Elizabeth George - With No One As Witness

Despite the hour, she wasn’t hungry. She knew that there was no way she was going to be able to face something even vaguely resembling breakfast, but she also knew she had to have something, so she forced herself to eat a tin of unheated American sweet corn followed by half a plastic container of rice pud.

When she’d worked herself up to it, she picked up the phone and tried to get real news of Helen. She couldn’t bear the thought of talking to Lynley, and she didn’t expect him to be at home anyway, so she phoned St. James’s number. This time she managed to get a real person on the line and not a voice on an answer machine. That person was Deborah.

When she had her there, Barbara wasn’t quite sure what to ask. How is she ? was ludicrous. How’s the baby ? was just as bad. How’s the superintendent coping ? was the only query even remotely reasonable, but it was also unnecessary because how the hell was the superintendent supposed to be coping, knowing the decision that faced him: a modest proposal of keeping his wife a dead body in a bed for the next few months, with air pumping mechanically in and out of her, while their child was reduced to…They just didn’t know. They knew it was bad. They just didn’t know how bad. How close to disaster was close enough?

Barbara settled on saying to Deborah, “It’s me. I just wanted to check in. Is he…? I don’t know what to ask.”

“Everyone’s arrived,” Deborah told her. Her voice was very quiet. “Iris-that’s Helen’s middle sister, she lives in America, did you know?-she was the last to get here. She made it, finally, last night. She had a terrible time getting out of Montana; they’ve had so much snow. Everyone stays at the hospital in a little room they’ve set up. It’s not far from hers. They go in and out. No one wants to leave her alone.”

She meant Helen, of course. No one wanted Helen left alone. It was an extended vigil for all of them. How could anyone decide? she wondered. But she couldn’t ask. So she said, “Has he talked to anyone? A priest, a minister, a rabbi, a…I don’t know, anyone?”

There was a silence. Barbara thought perhaps she’d intruded too far. But finally Deborah spoke again, and her tone had changed to such careful tightness that Barbara knew she was crying.

“Simon’s been there with him. Daze-that’s his mother-she’s there as well. There’s a specialist supposed to fly in today, someone from France, I think, or perhaps it’s Italy, I don’t really remember.”

“A specialist? What sort?”

“Neonatal neurology. Something like that. Daphne wanted it done. She said if there’s the slightest possibility that the baby wasn’t harmed…She’s taking this very badly. So she thought that an expert on babies’ brains…”

“But Deborah, how’s that going to help him cope ? He needs someone to help him deal with what he’s going through.”

Deborah’s voice dropped. “I know.” She gave a broken laugh. “It’s exactly what Helen hated, you know. All this soldiering on that people do. Stiff upper lips and just getting on with things. God forbid anyone should sound like a whinger. She hated that, Barbara. She’d prefer to have him screaming from the rooftop. At least, she would say, that’s real.”

Barbara felt her throat tighten. She couldn’t talk any longer. So she said, “If you see him, tell him…” What? I’m thinking of him? Praying for him? Going through the motions of bringing all this to an end when she knew it was only beginning for him? What was the message, exactly?

She needn’t have worried.

“I’ll tell him,” Deborah said.

On her way to her car, Barbara saw Azhar watching her somberly from the French windows of his flat. She raised a hand but she didn’t stop, not even when Hadiyyah’s solemn little face appeared next to him and his arm went round her thin shoulders. The parent-child love of it was too much at the moment. Barbara blinked away the image.

When Muwaffaq Masoud finally arrived at the Shepherdess Walk station those hours later, Barbara recognised him mostly by his confusion and unease. She met him in reception and introduced herself, thanking him for coming such a distance to help with the inquiry. He smoothed his beard unconsciously-she was to see that he did this a lot-and he polished his spectacles once she took him to the room from which they’d view the line of men.

He gazed upon them long and hard. They turned for him, one at a time. He asked that three of them step forward-Robson was one of them-and he took a lengthier look at them. Finally he shook his head.

“The middle gentleman resembles him,” he said, and Barbara felt a rush of pleasure since he’d fingered Robson. But the pleasure died when he went on. “But I must say it is only a resemblance based on the shape of his head and the type of body. The robustness of it. The man I sold the van to was older, I think. He was bald. He had no facial hair.”

“Try to think of this bloke here without the goatee,” Barbara said. She didn’t add that Robson could have shaved his thinning hair off before he went out to Hayes to purchase a van.

Masoud tried to do as she asked. But his conclusion remained unchanged. He could not say for certain that the man he was looking at was the same man who’d purchased a van from him in the summer. He was terribly sorry about that, Constable. He sincerely wished to be of help.

Barbara took this news back to New Scotland Yard. She kept her report to Stewart brief. It was yes on Minshall and no on Masoud, she told the DI. They needed to find that sodding van.

Stewart shook his head. He was going over someone’s report-red pencil in hand like a frustrated schoolteacher-and he tossed it down on his desk before he said, “That whole line’s a nonstarter, as things turn out.”

“Why?” Barbara asked.

“Robson’s telling the truth.”

She gawped at him. “What d’you mean?”

“I mean copycat, Constable. C-o-p-y and c-a-t. He killed the kid and arranged it to look like one of the other murders.”

She said, “What the hell ?,” and shoved her hand through her hair in sheer frustration. “I just spent four bloody hours putting this bloke into identity parades. D’you mind telling me why you had me waste my time like that if you knew …” She couldn’t even finish.

The DI said with his usual finesse, “Christ, Havers. Don’t get your knickers caught in the crack, all right? No one’s keeping secrets from you. St. James only just rang us with the details. He’d told Tommy it was likely, nothing else. Then the attack on Helen happened, and Tommy never passed the information on to us.”

“What information?”

“The dissimilarities revealed by the postmortem exam.”

“But we always knew there were dissimilarities: the manual strangulation, the lack of a stun gun, the rape. Robson himself pointed out that things escalate when-”

“The boy hadn’t eaten in hours, Constable, and there was no trace of ambergris oil on him.”

“That could be explained-”

“Every other boy had eaten within an hour of his death. Every other boy had consumed the identical thing. Beef. Some bread. Robson didn’t know that and he didn’t know about the ambergris oil. What he did to Davey Benton was based on what he knew of the crime, which was superficial: what he saw in the preliminary report and in the photographs of the scene. That’s it.”

“Are you saying Minshall had nothing to do…Robson had nothing…?”

“They’re responsible for what happened to Davey Benton. End of story.”

Barbara sank heavily into a chair. Round her, the incident room was muted. Obviously, everyone knew about the dead end they’d all just run headlong into. “Where does that leave us?” she asked.