IT WAS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON BY THE TIME ULRIKE decided the next approach she wanted to take, having learned from her encounter in Bermondsey with Jack Veness’s aunt that prevarication wasn’t going to serve her purpose. She began with the list of dates she’d got earlier from New Scotland Yard. She took this list and fashioned a multicolumn document from it, using the dates, the victims’ names, and the names of the police’s potential suspects as the columns and the rows. She allowed herself plenty of space to fill in any pertinent fact that came to light about everyone who looked questionable to her.
10 September, she wrote first. Anton Reid.
20 October came after that. Jared Salvatore.
25 November was next. Dennis Butcher. And then more quickly,
10 December, Kimmo Thorne.
18 December, Sean Lavery.
8 January, Davey Benton, who was-she thanked God-not one of theirs. Nor, if it came down to it, was the detective superintendent’s wife, and that had to mean something, didn’t it?
But just supposing what it meant was a killer moving further afield because the heat was too much at Colossus. That was highly possible, and she couldn’t discount it because to discount it-to anyone-could be construed as an attempt to direct suspicion elsewhere. Which was what she wanted to do, of course. But not while looking as if she was doing it.
She realised it had been completely ludicrous to pretend she was interviewing Mary Alice Atkins-Ward in order to see if Jack Veness was ready to be promoted to a more responsible position with Colossus. She couldn’t think how she’d actually come up with such a plan, and she certainly understood why Miss A-W had seen through it. So now she was going to opt for the direct approach, one that had to begin with Neil Greenham, the only individual who’d called in a solicitor, cavalrylike, with the Indians looming. She decided to accost Neil in his classroom, a glance at the clock telling her he’d still be there giving kids the individual help for which he was noted.
He was having a tête-à-tête with a black boy whose name escaped her for the moment. She frowned as she watched and heard Neil say something about the boy’s attendance. Mark, he called him.
Mark Connor, she thought. He’d come to them via Youth Offenders in Lambeth, perpetrator of a common street mugging gone wrong when he pushed an old lady and she fell, breaking her hip. Just the sort of kid Colossus was designed to save.
Ulrike watched as Neil put a hand on the boy’s slender shoulder. She saw Mark flinch. She went immediately on the alert.
She said, “Neil, could I have a word?,” and took note of how he then reacted. She was looking for any sign that she could interpret, but he appeared careful not to give her one.
He said, “Let me finish up here. I’ll be along directly. Your office?”
“That’s fine.” She’d have preferred to have him here in his own environment, but her office would do. She went on her way.
He turned up exactly fifteen minutes later, cup of tea in hand. He said, “I didn’t think to ask you if you wanted…?” and gestured with the cup to indicate his offer.
This seemed to signal a truce between them. She said, “That’s fine, Neil. I don’t want any. Thanks. Come in and sit down, won’t you?”
As he sat, she got up and closed the door. When she returned to her desk, he lifted an eyebrow. “Special treatment?” he asked, with a soundless sip of Darjeeling or whatever it was. It would be soundless, naturally. Neil Greenham was not the sort of bloke who slurped. “Should I be flattered or warned by the sudden attention?”
Ulrike ignored this. She’d thought about an entrée to the conversation she needed to have with Neil, and she decided she had to keep the goal in mind no matter where she began. That goal was cooperation. The time for stonewalling had long since passed.
She said, “It’s time we talked, Neil. We’re getting close to the moment when we open the North London branch of Colossus. You know that, don’t you?”
“Hard not to know it.” He looked at her steadily over the rim of his cup. His eyes were blue. There was a suggestion of ice about them that she had not noticed before.
“We’ll be wanting someone who’s already in the organisation to head that branch. D’you know that as well?”
He shrugged noncommittally. “That makes sense,” he said. “Not much learning curve involved for someone who already works here, right?”
“There’s that, and it’s a compelling reason. But there’s loyalty as well.”
“Loyalty.” Not a question, but a statement. He made it in a reflective tone.
“Yes. Obviously, we’ll be looking for someone whose first loyalty is to Colossus. It has to be that way. We’ve enemies out there, and meeting them head-on requires not only perspicacity but the spirit of a warrior. You know what I mean, I daresay.”
He took his time before replying, lifting his tea and having a thoughtful-and silent-sip. He said, “As it happens, I don’t.”
“What?”
