With No One As Witness

CHAPTER SIX

FIVE MORE DAYS PASSED. THEY COMPRISED WHAT EVERY investigation into murder comprised, cubed by the fact that the squad was dealing with multiple killings. So the hours that stacked upon hours, which worked their way into long days, longer nights, and meals grabbed on the run, ended up being devoted to 80 percent slog. This involved endless phone calls, record checks, fact gathering, statements taking, and reports making. Another 15 percent went to coalescing all the data and trying to make some sense of it. Three percent went to revisiting every piece of information dozens of times to make sure nothing had been misunderstood, misplaced, or missed altogether, and 2 percent went to the occasional feeling that progress was actually being made. Staying power was necessary for the first 80 percent. Caffeine worked well for the rest.

During this time, the Press Bureau did its promised part to keep the media informed, and at these events AC Hillier continued to require DS Winston Nkata-and frequently Lynley as well-to serve as window dressing for the Met’s display of Your Taxes at Work. Despite the maddening nature of the press conferences, Lynley had to admit that, so far, Hillier’s performances in front of the journalists appeared to be paying off, since the press had not begun baying yet. But that didn’t make the time spent with them any less onerous.

“My efforts might best be devoted to other pursuits, sir,” he informed Hillier as diplomatically as possible after his third appearance on the dais.

“This is part of the job,” was Hillier’s reply. “Cope.”

There was little enough to report to the journalists. DI John Stewart having divided his allocation of officers into teams, they were working with a military precision that could not be anything but pleasing to the man. Team one had completed their study of the alibis given by the possible suspects they’d dug up after looking into releases from mental hospitals and prisons. They’d done the same for sex offenders set free within the last six months. They’d documented who was working in open conditions prior to discharge, and they’d added homeless shelters to their list, to see if anyone behaving suspiciously had been hanging about on any of the murder nights. So far they’d uncovered nothing.

In the meantime, team two had taken over beating the bushes in an effort to roust out witnesses…to anything. Gunnersbury Park still looked like their best bet for this, and DI Stewart was, as he put it, damn well determined to find something in that direction. Surely, he had lectured the team, someone had to have seen a vehicle parked on Gunnersbury Road in the early hours of the morning when victim number one had been left inside, for it remained that the only two means of access into the park after hours were over the wall-which at eight feet high seemed an unlikely route for someone carrying a body-or through one of the two boarded-up sections of that wall on Gunnersbury Road. But so far, a canvassing of houses across the street had given team two nothing, and interviews with nearly all the lorry drivers who would have been on that route hadn’t unearthed anything either. Nor had conversations-still ongoing-with taxi and minicab companies.

They were left with the red van seen in the area of St. George’s Gardens. But when Swansea delivered a list of such vehicles registered to owners in the Greater London area, the total was an impossible 79,387. Even Hamish Robson’s profile of the killer-suggesting that they limit their interest to those vehicle owners who were male, single, and between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five-didn’t make that number remotely manageable.

The entire situation made Lynley long for the cinematic version of the detective’s life: a brief period of slog, a slightly longer period of cogitation, and then great scenes of action in which the hero chased the villain over land, over sea, through back alleys, and beneath elevated railway tracks, finally clobbering him into submission and securing his exhausted confession. But that wasn’t how it was.

It was after yet another appearance in front of the press that three hopeful developments occurred within moments of each other, however.

Lynley returned to his office in time to pick up the phone and receive a call from SO7. The analysis of the black residue on all of the bodies and on the bicycle had coughed up a valuable piece of information. The van they were looking for was likely a Ford Transit. The residue came from the disintegration of a type of optional rubber lining that had been offered for use on the floor of this vehicle between ten and fifteen years ago. The Ford Transit detail was going to go some way towards narrowing down the list they’d received from Swansea, although they wouldn’t know by how much until they fed the data into the computer.

When Lynley returned to the incident room with this news, he was greeted by the second development. They’d had a positive identification on the body left in the Bayswater carpark. Winston Nkata had taken a jaunt to Pentonville Prison to show photographs of their killer’s second victim to Felipe Salvatore-doing time for armed robbery and assault-and Salvatore had sobbed like a five-year-old when he declared the dead boy to be his little brother Jared whom he’d reported missing the first time he’d skipped a regular visit to the clink. As for any other members of Jared’s family…They were proving more difficult to locate, a fact apparently having to do with the cocaine addiction and peripatetic nature of the dead boy’s mother.

