnel. Three photographers accompanied them, creating strobe-like lighting as they shot above and around the constable who was trying vainly to control them. As Lynley and Havers showed their identification, the first of the television news vans pulled up, disgorging camera and soundmen onto the pavement as well. A media officer was needed desperately.

“…serial killer?” Lynley heard one of the journalists call out as he crossed the barrier with Havers behind him.

“…kid? Adult? Male? Female?”

“Hang on, mate. Give us bloody something.”

Lynley ignored them, Havers muttered, “Vultures,” and they moved in the direction of a low-slung, paintless, and abandoned sports car sitting midway through the tunnel. Here, they learned, the body had been discovered by a taxi driver on his way from Bermondsey to Heathrow, from which he would spend the day driving transatlantic fares into London for an exorbitant price made more exorbitant by the perennial tailback on the east side of the Hammersmith Flyover. That driver was long gone, his statement taken. In his place the SOCO team already worked, and a DI from the Borough High Street station waited for Lynley and Havers to join him. He was called Hogarth, he said, and his DCI had given the word to make no moves till someone from Scotland Yard checked out the crime scene. It was clear he wasn’t happy about that.

Lynley couldn’t be troubled with unruffling the DI’s feathers. If this was indeed another victim of their serial killer, there would be far greater concerns than someone’s not liking having his patch invaded by New Scotland Yard.

He said to Hogarth, “What have we got?” as he donned a pair of latex gloves handed over by one of the scenes-of-crime officers.

“Black kid,” Hogarth replied. “Boy. Young. Twelve or thirteen? Hard to tell. Doesn’t fit the MO of the serial, you ask me. Don’t know why you lot got a call.”

Lynley knew. The victim was black. Hillier was covering his well-tailored backside in advance of his next press briefing. “Let’s see him,” he said, and he stepped past Hogarth. Havers followed.

The body had been deposited unceremoniously in the abandoned car, where the driver’s seat had over time disintegrated down to metal frame and springs. There, with its legs splayed out and its head lolling to one side, it joined Coke bottles, Styrofoam cups, carrier bags of rubbish, McDonald’s take-away containers, and a single rubber glove that lay on what had once been the rim of the car’s back window. The boy’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at what remained of the car’s rusted steering column, short dreadlocks springing out of his head. With smooth walnut skin and perfectly balanced features, he had been quite lovely. He was also naked.

“Hell,” Havers murmured at Lynley’s side.

“Young,” Lynley said. “He looks younger than the last. Christ, Barbara. Why in God’s name…“ He didn’t finish, letting the unanswerable go unasked. He felt Havers’ glance graze him.

She said with a prescience that came from working with him for years, “There’re no guarantees. No matter what you do. Or what you decide. Or how. Or with whom.”

“You’re right,” he said. “There are never guarantees. But he’s still somebody’s son. All of them were that. We can’t forget it.”

“Think he’s one of ours?”

Lynley took a closer look at the boy, and upon a first glance, he found himself agreeing with Hogarth. While the victim was naked as had been Kimmo Thorne, his body clearly had been dumped without ceremony and not laid out like all the others. He had no piece of tatting as a modesty wrap on his genitalia, and there was no distinguishing mark on his forehead, both additional features of Kimmo Thorne’s body. His abdomen did not appear to be incised, but perhaps more important, the position of the body itself suggested haste and a lack of planning that were uncharacteristic of the other murders.

As the SOCO team moved round him with their evidence bags and collection kits, Lynley made a closer inspection. This proved to tell him a more complete tale. He said, “Have a look at this, Barbara,” as he gently lifted one of the boy’s hands. The flesh was deeply burned, and the marks of a restraint dug into the wrist.

There was much about any serial killing that was known only by its perpetrator, held back by the police for the dual reason of protecting the victims’ families from unnecessarily heartbreaking knowledge and of winnowing out false confessions from the attention seekers who plagued any investigation. In this particular case, there was much that still remained police knowledge only, and both the burns and the restraints were part of that knowledge.

Havers said, “That’s a pretty good indication of what’s what, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Lynley straightened up and glanced over to Hogarth. “He’s one of ours,” he said. “Where’s the pathologist?”

“Been and gone,” Hogarth replied. “Photographer and videographer as well. We’ve just been waiting for you lot before we clear him out of here.”

The rebuke was implied. Lynley ignored it. He asked for the time of death, for any witnesses, for the taxi driver’s statement.

“Pathologist’s given us a time of death between ten and midnight,” Hogarth said. “No witnesses to anything so far as we can tell, but that’s not surprising, is it. Not a place you’d find anyone with brains after dark.”

“As for the taxi driver?”

Hogarth consulted an envelope that he took from his jacket pocket. It evidently did duty as his notepad. He read off the name of the driver, his address, and the number of his mobile phone. He’d had no fare with him, the DI added, and the Shand Street tunnel was part of his regular route to work. “Goes past between five and half past every morning,” Hogarth told them. “Said this”-with a nod at the abandoned car-“has been here for months. Complained about it more’n once, he said. Banged on about how it’s asking for trouble when Traffic Division can’t seem to get round to-” Hogarth’s attention went from Lynley to the Crucifix Lane end of the tunnel. He frowned. “Who’s this? You lot expecting a colleague?”

Lynley turned. A figure was coming along the tunnel towards them, backlit from the lights for the television cameras that were rolling in the street. There was something familiar about the shape of him: big and bulky, with a slight stoop to the shoulders.

Havers was saying cautiously, “Sir, isn’t that…” when Lynley himself realised who it was. He drew in a breath so sharp that he felt its pressure beat within his eyes. The interloper on the crime scene was Hillier’s profiler, Hamish Robson, and there could be only one way he’d gained access to the tunnel.

Lynley didn’t hesitate before striding towards the man. He took Robson by the arm without preamble. “You need to leave at once,” he said. “I don’t know how you managed to cross that barrier, but you’ve no business here, Dr. Robson.”

Robson was clearly surprised by the greeting. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the barrier through which he’d just come. He said, “I had a phone call from Assistant-”

“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.”

Загрузка...