“Know what you mean. Not that perspicacity’s beyond my ability to comprehend, mind you. It’s the spirit of a warrior bit that has me confused.”
She gave a gentle laugh, of the self-directed kind. “Sorry. I was thinking of the image of the warrior leaving home-wife and kids behind him-and setting off to do battle. That willingness of the warrior to set the personal to one side when a battle has to be fought. The needs of Colossus in North London will have to come first to its director.”
“And in South London?” Neil inquired.
“What?”
“What about the needs of Colossus in South London, Ulrike?”
“The North London director isn’t going to be responsible-”
“That’s not actually what I meant. I was just wondering if the way South London Colossus is being run is a model for how North London ought to work.”
Ulrike gazed at him. He looked mild enough. Neil always had seemed a bit fuzzy round the edges, but now she had the distinct sensation of flint beneath the soft, boyish surface. And not just the flint of the anger problem that had cost him his erstwhile teaching job, but something else. She said, “Why don’t you speak a bit more directly?”
“I didn’t know I wasn’t,” Neil said. “Sorry. I guess what I’m saying is that it seems a little hypocritical, all this.”
“All what?”
“All this talk about loyalty and Colossus first. I’m…” He hesitated, but Ulrike knew the pause was for effect. “In other circumstances I’d be delighted to be having this confab with you. I’d even flatter myself by concluding that you’re considering recommending me to head the North London branch when it opens.”
“I thought I did imply-”
“But the loyalty to Colossus bit rather gives you away. Your own loyalty hasn’t exactly been impeccable, has it?”
She knew he was waiting for her to ask him to clarify his statement and she wasn’t about to give him that pleasure. She said, “Neil, everyone has a moment now and again when they’re distracted from their primary concern. No one at any level of administration expects anyone else to have tunnel vision in the loyalty department.”
“Which is good for you, I expect. Your own secondary concerns being what they are.”
“I beg your pardon?” She wanted to grab the question back the instant she said it, but it was too late because he snatched it up like a fisherman netting a hooked trout.
“Discretion is as discretion does. Which is to say that sometimes discretion doesn’t at all. Doesn’t do, I mean. Or perhaps ‘doesn’t work’ is a better way of putting it. It’s one of those ‘best-laid plans of mice and men’ kind of things, if you know what I mean. Which in itself is to say that when there’s a plan to cast stones, it’s always a good idea that the thrower live in a house of bricks. Do you want me to be any more direct, Ulrike, or do you get my meaning? Where’s Griff, by the way? He’s been flying under the radar for a bit, hasn’t he? Is that on your advice?”
So now they’d come to it, Ulrike thought. They were at a take-off-the-gloves moment. Perhaps it was time. Her personal life was none of his business, but he was going to be made to see that the reverse was not the case.
She said, “Get rid of the solicitor, Neil. I don’t know why you’ve hired him, and I don’t want to know. But I’m telling you to get rid of him straightaway and speak to the police.”
Neil changed colour, but the way he adjusted his body told her he was not blushing with embarrassment or shame. He said, “Am I hearing you…?”
“Yes. You are.”
“What the hell… Ulrike, you can’t tell me…You of all people…”
“I want you to cooperate with the police. I want you to tell them where you were for every date they question you about. If you’d like to make it easier on yourself, you can begin with telling me and I’ll convey the information to them.” She picked up her pen and held it poised above the paper on which she’d created her three-column data sheet. She said, “We’ll start with last September. The tenth, to be precise.”
He stood. “Let me see that.” He reached for the paper. She put her arm across it. “Is your name on that as well?” he asked her. “Or is the bonking-Griff alibi going to serve as your answer to any question they ask you? And anyway, how does it all work, Ulrike, you fucking a suspect on the one hand and acting the role of copper’s nark on the other?”
“My life-” she began, but he cut in.
“Your life. Your life.” His voice was a scoff. “All Colossus all the time. That’s how it’s supposed to look, right? Butter wouldn’t melt, and in the meantime, you don’t even know when a kid goes missing. Have the cops cottoned on to that? Have the board of trustees? Because I think they’d be rather interested, don’t you?”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m stating a fact. Take it however you like. In the meantime, don’t tell me how to react when the cops start trawling through my life.”
“Are you aware of how insubordinate-”
“Bugger off.” He reached for the door. He jerked it open. He shouted, “Veness! Get in here, will you?”
