With No One As Witness

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

HELEN WENT DOWN TO THE CAR WITH THEM. SHE stopped Lynley, saying only, “Tommy darling, please listen to me,” before he got inside. She cast a look towards Havers, who was already buckling herself into the passenger seat, and then said quietly to Lynley, “You’ll solve it, Tommy. Please don’t be so hard on yourself.”

He let out a breath. How well she knew him. He said just as quietly, “How can I be otherwise? Another one, Helen.”

“You must remember: You’re only one man.”

“I’m not. I’m more than thirty men and women, and we’ve done bloody sod all to stop him. He’s one man.”

“That’s not true.”

“Which part?”

“You know which part. You’re doing this the only way possible.”

“While boys-young boys, Helen, children barely into their teens-are dying out here in the street. No matter what they’ve done, no matter what their crimes, if they’ve even committed any, they don’t deserve this. I feel as if we’re all asleep at the wheel without knowing it.”

“I know,” she said.

Lynley could see the love and concern on his wife’s face. He was momentarily comforted by it. Still, as he got into the car, he said bitterly, “Please God don’t think so well of me, Helen.”

“I can’t think anything else. Go carefully please.” And then to Havers, “Barbara, will you see that he has a meal sometime today? You know him. He’s likely not to eat.”

Havers nodded. “I’ll find him a decent fry-up somewhere. Lots of grease. That’ll set him up proper.”

Helen smiled. She touched Lynley’s cheek and then stepped away from the car. Lynley could see her through the rearview mirror, still standing in place as they drove away.

They made fairly good time by using Park Lane and the Edgware Road, heading northwest initially. They skirted Regent’s Park on its north side, shooting towards Kentish Town. They were approaching Queen’s Wood from Highgate station when the day’s promised rain finally began to fall. Lynley cursed. Rain and a crime scene: a recipe for forensic nightmares.

Queen’s Wood was an anomaly in London: a bona fide woodland that had once been a park like any other park but had long ago been left to grow, thrive, or fail as it might. The result was acres of unbridled nature in the middle of urban sprawl. Houses and the occasional block of flats backed onto it, but within ten feet of the fences and walls of their back gardens, the woods burst out of the earth in an eruption of beech trees, bracken, shrubs, and ferns, all struggling with each other to survive just as they would in the countryside.

There were no lawns. No park benches. No duck ponds. No swans floating serenely on a lake or river. There were, instead, ill-marked paths, overfull rubbish bins sprouting everything from take-away containers to nappies, the odd signpost pointing vaguely to a route to Highgate station, and a hillside down which the woodland dropped towards a bank of allotments to the west.

The easiest access to Queen’s Wood lay beyond Muswell Hill Road. There, Wood Lane veered to the northeast, bisecting the southern portion of the park. The local police made a strong presence at the scene, having blocked off the end of the street with sawhorses where four police constables kitted out in rain gear held back the curious who were bobbing round beneath their umbrellas like a collection of mobile mushrooms.

Lynley showed his ID to one of the constables, who signaled to the others to move the roadblock long enough for the Bentley to pass. Before he did so, Lynley said to the man, “Don’t let anyone other than SOCO inside. Anyone. I don’t care who they are or what they tell you. No one passes who isn’t police with proper police ID.”

The constable nodded. The flash of camera lights told Lynley that the press was already hot on the story.

The first stretch of Wood Lane comprised housing: an amalgamation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings that consisted of conversions, apartments, and single homes. Perhaps two hundred yards along, however, the buildings stopped abruptly and on either side of the street the woods spread out, completely unfenced, utterly accessible, looking in this weather both brooding and dangerous.

“Good choice,” Havers muttered as she and Lynley alighted from the car. “He has a way, hasn’t he? You’ve got to give him that.” She turned up the collar of her donkey jacket against the rain. “Like a set from a thriller film, this is.”

Lynley didn’t disagree. In the summer, the area was probably a paradise, a natural oasis that afforded an escape from the prison of concrete, stone, brick, and tarmac that had long ago enveloped the rest of the native environment. But in the winter, it was a melancholy spot in which everything was in the process of decay. Layers of decomposing leaves covered the ground and sent forth the odour of peat. Beeches toppled by storms over the years lay in various stages of rot right where they had fallen, while branches severed from trees by the wind punctuated the slope, growing moss and lichen.

Activity centred on the south side of Wood Lane, where the park dipped down towards the allotments and then up again towards Priory Gardens, which was the street beyond them. A large square of translucent plastic suspended from poles formed a rough shelter for an area perhaps fifty yards to the west of the allotments. There, an enormous beech had been torn from the ground more recently than the others, for where its roots had been there was still a hollow that time, earth, wind, small creatures, ferns, and bracken had not yet filled in.

