Elizabeth George - With No One As Witness

She nodded. Rather than phone into Hillier’s office, however, she went through the door. She closed it softly behind her. A minute passed. Another. They were probably phoning someone to come up. Nkata again. Perhaps John Stewart. Someone capable of restraining him. Someone to escort him from the premises.

Judi MacIntosh returned. “Do go in,” she said.

Hillier wasn’t in his usual position, behind the desk. He wasn’t standing at one of the windows. Instead, he’d come across the carpet to meet Lynley halfway. He said quietly, “Thomas, you must go home and get some rest. You can’t continue-”

“I know.” Lynley couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept. He’d been running on anxiety and adrenaline for so long he no longer remembered what it felt like to be doing otherwise. He removed his warrant card and every other vestige of police identification that he had upon him. He extended them to the assistant commissioner.

Hillier looked at them but did not take them. “I won’t accept this,” he said. “You’ve not been thinking straight. You’re not thinking straight now. I can’t allow you to make a decision like this-”

“Believe me, sir,” Lynley cut in, “I’ve made far more difficult decisions.” He passed Hillier then and went to his desk. He lay his identification upon it.

“Thomas,” Hillier said, “don’t do this. Take some time off. Take compassionate leave. With everything that’s happened, you can’t be in a position to decide your future or anyone else’s.”

Lynley felt the hollowness of a laugh rising in him. He could decide. He had decided.

He wanted to say that he didn’t know any longer how to be, let alone who to be. He wanted to explain he was good for no one and nothing now and he did not know if things would ever be any different. Instead what he said was, “For my part of what went between us, sir, I am most deeply regretful.”

“Thomas…” The tone of Hillier’s voice-was it pained? It actually sounded so-stopped him at the door. He turned. Hillier said, “Where will you go?”

“To Cornwall,” he said. “I’m taking them home.”

Hillier nodded then. He said something more as Lynley opened the door. He couldn’t have been certain what the words were, but later he would think they’d been “Go with God.”

Outside, in the anteroom, Barbara Havers was waiting. She looked done in, and it came to Lynley that at this point she’d been working more than twenty-four hours straight. She said, “Sir…”

“I’m fine, Barbara. You needn’t have come up.”

“I’m to take you somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Just…They’re suggesting I drive you home. I’ve a car on loan, so you won’t have to cram yourself into my heap.”

“That’s fine, then,” Lynley said. “Let’s go.”

He felt her hand on his elbow, guiding him from the office to the lift. She spoke to him as they went along, and he gathered from her words that there was evidence aplenty to link Kilfoyle to the deaths of the Colossus boys.

“And the rest?” he asked her as the lift doors opened on the underground carpark. “What about the rest?”

And she spoke of Hamish Robson and then of the boy in lockup at the Harrow Road station. Robson’s was a crime of necessity and opportunity, she said. As for the boy in Harrow Road, he wouldn’t say.

“But there’s no connection at all between him and Colossus,” Havers said as they reached the car. They continued talking over its roof, her on one side and him on the other. “It looks like…Sir, it looks to everyone like a one-off street crime. He won’t talk…this kid. But we’re thinking it’s a gang.”

He looked at her. She seemed underwater to him, and at a great distance. “A gang? Doing what?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“But you have an idea. You must. Tell me.”

“Car’s unlocked, sir.”

“Barbara, tell me.”

She opened her door but didn’t climb inside. “It could’ve been an initiation, sir. He needed to prove something to someone, and Helen was there. She was just…there.”

Lynley knew from this there was supposed to come absolution for himself, but he could not feel it. He said, “Take me to Harrow Road, then.”

She said, “You don’t need to-”

“Take me to Harrow Road, Barbara.”

She gazed at him and then got into the car. She started it up. She said, “The Bentley…”

“You put it to good use,” he told her. “Well done, Constable.”

“It’s to be Sergeant again,” she said. “Finally.”

He said, “Sergeant,” and he felt his lips curve slightly. “Well done, Sergeant Havers.”

Her own lips trembled and he saw her chin dimple. She said, “Right. Well.” She got them out of the carpark and on their way.

If she worried that he was going to do something rash, she gave no sign of it. Instead she told him how Ulrike Ellis had got herself into the company of Robbie Kilfoyle, and from there she went on to say that the announcement of the arrest had been handed over to John Stewart to make before the media once Nkata refused to do it. “Stewart’s moment of glory, sir,” was how she concluded. “I think he’s been waiting for stardom for years.”

“Keep on his good side,” Lynley told her. “I don’t want to think of you with enemies in the future.”

She glanced at him. He could see what she feared. He wished he could tell her the situation was otherwise.

In the Harrow Road station, Lynley told her what he wanted. She listened, nodded, and in an act of friendship he welcomed with gratitude, she did not try to talk him out of it. When strings had been pulled and arrangements had been made, she came to fetch him. As she’d done in Victoria Street, she walked along at his side, her hand lightly upon his elbow.

She said, “In here, sir,” and opened a door to a dimly lit room. Beyond it, on the other side of the two-way mirror, Helen’s killer sat. They’d given him a plastic bottle of juice, but he hadn’t opened it. He had his hands clasped round it, and his shoulders were slumped.

Lynley felt a large breath leave him. All he could say was, “Young. So young. Good Christ in heaven.”

“He’s twelve years old, sir.”

“Why.”

There was no answer and he knew she knew he did not expect one. He said, “What’s happened to us, Barbara? What in God’s name?” And he also knew she knew he wanted no reply.

Still, she said, “Will you let me take you home now?”

He said, “Yes. You can take me home.”

IT WAS LATE in the afternoon when he went to Cheyne Row. Deborah answered the door. Wordlessly, she held it open for him to enter. They stood facing each other-long-ago lovers that they were-and Deborah gazed as if to make a study of him before she straightened her shoulders in what seemed to be resolve and said, “In here, Tommy. Simon’s not home.”

He didn’t tell her he’d come to see her, not his friend, because she seemed to know this. She took him into the dining room where, in what seemed like another century, she’d been wrapping the baby gift for Helen. On the table, folded neatly upon the carrier bags which had held them, lay the christening outfits that Deborah and Helen had bought. Deborah said, “It seemed to me that you’d want to see them before I…well, before I took them back to the shops. I don’t know why I thought that. But as it was the last thing she did…I hope I was right.”

They were Helen, all of them: her whimsical statement about what was truly important and what was decidedly not. Here was the tiny dinner jacket she’d spoken of, there a miniature clown costume, next to it white velvet dungarees, an impossibly tiny three-piece suit, an equally tiny BabyGro fashioned into a bunny costume…The assortment was appropriate to anything but a christening, but that had been Helen’s point. We’ll start our own tradition, darling. Neither side of our subtly battling families can possibly be offended by that.