Elizabeth George - With No One As Witness

The van’s lights went out. Barbara waited for a moment to see if Kilfoyle planned to emerge. If he dragged his victim out and did his stuff in the bushes…only how the hell could he burn someone’s hands in the bushes? No, she thought. He’d do it inside. He had no need to depart his mobile execution site. He just had to find a spot where no one was likely to hear any noise coming from the van, a spot where no one was likely ever to see the van. He’d do his stuff and then go on his way.

Which meant she had to do her business first.

She’d been idling the Bentley at the kerb, but now she slowly pulled into the carpark herself. She watched and waited for some sort of sign, like the slight motion of the vehicle as Kilfoyle moved round inside it. She got out of the car, although she left it running. She looked for something…for anything she could use. Surprise was the only thing she had, she reminded herself. What then constituted the biggest surprise she could give the sodding freak?

She went over the details feverishly. What they knew and everything they had tried to guess. He restrained them, so he’d be doing that now. For the drive, he’d have placed Lynley where he could zap him with the stun gun whenever he seemed to be coming to his senses. But now he’d be restraining him. And in the restraint came the hope of salvation. For as the restraints immobilised Lynley, so did they protect him. And that’s what she wanted.

Protection gave her the answer she needed.

LYNLEY WAS aware of his inability to order his body to move. What was gone from him was the message-to-action workings of his brain. Nothing was natural. He had to think about moving his arm instead of just moving it, but it didn’t move anyway. The same for his legs. His head felt unduly heavy, and somewhere his muscles were being told to short-circuit. It felt as if his nerve endings were in warfare.

He was aware also of darkness and movement. When he managed to focus his eyes on something, he was also aware of warmth. The warmth attached itself to movement-not his, unfortunately-and through a haze he saw that he was not alone. A figure lay in the gloom and he was sprawled upon it, half on a body and half on the floor of the van.

He knew it was a van. He knew it was the van. In the instant in which his name was called quietly from the shadows, in which he’d turned and thought it was a reporter who’d come to be the first to interview the non-husband and nonfather he had just become, one part of his brain told him something wasn’t right. Then he’d seen the torch in the extended hand, and he’d known whom he was looking at. After that, he’d been struck by the bolt of current and it was over.

He didn’t know how many times he’d been hit with the stun gun during the journey to wherever they were when the van finally stopped. What he did know was that the bolts hit him with a regularity that suggested the administrator knew how long a victim’s disorientation was likely to last.

When the van stopped and its engine shut off, the man who had called himself Fu climbed into the rear, stun-gun torch in his hand. He applied it to Lynley another time in the businesslike manner of a doctor administering a necessary injection, and the next time Lynley came to his senses and finally felt as if his muscles might be his own once more, he found that he was bound to the inside wall of the van, hanging downward by his armpits and his wrists, legs bent so that his ankles could also be bound to the wall behind him. The bindings felt like leather straps, but they could have been anything. He couldn’t see them.

What he could see was the woman, source of the earlier warmth he’d felt. She lay bound on the floor of the van, arms stretched out to either side in the manner of a horizontal crucifixion. The cross itself was there as well, represented by a board on which she was lying. She had duct tape patched across her mouth. Her eyes were open wide in terror.

Terror was good, Lynley managed to think. Terror was much better than resignation. As he looked at her, she seemed to sense his gaze. She turned her head. He saw that she was the woman from Colossus, but in his present state, he couldn’t recall her name. That suggested to him that Barbara Havers had been right all along, in her inimitable, stubborn, bloody-minded way: The killer in the van with them was one of the men who worked for Colossus.

The man Fu was getting everything ready, primarily himself. He’d lit a candle and stripped, and he was anointing his naked body with a substance-this would be the ambergris, wouldn’t it?-that he took from a small brown vial. Next to him was the cooker that Muwaffaq Masoud had described to them in Hayes. It was heating up a large pan from which the scent of previously burnt meat gave off a faint odour.

He was actually humming. It was all in a night’s work for him. They were in his power, and the manifestation of power and the execution of power were what he wanted out of life.

On the floor of the van, the woman made a pitiful sound from beneath the duct tape. Fu turned at this, and in the light Lynley saw that he looked vaguely familiar, that he possessed that quintessential and very English face of substantial pointed nose, rounded chin, and bread-dough cheeks. He could have been a hundred thousand men on the street, but in him the strain had mutated somehow, so he was not a bland little individual working at an ordinary job and going home to the wife and the children every evening in a terrace house somewhere but, rather, he was who circumstances in life had altered him to be: someone who liked to kill people.

Fu said, “I wouldn’t have chosen you, Ulrike. I rather like you. It was actually my mistake ever to mention Dad. But when you started asking for alibis-and it was fairly obvious that was what you were doing, by the way-I knew I had to tell you something you’d be happy with. Sitting home alone would never have cut the mustard, would it? The alone part would have made you curious.” He looked down on her, completely friendly. “I mean, you would have been all over that, p’rhaps even telling the coppers about it. And then where would we be?”

He brought out the knife. He took it from the little work top where the propane cooker was merrily heating not only the pan but the van itself now. Lynley could feel the warmth undulating across to him.

Fu said, “It was meant to be one of the boys. I thought Mark Connor. You know him, don’t you? Likes to hang round in reception with Jack? Little rapist in the making, you ask me. He needs sorting, Ulrike. They all need sorting. Proper little gobshites, they are. Need discipline and no one gives that to them. Makes one wonder what kind of parents they have. Parenting, you know, is essential to development. Will you excuse me for a moment?”

He turned back to the cooker. He took up the candle and held it to various points on his body. It came to Lynley that this was a hieratic ritual he was watching. And he was meant to be watching, like a worshipper at church.

He wanted to speak, but his mouth too was covered with tape. He tested the bindings that held his wrists to the side of the van. They were immovable.

Fu turned again. He stood there quite naturally in his nudity, his body glistening where he’d used the oil on it. He held up the candle and saw that Lynley was watching him. He reached for something on the work top again.

Lynley thought it would be the torch to stun him once more, but it was instead a small brown bottle, not the one he’d been using but another that he took from a little cupboard and held up so that Lynley would be sure to see it.

“Something new, Superintendent,” he said. “After Ulrike, I’ll switch to parsley. Triumph, you see. And there’ll be much cause for it. For triumph. For me, that is. For you? Well, I don’t expect you’ve much to feel grand about at this moment, have you? But you’re curious, still, and who can blame you? You want to know , don’t you? You want to understand.”