With No One As Witness

CHAPTER NINETEEN

WINSTON NKATA WAS IN NO HURRY TO GET TO WORK THE next morning. He knew he was going to take good-humoured heat from his colleagues over his appearance on Crimewatch, and he didn’t feel like facing it yet. Nor did he really have to because Crimewatch had actually produced a possible break in the case, and he would be tracking that break down before he headed over the river for the day.

From the sitting room, his mother’s usual morning fare-BBC Breakfast-was doing its regular bit of recycling the news, traffic, weather, and special reports every thirty minutes on the telly. They’d reached the part where they were informing the public of what was on the front page of every national broadsheet and tabloid. From this, he was able to assess the temperature of the press regarding the serial killings.

According to BBC Breakfast, the tabloids were making the most of the Queen’s Wood body, which at least had driven Bram Savidge and his accusations of institutional racism off their front pages. But Savidge still had a spot relegated to him, and those reporters not attempting to unearth more data about the body in the woods appeared to be conducting interviews wherever they could find them with people bearing grievances against the police. Navina Cryer shared space with the Queen’s Wood body on the front of the Mirror, telling her tale of being ignored when she reported Jared Salvatore missing shortly after his disappearance. Cleopatra Lavery had managed to conduct a telephone interview from inside Holloway Prison with News of the World, and she had much to say on the subject of the criminal-justice system and what it had done to “her lovely Sean.” Savidge and his African wife had been interviewed at home by the Daily Mail, complete with half-page photos of the wife playing a musical instrument of some sort under the fond eye of her husband. And according to what he was able to pick up from the presenters’ comments on the telly as they nattered on about the other papers, Nkata could tell that the rest of the press were not going softly on the Met in the face of another boy’s murder. One killer and how many cops? was the rhetorical question being asked by the news media with lofty irony.

Which was why Crimewatch and the manner in which the programme depicted the Met’s endeavours in the investigation had been so crucial. Which was also why AC Hillier had attempted to usurp the director’s job prior to the broadcast on the previous evening.

He wanted a split-screen effect, he’d told the men in the studio. DS Nkata would be identifying the dead boys by name and by photograph during the course of the programme, and having a head shot of Nkata speaking on one side of the screen while he identified photos of the victims of the serial killer on the other side of the screen would drive home to the viewers-by means of DS Nkata’s sombre demeanour-how seriously the Met was taking the situation and the pursuit of this killer. That, of course, was utter cock. What Hillier wanted front and centre was what he and the Directorate of Public Affairs had wanted front and centre from the first: a black face attached to a rank senior to that of detective constable.

The assistant commissioner didn’t get his way. They didn’t go for anything fancy on Crimewatch, he’d been told. Just video footage if it was available, e-fits, photographs, dramatic reconstructions, and interviews with investigators. The people in makeup would buff away the shine on the face of anyone in front of the camera, and the sound blokes would clip a microphone onto the lapel of a jacket so it looked like something other than an insect about to crawl onto the presenter’s chin, but Steven Spielberg this group was not. This was a low-budget operation, thank you very much. So who was going to say what to whom and in what order, please?

Hillier wasn’t happy, but he could do nothing about it. He made sure that DS Winston Nkata was introduced by name, however, and he made doubly certain he repeated that name during the course of the broadcast. Other than that, he explained the nature of the crimes, gave the relevant dates, showed the locations where the bodies had been found, and sketched out a few details of the ongoing investigation in a manner that suggested he and Nkata were working it shoulder to shoulder. That plus the e-fit of the Square Four Gym mystery man, the reconstruction of Kimmo Thorne’s abduction, and Nkata’s recitation of the names of the dead boys comprised the programme’s entirety.

The endeavour bore fruit. This, at least, made the whole enterprise worthwhile. It even made the prospect of having the piss taken out of him by his fellow officers somewhat bearable since Nkata intended to enter the incident room with solid information later that morning.

He finished his breakfast as the BBC was doing yet another traffic round-up. He ducked out of the flat to his mum’s “Mind how you go, Jewel” and his dad’s chin nod and soft “Proud of you, son,” and he made his way along the outdoor corridor and down the stairs as he buttoned his overcoat against the chill. Across the grounds of Loughborough Estate, he met no one save a mum shepherding three small children in the general direction of the primary school. He made it to his car and began to climb inside, only to see that the right front tyre had been slashed.