The final development also came from Winston Nkata, who’d spent two mornings on Kipling Estate, attempting to unearth someone whom they knew only as Blinker. His perseverance-not to mention his good manners-had finally paid off: One Charlie Burov, aka Blinker, had been located and was willing to talk to someone about his relationship with Kimmo Thorne, the St. George’s Gardens victim. He didn’t want to meet up on the housing estate where he dossed at his sister’s, though. Instead he would meet someone-not in uniform, he’d apparently stressed-inside Southwark Cathedral, five pews from the back on the left-hand side, at precisely 3:20 in the afternoon.

Lynley grasped the opportunity to get out of the building for a few hours. He phoned the assistant commissioner with an update that offered fodder for the next press conference, and he himself effected an escape to Southwark Cathedral. He tapped DC Havers to go along. He told Nkata to check Jared Salvatore’s name with Vice in the last police borough in which he’d lived, and after that to get on to the present location of the boy’s family. Then he set off with Havers in the direction of Westminster Bridge.

It was a straightforward affair to get to Southwark Cathedral once the general confusion round Tenison Way was mastered. Fifteen minutes after setting off from Victoria Street, Lynley and the detective constable were in the nave of the church.

Voices came from the direction of the chancel, where a group of what appeared to be students stood round someone pointing out details on the tester above the pulpit. Three out-of-season tourists were flipping through postcards at a bookstall directly across from the entrance, but no one appeared to be waiting for a meeting with anyone. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that, like most medieval cathedrals, Southwark had no regular pews, so there was no fifth-row-from-the-back-and-on-the-left seating where Charlie Burov, aka Blinker, might have slouched in anticipation of their arrival.

“So much for his churchgoing proclivities,” Lynley murmured. As Havers looked round, sighed, and muttered a curse, he added, “Mind the mouth, Constable. Lightning is never a dear commodity when it comes to the Lord.”

“He might’ve at least sussed out the place first,” she groused.

“In the best of all worlds.” Lynley finally spied a spindly, black-garbed figure near the baptismal font, who was darting looks in their general direction. “Ah. Over there, Havers. That could be our man.”

He didn’t run off as they approached him, although he cast a nervous glance towards the group at the pulpit and then another towards the people at the bookstall. When Lynley asked politely if he was Mr. Burov, the boy said, “’S Blinker. You the fuzz, then?” out of the side of his mouth like a character in a bad film noir.

Lynley introduced himself and Havers while he gave the boy a quick appraisal. Blinker appeared to be round twenty years old with a face that would have been completely nondescript had not head shaving and body piercing been in vogue. As it was, studs erupted from his face like a visitation of smallpox in silver and when he spoke, which was with some difficulty, it was to reveal half a dozen additional studs lined up along the edge of his tongue. Lynley didn’t want to think about the difficulty they presented the boy in eating. Hearing the difficulty they presented him in speaking was bad enough.

“This might not be the best place to have our conversation,” Lynley noted. “Is there somewhere nearby…”

Blinker agreed to a coffee. They managed to find a suitable café not far from St. Mary Overy Dock, and Blinker slid onto a chair at one of the grubby, Formica-topped tables where he studied the menu, and said, “C’n I get a spag bol, then?”

Lynley eased a malodorous ashtray towards Havers and said to the boy, “Be my guest,” although he shuddered at the thought of personally ingesting any kind of food-not to mention any kind of pasta-served up in a place where one’s shoes adhered to the lino and the menus looked in need of disinfectant.

Blinker apparently took Lynley’s reply as licence for liberality, for when the waitress came for their order he added gammon steak, two eggs, chips, and mushrooms along with a tuna and sweet-corn sandwich to the spaghetti. Havers ordered an orange juice, Lynley a coffee. Blinker grabbed the plastic salt shaker and began rolling it between his palms.

He didn’t want to talk until he’d “had a nosh,” he told them. So they waited in silence for the first of his plates to arrive, Havers taking the opportunity for another smoke, Lynley nursing his coffee and steeling himself to the spectacle of the boy working food past his tongue studs.

