With No One As Witness

CHAPTER FOUR

A DAY LATER, STEPHENSON DEACON AND THE DIRECTORATE of Public Affairs decided the time had ripened enough for the first press briefing. Assistant Commissioner Hillier, given the word from above, instructed Lynley to be there for the big event, with “our new detective sergeant” in tow. Lynley wanted to be there as little as Nkata, but he knew the wisdom of at least appearing to cooperate. He and the DS descended via the stairs to arrive promptly at the conference. They encountered Hillier in the corridor.

“Ready?” The AC spoke to Lynley and Nkata as he paused to examine his impressive head of grey hair in the glass cover of a notice board. Unlike the other two men, he looked pleased to be there and he seemed to be restraining himself from rubbing his hands in anticipation of the coming confrontation. Clearly, he expected the briefing to click along like the well-oiled machine it was designed to be.

He didn’t wait for a response to his question. Instead, he ducked into the room. They followed.

The print and broadcasting journalists had been relegated to the rows of seats fanning out before the dais. The television cameras were set to shoot over their heads. This would illustrate later for the public-via the nightly news-that the Met was making all possible efforts to keep the citizenry in the picture through an ostensibly open and welcoming venue for their human conduits of information.

Stephenson Deacon, the head of the Press Bureau, had himself chosen to make the prefatory remarks at this first briefing. His appearance not only signaled the importance of what was about to be announced, but it also telegraphed to the general public the appropriate level of police concern. Only the presence of the head of the DPA could have made a more impressive statement.

The newspapers had, of course, jumped upon the story of a body found on the top of a tomb in St. George’s Gardens, as anyone with a brain at New Scotland Yard had known they would. The reticence of the police at the crime scene, the arrival there of an officer from New Scotland Yard long before the removal of the body, the lapse of time between the body’s discovery and this press conference…All of it had whetted the appetite of the journalists and spoke of a much bigger story to come.

When Deacon turned the meeting over to him, Hillier played on this. He began with the larger purpose of the press conference, which was, he declared, “to make our young people aware of the dangers they face in the streets.” He went on to sketch out the crime under investigation, and just at the point at which anyone might have logically wondered why a briefing was being held to inform the media of a killing they’d already featured at the top of the news and on the first pages of their papers, he said, “At this juncture, we’re looking for witnesses to what appears to be a series of potentially related crimes against young men.”

It took less than five seconds for the word series to lead ineluctably to serial, at which point the reporters jumped aboard like commuters leaping on the night’s final train. Their questions erupted like pheasants from beaten bushes.

Lynley could see the pleasure in Hillier’s features as the reporters asked just the sort of questions that he and the Press Bureau had hoped they would ask, leaving unspoken the very topics that he and the Press Bureau had wished to avoid. Hillier held up a hand with an expression that communicated both his understanding and his tolerance of their outburst. He then went on to say precisely what he had planned to say, regardless of their questions.

The individual crimes, he explained, had initially been investigated by the murder squads most closely associated with the locations in which the bodies had been found. Doubtless their brother and sister journalists who were responsible for gathering the news at each of these relevant stations would be happy to supply the notes they themselves had already assembled on the killings, which would save everyone valuable time just now. For its part, the Met was going to press forward with a thorough investigation of this most recent murder, tying it to the others if there was a clear indication that the crimes were related. In the meantime, the Met’s immediate concern-as he’d already mentioned-was the safety of the young people who populated the streets, and it was crucial that the message get out to them at once: Adolescent boys appeared to be the target of one or more killers. They needed to be aware of that and take appropriate precautions when away from home.

Hillier then introduced the “two leading officers” in the investigation. Acting Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley would be heading it and coordinating all previous investigations done by the local stations, he said. He would be assisted by Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata. No mention was made of DI John Stewart or anyone else.

There followed more questions, these about the composition, size, and strength of the squad, which Lynley answered. After that, Hillier deftly resumed control. He said, as if it had just crossed his mind, “While we’re on the subject of the constitution of the squad…,” and he went on to tell the journalists that he’d personally brought aboard forensic specialist Simon Allcourt-St. James, and to enhance his work and the work of the officers from the Met, a forensic psychologist-otherwise more commonly known as a profiler-would be contributing his services as well. For professional reasons, the profiler preferred to remain in the background, but suffice it to say that he had trained in the U.S. at Quantico, Virginia, home of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s profiling unit.