Ulrike stood then. Neil was crimson with fury and she knew she matched him colour for colour, but this was intolerable. She said, “Don’t you dare start ordering round other employees. If this is an example of how you take or don’t take direction from a superior, then believe me, it’s going to be noted. It’s already noted.”
He swung round. “D’you think I actually believed you’d consider me for anything other than bum wiper of this lot? Jack! Get in here.”
Jack arrived at the door, saying, “What’s going on?”
“Just want to make sure you know Ulrike’s grassing to the cops about us. I’ve had my sit down with her, and I expect you’re next on the list.”
Jack looked from Neil to Ulrike, and then his gaze dropped to the desk and the fact sheet upon it. He said an eloquent, “Shit, Ulrike.”
Neil said, “She’s found a second calling.” He adjusted the chair he’d been sitting in and gestured to it. “Your turn,” he said to Jack.
“That’ll do,” Ulrike told him. “Go back to work, Jack. Neil’s giving in to his predilection for temper tantrums.”
“While Ulrike’s spent a good long time giving in to-”
“I said that’ll do!” It was time to wrest control from the snake. Pulling rank was the only way, even if it meant he would make good his threat and put the board of trustees into the picture about her carrying on with Griff. She said, “If you want to keep your job, I suggest you get back to it. Both of you.”
“Hey!” Jack protested. “I only came in here-”
“Yes, I know,” Ulrike said calmly. “I’m speaking largely to Neil. And what I’m saying remains the same, Neil. Do what you intend to do, but in the meantime drop the solicitor.”
“I’ll see you in hell first.”
“Which makes me rather wonder what you’re hiding.”
Jack looked from her to Neil and back again. He said, “Holy shit,” and left them together.
“I won’t forget this,” was Neil’s final comment.
“I don’t expect you will,” was hers.
NKATA HATED the moment, the activity, and himself: sitting at Hillier’s side before a newly energised collection of journalists. There was nothing like the drama of trauma to get them motivated. Nothing like bringing that trauma home and giving it a human face to make them momentarily sympathetic to the Met.
He knew this was what AC Hillier was thinking as he fielded their questions after having made his statement. Now they had the press where they wanted them, the AC’s demeanor seemed to suggest. They were going to think twice before they went after the Met while an officer’s wife was fighting for her life in hospital.
Except she wasn’t fighting for her life. She wasn’t fighting for anything because she wasn’t any longer.
He was immobile. He wasn’t attending to what was being said, but he knew that this was fine with Hillier. All he needed to look was fierce and ready. Nothing more would be asked of him. He hated himself for complying.
Lynley had insisted. Nkata had got him out of the AC’s office by grabbing him round the shoulders in an embrace of insistence but also one of devotion. He’d known in that instant that he would do anything for this man. And that had startled him because for years he’d told himself that the only important fact of his life was to succeed. Do the job, and let everything else slide right off you because it is not important what anyone thinks. It is only important what you know and who you are.
Lynley had seemed to understand this about him without their ever having spoken about it. He’d continued to understand it even in the midst of what he was going through.
Nkata had taken him from Hillier’s office. As they left, he’d heard the AC punching numbers on the telephone. He reckoned Hillier was trying to reach building security to escort Lynley from the premises, so he made for a spot they’d not be likely to look: the library on the twelfth floor of the building, with its sweeping views of the city and the silence into which Lynley had told him the worst.
And the worst was actually more than the superintendent’s wife being dead. The worst was what they were asking of him.
He’d said dully, staring out at the view, “The machines can keep her breathing for months. Long enough to deliver a viable…” He stopped. He rubbed his eyes. Looking like hell was such a common expression, Nkata had thought as he’d stood there. But this was real hell, he realised. This wasn’t looking like. This was living in. “There’s no way to measure the exact amount of brain damage to the baby. It’s there. They can be…what was it…ninety-five percent certain of that because she’d gone without sufficient oxygen for twenty minutes or more and if that destroyed her brain, it only stands to reason…”
“Man, it’s…You don’t have to…” Nkata hadn’t known what else to say.