The killer had placed the body in this hollow. At the moment, a forensic pathologist was attending it while a SOCO team worked with silent efficiency in the immediate area. Beneath a tall beech some thirty yards away, an adolescent boy was watching the activity, one trainer-shod foot up on the trunk behind him to prop him up and a rucksack at his feet. A ginger-haired man in a trench coat stood with him, and he jerked his head at Lynley and Havers in a signal to come over and join him.

Ginger Hair introduced himself as DI Widdison from the Archway police station. His companion, he said, was Ruff.

“Ruff?” Lynley glanced at the boy, who glowered at him from beneath the hood of a sweatshirt that was covered by an outsize anorak.

“No surname at present.” Widdison walked five paces away from the boy and took Lynley and Havers with him. “Found the body,” he said. “He’s a tough little bugger, but it’s shaken him up. Sicked up on his way to get help.”

“Where did he go for that?” Lynley asked.

Widdison tossed a nonexistent ball back in the direction of Wood Lane. “Walden Lodge. Eight or ten flats in there. He leaned on the bells till someone let him inside to use the phone.”

“What was he doing here, anyway?” Havers asked.

“Tagging,” Widdison told her. “Course, he doesn’t want us to know that, but he was shaken up and gave us his tag by mistake, which is why he doesn’t want to give us his real name now. We’ve been trying to catch him for some eight months. He’s put ‘Ruff’ on every available surface round here: signs, dustbins, trees. Silver.”

“Silver?”

“His tagging colour. Silver. He’s got the cans of paint in that rucksack of his. Didn’t have the presence of mind to chuck them before he phoned us.”

Lynley said, “What’s he given you?”

“Sod all. You can talk to him if you’d like, but I don’t think he saw a thing. I don’t think there was anything to see.” He tilted his head in the direction of the intense circle of work surrounding the body. “I’ll be over there when you’re ready.” He strode off.

Lynley and Havers returned to the boy, Havers digging into her bag. Lynley said to her, “I expect he’s right, Barbara. I don’t imagine taking notes-”

“Not going for the notes, sir,” she replied, and she offered the boy her crumpled packet of Players when they joined him.

Ruff looked from the cigarettes to her, back to the cigarettes. He finally mumbled, “Cheers,” and took one, which she lit for him with a plastic lighter.

“Anyone about when you found the body?” Lynley asked the boy once he’d had time to suck hungrily on the cigarette. His fingers were dirty, with grime crusted beneath the nails and the cuticles. His face was spotty but otherwise pale.

Ruff shook his head. “Someone in the ’lotments, is all,” he said. “Old bloke turning the earth with a shovel like he’s looking for something. I seen him when I come down through Priory Gardens. On the path. Tha’s all, innit.”

“Were you by yourself tagging?” Lynley asked.

The boy’s eyes flashed. “Hey, I di’n’t say-”

“Sorry. Did you come into the park by yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“See anything unusual? A car or van that didn’t look right, up on Wood Lane? Perhaps when you went to phone for help?”

“I di’n’t see fuck,” Ruff said. “Anyways, there’s lots ’f cars parked up there all the time in daytime. Cos people come into town from outside and they take the tube rest of the way, don’t they? Cos tube’s just over there. Highgate station. Look, I tol’ the dibble all this. They ack like I did summat. An’ they won’t let me go.”

“That might have something to do with your not giving them your name,” Havers told the boy. “If they want to talk to you again, they won’t know where to find you.”

Ruff looked at her suspiciously, a bloke trying to suss out a trick from among her words. She said reassuringly, “We’re from Scotland Yard. We’re not going to drag you to the nick for spraying your name about. We’ve bigger fish to fry.”

He sniffed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and relented. He was called Elliott Augustus Greenberry, he finally admitted, eyeing them sharply, as if watching for incredulous expressions to cross their faces. “Double ell, double tee, double ee, double ar. An’ don’ tell me how fuckin stupid, it is. I know, don’ I. Look, c’n I go now?”

“In a moment,” Lynley said. “Did you recognise the boy?”

Ruff brushed a greasy lock of hair off his face, tucking it into the hood of the sweatshirt. “Wha,’ him, you mean? The…it?”

“The dead boy, yes,” Lynley said. “Do you know him?”

“I never,” Ruff said. “Nobody I ever seen. Could be he’s from round here somewheres, like up on the street over there behind the ’lotments, but I don’t know him. Like I said, I don’t know fuck. C’n I go?”

“Once we have your address,” Havers said.