Hillier then drew the meeting to a practised close, telling the journalists that the Press Bureau would be offering them daily briefings. He switched off his mike and led Lynley and Nkata out of the room, leaving the reporters with Deacon, who signaled a minion to pass out the sheaves of additional information that had previously been determined suitable for media consumption.

In the corridor, Hillier gave a satisfied smile. “Time bought,” he said. “See that you use it well.” His attention then went to a man who was waiting nearby in the company of Hillier’s secretary, a visitor’s badge pinned to his baggy green cardigan. Hillier said to him, “Ah. Excellent. You’ve arrived already,” and he set about making the introductions. This was Hamish Robson, he told Lynley and Nkata, the clinical and forensic psychologist he’d just been speaking about to the journalists. Otherwise employed at the Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Dagenham, Dr. Robson had kindly agreed to be of assistance by joining Lynley’s murder squad.

Lynley felt his spine stiffen. He realised he’d been blindsided yet again, having erroneously assumed during the press conference that Hillier had been lying through his teeth about an unnamed forensic psychologist. He went through the motions of shaking Dr. Robson’s hand, however, while he said to Hillier, “If we could have a word, sir,” in as agreeable a voice as he could manage.

Hillier made much of glancing at his watch. He made even more of telling Lynley that the deputy commissioner was waiting for a report on the conference they’d only just concluded.

Lynley said, “This will take less than five minutes and I consider it essential,” adding the word sir as a deliberate afterthought whose tone and meaning Hillier could not avoid comprehending.

“Very well,” Hillier said. “Hamish, if you’ll excuse us…? DS Nkata will show you where the incident room-”

“I’ll need Winston for the moment,” Lynley said, not because this was strictly the truth but because somewhere along the line he knew he was going to have to drive home to Hillier the point that the assistant commissioner of police was not running the investigation.

There was a tight little silence during which Hillier appeared to be evaluating Lynley for his level of insubordination. He finally said, “Hamish, if you’ll wait here for a moment,” and he ushered Lynley and Nkata not to an office, not to the stairs, not to the lift to take them above to his own quarters, but into the men’s toilet where he told a uniformed constable in the act of emptying his bladder to vacate the premises and stand before the door, allowing no one to enter.

Before Lynley could speak, Hillier said pleasantly, “Don’t do that again, please. If you do, you’ll find yourself back in uniform so fast that you’ll wonder who zipped your trousers.”

Seeing what the temperature of this conversation was likely to become despite Hillier’s momentarily affable tone, Lynley said to Nkata, “Winston, would you leave us, please? Sir David and I need to have some words I’d prefer you not hear. Go back to the incident room and see where Havers has got to with Missing Persons, particularly with the one that looks like a possibility.”

Nkata nodded. He didn’t ask if he was meant to take Hamish Robson with him as previously ordered by Hillier. Instead, he looked glad of the command that gave him the opportunity to demonstrate where his loyalties lay.

When he was gone, Hillier was the one to speak. “You’re out of order.”

“With due respect,” Lynley returned, although he felt little enough of it, “I believe you are.”

“How dare you-”

“Sir, I’ll bring you up to the minute daily,” Lynley said patiently. “I’ll face the television cameras if you like and sit at your side and force DS Nkata to do the same. But I’m not going to hand over the direction of this investigation to you. You need to stay out of it. That’s the only way this is going to work.”

“Do you want to be up for review? Believe me, that can be arranged.”

“If you need to do it, you’ll have to do it,” Lynley replied. “But, sir, you’ve got to see that at the end of the day, there has to be only one of us heading this inquiry. If you want to be that person, then be him and have done with pretending I’m in charge. But if you want me to be that person, you’re going to have to back off. You’ve blindsided me twice now, and I don’t want a third surprise.”

Hillier’s face went the red of sunset. But he said nothing as he evidently registered the lengths Lynley had gone to to remain calm as he simultaneously evaluated the ramifications of Lynley’s words. He finally said, “I want daily briefings.”

“You’ve been getting them. You’ll continue to get them.”

“And the profiler stays.”

“Sir, we don’t need psychic mumbo jumbo at this point.”

“We need all the help we can get!” Hillier’s voice grew loud. “The papers are twenty-four hours away from starting the hue and cry. You damn well know that.”

“I do. But we also both know that’s going to happen eventually, now that the other murders have been mentioned.”