“There’s no test, Winston. Just the choice. Keep her on the machines for two months-although three would be ideal…well, at least as ideal as anything could be at this point-and then go in for the baby. Cut her open, take the baby, and then bury the body. Because there is no her any longer. Just the body. The breathing corpse, if you will, from which they could cut the living-albeit permanently damaged-child. You’ll have to make this decision, they say. Think about it, they say. No real hurry, of course, because it’s not as if a decision either way is going to affect the corpse.”
Nkata knew they probably hadn’t used the word corpse. He could see that Lynley himself was using it because it was the brutal truth of the matter. And he also could see what a story it would make and was already making: the earl’s wife dead, her body reduced to incubator and incubator’s inhabitant, the eventual birth-could they even call it a birth?-featured on the front page of every tabloid in town once it happened, because what a story it was, and then the follow-ups ever after, perhaps one a year in a deal that would have to be made with the press: Give us our privacy to cope with this situation now and occasionally we’ll tell you how the child is doing, perhaps allow a photo to be taken, only leave us alone, please leave us alone.
All Nkata could say was, “Oh,” a sound that escaped him in a groan.
Lynley looked at him. “I made her the sacrificial lamb. How do I live with that?”
Nkata knew what he was talking about. Although he didn’t quite believe his own words, he said, “Man, you did not do that. You never think that. You are not responsible.” Because for Lynley to believe that this tragedy was down to him, a chain would be forged and its links would lead inexorably to Nkata himself, and he couldn’t stand that, he knew he couldn’t. For he also knew that part of the superintendent’s plan had been to occupy Mitchell Corsico so thoroughly with a story about himself that he would be kept away from everyone else and from Nkata especially, who had perhaps the most attention-grabbing past of everyone involved in the serial-killing investigation.
Lynley seemed to know what he was thinking because he’d replied with, “It’s down to me. Not to you, Winston.”
And then he’d left. He’d said, “Do your bit. Something has to come out of all this. Don’t take my side. It’s over. All right?”
Nkata responded with, “I can’t-” but Lynley cut him off.
“Don’t bloody make me responsible for anything else, for God’s sake. Promise me, Winston.”
So here he was at Hillier’s side, playing the part.
Dimly he could hear the press briefing drawing to a conclusion. The only indication Hillier gave of his own inner state was in the direction he sent Mitchell Corsico afterwards. The reporter would return to the press pool, to his paper, to his editor’s side, to wherever he wanted to go or to be. But he wouldn’t be writing any further profiles of anyone in the investigation.
Corsico protested with, “But you can’t be thinking the story on the superintendent had anything to do with what’s happened to his wife. Jesus God, there was no way this bloke could have found her. No way. I made certain of that. You know I made certain. That story was vetted by everyone but the pope.”
“You’ve had my last word on the matter,” Hillier said.
Other than that, he spoke nothing about Lynley and what had happened in his office. He merely nodded at Nkata and said, “Get on with it,” and went on his way. Solitary, this time. No minion accompanied him.
Nkata returned to the incident room. He saw he had a message to phone Barb Havers on her mobile, and he made a mental note to do it. But first he tried to remember what he’d been engaged in so much earlier when Dorothea Harriman had given him the word about Lynley’s possible arrival in Victoria Street.
The profile, he thought. He’d intended to have another look at the profile of the killer in the hope that something therein would relate to one of the suspects…if they were indeed suspects at all because the only thing that appeared to connect them to the killings was proximity to some of the victims, which was seeming more and more like nothing to build anything upon at all, not sand beneath the foundation but ice, ready to crack under the burden of proof.
He took himself to Lynley’s office. On the superintendent’s desk, there stood a photograph of his wife, Lynley at her side. They were both perched on a sun-drenched balustrade somewhere. His arm was round her, her head rested on his shoulder, they both were laughing into the camera while in the background a blue sea glittered. Honeymoon, Nkata thought. He realised they’d been married less than a year.
He averted his eyes. He made himself look through the stack of paperwork on Lynley’s desk. He read Lynley’s notes. He read a recent report by Havers. And at last he found it, identifiable by the cover-sheet stationery from Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He slid the report out from the stack in which Lynley had placed it. He carried it to the conference table, sat, and tried to clear his mind.
“Superintendent,” a neat sample of cursive on the covering stationery said, “while you may not be a believer, I hope you’ll find this information helpful.” No signature, but the profiler himself must have written it. No other person would have a reason to.