“Why?”

“Because we’ll want you to sign a statement eventually, and we need to know where to find you, don’t we.”

“But I said I di’n’t-”

“It’s routine, Elliott,” Lynley said.

The boy scowled but cooperated, and they released him. He shed the anorak, handed it over, and took off down the slope, west towards the path that would lead him up again to Priory Gardens.

“Anything from him?” DI Widdison said when Lynley and Havers joined him.

“Nothing,” Lynley said, handing over the anorak, which Widdison passed to a sodden constable, who donned it gratefully. “Aman digging in the allotments.”

“That’s what he told me as well,” Widdison said. “We’ve got a door-to-door going on up there now.”

“And along Wood Lane?”

“The same. I’m reckoning our best bet is Walden Lodge.” Once again, Widdison indicated a modern and solid-looking block of flats that squatted at the edge of the woods. It was the last building on Wood Lane before the park, and on every side it presented balconies. Most of them were empty save for the occasional barbecue and garden furniture covered for the winter, but on four of them, watchers stood. One of them held up binoculars. “I can’t think the killer brought the body down here without a torch,” Widdison said. “Someone up there might have seen that.”

“Unless he brought it just after dawn,” Havers pointed out.

“Too risky,” Widdison said. “Commuters park on the lane and use the underground to get into town from here. He’d have to know that and plan accordingly. But he’d still run the risk of being seen by someone who decided to make the journey earlier than usual.”

“He does his homework, though,” Havers pointed out. “We know that from where he’s left the rest of them.”

Widdison looked unconvinced. He took them under the shelter and over to the body. It lay on its side but was otherwise dumped carelessly in the hollow created by the unearthed roots of the fallen beech. Its head was tucked into its chest; its arms windmilled out like someone frozen in the act of giving a signal.

This boy, Lynley saw, seemed younger than the others, although not by much. He was white as well: blond and extremely fair skinned, small and not particularly developed. At first glance, Lynley concluded-with relief-that he wasn’t one of theirs at all, that he and Havers needn’t have come this distance across London on someone’s whim. But when he squatted to have a better look, he saw the postmortem incision running down the boy’s chest and disappearing into the fold of his waist, while on his forehead, a crude symbol had been drawn in blood, brother to the symbol found on Kimmo Thorne.

Lynley glanced at the forensic pathologist, who was speaking into the microphone of a handheld tape recorder. “I’d like a look at his hands,” he said.

The man nodded. “I’ve done my bit. We’re ready to bag him,” and one of the team came forward to do so. They’d start by bagging the hands in paper, preserving any trace evidence from the killer that might be under the boy’s fingernails. From there they’d do the rest and when they moved the body, Lynley reckoned he’d get a better look at it.

That turned out to be the case. Rigor was present, but enough of the surface of the hands became visible when the body was lifted out of the hollow for Lynley to see that the palms were blackened from having been burnt. The navel was missing as well, chopped crudely out of the body.

“The Z that stands for Zorro,” Havers murmured.

She was right. They were indeed the signatures of their killer, despite the differences that Lynley could see were present on the body: There were no restraint marks on the wrists and the ankles, and the strangulation had been manual this time, leaving ugly dark bruises round the boy’s neck. There were other bruises as well, on the upper arms, extending down to the elbows, and along the spine, the thighs, and the waist. The largest bruise coloured the flesh from the temple down to the chin as well.

Unlike the others, Lynley concluded, this one boy had not gone gentle, which told him the killer had made his first error in his choice of victim. Lynley could only hope that the miscalculation left behind him a pile of evidence.

“He put up a fight,” Lynley murmured.

“No stun gun this time?” Havers asked.

They checked the body for the signature of that weapon as well. Lynley said, “It doesn’t appear so.”

“What d’you reckon that means? Would it be out of juice? Do they run out of it? They must, no?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps there wasn’t the chance to use it. It looks like things might not have gone according to plan.” He stood, nodded to those who stood waiting to bag the body, and returned to Widdison. “Anything in the area?” he asked.

“Two footprints beneath the boy’s head,” he said. “Protected from the rain. Could have been there earlier, but we’re taking casts anyway. We’re doing a perimeter search, but I reckon our real evidence is going to come from the body.”

Lynley left the DI with the instruction to get every statement from every house on Wood Lane over to him at New Scotland Yard as soon as possible. “That block of flats especially,” he said. “I agree with you. Someone has to have seen something. Or heard something. And have constables in place the rest of the day on either end of the street to grill commuters who come down from the underground station to fetch their cars.”

“Don’t expect to get much joy from that,” Widdison warned.