“Are you accusing me-”

“No. No. You said what had to be said in there. But once they start digging, they’ll go after us, and there’s plenty of truth in what they’re going to allege about the Met.”

“Where the hell are your loyalties?” Hillier demanded. “Those buggers are going to go back and look up the other murders and then they’ll put it down to us-not to themselves-that not one of them ever made the front page. At which point they’ll wave the racism flag, and when they do, the whole community’s going to blow. Like it or not, we have to stay one step ahead of them. The profiler’s one way to do it. And that, as you might say, is that.”

Lynley considered this. He hated the idea of having a profiler onboard, but he had to admit that his presence did serve the purpose of buoying up the investigation in the eyes of the journalists who were covering it. And while he ordinarily had no use for either newspapers or television-seeing the collection and dissemination of information as something that was yearly becoming more opprobrious-he could understand the necessity of keeping their focus on the progress of the current investigation. If they started to rave about the Met’s failure to see the relationships among three prior killings, they would put the police in the position of having to waste time attempting to excuse the lapse. This served no one and nothing but the coffers of the newspapers, who might be able to increase their sales by fanning the flames of a public indignation that always lay like a dragon in repose.

“All right,” Lynley said. “The profiler stays. But I determine what he sees and what he doesn’t.”

“Agreed,” Hillier said.

They returned to the corridor, where Hamish Robson waited for them unaccompanied. The profiler had taken himself down to a notice board some distance from the toilets. Lynley had to admire the man for that.

He said, “Dr. Robson?,” to which Robson replied, “Hamish. Please.”

Hillier said, “The superintendent will take you in hand at this point, Hamish. Good luck. We’re relying on you.”

Robson glanced from Hillier to Lynley. Behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes looked wary. The rest of his expression was muted by his greying goatee, and as he nodded, a lock of thinning hair flopped onto his forehead. He brushed it off. The glint of a gold signet ring caught the light. “I’m happy to do what I can,” he said. “I’ll need the police reports, the crime-scene photos…”

“The superintendent will give you what you need,” Hillier said. And to Lynley, “Keep me up to speed.” He nodded to Robson and strode off in the direction of the lifts.

As Robson observed Hillier walking off, Lynley observed Robson and decided he looked harmless enough. There was, indeed, something vaguely comforting about his dark green cardigan and his pale yellow shirt. He wore a conservative, solid-brown tie with this, the same colour as his trousers, which were worn and lived in. He was podgy of body and looked like everyone’s favourite uncle.

“You work with the criminally insane,” Lynley said as he led the other man to the stairwell.

“I work with minds whose only outlet for torment is the commission of a crime.”

“Isn’t the one the same as the other?” Lynley asked.

Robson smiled sadly. “If that were only the case.”

LYNLEY BRIEFLY INTRODUCED Robson to the team before he took him from the incident room to his office. There he gave the psychologist copies of the crime-scene photographs, the police reports, and the preliminary postmortem information from the forensic pathologists who’d examined the bodies at the scene of each crime. He held back the autopsy reports. Robson took a cursory look through the material, then explained that it would take him at least twenty-four hours to evaluate it.

That was no problem, Lynley told him. There was plenty for the team to do while they were waiting for his…Lynley wanted to say performance, as if the man were a psychic come to bend spoons in their presence. He settled on information instead. Report gave Robson too much legitimacy.

“The investigators seemed…” Robson appeared to look for a word. “Rather wary to have me among them.”

“They’re used to the old-fashioned way of doing things,” Lynley told him.

“I believe they’ll find what I have to say useful, Superintendent.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Lynley said, and he called Dee Harriman to see Dr. Robson on his way.

When the profiler had departed, Lynley returned to the incident room and the work at hand. What did they have? he wanted to know.

DI Stewart was, as ever, ready with his report, which he stood to present like a schoolboy hoping for high marks from the teacher. He announced he’d subdivided his officers into teams, the better to deploy them in different areas. At this, a few eyes rolled heavenward in the incident room. Stewart did most things like a frustrated Wellington.

They were inching forward, engaging in the tedious plodwork of a complicated investigation. Stewart had two officers from team one-“They’ll be doing background,” he reported-covering the mental hospitals and the prisons. They had unearthed a number of potential leads that they were following up: paedophiles having finished their time in open conditions within the last six months, paroled murderers of adolescents, gang members in remand awaiting trial-

“And from youth offenders?” Lynley asked.