He’d apparently had plenty of practice, as things turned out. When the first plate was deposited in front of him, Blinker made quick work of the gammon steak and its companions, with minimum fuss and-blessedly-even less display. When he’d sopped up the remaining egg yolk and gammon grease with a triangle of toast, he said, “Better, that,” and appeared ready to give himself over for conversation and a cigarette, which he cadged from Havers while he waited for the pasta’s arrival on the scene.

He was “that torn up” about Kimmo, he told them. But he’d warned his mate-he’d warned him a hundred million times-about taking it up the chute from blokes he didn’t know. Kimmo always claimed the risk was worth it, though. And he always made them use a spunk bag…even if, admittedly, he didn’t always turn round at the vital moment to make sure it was on.

“I tol’ him it wa’n’t about some bloke infectin’ him, for God’s sake,” Blinker said. “It was about ’xactly what happened to him anyways. I never wanted him out there alone. Never. When Kimmo was on the streets, I was on the streets wif him. Tha’s the way it was s’posed to be.”

“Ah,” Lynley said. “I’m getting the picture. You were Kimmo Thorne’s pimp, then?”

“Hey. It wa’n’t like that.” Blinker sounded affronted.

“So you weren’t his pimp?” Barbara Havers put in. “What would you call it when it was home with its mother?”

“I was his mate,” Blinker said. “I kept watch for any nasty sort of business ’at might be going on, like some bloke wif more on his mind than a bit ’f fun wif Kimmo. We worked together, like a team. It wa’n’t my fault, was it, Kimmo being the one they fancied?”

Lynley wanted to say that Blinker’s appearance might have had something to do with who was being fancied by the punters, but he let the subject go. He said, “The night Kimmo disappeared, he didn’t start out with you, then?”

“I di’n’t even know he was going out, did I. We’d done Leicester Square the night before, see, and we’d found a party wanting some entertainment over in Hollen Street, so we did a bit of business wif them. We had enough dosh off that that we di’n’t need to be out again and Kimmo said his gran wanted him home for a night anyways.”

“Was that normal?” Lynley asked.

“Nah. So I should’ve known summat was up when he said it, but I didn’t cos it was fine wif me not to go out. I had the telly…and other things to do.”

“Such as?” Havers asked. When Blinker didn’t respond, merely looking in the direction of the kitchen for his spaghetti Bolognese to put in an appearance, she said, “What else were you two into besides prostitution, Charlie?”

“Hey. Like I said. We never were into-”

“Let’s not play games,” Havers cut in. “Tart it up any way you want, but the truth is, if you get paid for it, Charlie, it’s not true love. And you did get paid for it, right? Isn’t that what you said? And isn’t that why you didn’t need to be going out another night? Because Kimmo had earned you enough cash for a week probably, providing ‘entertainment’ in Hollen Street. I’m wondering what you did with the lolly, though. Smoke it, shoot it, snort it? What?”

“You know, I don’ have to talk to you lot,” Blinker said hotly. “I could get up right now and be out of that door faster’n-”

“And miss your spaghetti Bolognese?” Havers asked. “Holy hell, not that.”

Lynley said, “Havers,” in the tone he generally used-with limited success-to restrain her. And to Blinker, “Would it have been like Kimmo to go off on his own? Despite your usual arrangement?”

“He did sometimes, yeah. Like I said. I tol’ him not to, but he did it anyways. I said it wa’n’t safe. He wa’n’t a big bloke, was he, an’ if he misjudged who he let do him…” Blinker crushed his cigarette and looked away. His eyes grew watery. “Stupid little bugger,” he muttered.

His spaghetti Bolognese showed up, along with a dispenser of cheese that looked like sawdust deficient in iron. This he sprinkled delicately over the pasta and tucked in, his emotion subdued by his appetite. The café door opened and two workmen entered, jeans whitened by plaster dust and thick-soled shoes crusted with cement. They called out familiar hellos to the cook who was visible by means of a serving hatch, and they chose a table in a corner where they placed their orders for a multicourse meal not unlike the one Blinker himself had requested.

“I tol’ him this would happen if he went it alone,” Blinker said when he had finished wolfing down the pasta and was waiting for his tuna and sweet-corn sandwich. “I tol’ him over an’ over, but he never listened, did he. He said he could tell about blokes, he could. The bad ones, he said, they have this kind of smell ’bout them. Like they been thinking too long what they want to do to you and it makes their skin all oily and cooked up, like. I tol’ him that was rubbish and he had to take me wif him no matter what, but he wasn’t having any of that, was he, so look what happened.”