“Anything goes for joy at this point,” Lynley told him. He added the information about the van they were looking for. “Someone may have seen it,” he said.

Then he and Havers set off up the slope. Back on Wood Lane, they could see that the house-to-house was well in progress. Uniformed police were knocking on doors; others were standing in the shelter of porches, talking to inhabitants. Otherwise, no one else was on the pavement or in any front garden. The persistent rain was keeping everyone inside.

That was not the case at the barricade, however. More gawkers had gathered. Lynley waited while the sawhorse was moved once more, and he was thinking about what they’d seen in Queen’s Wood when Havers muttered, “Bloody hell, sir. He did it again,” and roused him from his thoughts.

He quickly saw what she was talking about. Just to the other side of the barricade, Hamish Robson gestured to them. At least, Lynley thought grimly, they’d managed to thwart AC Hillier in this: The constable standing watch had followed Lynley’s orders to the letter. Robson had no police identification; he would not be allowed beyond the barrier no matter what Sir David Hillier had told him to do.

Lynley lowered the window, and Robson worked his way over to the car. He said, “The constable here wouldn’t-”

“Those were my orders. You can’t go onto this crime scene, Dr. Robson. You shouldn’t have been allowed onto the last one.”

“But the assistant commissioner-”

“I’ve no doubt he rang you, but it’s just not on. I know you mean well. I also know you’re caught in the middle, one of us a rock and the other a hard place. I apologise for that. For that and the inconvenience to you, coming all this way. But as it is-”

“Superintendent.” Robson shivered, shoved his hands into his pockets. He’d obviously come in a hurry, without umbrella or raincoat. Great patches of damp extended across his shoulders, his spectacles were spotted with rain, and what little hair he had was sagging wetly round his face and into his forehead. “Let me help,” he said urgently. “It’s completely pointless to send me back to Dagenham when I’m already here, available to you.”

“That’s something you’ll have to take up with AC Hillier,” Lynley said, “the pointlessness of it.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.” Robson glanced round and nodded a few yards down the road. “Will you pull over there for a moment so we can talk about this?”

“I have nothing more to say.”

“Understood. But I have, you see, and I’d very much like you to hear me out.” He stepped back from the car in what seemed like a gesture of goodwill, one that left the decision up to Lynley: Drive off or cooperate. Robson said, “A few words. That’s all,” and he gave a wry smile. “I wouldn’t mind getting out of this rain. If you’ll let me get in the car, I promise to be gone the moment I’ve said my bit and heard your response to it.”

“And if I have no response?”

“You’re not that sort. So may I…?”

Lynley considered, then nodded sharply once. Havers said, “Sir,” in that uncharacteristically beseeching manner she used when she disapproved of a decision he’d taken. He said, “We may as well, Barbara. He’s here. He may have something we can use.”

“Crikey, are you-” She bit off her words as the back door opened and Hamish Robson sank into the car.

Lynley drove a short distance away, beyond the crowd. He pulled to the kerb, the engine still running and the wipers still moving rhythmically across the windscreen.

Robson didn’t fail to take notice of this. He said, “I’ll be quick, then. “I’d expect this crime scene to be different to the others. Not in all ways but in some. Am I right?”

“Why?” Lynley asked. “Were you anticipating as much?”

“Is it different?” Robson persisted. “Because, you see, with profiling, we often see-”

“With respect, Dr. Robson, your profiling has got us nowhere so far. Nowhere important, and not one step closer to the killer.”

“Are you sure?” Before Lynley could answer, Robson leaned forward in his seat. He went on, his voice kind. “I can’t imagine having your job. It must be more draining than anyone can picture. But you must not blame yourself for this death, Superintendent. You’re doing your best. No one could ask more of you than that, so you mustn’t ask more than your best of yourself. That’s the road to madness.”

“Professional opinion?” Lynley asked sardonically.

Robson took the two words at their face value and ignored Lynley’s tone, saying, “Completely. So let me give you a fuller opinion. Let me see the crime scene. Let me give you some guidance that you’ll be able to use. Superintendent, in a psychopath the compulsion to kill only grows stronger. With each crime, it escalates; it does not subside. But each time, to achieve pleasure it takes more and more of whatever the killer’s been doing during the commission of the crime to fulfill himself. So understand me. There’s profound danger here. To young men, to boys, to little children, to…we don’t know for sure, so for God’s sake let me help you.”

Lynley had been watching Robson through his rearview mirror, Havers from her seat where she’d turned to observe the psychologist as he spoke. The man looked as if he’d shaken himself with the passion of his words, and he turned from them to look out of the window when he’d finally finished speaking.

Lynley said, “What’s your own background, Dr. Robson?”