Before he turned to the report beneath the stationery, Nkata gave thought to where the hospital was located. He admitted to himself that he was thinking of Stoney, even now. It always came down to his brother in the end. He wondered if a place like Fischer could have helped his brother, eased his anger, cured his madness, removed the urge to strike out and even to kill…
Nkata realised he was reading the heading on the creamy paper over and over. He frowned. He focussed. He read again. He’d been taught that there were no coincidences at the end of the day and he’d just, after all, seen Lynley’s notes and Havers’ report. He reached for the phone.
Barbara Havers burst into the office. She said, “Didn’t you get my message? Bloody hell, Winnie. I phoned. I asked you to ring me back. I’ve got…What the hell’s going on round here?”
Nkata handed the report to her. “Read this,” he said. “Take your time.”
WITH REASON, everyone not only wanted a part of him but also needed a part of him. Lynley accepted this even as he knew he could do next to nothing to accommodate anyone. He could barely accommodate himself.
When he returned to the hospital, he was aware of virtually nothing. He found his family and hers where he’d left them, along with Deborah and St. James. Holding the fort came ridiculously into his mind. There was no fort to hold and nothing to hold it for.
Helen’s sister Daphne had arrived from Italy. Her sister Iris was due from America, anticipated at any moment, although no one knew when that moment might be. Cybil and Pen were tending to their parents, while his own siblings sat with their mother, no stranger to hospitals, certainly no stranger to sudden and violent death.
The room they’d been allotted was small, and they crowded it, perched uncomfortably on whatever chairs and settees had been scavenged, sent to this particular place to shield them from the other families of other patients because of their numbers, because of the sensitivity of the situation, and because of who they were. Not who they were by class but who they were by occupation: the family of a cop whose wife had been shot in the street. Lynley was aware of the irony of it all: being granted this privacy because of his career and not because of his birth. It seemed to him that this was the only moment in his life that was honestly defined by his chosen occupation. The rest of the time, he’d always been the earl, that odd bloke who’d eschewed life in the country and mingling among his own kind for work of the commonest sort. Tell us why, Superintendent Lynley. He couldn’t have done so, especially now.
Daphne, the latest arrival, came to him. Gianfranco, she told him, had wanted to be there as well. But that would have meant leaving the children with-
“Daph, it’s fine,” Lynley said. “Helen wouldn’t have wanted…thank you for coming.”
Her eyes-dark like Helen’s, and it came to him how much Helen looked like her eldest sister-grew bright, but she did not weep. She said, “They’ve told me about…”
“Yes,” he replied.
“What’re you…?”
He shook his head. She touched his arm. “Dear heart,” she said.
He went to his mother. His sister, Judith, made a spot for him on the settee. He said, “Go to the house, if you’d like. There’s no need for you to stay here hour after hour, Mother. The spare room’s available. Denton’s in New York, so he won’t be there to do a meal for you, but you can…in the kitchen…I know there’s something. We’ve been fending for ourselves, so in the fridge there’re cartons-”
“I’m fine,” Lady Asherton murmured. “We’re all fine, Tommy. We don’t need a thing. We’ve been to the café. And Peter’s been fetching coffee for everyone.”
Lynley glanced at his younger brother. He saw that Peter still could not look at him for longer than a second. He understood. Eyes upon eyes. Seeing and acknowledging. He himself could barely stand the contact.
“When does Iris get here?” Lynley asked. “Does anyone know?”
His mother shook her head. “She’s in the middle of nowhere over there. I don’t know how many flights she’s had to take or even if she’s taken them yet. All she said to Penelope was that she was on her way and she’d be here as soon as possible. But how does one get here from Montana? I’m not even sure where Montana is.”
“North,” Lynley said.
“It’s going to take her forever.”
“Well. It doesn’t matter, does it?”
His mother reached for his hand. Hers was warm but quite dry, which seemed to him an unlikely combination. And it was soft as well, which was also strange because she loved to garden and she played tennis every day the Cornwall weather allowed it, every season of the year, so why were her hands still soft? And God in heaven, what did that matter?
St. James came over to him while Deborah watched from across the room. Lynley’s old friend said, “The police have been, Tommy.” He glanced at Lynley’s mother and then said, “Do you want to…?”
Lynley rose. He led the way out of the room to the corridor. “By the worst means the worst” came to him from somewhere. A song? he wondered. No, it couldn’t be that.
“What is it?” he asked.