He sighed. It was not just flat, of course. That could have been ascribed to anything: from a slow leak to a nail picked up in a street somewhere and dislodged after the damage was done. That sort of disagreeable start to his day would have been an irritant, but it wouldn’t have had the cachet that a knifing had. A knifing suggested that the car’s owner ought to watch his back, not only right now when he had to break out the jack and the spare but also anytime he was on the estate.

Nkata looked round automatically before he set to changing the tyre. Naturally, there was no one about. This damage had been done on the previous night, sometime after he’d arrived home post Crimewatch. Whoever had done this didn’t have the bottle to face him squarely. At the end of the day, while he was a cop to them and consequently the enemy, he was also an alumnus of the Brixton Warriors, among whom he’d spilt his own blood and the blood of others.

Fifteen minutes later and he was on his way. His route took him past the Brixton police station, whose interview rooms he knew only too well from his adolescence, and he made a right turn into Acre Lane, with little traffic moving in the direction he was traveling.

This was towards Clapham, for it was from Clapham that the phone call had come at the end of Crimewatch. The caller was Ronald X. Ritucci-“It’s for Xavier,” he’d said-and he thought he had some information that might help the police in their investigation of the death of “that kid with the bicycle in the gardens.” He and his wife had been watching the show without thinking how it might relate to them when Gail-“that’s the wife”-pointed out that the night they’d been burgled corresponded to the night of that boy’s death. And he-Ronald X.-had had a glimpse of the little thug just before he leapt out of the first-floor bedroom window of their house. He’d definitely worn makeup. So if the police were interested…

They were. Someone would call in the morning.

That someone was Nkata, and he found the Ritucci home not far to the south of Clapham Common. It was in a street of similar post-Edwardian houses, distinguished from so many of those north of the river by being detached dwellings in a city where land was at a premium.

When he rang the bell, he heard the sound of a child clattering along a corridor to the door. The inside bolt was messed about a bit, unsuccessfully, while a little voice called out, “Mummy! The doorbell! Did you hear?”

In a moment, a man said, “Gillian, get away from there. If I’ve told you once about answering the door, I’ve told you a thousand…” He jerked it open. A small girl in patent-leather tap shoes, tights, and a ballerina’s tutu peered round his leg, one arm clinging to his thigh.

Nkata had his identification ready. The man didn’t look at it. “Saw you on the telly,” he said. “I’m Ronald X. Ritucci. Come in. D’you mind the kitchen? Gail’s still feeding the baby. Au pair’s down with flu, unfortunately.”

Nkata said he didn’t mind, and he followed Ritucci, after the man had closed, bolted, and tested the security of the front door. They went to a modernised kitchen at the back of the house, where a glassed-in nook held a pine table and matching chairs. There a harried-looking woman in a business suit was trying to spoon something into the mouth of a child perhaps one year old. This would be Gail, making a heroic attempt in the absence of her au pair to do the mother thing before she dashed off to work.

She said, like her husband, “You were on the television.”

The child Gillian put in a clear, bell-like observation. “He’s a black man, Daddy, isn’t he?”

Ritucci looked mortified, as if the identification of Nkata’s race were akin to mentioning a social disease that polite individuals would know to ignore. He said, “Gillian! That’s quite enough.” And to Nkata, “Tea, then? I can brew you a cup in a tick. No problem.”

Nkata told him no thanks. He’d just had his own breakfast and wanted nothing. He nodded towards one of the pine chairs and said, “C’n I…”

“Of course,” Gail Ritucci said.

Gillian said, “What did you eat, then? I had boiled egg ’n’ soldiers.”

Her father said to her, “Gillian, what did I just say?”

Nkata said to the child, “Eggs but no soldiers. My mum thinks I’m too old for them, but I ’xpect she’d make them if I asked nice enough. I had sausage ’s well. Some mushrooms and tomatoes.”

“All that?” the child asked.

“I’m a growing boy.”

“C’n I sit on your lap?”