Robson was gazing to his left, in the direction of a yew hedge dripping small pools of water onto the pavement. He said, “Sorry. I can’t abide what’s done to children in the name of love. Or play. Or discipline. Or whatever.” Then he was silent. Only the soft whirr of the wipers brushing off the windscreen and the purr of the Bentley’s engine broke the quiet. He finally said, “For me it was my maternal uncle. Wrestling, he called it. But it wasn’t. That sort of thing rarely is between an adult and a male child when it’s the adult’s idea. But the child, of course, never understands.”

“I’m sorry,” Lynley said. He too turned in his seat then and looked at the psychologist directly. “But perhaps that makes you less objective than-”

“No. Believe me, it makes me someone who knows exactly what to look for,” Robson said. “So let me see the crime scene. I’ll tell you what I think and what I know. The decision to act is up to you.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“God damn it-”

“The body’s been moved, Dr. Robson,” Lynley cut in. “The only crime scene for you to look at is a fallen beech tree and a hollow beneath it.”

Robson sank back into the seat. He gazed out at the street, where an ambulance had come along Wood Lane up to the barrier erected by the police. It drove without lights whirling or siren blaring. One of the constables went out into the street and halted traffic-already slowed to a curious crawl anyway-long enough for the ambulance to pass. It did so unhurriedly; there was no urgency to get its burden to hospital quickly. This gave the photojournalists time to record the moment for the newspapers. Perhaps it was the sight of them that prompted Robson to ask his next question.

“Will you let me look at the photos, then?”

Lynley considered this. The police photographer had completed his work by the time he and Havers had arrived on the scene, and a videographer had been recording the body, the site, and the ensuing activity round the body and the site when they’d descended the slope. The incident caravan was not that far from where they were sitting at this moment. Doubtless, in that caravan there would be a visual record of the crime scene already suitable for Robson’s viewing.

It wouldn’t hurt at this point to let the profiler look at what they had: video footage, digital pictures, or whatever else the murder squad had so far produced. It would also act as a compromise between what Hillier wanted and what Lynley was determined not to give him.

On the other hand, the psychologist wasn’t wanted here. No one at the scene had requested him and it was only down to Hillier’s interference and his desire for something to feed to the media that had brought Robson here in the first place. If Lynley gave in to Hillier now, the AC would probably bring in a psychic next. And after that, what? Someone to read tea leaves? Or the entrails of a lamb? It couldn’t be allowed to happen. Someone had to gain control over the lurching, runaway wagon of this entire situation, and this was the moment to do it.

Lynley said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Robson.”

Robson looked deflated. He said, “Your last word on the subject?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain that’s wise?”

“I’m not certain of anything.”

“That’s really the hell of it, isn’t it?”

Robson got out of the car, then. He headed back towards the barricade. He passed DI Widdison on his route, but he made no attempt to speak to him. For his part, Widdison saw Lynley’s car and raised a hand as if to stop him from leaving the scene. Lynley lowered the window as the DI hurried over.

“We’ve had a call from the Hornsey Road station,” Widdison said when he reached the car. “A boy’s gone missing, reported by his parents last night. He fits the general description of our victim.”

“We’ll take it,” Lynley said as Havers emptied her shoulder bag on the floor to find her notebook and take down the address.

IT WAS IN Upper Holloway, on a small housing estate just off Junction Road. There, round the corner from William Beckett Funeral Directors and Yildiz Supermarket, they found a serpentine stretch of tarmac splendidly called Bovingdon Close. It was a pedestrian precinct, so they left the Bentley on Hargrave Road where a bearded vagrant with a guitar in one hand and a wet sleeping bag dragging on the pavement behind him offered to keep an eye on the car for the price of a pint. Or a bottle of wine, if they felt so inclined and he did a good job of keeping the local riffraff away from “s’ch a fine motor as yairs is, master.” He wore a large green rubbish bag as a mackintosh in the rain, and he sounded like a character from a costume drama, someone who’d spent far too much of his youth tuned in to BBC1. “They’s ferrinners plenty round here,” he informed them. “You can’t leave nothin’ lying ’bout what they don’t put their mitts on it, sir.” He appeared to search vaguely in the direction of his head for something to tug respectfully as he concluded. When he spoke, the air became heavy with the scent of teeth in need of extraction.

Lynley told the man he was welcome to keep his eyes glued to the car. The vagrant hunkered down on the nearest stairs to one of the terrace houses, and-rain or not-he began to pluck at the three strings remaining on his guitar. Sourly, he eyed a pack of young black kids wearing rucksacks on their backs, trotting along the pavement across the street.

