Elizabeth George: With No One As Witness

“He’s up with the assistant commissioner, Detective Constable,” she said. “He said you’re to go up and join them. D’you know the hem’s coming out of your trousers?”

“Is it? Damn,” Barbara said.

“I’ve a needle if you want it.”

“No time, Dee. D’you have a safety pin?”

Dorothea went to her desk. Barbara knew how unlikely it was that the other woman would have a pin. Indeed, Dee was always turned out so perfectly that it was tough to imagine her even in possession of a needle. She said, “No pin, Detective Constable. Sorry. But there’s always this.” She held up a stapler.

Barbara said, “Go for it. But be quick. I’m late.”

“I know. You’re missing a button from your cuff as well,” Dorothea noted. “And there’s…Detective Constable, you’ve got…Is this slut’s wool on your backside?”

“Oh damn, damn ,” Barbara said. “Never mind. He’ll have to take me as I am.”

Which wasn’t likely to be with open arms, she thought as she crossed over to Tower Block and took the lift up to Hillier’s office. He’d been wanting to sack her for at least four years, and only the intervention of others had kept him from it.

Hillier’s secretary-who always referred to herself as Judi-with-an-i-MacIntosh-told Barbara to go straight in. Sir David, she said, was waiting for her. Had been waiting with Acting Superintendent Lynley for a good many minutes, she added. She smiled insincerely and pointed to the door.

Inside, Barbara found Hillier and Lynley concluding a conference call with someone who was on Hillier’s speakerphone talking about “preparing to engage in damage limitation.”

“I expect we’ll want a press conference, then,” Hillier said. “And soon, so we don’t end up seeming as if we’re doing it just to appease Fleet Street. When can you manage it?”

“We’ll be sorting that out directly. How closely do you want to be involved?”

“Very. And with an appropriate companion at hand.”

“Fine. I’ll be in touch then, David.”

David and damage limitation, Barbara thought. The speaker was obviously a muckety-muck from the DPA.

Hillier ended the conversation. He looked at Lynley, said, “Well?” and then noticed Barbara, just inside the door. He said, “Where the hell have you been, Constable?”

So much, Barbara thought, for having a chance to polish anyone’s apples. She said, “Sorry, sir,” as Lynley turned in his chair. “Traffic was deadly.”

“Life is deadly,” Hillier said. “But that doesn’t stop any of us from living it.”

Absolute monarch of the flaming non sequitur, Barbara thought. She glanced at Lynley, who raised a warning index finger approximately half an inch. She said, “Yes, sir,” and she joined the two officers at the conference table where Lynley was sitting and where Hillier had moved when he’d ended his phone call. She eased a chair out and slid onto it as unobtrusively as possible.

The table, she saw with a glance, held four sets of photographs. In them, four bodies lay. From where she sat, they appeared to be young adolescent boys, arranged on their backs, with their hands folded high on their chests in the manner of effigies on tombs. They would have looked like boys asleep had they not been cyanotic of face and necklaced with the mark of ligatures.

Barbara pursed her lips. “Holy hell,” she said. “When did they…?”

“Over the past three months,” Hillier said.

“Three months? But why hasn’t anyone…?” Barbara looked from Hillier to Lynley. Lynley, she saw, looked deeply concerned; Hillier, always the most political of animals, looked wary. “I haven’t heard a whisper about this. Or read a word in the papers. Or seen any reports on the telly. Four deaths. The same MO. All victims young. All victims male.”

“Please try to sound a little less like an hysterical newsreader on cable television,” Hillier said.

Lynley shifted position in his chair. He cast a look Barbara’s way. His brown eyes were telling her to hold back from saying what they all were thinking until the two of them managed to get alone somewhere.

All right, Barbara thought. She would play it that way. She said in a careful, professional voice, “Who are they, then?”

“A, B, C, and D. We haven’t any names.”

“ No one reported them missing? In three months?”

“That’s evidently part of the problem,” Lynley said.

“What d’you mean? Where were they found?”

Hillier indicated one of the photographs as he spoke. “The first…in Gunnersbury Park. September tenth. Found at eight-fifteen in the morning by a jogger needing to have a piss. There’s an old garden inside the park, partially walled, not far off Gunnersbury Avenue. That looks to be the means of access. There’re two boarded-up entrances there, right on the street.”

“But he didn’t die in the park,” Barbara noted, with a nod at the photo in which the boy had been positioned supine on a mattress of weeds that grew at the juncture of two brick walls. There was nothing that suggested a struggle had taken place in the vicinity. There was also, in the entire stack of pictures from that crime scene, no photograph of the sort of evidence one expected to find where a murder occurs.

“No. He didn’t die there. Nor did this one.” Hillier picked up another batch of photographs. In it, the body of another slender boy was draped across the bonnet of a car, positioned as neatly as the first in Gunnersbury Park. “This one was found in an NCP car park at the top of Queensway. Just over five weeks later.”

“What’s the murder squad over there saying? Anything from CCTV?”

“The car park doesn’t have closed-circuit cameras.” Lynley answered Barbara’s question. “There’s a sign posted that there ‘may’ be cameras on the premises. But that’s it. That’s supposed to do the job of security.”

“This one was in Quaker Street,” Hillier went on, indicating a third set of photos. “An abandoned warehouse not far from Brick Lane. November twenty-fifth. And this-” he picked up the final batch and handed them over to Barbara-“is the latest. He was found in St. George’s Gardens. Today.”

Barbara glanced at the final set of pictures. In them, the body of an adolescent boy lay naked on the top of a lichen-covered tomb. The tomb itself sat on a lawn not far from a serpentine path. Beyond this, a brick wall fenced off not a cemetery-as one would expect from the tomb’s presence-but a garden. Beyond the wall appeared to be a mews of garages and a block of flats behind them.

“St. George’s Gardens?” Barbara asked. “Where is this place?”

“Not far from Russell Square.”

“Who found the body?”

“The warden who opens the park every day. Our killer got access from the gates on Handel Street. They were chained up properly, but bolt cutters did the trick. He opened up, drove a vehicle inside, made his deposit on the tomb, and took off. Stopped to wrap the chain back round the gate so anyone passing wouldn’t notice.”

“Tyre prints in the garden?”

“Two decent ones. Casts are being made.”

“Witnesses?” Barbara indicated the flats that lined the garden just beyond the mews.

“We’ve constables from the Theobald’s Road station doing the door-to-door.”

Barbara pulled all of the photographs towards her and laid the four victims in a row. She immediately took note of the differences-all of them major ones-between the final dead boy and the first three. All of them were young teenagers who’d died in an identical fashion, but unlike the first three boys, the latest victim was not only naked but also had a copious amount of makeup on: lipstick, eye shadow, liner, and mascara smeared across his face. Additionally, the killer had marked his body by slicing it open from sternum to waist and by drawing with blood an odd circular symbol on his forehead. The most potentially explosive political detail, however, had to do with race: Only the final victim was white. Of the earlier three, one was black and the two others were clearly mixed race: black and Asian, perhaps, black and Filipino, black and a blend of God only knew what.