This was apparently the limit. The parents said Gillian’s name in simultaneous horror, and the father swept her into his arms and out of the room. The mother shoved a spoonful of porridge into the gaping mouth of the toddler and said to Nkata, “She’s…It’s not you, Sergeant. We’re trying to teach her about strangers.”

Nkata said, “Mums and dads can’t ever be too careful in that department,” and geared up his pen to take down notes.

Ritucci returned almost immediately, having deposited his older child somewhere in the house, out of sight. Like his wife, he apologised, and Nkata found himself wishing there were actually something he could do to make them more comfortable.

He reminded them that they’d phoned the Crimewatch number. They’d reported a boy wearing makeup who’d burgled them…?

Gail Ritucci was the one who told the first part of the story, handing over the spoon and the porridge to her husband who took up feeding their other child. They’d been out for the evening, she explained, having dinner in Fulham with old friends and their children. When they got back to Clapham, they found themselves behind a van in their street. It was moving slowly, and at first they’d thought it was looking for a space to park. But when it passed one space and then another, they became uneasy.

“We’d got a notice about break-ins in the neighbourhood,” she said and turned to her husband. “When was that, Ron?”

He paused in his feeding of the toddler, spoon poised in the air. “Early autumn?” he said.

“I think that’s right.” She went back to Nkata. “So when the van crept along, it looked suspicious. I took down its number plates.”

“Well done,” Nkata told her.

She said, “Then we got home and the alarm was going off. Ron ran upstairs and saw the boy just as he went out of the window and onto the roof. Of course, we phoned the police at once, but he was long gone by the time they got here.”

“Took them two hours,” her husband said grimly. “Makes you wonder.”

Gail looked apologetic. “Well, naturally, there must have been other things…more important…an accident or serious crime…not that it wasn’t serious to us, to come home and find someone inside our house. But to the police…”

“Don’t make excuses for them,” her husband told her. He set down the porridge bowl and the spoon and used the edge of a tea towel to wipe the residue from his young child’s face. “Law enforcement’s going down the toilet. Has been for years.”

“Ron!”

“No offence intended,” he said to Nkata. “It’s probably not down to you.”

Nkata said no offence was taken, and he asked them if they’d given the number plates of that van to their local police.

They had done, they said. The very night they phoned. When the police finally showed up on their doorstep-“Must have been two A.M. then,” Ritucci said-it was in the person of two female constables. They took a report and tried to look sympathetic. They said they would be in touch and in the meantime to come down to the station in a few days and pick up their report for insurance purposes.

“That was the end of it,” Gail Ritucci told Nkata.

“Cops didn’t do a bloody thing,” her husband added.

ON HER WAY to meet Lynley in Upper Holloway, Barbara Havers stopped by the ground-floor flat, which she’d been passing assiduously with her eyes directed forward for ages by this point. She carried with her the peace offering she’d bought off Barry Minshall’s stall: the pencil-through-the-five-pound-note trick meant to amuse and delight one’s friends.

She missed both Taymullah Azhar and Hadiyyah. She missed the casual friendship they shared, dropping by one another’s digs for a chat whenever the fancy took them. They weren’t family. She couldn’t even say they were the next best thing to family. But they were…something, a piece of familiarity and a comfort. She wanted both back, and she was willing to eat humble pie if that was what it was going to take to put things right between them.

She knocked on their door and said, “Azhar? It’s me. Have you got a few minutes?” Then she stood back. A dim light shone through the curtains, so she knew they were up and about, perhaps shrugging into dressing gowns or something.

No one answered. Music’s on, she told herself. A radio alarm that hadn’t been shut off after it awoke the sleeper. She’d been too quiet in her attempt. So she knocked again, harder this time. She listened and tried to decide if what she heard behind the door was the rustle of someone disturbing the curtains to see who’d come calling so early in the morning. She looked towards the window; she studied the panel of material that covered the panes of the French door. Nothing.

Then she felt embarrassed. She stood back another step. She said more quietly, “Well, all right then,” and she moved off to her car. If that was the way he wanted it…If she’d hit him so far below the belt with her remark about his wife taking off…But she’d said nothing but the truth, hadn’t she? And anyway, they’d both played dirty and he hadn’t been trotting to the bottom of the garden to apologise to her.