Lynley and Havers left the man to it and set off into Bovingdon Close. They accessed this by means of a tunnel-like opening in the cinnamon-coloured brick buildings that comprised the housing estate itself. They were looking for number 30, and they found it not far from the estate’s sole recreational area: a triangular green with dormant rosebushes languishing in each of the three corners and a small bench set against one side. Other than four saplings struggling for life in the green’s patch of lawn, there were no trees in Bovingdon Close, and the houses that didn’t face the tiny recreational area faced each other across a width of tarmac that didn’t measure more than fifteen feet. In the summer when the windows were open, everyone would doubtless be into everyone else’s business.

Each of the houses had been given a sandwich-size plot of earth in front of its door that the more optimistic inhabitants were treating as their gardens. In front of number 30, the patch of earth in question was a rough triangle of dying grass, and a child’s bike lay on its side upon it, next to a green plastic garden chair. Near this a tattered shuttlecock looked as if a dog had been chewing on it. The accompanying racquets leaned against the wall by the front door, most of their strings broken.

When Lynley rang the bell, a man in miniature opened the door. He was not even eye to eye with Havers, top heavy with the look of someone who weight trained to compensate for his lack of height. He was red eyed and unshaven, and he glanced from them to the tarmac beyond them as if expecting someone else.

He said, “Cops,” like the answer to a question no one had asked.

“That’s who we are.” Lynley introduced himself and Havers and waited for the man-they knew only that his name was Benton-to ask them in. Beyond him, Lynley could see the doorway to a darkened sitting room and the shapes of people seated inside. A child’s querulous voice asked why couldn’t they open the curtains, why couldn’t he play, and a woman shushed him.

Benton said harshly over his shoulder in that direction, “You mind what I told you.” Then he gave his attention back to Lynley. “Where’s the uniform?”

Lynley said they weren’t part of the uniformed patrol but rather they worked in a different department and were from New Scotland Yard. “May we come in?” he asked. “It’s your son that’s gone missing?”

“Didn’t come home last night.” Benton’s lips were dry and flaky. He licked them.

He stepped back from the door and led them into the sitting room, at the end of a corridor of no more than fifteen feet. In the semidarkness there, five people were arrayed on chairs, the sofa, a footstool, and the floor. Two young boys, two adolescent girls, and a woman. She was Bev Benton, she said. Her husband was Max. And these were four of their children. Sherry and Brenda the girls, Rory and Stevie the boys. Their Davey was the one gone missing.

All of them, Lynley noted, were uncommonly small. To one degree or another, all of them also resembled the body in Queen’s Wood.

The boys were meant to be at school, Bev told them; the girls were meant to be at work in the food stalls at Camden Lock Market. Max and Bev themselves were meant to be serving the public from their fish van in Chapel Street. But no one was going anywhere from this house till they had word about Davey.

“Something’s happened to him,” Max Benton said. “They would’ve sent regular coppers otherwise. We’re none of us so thick ’s we don’t know that much. What is it, then?”

“It might be best for us to speak without the children here,” Lynley said.

Bev Benton keened two words, “Oh God.”

Max barked at her, “We’ll have none of that,” and then said to Lynley, “They stay. If it’s an object lesson they’re about to have, then I by God want them having it.”

“Mr. Benton-”

“There’ll be no Mr. Benton about it,” Benton said. “Give us the brief.”

Lynley wasn’t about to go at it that way. He said, “Have you a photograph of your son?”

Bev Benton spoke. “Sherry, pet, fetch Davey’s school picture from the fridge for the officer.”

One of the two girls-blonde like the body in the woods, and identically fair skinned, delicate featured, and small boned-left them quickly and just as quickly returned. She handed over the picture to Lynley, her eyes cast down to his shoes, and then returned to the footstool, which she shared with her sister. Lynley dropped his gaze to the picture. A cheeky-looking boy grinned up at him, his fair hair darkened by the gel that formed it into little spikes. He had a sprinkling of freckles across his nose and headphones slung round his neck, above his school-uniform pullover.

“Slipped them on at the last minute, he did,” Bev Benton commented, as if in explanation of the headphones, which were hardly part of his regulation school attire. “Likes his music, Davey. Rap music. Mostly those blacks from America with the p’culiar names.”

The boy in the photo resembled the body they had, but only an identification made by one of the parents could confirm this. Still, no matter what sort of lesson Max Benton wanted the rest of his children to have, Lynley had no intention of offering it to them. He said, “When was the last time you saw Davey?”

“Yesterday morning.” Max was the one to answer. “He got off to school like always.”