“So you think this is the work of a punter,” Lynley said. “Kimmo making a bad judgment call when he was alone.”

“What else could it be?”

“Kimmo’s gran said you’ve got him in trouble,” Havers said. “She claims he was flogging stolen property you handed over to him. What d’you know about that?”

Blinker rose in his chair as if he’d been mortally wounded. “I never!” he said. “She’s a bloody liar, she is. Flaming old cow. She di’n’t like me from the first and now she’s tryin to get me under the cosh, i’n’t she. Well, any trouble Kimmo got in di’n’t have nothing to do wif me. You ask round Bermondsey and see who knows Blinker and who knows Kimmo. Tha’s what you do.”

“Bermondsey?” Lynley asked.

But Blinker was saying nothing else. He was, instead, fuming at the idea that someone had fingered him as a thief instead of as what he really was, a common chili chump on the street, promoting the services of a fifteen-year-old boy.

Lynley said, “Were you and Kimmo lovers, by the way?”

Blinker shrugged, as if the question were unimportant. He looked round for his tuna sandwich, saw it waiting for delivery on the sill of the serving hatch, and went to fetch it himself. The waitress said, “Hang on, mate. I’ll get to you soon ’nough.”

Blinker ignored her and took the sandwich to the table. There, he didn’t sit again. Nor did he eat. Instead, he wrapped the sandwich in his used paper napkin and shoved the package into the pocket of his worn leather jacket.

Lynley watched him and saw that the young man wasn’t so much piqued by his final question as he was grieved in a way that he clearly had not expected to be. In a quivering muscle visible on his jaw, the answer lay. He and the dead boy had indeed been lovers, if not recently then initially, and probably before they had set off on a course of making money through the use of Kimmo’s body.

Blinker looked at them as he zipped his jacket. He said, “Like I said. Kimmo wouldn’t’ve had no trouble if he stayed wif me. But he didn’t, did he? He went his own way when I tol’ him not to. Thought he knew the world, he did. And look where it got him.” That said, he was gone, making for the door and leaving Lynley and Havers studying the remains of his spaghetti Bolognese like high priests searching for auguries.

Havers said, “Didn’t even say cheers for the meal.” She picked up his fork and twirled two strands of the pasta onto it. This she then raised to the level of her eyes. “The body, though. Kimmo’s body. None of the reports claim sex before he died, do they?”

“None of the reports,” Lynley agreed.

“Which could mean…?”

“That his death has nothing to do with working the streets. Unless, of course, what happened that night happened before they ever got to the sex.” Lynley pushed his coffee cup to the centre of the table, most of it undrunk.

“But if we have to eliminate sex as part…?” Havers asked.

“Then the question is: How are you at getting up before dawn?”

She looked at him. “Bermondsey?”

“I’d say that’s our next direction.” Lynley watched her as she considered this, the fork still dangling from her fingers.

She finally nodded, but she didn’t look pleased. “I hope you’re planning to be part of that party.”

“I’d hardly let a lady prowl round South London in the dark on her own,” Lynley replied.

“That’s good news, then.”

“I’m glad you’re reassured. Havers, what are you intending to do with that pasta?”

She glanced at him, then back at the fork still dangling in the air. “This?” she said. She popped the spaghetti into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. “They definitely need to do some work on their al dente,” she told him.

JARED SALVATORE, the second victim of their murderer-to whom they’d begun referring as Red Van for want of another sobriquet-had lived in Peckham, some eight miles as the crow flies from where his body had been found in Bayswater. Since from Pentonville Prison Felipe Salvatore had not been able to provide a recent address for his family, Nkata went first to their last-known abode, which was a flat in the wilderness of North Peckham Estate. This was a place where no one wandered unarmed after dark, where cops were not welcome, where turf was marked. It offered the worst there was in communal living: dismal lines of washing hanging from balconies and from drainpipes, broken and tyreless bicycles, shopping trolleys given over to rust, and every kind of rubbish imaginable. The North Peckham area made Nkata’s own housing estate look like Utopia on opening day.