She forced herself to shrug the matter off and she used even more determination to leave the vicinity without looking back to see if one of them was watching her from a parted curtain. She went to where she’d left her car, all the way over in Parkhill Road, which was the closest space she’d been able to find upon her return the previous night.

From there she drove to Upper Holloway and found the comprehensive whose address Lynley had phoned to her while she’d still been in bed, trying to make herself rise to the irresistible oldies beat of Diana Ross and the Supremes ordering someone to “set me free why doanchew babe” on her radio alarm. She’d reached for the phone, attempted to sound chipper, and taken down the information on the inside bodice-ripping cover of Torn by Desire, which had kept her awake far into the night with the burning question of whether the hero and heroine would give in to their fatal passion for each other. That would take some heavy guesswork, she’d told herself sardonically.

The comprehensive in question wasn’t too far from Bovingdon Close, where Davey Benton’s family lived. It looked like a minimum-security prison, one whose occasional visual relief had been supplied courtesy of a David Hockney wanna-be.

Despite the distance he’d had to travel to get there in comparison with her own, Lynley was already waiting for her. He looked dead grim. He’d been to call upon the Bentons, he explained.

“How’re they doing?”

“As you’d expect. As anyone would be doing in the same situation.” Lynley’s words were terse, even more than she would have expected them to be. She looked at him curiously and was about to ask him what was up when he nodded at the front of the school. “Ready, then?” he asked her.

Barbara was. They were there to talk to one Andy Crickleworth, supposed mate of Davey Benton. Lynley had said on the phone that he wanted as much ammunition as possible when they finally spoke to Barry Minshall in an interview room at the Holmes Street police station, and he had a feeling that Andy Crickleworth would be the person to supply it.

He’d phoned ahead so the comprehensive’s administrators would be aware of the police interest in one of their pupils. Thus it was a matter of a few minutes only before Lynley and Barbara found themselves in the company of the school’s headteacher, his secretary, and a thirteen-year-old boy. The secretary looked grey and defeated, and the headteacher had the used-up appearance of a man for whom a pension couldn’t come too soon. For his part, the boy had braces on his teeth, spots on his face, and hair slicked back in the manner of a 1930s gigolo. By raising one half of his upper lip as he entered the room, he managed to look scornful about the whole matter of meeting the police. But the rehearsed snarl couldn’t stop the fidgeting of his hands, which pressed down into his groin throughout the interview, as if they wished to stop him from wetting himself.

The headteacher-Mr. Fairbairn-made the introductions. They held their meeting in a conference room, round an institutional table that was itself surrounded by uncomfortable institutional chairs. His secretary sat in a corner, taking notes furiously, as if they’d need to be compared to Barbara’s in an eventual lawsuit.

Lynley began by asking Andy Crickleworth if he knew that Davey Benton was dead. Davey’s name was due to be released to the press that morning, but the grapevine is a powerful plant. If the school had been informed of the murder via Davey’s parents, there was a high probability the word was out.

Andy said, “Yeah. Everyone knows. Least everyone in year eight knows.” He didn’t sound regretful about the matter. He clarified this by saying, “He got murdered, right?,” and the tone of the question suggested being murdered was a higher form of leaving life than falling ill or dying in an accident, achieving a coolness unavailable to the others.

That belief would be typical of almost any thirteen-year-old boy, Barbara thought. Sudden death was a seven-day wonder to them, happening to someone else and never to you. She said lightly, “Throttled first, discarded second, Andy,” to see if that would shake him. “You know there’s a serial killer working round London, don’t you?”

“He got Davey?” If anything, Andy sounded impressed, not chastened. “You want me to help you catch him or summat?”

Mr. Fairbairn said to the boy, “You’re to answer their questions, Crickleworth. That will be the limit to the matter.”

Andy gave him a sod you look.

Lynley said, “Tell us about the Stables Market.”

Andy looked wary. “Wha’ about it, then?”

“We’re told by his parents that Davey went there. And if he went, I expect his whole crew went as well. You were part of his crew, weren’t you?”

Andy shrugged. “Might’ve gone there. But it wouldn’t’ve been to do nothing wrong.”