“Didn’t come home when he was due, though,” Bev Benton said. “He was meant to mind Rory and Stevie here.”

“I went to tae kwon do to see was he there,” Max added. “Last time he bunked off doing something he was meant to do, that’s where he claimed he went instead.”

“Claimed?” Barbara Havers asked. She’d remained in the doorway, and she was writing in her new spiral notebook.

“He was meant to come to our fish stall in Chapel Market one day,” Bev explained. “To help his dad. When he didn’t come, he said he’d gone to tae kwon do and lost the time. There’s a bloke he’s had some trouble with-”

“Andy Crickleworth,” Max put in. “Little sod’s trying to sort Davey out and set himself up as head of the crew Davey runs with.”

“Not a gang,” Bev added hastily. “Just boys. They been mates for ages.”

“But this Crickleworth’s new. When Davey said he wanted to see the tae kwon do, I thought…” Max had been standing, but now he went to the sofa to join his wife. He dropped down onto it and scrubbed his hands across his face. The smaller children reacted to this evidence of their dad’s upset by huddling together at the knees of one of their sisters, who put her hands on their shoulders as if to comfort them. Max brought himself under control, saying, “Tae kwon do people? They never heard of Davey. Never seen him. Didn’t know him. So I phoned the school to see had he been going truant without them telling us, only he hadn’t, see. Today’s the only day he didn’t show up. All term.”

“Has he been in trouble with the police before?” Havers asked. “Ever face the magistrates? Ever been assigned to a young people’s group for straightening him out?”

“Our Davey doesn’t need straightening out,” Bev Benton said. “He never even misses school. And he’s that good in his classes, he is.”

“Doesn’t like anyone to know that, Mum,” Sherry murmured, as if believing her mother had betrayed a confidence in her final remark.

Max added to this. “He was meant to be tough. Tough louts don’t care much for school.”

“So Davey acted the part,” Bev explained. “But he wasn’t like that.”

“And he’s never been in trouble with the police? Never had a social worker?”

“Why d’you keep asking that? Max…” Bev turned to her husband as if for explanation.

Lynley intervened. “Have you phoned his friends? The boys you mentioned?”

“No one’s seen him,” Bev replied.

“And this other boy? This Andy Crickleworth?”

No one in the family had met him. No one in the family even knew where to find him.

“Any chance Davey might’ve made him up?” Havers asked, looking up from her notebook. “Covering for something else he was up to?”

There was a little silence at this. Either no one knew or no one wanted to answer. Lynley waited, curious, and saw Bev Benton glance at her husband. She seemed reluctant to say anything else. Lynley let the silence continue till Max Benton broke it.

“Bullies di’n’t ever go after him, did they. They knew our Davey’d sort them if they picked a fight. He was small and…” Benton seemed to realise he’d slipped into the past tense and he stopped himself, looking shaken. His daughter Sherry supplied the conclusion to his thought.

“Pretty,” she said. “Our Davey’s dead pretty.”

They all were that, Lynley thought: pretty and small, very nearly doll-like. The boys especially would have to do something to compensate for that. Like fight back furiously if someone tried to harm them. Like end up getting bruised and banged about before they were throttled, sliced, and discarded in the woods.

Lynley said, “May we see your son’s bedroom, Mr. Benton?”

“Why?”

“There might be some indication where he’s gone off to,” Havers said. “Sometimes kids don’t tell their parents everything. If there’s a mate you don’t know about…”

Max exchanged a look with his wife. It was the first time he’d seemed anything but master of the family. Bev nodded encouragingly. Max told Lynley and Havers to come with him, then.

He took them upstairs where three bedrooms opened onto a simple square landing. In one of the rooms, two sets of bunk beds stood against opposite walls, a chest of drawers between them. Over one of the bed sets a shelf high on the wall held a collection of CDs and a small, neat stack of baseball caps. Beneath the upper bed, the lower one had been removed altogether and in its place a private lair had been fashioned. Part of it was given over to clothes: baggy trousers, trainers, jumpers, and T-shirts featuring graphics of the American rap artists Bev Benton had spoken about. Part of it contained a set of cheap metal bookshelves that, upon inspection, held all fantasy novels. At the far end of the lair stood a small chest of drawers. All of this, Max Benton told them, was Davey’s.

As Lynley and Havers ducked within, each of them making for a different part, Max said in a voice no longer authoritarian but instead desperate and very much afraid, “You got to tell me. Wouldn’t be here, would you, unless there was something more. Course I see why you di’n’t want to say in front of the wife and the little ones. But now…They would’ve sent uniforms, not you lot.”