Stewart shook his head. Sod all appeared useful from that end of things. All the youth offenders recently released were accounted for.

“What are we getting from the door-to-doors at the body sites?” Lynley asked.

Little enough. Stewart had constables reinterviewing everyone in those areas, seeking witnesses to anything at all. They knew the drill: It wasn’t so much the unusual that they were looking for, but the ordinary that, upon reflection, made one stop and think. Since serial killers by their very nature faded into the woodwork, the woodwork itself had to be examined, inch by tedious inch.

He’d directed enquiries to hauling companies as well, Stewart explained, and he’d so far come up with fifty-seven lorry drivers who would have been on Gunnersbury Road on the night when the first victim had been left in Gunnersbury Park. A DC was in the process of contacting them, to see if she could jump-start their memories about any kind of vehicle that might have been parked alongside the brick wall of the park, on the road into London. In the meantime, another DC was in touch with every taxi and minicab service, looking for much the same result. As to the door-to-door, a line of houses stood directly across the road from the park, albeit separated from it by four lanes of traffic and a central reservation. There were hopes of getting something from one of them. One never knew who might have been suffering insomnia and gazing out of the window on the night in question. The same went for Quaker Street, by the way, where a block of flats stood opposite the abandoned warehouse in which the third body had been found.

On the other hand, the multi-story carpark location-site of the second body-was going to be more difficult. The only person who might have seen anything inside it was the attendant on duty that night, but he swore he’d seen nothing between one in the morning and six-twenty, when the body was discovered by a nurse heading to an early shift at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. That didn’t, of course, mean he hadn’t slept right through the entire circumstance. The carpark in question had no central kiosk at which an attendant sat day and night, but rather an office tucked away deep in the interior of the structure and furnished with a reclining chair and a television set to make the long hours of the night shift seem moderately less so.

“And St. George’s Gardens?” Lynley asked.

That was somewhat more hopeful, Stewart reported. According to Theobald’s Road’s DC who’d canvassed the vicinity, a woman living on the third floor of the building at the junction of Henrietta Mews and Handel Street heard what she thought was the sound of the garden’s gate being opened sometime round three in the morning. She’d thought it was the park warden at first, but upon reflection she’d realised it was far too early for him to be unlocking the gates. By the time she got herself out of bed, swathed in her dressing gown, and in place at her window, she was just in time to see a van driving off. It passed beneath a streetlamp as she watched. It was “large-ish,” as she described it. She thought the colour of the van was red.

“That’s taken it down to a few hundred thousand vans across the city, however,” Stewart added regretfully. He flipped his notebook closed, his report complete.

“We need to get someone on to Swansea, pulling vehicle records anyway,” Barbara Havers said to Lynley.

“That, Constable, is a complete nonstarter, and you ought to know it,” Stewart informed her.

Havers bristled and began to respond.

Lynley cut her off. “John.” He said the DI’s name in a minatory tone. Stewart subsided, but he didn’t look happy to have Havers-lowly DC that she was-offering her opinion.

Stewart said, “Fine. I’ll see to it. I’ll put someone on to the old bat in Handel Street as well. We may be able to jog something else from her memory about what she saw from that window.”

“What about the piece of lace on body four?” Lynley asked.

Nkata was the one to reply. “Looks like tatting, you ask me.”

“What?”

“Tatting. That’s what it’s called. My mum does it. Knotting up string along the edges of a mat. For putting on antique furniture or under a piece of porcelain or something.”

“Are you talking about an antimacassar?” John Stewart asked.

“Anti-what?” one of the DCs asked.

“It’s antique lacework,” Lynley explained. “The sort of thing ladies used to do for their bottom drawers.”

“Bloody hell,” Barbara Havers said. “Our killer’s an Antiques Roadshow freak?”

Guffaws all round greeted this remark.

Lynley said, “What about the bicycle left in St. George’s Gardens?”

“Prints on it are the kid’s. There’s some sort of residue on the pedals and the gear shift, but SO7’s not done with it yet.”

“The silver at the scene?”

Aside from the fact that the silver comprised only photo frames, no one knew anything else about it. Someone made reference to the Antiques Roadshow once again, but the comment was less humorous the second time round.