“Davey’s dad says he nicked a pair of handcuffs off a magic stall there. Do you know about that?”

“I didn’t nick nothing,” Andy said. “If Davey did, he did. Wouldn’t surprise me, though. Davey liked nicking things. Videos from the shop in Junction Road. Sweets off the newsagent. Banana from the market. He thought it was cool. I told him he was asking to be caught sometime and dragged off to the nick, but he wouldn’t listen. Tha’ was Davey all over. He liked the lads to think he was hard.”

“What about the magic stall?” Barbara put in.

“Wha’ about it, then?”

“Did you go there with Davey?”

“Hey, I said I never nicked-”

“This isn’t about you,” Lynley cut in. “It isn’t about what you did or did not steal and where you might or might not have stolen it. Are we clear on that? We have the word of Davey’s parents that he visited a magic stall in the Stables Market, but that’s all we have, aside from your name, which they also gave us.”

“I di’n’t even know them!” Andy sounded panicked.

“We realise that. We also realise that you and Davey had some difficulty getting on with each other.”

“Superintendent,” Mr. Fairbairn said in a monitory tone, as if understanding how easily “difficulty getting on” could lead them into an accusation he did not intend to allow spoken in his conference room.

Lynley held up his hand, stopping him from saying anything further. “But none of that is important now, Andy. Do you understand? What is important is what you can tell us about the market, the magic stall, and anything else that might help us find Davey Benton’s killer. Is that clear enough for you?”

Andy said reluctantly that it was, although Barbara doubted it. He seemed more fixed on the drama of the situation than on the grim reality behind it.

Lynley said, “Did you ever accompany Davey to the magic stall in the Stables Market?”

Andy nodded. “Once,” he said. “We all went down there. Wasn’t my idea or nothing, mind you. I can’t remember who said let’s go. But we did.”

“And?” Barbara asked.

“And Davey tried to pinch some handcuffs off that weird bloke runs the magic stall. He got caught and the rest of us scarpered.”

“Who caught him?”

“The bloke. The weird one. Dead weird, he is. He wants sorting, you ask me.” Andy seemed to make a sudden connection between the questions and Davey’s death. He said, “D’you think that wanker killed our Davey?”

“Did you ever see them together after that day?” Lynley asked. “Davey and the magician?”

Andy shook his head. “I never.” He frowned and then added after a moment, “’Cept they must’ve.”

“Must have what?” Barbara asked.

“Must’ve seen each other.” He squirmed in his seat to look at Lynley, and he told the rest of his tale to him. Davey, he said, did some magic tricks at school. They were dead-stupid tricks-prob’ly anyone could’ve done them, really-but Davey’d never done any tricks before the day the crew went to that stall in the Stables Market. After, though, he did a trick with a ball: making it disappear, although anyone with a brain bigger than a pea could’ve seen how he did it. And then he did a trick with a rope: He cut it in half and then produced it uncut. He might’ve taught himself off the telly or something or even out of a book, but p’rhaps that wanker magician’d taught him the tricks, in which case Davey had prob’ly seen him more than once.

Andy sounded proud of this deduction and he looked round as if waiting for someone to shout, “Holmes, you amaze me.”

Instead, Lynley said, “Had you ever been to the magic stall before that day?”

Andy said, “No. I never. Never,” but as he spoke, he pressed his hands down into his crotch and held them there, and his glance went to Barbara’s biro.

Lying, she thought. She wondered why. “Do you like magic yourself, then, Andy?”

“’S all right. But not that baby stuff with balls an’ ropes. I like the sort makes jets disappear. Or tigers. Not th’ other shit.”

“Crickleworth,” Mr. Fairbairn said in warning.

Andy shot him a look. “Sorry. I don’t like the sort Davey did. Tha’s for little kids, innit. It don’t suit me.”

“But it suited Davey?” Lynley said.

“Davey,” Andy said, “was a little kid.”

Just the sort, Barbara thought, to appeal to a sod like Barry Minshall.

There was nothing more that Andy could tell them. They had what they needed: confirmation that Minshall and Davey Benton had had an interaction. Even if the magician claimed that his prints were on the handcuffs because they had belonged to him although he hadn’t seen Davey steal them off his stall, the police would be able to thwart him there. Not only had he seen Davey attempt to steal the handcuffs, but he’d also caught the boy in the act. As far as Barbara could see, they had Minshall coming and going.