At the address he’d been given for the Salvatore family, Nkata found no one at home. He knocked up neighbours who either knew nothing or were willing to say nothing, until he found one who offered the information that the “crackhead cow and her snivellers” had finally been evicted after a monumental battle with Navina Cryer and her crew, all of whom hailed from Clifton Estate. That was the extent of the information available on the family. But having been given a new name-that of Navina Cryer-Nkata next went to Clifton Estate to seek her and whatever information she could give him of the Salvatores.

Navina turned out to be a sixteen-year-old girl who was hugely pregnant. She lived with her mother and her two younger sisters, along with two toddlers in nappies who, during Nkata’s conversation with the girl, were never identified as belonging to anyone. Unlike the denizens of North Peckham Estate, Navina was only too happy to talk to the police. She took a long look at Nkata’s warrant card, took a longer look at Nkata himself, and ushered him inside the flat. Her mother was at work, she informed him, and the rest of that lot-by which he reckoned she meant the other children-could look after themselves. She led him to the kitchen. There a table held several loads of unwashed laundry, and the air was ripe with the scent of disposable nappies in need of disposal.

Navina lit a cigarette on one of the grimy stove’s gas burners, and she leaned against it rather than taking a seat at the table. Her stomach protruded so far that it was difficult to see how she actually remained upright, and beneath the taut material of her leggings, her veins stood out like worms after rainfall. She said abruptly, “’Bout time, innit. Wha’ was it lit the fire under you lot? I’d like to know, so nex’ time I got the right approach.”

Nkata sorted through these remarks. He concluded from them that she’d been expecting the police. Considering the information he’d gleaned from the one neighbour willing to talk on North Peckam Estate, he assumed she was referring to the outcome-whatever it had been-of her reported altercation with Mrs. Salvatore.

He said, “Woman over North Peckham…? She told me you might know the whereabouts of Jared Salvatore’s mum. ’S that right?”

Navina narrowed her eyes. She took a deep hit on her cigarette-deep enough to make Nkata shudder for her unborn child-and as she blew the smoke out, she studied him, then studied the ends of her fingernails, which were painted fuchsia and matched her toenails. She said slowly, “Wha’ ’bout Jared? You got word on him?”

“Word for his mum, you can tell me where she is,” Nkata replied.

“Like she going t’ care, you mean?” Navina sounded scornful. “Like he mean more to her than flake? That cunt di’n’t even know he was gone till I tol’ her, mister, an’ if you find her under wha’ever car she been dossin since they got done wif her on North Peckham, you c’n tell her I said she c’n die an’ I spit on her coffin an’ be glad to do it.” She took another hit on the cigarette. Nkata saw that her fingers were shaking.

He said, “Navina, c’n we reverse things here? I’m in the dark.”

“How? Wha’ more do I got to tell you lot? He been gone an’ gone an’ it ain’t like him, which is what I been sayin over and over. Only no one’s listenin an’ I just ’bout ready-”

“Hang on,” Nkata said. “C’n I get you to sit over here? I’m sorting this, but you’re going too quick.” He pulled a chair from beneath the table and indicated she should take it. One of the toddlers trundled into the kitchen at that point, nappy hanging nearly to his knees, and Navina took a moment to change him, which consisted of ripping the nappy off, tossing it into a swing bin-with its load mercifully intact-and strapping him into another without undo ceremony, the remains of his droppings still clinging to his flesh. After that, she rooted out a boxed Ribena for the child and handed it over, leaving him to suss out a manner of detaching its straw and driving it into the small carton. Then she lowered herself into the chair. All along her cigarette had dangled from her lips, but now she stubbed it out in an ashtray that she took from beneath the pile of dirty laundry.

Nkata said to her, “You reported Jared missing? Tha’s what you’re telling me?”

“I tol’ the cops d’rectly he di’n’t show up for the antenatal. I knew right then there was summat wrong ’cause he always come, di’n’t he, to see ’bout his baby.”

Nkata said, “He’s the dad, then? Jared Salvatore’s your baby’s dad?”

“An’ proud to be from the first, he was. Thirteen years old, not many blokes get started so fast, and he liked that, Jared. It made him swell up bigger ’n you would’ve believed, the day I tol’ him.”