“They’ve determined where he went after he shot her. Not where he came from, although they’re working on that, but where he went. Where they went, Tommy.”
“They?”
“It appears there may have been two. Males, they think. An elderly woman was walking her dog along the north end of West Eaton Place. She’d just come round the corner from Chesham Street. Do you know where I mean?”
“What did she see?”
“From a distance. Two individuals were running round the corner from Eaton Terrace. They seemed to have seen her and they ducked into West Eaton Place Mews. A Range Rover was parked alongside a brick wall there. It took a dent in the bonnet. Belgravia think these blokes-individuals, whoever they were-jumped onto the Range Rover and leapt into the garden beyond that brick wall. Do you know where I’m talking about, Tommy?”
“Yes.” Beyond the brick wall a line of gardens-each one defined by yet another brick wall-comprised the back of the houses on Cadogan Lane, itself another mews that was one of hundreds in the area, once housing stables for the sumptuous dwellings nearby, now housing homes converted from garages that themselves had been converted from the stables. It was a complicated area of streets and mewses. Anyone could fade into the woodwork there. Or make good an escape. Or anything.
St. James said, “It’s not what it sounds like, Tommy.”
“Why is that?” Lynley asked.
“Because an au pair on Cadogan Lane also reported a break-in, shortly after Helen…shortly after. Within the hour. She’s being interviewed. She was home when the break-in occurred.”
“What do they know?”
“Just about the break-in at the moment. But if it’s related-and good God, it has to be related-and if whoever broke in went out of the front of the house, then there’s further good news. Because one of the larger houses along Cadogan Lane has two CCTV cameras mounted on the front of it.”
Lynley looked at St. James. He wanted desperately to care about this because he knew what it meant: If the au pair’s housebreaker had gone in that direction, there was a chance the closed-circuit television cameras had caught him on film. And if he’d been caught on film, that was a step in the direction of bringing him to whatever justice there was, which was little enough, and what did it matter at the end of the day?
Lynley nodded, however. It was expected of him.
St. James said, “The house with the au pair?”
“Hmm. Yes.”
“It’s quite a distance from where the Range Rover was, in the mews, Tommy.”
Lynley struggled to think what this meant. He could come up with nothing.
St. James went on. “There’re perhaps eight-maybe fewer, but still a number of them-gardens along the route. Which means whoever went over the wall where the Range Rover stood had to continue going over walls. So Belgravia are doing a search of every one of the gardens. There’ll be evidence.”
“I see,” Lynley said.
“Tommy, they’re going to come up with something. It’s not going to take long.”
“Yes,” Lynley said.
“Are you all right?”
Lynley considered this question. He looked at St. James. All right. What did it really mean?
The door opened, and Deborah joined them. “You must go home now,” Lynley said to her. “There’s nothing you can do.”
He knew what he sounded like. He knew she would misread him, hearing the blame, which was there but not directed towards her. Seeing her merely reminded him that she’d been with Helen last, heard her talk last, laughed with her last. And it was the last of it that he couldn’t stand, just as earlier he’d not been able to tolerate the first of anything else.
She said, “If you like. If it’ll help you, Tommy.”
“It will,” he said.
She nodded and went to collect her things. Lynley said to St. James, “I’m going to her now. Do you want to come? I know you’ve not seen…”
“Yes,” St. James said. “I’d like to, Tommy.”
So they went to Helen, dwarfed in her bed by everything that kept her working as a womb. She looked waxen to him, Helen yes but even more Helen no and never again. While within her, damaged beyond hope or repair but who knew how much-
“They want me to decide,” Lynley said. He took his wife’s lifeless hand. He curled her flaccid fingers into his palm. “I can’t stand it, Simon.”
WINSTON DROVE, and for this Barbara Havers was grateful. After a day in which she’d determinedly not thought about what was happening at St. Thomas’ Hospital, she felt she’d been punched in the gut with the news about Helen Lynley. She’d known it was going to be a grim prognosis. But she’d told herself that people survived being shot all the time, and medicine being as advanced as it was meant Helen’s chances had to be good. But there was no current advance in medicine that compensated for a brain deprived of oxygen. A surgeon didn’t just go in and repair that damage like the Messiah laying hands on a leper. There was literally no coming back once the word vegetative was applied to a situation. So Barbara hunched against the door in Winston Nkata’s car and clenched her teeth so hard together that her jaw was pulsing and sore by the time they reached their destination in the darkness.