As she and Lynley left the comprehensive, she said, “La-dee-dah-dah, Superintendent. Barry Minshall’s about to become our breakfast.”

“If it were only that easy.” Lynley’s voice sounded heavy, not at all as she’d expected it to sound.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Barbara asked him. “We’ve the kid’s statement now, and you know we can get the rest of Davey’s crew onboard if we need them. We’ve got the Indian woman putting Davey at Minshall’s flat, and his prints are going to be all over it. So I’d say things are looking up. What would you say?” She looked at him closely. “Has something else happened, sir?”

Lynley paused by his car. Hers was farther along the street. He didn’t say anything for a moment and she was wondering if he would when he uttered one word, “Sodomised.”

She said, “What?”

“Davey Benton was sodomised, Barbara.”

She muttered, “Hell. It’s just like he said.”

“Who?”

“Robson told us things would escalate. That whatever gave the killer his kicks at first would fail after a while. He’d need more. Now we know what it was.”

Lynley nodded. “We do.” Then he roused himself to add, “I couldn’t bring myself to tell the parents about it. I went to do so-they have a right to know what happened to their son-but when it came down to it…” He glanced away from her, across the street to an old-age pensioner who was hobbling along, pulling a wheeled grocery trolley behind him. “It was his father’s worst fear. I couldn’t realise it for him. I didn’t have the heart. They’re going to have to know eventually. If nothing else, it’ll come out during the trial. But when I looked at his face…” He shook his head. “I’m losing the will to keep doing this, Havers.”

Barbara found her Players and brought the packet out. She offered him one and hoped he’d hold firm and refuse, which he did. She lit up herself. The smell of burning tobacco was sharp and bitter in the cold winter air. “It doesn’t make you less of a cop,” she said, “just because you’ve become more of a human being.”

“It’s the marriage thing,” he said to her. “It’s the fatherhood business. It makes one feel-” He corrected himself. “It makes me feel too exposed. I see how fleeting life can be. It can go in an instant, and this…what you and I are doing…it underscores that. And…Barbara, here’s what I never expected to feel.”

“What?”

“That I can’t bear it. And that dragging someone by his bollocks to justice isn’t going to change that for me any longer.”

She took a deep hit on the fag and held it long. It was all a crap shoot, she wanted to tell him. Life had strings but no guarantees. But he knew that already. Every cop knew it. Just as every cop knew that one didn’t safeguard a wife, a husband, or a family just by working every day on the side of good guys. Kids still went bad. Wives committed adultery. Husbands had heart attacks. Everything one possessed could easily be wiped out in an instant. Life was life.

She said, “Let’s just muddle through today. That’s what I say. We can’t take care of tomorrow till it gets here.”

BARRY MINSHALL didn’t look as if he’d had an easy night of it, which was what Lynley had had in mind when he’d decided to wait until morning to interview the magician. He was disheveled and stooped. He came into the interview room in the company of the duty solicitor-James Barty, he said his name was as he led Minshall to the table and lowered him into a chair-and when the magician sat, he squinted in the bright lights and asked if he could have his dark glasses returned to him.

“You’ll get nothing of use from looking at my eyes, if that’s what you hope,” he informed Lynley, and to make his point he raised his head and gave an illustration of his meaning. His eyes were slightly darker than the colour of smoke when dry wood burns, and they moved back and forth rapidly and incessantly. He took only a moment for this before he lowered his head. “Nystagmus and photophobia,” he said. “That’s what it’s called. Or do I need a note from my doctor to prove it to you lot? I need those glasses, all right? I can’t cope with the lights and I can’t bloody see without them anyway.”

Lynley nodded at Havers. She left the room to fetch Minshall’s glasses. Lynley took the time to make ready the tape recorder and to study their suspect. He’d not seen albinism in the flesh before. It wasn’t what, in his ignorance, he’d thought it would be. No pink eyes. No snow-white hair. Rather, the greyish eyes and a dense look to the hair, as if a buildup of deposits had been laid upon it over time, causing it to bear a yellow tint. He wore this hair long, although it was drawn back from his face and banded at his neck. His skin was completely without pigmentation. Not even a freckle dotted its surface.