Lynley told them all to carry on. He directed Nkata to continue trying to make contact with the family of the one missing boy who looked like a possible match, he told Havers to continue with the missing-persons reports-an order she did not embrace with a full heart, if her expression was any indication-and he himself returned to his office and sat down with the autopsies. He put on his reading spectacles and went over the reports with eyes that he tried to make fresh. He also created a crib sheet for himself. On this, he wrote:

Means of death: strangulation by ligature in all four cases; ligature missing.

Torture prior to death: palms of both hands burnt in three of four cases.

Marks of restraints: across the forearms and at ankles in all four cases, suggesting victim tied to an armchair of some kind or possibly supine and restrained another way.

Fibre analysis corroborates this: same leather fibres on the arms and ankles in all four cases.

Contents of stomach: a small amount of food eaten within an hour preceding death in all four cases.

Gagging device: duct-tape residue over the mouth in all four cases.

Blood analysis: nothing unusual.

Postmortem mutilation: abdominal incision and removal of navel in victim four.

Marking: forehead marked in blood in victim four.

Trace evidence on the bodies: black residue (under analysis), hairs, an oil (under analysis) in all four cases.

DNA evidence: nothing.

Lynley went through it all once, then a second time. He picked up the phone and called SO7, the forensic lab on the south bank of the Thames. It had been ages since the first of the murders. Surely by now they had an analysis of both the oil and the residue they’d found on the first of the bodies, no matter how overwhelmed with work they were.

Maddeningly, they had nothing yet on the residue, but “Whale” was the single answer he was given when he finally tracked down the responsible party in Lambeth Road. She was called Dr. Okerlund, and she was apparently given to monosyllables unless pressed for more information.

“Whale?” Lynley asked. “Do you mean the fish?”

“For God’s sake, mammal,” she corrected him. “Sperm whale, to be exact. Official name-the oil, not the whale-is ambergris.”

“Ambergris? What’s it used for?”

“Perfume. All you need from me, Superintendent?”

“Perfume?”

“Are we playing at echoes here? That’s what I said.”

“Nothing else?”

“What else d’you want me to say?”

“I mean the oil, Dr. Okerlund. Is it used for anything besides perfume?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” she said. “That’s your job.”

He thanked her for the reminder as pleasantly as he could manage. Then he rang off. He added the word ambergris in the section for trace evidence, and he returned to the incident room. He called out, “Anyone familiar with ambergris oil? It was found on the bodies. It’s from whales.”

“Cardiff, I reckon,” a DC noted.

“Not Wales,” Lynley said. “Whales. The ocean. Moby-Dick.”

“Moby-who?”

“Christ, Phil,” someone called out. “Try elevating your reading beyond page three.”

Ribald remarks greeted this comment. Lynley let them feed off one another. To his way of thinking, the work they had to engage in was time consuming, wearisome, and gut wrenching, weighing on the shoulders of the officers involved and often causing trouble in their homes. If they needed to relieve the stress of it with humour, that was fine by him.

Nonetheless, what happened next was more than welcome. Barbara Havers looked up from a phone call she had just completed.

“We’ve got a positive ID on St. George’s Gardens,” she announced. “He’s a kid called Kimmo Thorne and he lived in Southwark.”

BARBARA HAVERS INSISTED that they take her car, not Nkata’s. She saw Lynley’s assigning her to the interview of Kimmo Thorne’s relations as an opportunity for a celebratory cigarette, and she didn’t want to pollute the interior of Winston’s pristinely kept Escort with her ash or smoke. She lit up as soon as they hit the underground carpark, and she watched with some amusement as her colleague folded his six-feet, four-inch frame into her Mini. He was left grumbling, with his knees pressed into his chest and his head scraping the ceiling.

Once she finally got the car started, they lurched in the direction of Broadway. From there, Parliament Square opened onto Westminster Bridge and their route across the river. This was more Winston’s territory than it was Barbara’s, and he acted the part of navigator once York Road loomed in front of them on the left. From that point, she found it short work to weave over to Southwark, where Kimmo Thorne’s aunt and grandmother lived in one of the many nondescript blocks of flats that had been thrown up south of the river after the Second World War. The building’s only distinction turned out to be its proximity to the Globe Theatre. But as Barbara sardonically pointed out to Nkata as they alighted into the cramped street, it wasn’t as if anyone who lived in the vicinity could actually afford a ticket.