Funny, Barbara thought as Nkata parked the car with his usual quasi-scientific precision, she’d never thought of the City as a place people lived. They worked here, true. They went to events at the Barbican. Tourists came here to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral, but after hours the place was supposed to be a ghost town.
That was not the case at the corner of Fann and Fortune Streets. Here Peabody Estate welcomed home its residents at the end of their working day, a pleasant, upmarket area with blocks of flats that faced a perfectly groomed garden of winter-pruned rosebushes, shrubbery, and lawn across the street.
They’d phoned first. They’d decided they would go in the back door on this one, no storm-trooping but rather a collegial approach. There were facts to check and they’d come to check them.
The first thing Hamish Robson said to them when he answered the door was, “How is Superintendent Lynley’s wife? I’ve seen the news. They’ve apparently got a witness. Did you know? There’s some sort of film footage as well, although I don’t know from where. They say they may have an image to broadcast…”
He’d come to the door wearing rubber gloves, which seemed odd till he ushered them into the kitchen where he was doing the washing up. He appeared to be something of a gourmet cook, because there were pots and pans on the work top in amazing abundance, and crockery, cutlery, and glassware for at least four people, already standing wetly in the dish drainer. Suds galore mounded in the sink. The place looked like a set for a Fairy Liquid commercial.
“She’s brain dead.” Winnie was the one to tell him. Barbara could not bring herself to use the term. “They got her hooked up to machines because she’s pregnant. You know she was pregnant, Dr. Robson?”
Robson had plunged his hands into the sink, but he took them out and rested them on the edge of it. “I’m so sorry.” He sounded sincere. Perhaps he was at some level. Some people were good at creating compartments for the various parts of themselves. “How is the superintendent? He and I had made an arrangement to meet the day…the day this all occurred. He never turned up.”
“He’s trying to cope,” Winston said.
“How can I help?”
Barbara brought out the profile of the serial killer that Robson had provided for them. She said, “Can we…?” and indicated a neat chrome-and-glass table that defined a dining area just beyond the kitchen.
“Of course,” Robson said.
She laid the report on the table and pulled out a chair. She said, “Join us?”
Robson said, “You don’t mind if I carry on with the washing up?”
Barbara exchanged a glance with Nkata, who’d joined her at the table. He gave an infinitesimal shrug. She said, “Why not. We can talk from here.”
She sat. Winston did likewise. She gave the ball to him. “We took some second and third looks at this profile,” he told Robson, who went back to washing a pot he brought forth from the suds. He was wearing a cardigan and he hadn’t bothered to roll the sleeves up, so where the gloves ended, the wet began, weighing down the wool of his sweater. “I had a look at some of the guv’s handwritten notes ’s well. We got some conflicting information. We wanted to sort that with you.”
“What kind of conflicting information?” Robson’s face was shiny, but Barbara put that down to the steamy water.
“Le’ me put it this way,” Nkata said. “Why’d you come up with the age of the serial killer as twenty-five to thirty-five?”
“Statistically speaking-” Robson began, but Nkata interrupted.
“Beyond statistics. I mean, the Wests wouldn’t’ve fitted that part of a statistical description. And tha’s just for starters.”
“It’s never going to be foolproof, Sergeant,” Robson told him. “But if you’ve doubts about my analysis, I suggest you bring in someone else to do another. Bring in an American, an FBI profiler. I’d bet the results-the report you get-is going to be nearly the same.”
“But this report here-” Nkata gestured to it, and Barbara slid it across the table to him. “I mean, come down to it, all we got is your word that it’s even authentic. I’n’t that right?”
Robson’s glasses winked in the overhead lights as he looked from Nkata to Barbara. “What reason would I have to tell you anything but the truth of what I saw in the police reports?”
“That,” Nkata said, with a lift of his finger to stress the point, “is one very good question, innit.”
Robson went back to his washing up. The pot he was scrubbing didn’t appear to need the attention he was giving to it.
Barbara said to him, “Why don’t you come over here to the table, Dr. Robson? It’ll be a little easier to talk.”
He said, “The washing up…”
“Right. Got it. Only there’s a hell of a lot of washing up, isn’t there? For just one bloke? What’d you fix up for dinner?”