Nkata wanted to know what she’d been doing messing with a mere boy who should have been at school making a future and not out on the loose making babies, but he did not ask. Navina herself should have been at school, if it came to that, or at least she should have been doing something more useful than offering herself to a randy adolescent at least three years her junior. She also had to have been doing the job with Jared since the boy had been twelve. It made Nkata’s head swim, just thinking about it. And knowing that at twelve years old, with a willing female, he too might have happily plunged away his life, hot for that fleshy moment of contact and thinking about nothing else.

He said to Navina, “We got the report from his brother Felipe, in the Ville. Jared di’n’t show for visiting when he should’ve, and Felipe called him in missing. This was something like five, six weeks ago.”

“I went to them louts two days later!” Navina cried. “Two days af’er he di’n’t show at the antenatal like he was s’posed to. I tol’ the cops and they di’n’t listen. They weren’t havin none of it off me.”

“When was this?”

“More’n a month ago,” she said. “I go to the station and tell that bloke in reception I got someone missin. He say who and I say Jared. I tell him he di’n’t come to the antenatal and he di’n’t ever give me a bell about that or nothin which wa’n’t like him. They figger he done a runner ’cause of the baby, see. They say wait ’nother day or two and when I go back, they say wait ’nother. An’ I keep goin an’ I keep tellin them an’ they jot down my name an’ Jared’s an’ no one does nothing.” She began to cry.

Nkata got up from his own chair and went to hers. He put his hand on the back of her neck. He could feel how slender it was beneath his fingers and how warm her flesh was where it touched his own, and from that he guessed what the girl’s appeal had been prior to being made hugely swollen and ungainly with a thirteen-year-old’s child. He said, “I’m sorry. They should’ve listened, the locals. I’m not from there.”

She raised her wet face. “But you said a cop…Then where?”

He told her. Then as gently as he could, he told her the rest: that the father of her baby was dead at the hands of a serial killer, that he’d probably already been dead on the day of the antenatal appointment he’d missed, that he was one of four victims who, like himself, were adolescent boys whose bodies had been found too far from their homes for anyone in the vicinity to recognise them.

Navina listened and her dark skin shone beneath the tears that continued to roll down her cheeks. Nkata felt torn between the need to comfort her and the desire to lecture some sense into her. What did she actually think, he wondered and wanted to say, that a thirteen-year-old boy would be around forever? Not so much because he’d die, although God knew enough of their young men never made it to thirty, but because he’d come to his senses eventually and realise there was more to life than fathering babies and he wanted whatever that more was?

The need to comfort won out. Nkata fished a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and pressed it on her. He said, “They should’ve listened and they di’n’t, Navina. I can’t ’xplain why. I’m that sorry ’bout it.”

“Can’t you ’xplain?” she asked bitterly. “What’m I to them? Cow up the spout, done to by the kid got caught wif two nicked credit cards and tha’s what they remember ’bout him, innit? Snatched a purse once’r twice. Wif some blokes, tried to carjack a Mercedes one night. Some rude boy, so we don’t plan on lookin for him nowhere, so get out of here, girl, and stop pollutin our precious atmosphere, thank you. Well I loved him, I did, and we meant to have a life together and he was makin that life. He was learning cookin and he meant to be a real chef. You ask round about that. You see what they say.”

Cooking. Chef. Nkata took out the slender leather diary he used as a notebook, and he jotted the words down in pencil. He didn’t have the heart to press Navina for more information. From what she’d already said, he reckoned there was going to be a treasure trove of facts about Jared Salvatore at the Peckham police station.

He said, “You be all right, Navina? You got someone I c’n ring for you?”

She said, “My mum,” and for the first time she seemed sixteen and also what she probably was at heart, which was afraid, like so many of the girls who grew up in an environment where no one was safe and everyone was suspect.

Her mum worked in the kitchen at St. Giles Hospital, and when Nkata spoke to her by phone, she said she’d be home at once. “She i’n’t startin, is she?” the woman asked anxiously and then said, “Thank Jesus for that, at least,” when Nkata told her it was something of a different nature entirely but her presence would be a great comfort to the girl.

He left Navina in anticipation of her mother’s arrival, and he went from Clifton Estate to Peckham police station, which was only a short distance along the High Street. In reception, a white special constable was working behind the counter, and he spent just a shade longer than seemed necessary at his tasks before he acknowledged Nkata. Then he said, “Help you?,” with a face that managed to be perfectly blank.