When they presented themselves at the Thorne establishment, they found Gran and Aunt Sal sitting dully before three framed photographs that had been placed on a coffee table in front of their sofa. They’d identified the body, Aunt Sal explained. “I di’n’t want Mum to go, but she wasn’t having any of that from me. It’s done her in proper, seeing our Kimmo laid out like that. He was a good boy. I hope they hang who did this to him.”

Gran said nothing. She looked shell-shocked. In her hand she clutched a white handkerchief that was embroidered round the edges with lavender bunnies. She gazed on one of the pictures of her grandson-in it he appeared curiously attired as if for a fancy dress party, wearing an odd combination of lipstick, a Mohawk, green tights, and a Robin Hood tunic with Doc Marten boots-and she pressed the handkerchief beneath her eyes when tears welled up in them during the course of their interview.

The police, Barbara told Kimmo Thorne’s gran and aunt, were doing everything they could to find the young man’s killer. It would help enormously if Miss and Mrs. Thorne would tell them everything they could about the last day of Kimmo’s life.

After she said all this, Barbara realised that she’d automatically assumed the role that had once been hers, the very role that now belonged to Nkata. She gave a tiny grimace of chagrin and looked in his direction. He lifted a hand, telegraphing “It’s okay” in a gesture that was unnervingly like one Lynley might have made in the same circumstances. She dug out her notebook.

Aunt Sal took the request seriously. She started with Kimmo’s rising in the morning. He dressed in his usual-

“Leggings, boots, an outsize sweater, that nice Brazilian scarf knotted round his waist…the one his mum and dad sent over at Christmas, do you remember it, Mum?”

– and put on his makeup. He had his breakfast of cornflakes and tea, and he went to school.

Barbara exchanged a glance with Nkata. Considering the description of the boy, along with the pictures on the coffee table and their proximity to the Globe, the next question rose naturally. Nkata asked it. Was Kimmo taking courses at the theatre? Acting classes or the like?

Oh, their Kimmo was made for drama and make no mistake about that, Aunt Sal replied. But no, he wasn’t doing a course at the Globe or anywhere else. As things turned out, this was his regular getup when he left the flat. Or when he stayed in the flat, if it came down to that.

Setting aside the issue of his clothing, Barbara said, “He wore makeup regularly, then?” When the two women nodded, she did a mental cross off on one of their working theories: that the killer might have bought cosmetics somewhere and smeared them across the most recent victim’s face. Yet it was hardly likely that Kimmo was attempting to attend school thus arrayed. Certainly, his aunt and gran would have heard from the head teacher if that had been the case. Still, she asked them if Kimmo had returned home from school-or wherever he’d been, she added mentally-at the usual time on the day of his death.

They said he’d been back by six o’clock as usual, and they’d had dinner together as usual as well. Gran did a fry-up, which Kimmo didn’t much like because he was watching his figure, and afterwards Aunt Sal did the washing up while Kimmo applied the tea towel to the cutlery and crockery.

“He was the same as always,” Aunt Sal said. “Chatting, telling stories, making me laugh till my insides hurt. He had a real way with words. Wasn’t a thing in life he couldn’t make a drama of and act it out. And sing and dance…the boy could do them like magic.”

“‘Do them’?” Nkata asked.

“Judy Garland. Liza. Barbra. Dietrich. Even Carol Channing when he put on the wig.” He’d been working hard lately at Sarah Brightman, Aunt Sal said, only the high notes were a trial for him and he’d not got the hands quite right. But he would’ve, he would’ve, God love the boy, only now…

Finally, Aunt Sal broke down. She began to sob when she tried to speak, and Barbara glanced Nkata’s way to see if he was making the same assessment of this little family: It was clear that as odd as Kimmo Thorne had looked and might have been, he’d also been night and day to his aunt and his gran.

Gran took her daughter’s hand and pressed the bunny-edged handkerchief into it. She took up the story.

He did Marlene Dietrich for them after supper: “Falling in Love Again.” The tails, the mesh stockings, the heels, the hat…Even the platinum hair, with its little scoop of a wave. He had it all down perfect, had Kimmo. And then after the show, he went out.

“What time was this?” Barbara asked.

Gran looked at an electric clock that sat atop the television set. She said, “Half ten? Sally?”

Aunt Sal dabbed her eyes. “Somewhere round there.”

“Where was he going?”

They didn’t know. But he said he’d be messing about with Blinker.

“Blinker?” Barbara and Nkata said together.