When Havers returned with Minshall’s dark glasses, he put them on at once. This allowed him to raise his head although he kept it tilted throughout their interview, perhaps the better to control the dancing movement of his eyes.

Lynley began with the preliminaries spoken for the sake of the tape recording that was being made. He went on to give the formal caution in order to snare Minshall’s complete attention and in case the magician did not understand the extent of his jeopardy, which was unlikely. Then he said, “Tell us about your relationship with Davey Benton,” as next to him, Havers took out her notebook for good measure.

“Considering the present circumstances, I don’t think I’ll be telling you anything.” Barry Minshall’s words were even, sounding well rehearsed.

His solicitor rested back in his chair, apparently at ease with that answer. He would have had the entire night to advise his client of his rights had Minshall asked for them.

“Davey’s dead, Mr. Minshall,” Lynley said, “as you know. I’d advise you to take a more cooperative approach. Will you tell us where you were two nights ago?”

There was a marked hesitation as Minshall thought about all the ramifications of remaining silent or offering an answer to this question. He finally said, “At what hour, Superintendent?,” and gestured to his solicitor when Barty made a move, as if to stop him from speaking at all.

“At all hours,” Lynley told him.

“You can’t be more specific than that?”

“Are you that much in demand in the evenings?”

Minshall’s lips curved. Lynley found it was disconcerting to interview someone whose eyes were protected by dark lenses, but he schooled himself to look for other signs: in the movement of the Adam’s apple, the twitch of fingers, the alteration in posture.

“I closed my stall at the usual hour of half past five. No doubt John Miller-the bath-salts vendor-will confirm that, as he spends an inordinate amount of time observing the children who dawdle round me. I went from there to a café near my home, where I regularly eat my dinner. It’s called Sofia’s Cupboard although there’s no Sofia and the coziness implied by cupboard is absent. But the price is reasonable and they leave me alone, which is how I prefer it. I went from there to my home. I went out again briefly to buy milk and coffee. That was it.”

“And while you were home during the evening?” Lynley said.

“What about it?”

“What did you do? Watch your videos? Surf the Internet? Read a few magazines? Entertain visitors? Practise your magic?”

This took him some time to think about. He said, “Well, as I recall…,” and then spent a long while doing his recalling. Too long for Lynley’s liking. Doubtless, what Minshall was doing was trying to assess how much the police would be able to confirm depending upon what he claimed to have been doing. Phone calls? There would be records of them. Mobile phone? The same. Internet use? The computer would show it. Visits to the local pub? There would be witnesses. Considering the state of his digs, he could hardly claim to have been cleaning the house, so it was down to television-in which case he’d have to name the programmes-his magazines, or his videos.

He finally said, “I had an early night. I had a bath and went straight to bed. I don’t sleep well and occasionally it catches up with me, so I turn in early.”

“Alone?” Havers asked the question.

“Alone,” Minshall said.

Lynley took out the Polaroid photos they’d found in his flat. He said, “Tell us about these boys, Mr. Minshall.”

Minshall glanced down. After a moment he said, “Those would be the prize winners.”

“The prize winners?”

Minshall pulled the plastic case of Polaroids towards himself. “Birthday parties. They’re part of how I make my living, along with the stall in the market. I tell the hosts to have a game prepared for the children to play, and you’re looking at the prize.”

“Which is?”

“A magician’s costume. I have them made in Limehouse if you’d like the address.”

“The names of these boys? And why is the winner always a boy? Are there no girls where you perform?”

“One doesn’t actually find many girls who’re interested in magic. It doesn’t attract them as it does boys.” Minshall made much of examining the photos again. He held them closer to his face than was normal. He shook his head and put the pictures down. “I may have known their names at one time, but they’re gone now. In some cases, I don’t think I ever caught names at all. I didn’t think to. I never thought I’d have to name them to anyone. And certainly not to the police.”

“Why did you photograph them at all?”

“To show parents when arranging the next party,” he said. “It’s advertising, Superintendent. Nothing more sinister than that.”