Nkata took a certain pleasure in saying, “DS Nkata,” as he showed his warrant card to the man. He explained why he’d come. As soon as he mentioned the Salvatore family name, it seemed he would need no further introduction. Finding someone at the station who didn’t know the Salvatores would have been more challenging than finding someone who’d mixed with them at one time or another. Aside from Felipe doing time in Pentonville, there was another brother languishing in remand on a charge of assault. The mother had a record going back to her adolescence and the other boys in the family were apparently doing what they could to better it before they reached their twenties. So the real question was, who in the station did DS Nkata want to talk to, because just about anyone could give him an earful.

Nkata said that whoever had taken Navina Cryer’s missing-persons report about Jared Salvatore would do. This, of course, brought up the delicate question of why no one had bothered to file such a report, but he didn’t want to travel that road. Surely someone had listened to the girl if not formally recording what she’d said. That was the person he wanted to find.

Constable Joshua Silver turned out to be the man. He came to fetch Nkata from reception and ushered him into an office shared by seven other officers, where space was at a minimum and noise was at a maximum. He had something of a cubby hole carved out between a bank of perpetually ringing phones and a row of ancient filing cabinets, and he guided Nkata to this. Yes, he admitted, he’d been the person to whom Navina Cryer had spoken. Not the first time she’d come to the station, when she hadn’t apparently got beyond reception, but the second and third times. Yes, he’d written down the information she’d offered, but truth to tell, he hadn’t taken her seriously. The Salvatore yobbo was thirteen years old. Silver reckoned the boy’d done a runner, what with the girl on her way to popping. There was nothing in his past that suggested he’d be apt to hang round waiting for any blessed events to be occurring.

“Kid’s been in trouble since he was eight years old,” the constable said. “He came up before the magistrate first when he was nine-bag snatching from an old lady, this was-and the last time we hauled his bum through the door, it was for breaking into a Dixon’s. Planned to sell the takings in one of the street markets, our Jared.”

“You knew him personally?”

“As good as anyone round here, yeah.”

Nkata handed over a photo of the body that Felipe Salvatore had named as that of his brother. Constable Silver examined it and nodded his confirmation of Felipe’s identification. It was Jared, all right. The almond eyes, the squashed-tip nose. All the Salvatore kids had them, gift of the racial mix of their parents.

“Dad’s Filipino. Mum’s black. A crackhead.” Silver looked up quickly as he said this last, as if he’d suddenly realised he might have given offence.

“I sorted that.” Nkata took the picture back. He asked about the cooking that Jared was supposedly learning.

Silver knew nothing about this and declared it the product of either Navina Cryer’s wishful thinking or Jared Salvatore’s outright prevaricating. All he knew was that Jared had been turned over to Youth Offenders, where a social worker had tried-and obviously failed-to make something of him.

“Youth Offenders over here,” Nkata said, “could they’ve arranged some training for the boy? D’they get jobs for kids?”

“When pigs fly,” Silver said. “Our Jared frying fish in your local Little Chef? Don’t know I’d’ve eaten a meal that bloke put on a plate if I was starving.” Silver took a staple remover from the top of his desk and used it to dig some grime from beneath his thumbnail as he concluded, “Here’s the real truth about scum like the Salvatores, Sergeant. Most of them end up where they’re heading all along, and it was going to be no different for Jared, which was something Navina Cryer couldn’t accept. Felipe’s locked up already; Matteo’s in remand. Jared was third in line of the kids, so he was next in line for the nick. Do-gooders over at Youth Offenders might’ve done their best to stop that from happening, but they had everything set against it from the start.”

“Everything being…?” Nkata inquired.

Silver eyed him over the staple remover and flicked the detritus from beneath his thumbnail onto the floor. “No offence meant, but you’re the exception, man. You’re not the rule. And I expect you had some advantages along the way. But there’re times when people don’t add up to much, and this is one of those times. You start out bad, you end up worse. That’s just how it is.”

Not if someone takes an interest, was what Nkata wanted to reply. Nothing was written in stone.

But he said nothing. He had the information he’d come for. He had no greater understanding of why Jared Salvatore’s disappearance had gone largely unremarked by the police, but he needed no greater understanding. As Constable Silver himself had put it: That’s just how it was.