Lynley had slid his hands into the pockets of the first pair of trousers as Max Benton was speaking. He stopped, though, and came back out of the lair as Havers continued searching within it. He said, “You’re right. We have a body, Mr. Benton. It was found in Queen’s Wood, not far from Highgate station.”

Max Benton sagged a little, but he waved Lynley off when Lynley would have taken his arm and led him to the lower of the two beds across the room. He said, “Davey?”

“We’re going to ask you to look at the body. It’s the only way to be absolutely sure. I’m terribly sorry.”

He said again, “Davey?”

“Mr. Benton, it may not be Davey.”

“But you think…Else why would you be troubling to come up here wanting to see his things?”

“Sir…” From within the lair, Havers spoke. Lynley turned to see that she was holding out something for his inspection. It was a set of handcuffs, but not ordinary ones. They were not metal but formed from heavy plastic and in the dim light beneath the upper mattress, the handcuffs glowed. Havers said, “Could be-” But she was cut off by Max Benton, who said harshly, “I told him to return them things. He said he did. Swore to me because he di’n’t want me taking him along to make sure he handed them over.”

“To who?” Havers asked.

“He got ’em off a stall in the Stables Market, di’n’t he. Over by Camden Lock. He said they were a present from a vendor there, but what vendor hands out goods to kids hanging about, you tell me. So I reckoned he nicked them and I told him to take them back straightaway. Little bugger must’ve hid them instead.”

“What stall in the market? Did he tell you?” Lynley asked.

“Magic stall, he said. I don’t know the bloke’s name. He never said and I di’n’t ask. I just told him to take the handcuffs back and to bloody well stop pinching clobber not belonging to him.”

“Magic stall?” Barbara Havers asked. “Are you sure about that, Mr. Benton?”

“That’s what he said.”

Havers came out of the lair then. She said to Lynley, “Could I have a word, sir?” She didn’t wait for him to reply. She left the bedroom and went onto the landing.

She said to Lynley in a quiet, terse voice, “Bloody hell. I may’ve been wrong. Tunnel vision. Whatever you want to call it.”

“Havers, this isn’t the moment for sharing your epiphanies,” Lynley said.

“Wait. I’ve been thinking all along of Colossus. But I never thought of magic. What kid fifteen and under doesn’t like magic? No. Sir. Wait-” as Lynley was about to leave her to her stream-of-consciousness monologue. “Wendy’s Cloud is in Camden Lock Market, right next door to the Stables. Now, she’s hopped up on something much of the time and she can’t say what she’s selling or when she’s selling it. But she’s carried ambergris oil in the past-we know that-and when I finished talking to her the other day and was hiking back to my car, I saw this bloke at the Stables…”

“What bloke?”

“He was unloading boxes. He was taking them into a magic stall or something like a magic stall and he was a magician. That’s what he said. There can’t be more than one of them at the Stables, can there? And listen to this, sir. He was driving a van.”

“Red?”

“Purple. But in the light of a streetlamp at three A.M. or whenever…You’re at your window. You catch a glimpse. You don’t even think about it because, after all, this is a huge city we’re talking about and why would you think you were meant to notice everything about it if a van’s on the street at three A.M.?”

“Lettering on the van?”

“Yeah. It was a magician advert.”

“That’s not what we’re looking for, Havers. That’s not what we saw on the CCTV tape from St. George’s Gardens.”

“But we don’t know what that van was, the St. George’s Gardens one. It could have been the warden opening up. Or someone there to make a repair.”

“At three in the morning? Carrying a suspicious-looking tool that very well could have cut the lock from the gate? Havers-”

“Just hang on. Please. For all we know that could have a logical explanation that’ll be sorted out in another hour. Bloody hell, the bloke could’ve had legitimate business in the garden and what you thought was a tool was something to do with that business. He could have been doing anything: making a repair, taking a piss, making an early newspaper delivery, testing out a new sort of milk float. Anything. My point is…”

“All right. Yes. I see.”

She went on as if Lynley were still not onboard. “And I talked to this bloke. This magician. I saw him. So if this body in Queen’s Wood is Davey and if this bloke I saw is the one who had the handcuffs nicked by Davey…” She let him finish her thought.

Which he did, in short order. “He damn well better have an alibi for last night. Yes, all right, Barbara. I see how you’re putting it together.”

“And it’s him, sir. Davey. You know it.”

“The body? Yes. I think it is. But we can’t go further without the formality. I’ll deal with that.”

“And sh’ll I…?”

“Get on to the Stables Market. Make the connection between Davey and this magician if you can. Once you do that, get him in for questioning.”

“I think we’ve got our first real break, sir.”

“I hope you’re right,” Lynley replied.