Smooth, Lynley thought. He had to give Minshall credit. It was not in vain that the magician had spent his night locked up in the Holmes Street station. But all his smoothness wrote guilt large upon his person. The job now was to discover a crack in the confident persona.

Lynley said, “Mr. Minshall, we have Davey Benton placed at your stall. We have him stealing handcuffs from you. We have a witness to your catching him in the act. So I’ll ask you again to explain your relationship with the boy.”

“Catching him in the act of pinching something from the stall doesn’t constitute a relationship,” Minshall said. “Children try to pinch things from me all the time. Sometimes I catch them. Sometimes I don’t. In the case of this boy…the constable here”-with a nod at Barbara-“did tell me you’d come across some handcuffs related to him, and they might have come from my stall at some point in time. But if they did, doesn’t that suggest to you that I didn’t catch him in the act of pinching them at all? Because why would I catch him in the act and then let him go off with the handcuffs afterwards?”

“You may have had a very good reason for that.”

“What would that be?”

Lynley was not about to allow the suspect to start asking his own questions at this point or any other point in the interview. He knew they’d got all they were going to get from Minshall, but not all that was available. So he said, “A SOCO team is taking evidence from your flat as we speak, Mr. Minshall, and I daresay you and I both know what’s going to be found inside that place. Another officer has your computer in hand, and I’ve little doubt what sort of pretty pictures are going to turn up on it in short order when we begin logging on to the Web sites you’ve visited. In the meantime, forensic specialists are examining your van, your neighbour-I expect you know Mrs. Singh-positively identified Davey Benton as a child who visited you in Lady Margaret Road, and when she has a look at photos of some other dead boys…well, I expect you can fill the blanks there yourself. And this doesn’t begin to address the manner in which your fellow vendors in the Stables Market are going to dig your grave for you when we talk to them.”

“About what?” Minshall said, although he sounded less full of himself now and he glanced at the solicitor as if for some kind of support.

“About what’s about to happen now, Mr. Minshall. I’m arresting you on a charge of murder. One charge and counting. This interview is concluded for the moment.”

Lynley leaned forward, gave the date and the time, and switched off the recorder. He handed over his card to James Barty and said to the solicitor, “I’m available should your client wish to expatiate on any answers, Mr. Barty. In the meantime, we’ve got work to do. I’m sure the duty sergeant will make Mr. Minshall quite comfortable here before he’s moved to a remand centre.”

Outside, Lynley said to Havers, “We need to find the boys in those Polaroids. If there’s a tale to be told about Barry Minshall, one of them is going to tell it. We need to compare them to the photos of the dead boys as well.”

She looked back at the station. “He’s dirty, sir. I can feel it. Can you?”

“He’s what Robson told us to look for, isn’t he. That air of confidence. He’s up against it, and he’s not even worried. Check into his background. Go back as far as you can manage. If he was warned off biking on the pavement when he was eight years old, I want to know about it.” Lynley’s mobile rang as he was speaking. He waited till Havers had her actions jotted down in her notebook before he answered.

The caller was Winston Nkata, and his voice had the sound of someone who was being careful to control his excitement. “We got the van, guv. Night of Kimmo Thorne’s last break-in, a van was cruising down the street too slow, like it was doing a recce of the area. Cavendish Road station took the information, but nothing came of it. Couldn’t relate it to the break-in, they said. They said the witness had to be mistaken on the number plates.”

“Why?”

“’Cause the owner had an alibi. Confirmed by nuns from that Mother Teresa group.”

“An unimpeachable source, I’d say.”

“But listen to this. Van belongs to a bloke called Muwaffaq Masoud. His phone number matches the numbers we c’n see on the video of that van in St. George’s Gardens too.”

“Where can we find him?”

“Hayes. In Middlesex.”

“Give me the address. I’ll meet you there.”

Nkata did so. Lynley motioned to Havers to hand over her notebook and biro, and he jotted the address down in it. He ended the call from Nkata and thought about what this new development implied. Tentacles, he concluded. They were reaching out in all directions.

He said to Havers, “Get on to Minshall and the rest at the Yard.”

“Are we close to something?”

“Sometimes I think so,” he answered honestly, “and other times I think we’ve barely begun.”