Blinker, they confirmed. They didn’t know the boy’s last name-apparently Blinker was male and of the human species-but what they did know was that he was definitely the cause of any trouble their Kimmo ever got into.

The word trouble struck Barbara, but she let Nkata do the honours. “What sort of trouble?”

No real trouble, Aunt Sal assured them. And nothing he’d ever started on his own. It was just that that bloody Blinker-“Sorry, Mum,” she said hastily-had passed along something of some kind to their Kimmo, which Kimmo had flogged somewhere, only to be caught out selling stolen property. “But it was that Blinker responsible,” Aunt Sal said. “Our Kimmo’d never been in trouble before.”

That certainly remained to be seen, Barbara thought. She asked if the Thornes could direct them to Blinker.

They had no phone number for him, but they knew where he lived. They said it shouldn’t be hard to find him on any morning because the one thing they knew about him was that he was up all night hanging about Leicester Square and he slept till one in the afternoon. He kipped on his sister’s sofa, and she lived with her husband on Kipling Estate, near Bermondsey Square. Aunt Sal didn’t know the sister’s name-nor did she have the first idea of Blinker’s Christian name, but she expected if the police went round asking where a bloke called Blinker might be, someone would know for certain. Blinker was someone who always managed to get known.

Barbara asked if they might have a look through Kimmo’s belongings, then. Aunt Sal took them to his room. This was crowded with bed, dressing table, wardrobe, chest of drawers, television, and music system. The dressing table held a display of makeup that would have done Boy George proud. The top of the chest of drawers served as a location for wig stands, of which there were five. And the walls held dozens of professional head shots of Kimmo’s sources of apparent inspiration: from Edith Piaf to Madonna. The boy was nothing if not eclectic in his taste.

“Where’d he get the dosh for all this?” Barbara asked once Aunt Sal had left them to look through the dead boy’s lumber. “She didn’t mention anything about employment, did she?”

“Makes you think about what Blinker was really giving him to sell,” Nkata replied.

“Drugs?”

He waggled his hand: maybe yes, maybe no. “A lot of something,” he said.

“We need to find that bloke, Winnie.”

“Shouldn’t be tough. Someone’ll know him on the estate, ask round enough. Someone always does.”

Ultimately, they got little joy from their efforts in Kimmo’s room. A small stack of cards-birthday, Christmas, and the odd Easter thrown in, all signed “Lovekins, darling, from Mummy and Dad”-were hidden away in a drawer along with a photo of a well-tanned thirtysomething couple on a sunny, foreign balcony. A yellowed newspaper article about a transgender professional model who’d been outed by the tabloids in the distant past surfaced beneath a knot of costume jewellery on the dressing table. A hair-styling magazine-at least in other circumstances-could have indicated a future career.

Otherwise, much of it was what one would expect in the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old boy. Malodorous shoes, underpants screwed up beneath the bed, stray socks. It would have been ordinary, except for the presence of all the items that made it into a hermaphroditic curiosity.

When they’d seen it all, Barbara stood back and said to Nkata, “Winnie, what d’you reckon he was really into?”

Nkata joined her in assessing the room. “I got a feeling this Blinker can tell us.”

They both knew there was no point in looking up Blinker at the moment. They’d be better off trying in the morning just about the time those who had jobs would be setting off for work from the housing estate where Blinker lived. They returned to Aunt Sal and Gran, then, and Barbara asked about Kimmo’s parents. It was the small and pathetic hoard of postcards in the boy’s room that prompted her question, rather than a need to know for purposes of their investigation. It was also what that hoard of postcards said about people’s priorities in life.

Oh, they were in South America, Gran said. They’d been there since just before Kimmo’s eighth birthday. His dad was in the hotel business, you see, and they’d gone there to manage a luxury spa. They intended to send for Kimmo when they got settled in. But Mum wanted to learn the language first, and it was taking her longer than she’d thought it would.

Had they been informed of Kimmo’s death? Barbara asked. Because-

Gran and Aunt Sal had exchanged a look.

– surely there were arrangements they’d want to be making to come home straightaway.

She said this in part because she wanted them to have to acknowledge what she assumed: Kimmo’s parents were parents only because of an egg, a sperm, and an accidental inception. They had more important concerns than what had come of that flesh-rubbing moment between them.

Which led her to think of the other victims. And of what it was that might tie all of them together.