“I admit to not washing up every night.”
“Those pots don’t look used to me. Take off the gloves and join us, please.” Barbara turned to Nkata. “You ever see a bloke wear rubber gloves to do the washing up, Winnie? Ladies do, sometimes. I do, being a lady myself. Got to keep the manicure manicured. But blokes? Why d’you think…? Ah. Thanks, Dr. Robson. It’s cozier like this.”
“I’m protecting a cut,” Robson said. “There’s no law against that, is there?”
“He’s got a cut,” Barbara said to Nkata. “How’d you get that, Dr. Robson?”
“What?”
“The cut. Let’s have a look at it, by the way. DS Nkata here is something of an expert on cuts, as you can probably tell by his mug. He got his…How’d you get that impressive scar, Sergeant?”
“Knife fight,” Nkata told her. “Well, I used the knife. Other bloke had a razor.”
“Ouch in a lifeboat,” Barbara said, and again to Robson, “How’d you say you got yours?”
“I didn’t say. And I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”
“Well, it can’t be from pruning the rosebushes because the time to do that’s come and gone, hasn’t it. So it has to be from something else. What?”
Robson said nothing, but his hands were clearly visible now and what was on them wasn’t a cut at all but rather a scratch, several scratches, in fact. They’d been deep by the look of them and possibly infected, but they were healing now and the flesh was new and pink.
Barbara said, “I can’t sort out why you won’t answer me, Dr. Robson. What’s going on? Cat got your tongue?”
Robson licked his lips. He took off his glasses and polished them on a cloth that he removed from his pocket. He was nobody’s fool; he must have learned at least something from his years of dealing with the criminally insane.
“See,” Nkata said to the man, “way the constable and I look at it, we got only one thing tells us your report i’n’t a bucketful of cock, and that’s your word on the matter, unnerstan?”
“As I’ve said, if you don’t believe me-”
“An’ we realised-this is the constable and me-that we been running six ways to Sunday looking for someone who fits that profile. But what if-this’s what the constable and me’ve been thinking cos we do think on occasion, you know-the real bloke we’re looking for had a way to make us think we were looking for someone else? ’F we were-” He turned to Barbara. “What was that word, Barb?”
“Predisposed,” she said.
“Yeah. Predisposed. What if we were predisposed to think one way while the truth was the other? Seems to me, then, the killer could go on doing his thing, pretty safe knowing who we were looking for wasn’t anything in the world like him. It’d be clever, don’t you think?”
“Are you trying to suggest…?” Robson’s skin was shiny. But he wouldn’t remove his cardigan. He’d probably donned it before letting them into the flat, Barbara thought. He’d have wanted to cover his arms.
“Scratches,” Barbara said. “Always nasty. How’d you get yours, Dr. Robson?”
“Look,” he replied, “I’ve a cat that-”
“Would that be Mandy? The Siamese? Your mother’s cat? She was a bit thirsty when we were introduced this afternoon. I took care of that, by the way. You’re not to worry.”
Robson said nothing.
“The thing about Davey Benton that you didn’t expect was that he was a fighter,” Barbara went on. “And how would you know? How would anyone know because he didn’t look like a fighter, did he? He looked just like his brothers and sisters, which is to say he looked like…well, he looked like an angel, didn’t he? He looked fresh. Untouched. Nice boyflesh there for the taking. I can almost understand why a bloody sick bastard like you might’ve wanted to carry things further with this one and rape him, Dr. Robson.”
“You haven’t a shred of evidence to back up that statement,” Robson said. “And I suggest you take yourselves out of this flat straightaway.”
“Really?” Barbara nodded thoughtfully. “Winnie, the doctor would like us to leave.”
“Can’t do that, Barb. Not without his shoes.”
“Oh right. You left two footprints at the final crime scene, Dr. Robson.”
“One hundred thousand footprints wouldn’t mean a thing and all of us know it,” Robson told her. “How many people do you expect buy the same ordinary pair of shoes each year?”
“Millions, probably,” Barbara said. “But only one of them leaves his footprint at the scene of a murder where the victim-this is Davey, Dr. Robson-also has DNA evidence under his fingernails. Your DNA, I expect. From those nice scratches you’ve been protecting. Oh, and the cat’s, by the way. The cat’s DNA. That’s going to be a difficult one to talk your way out of at the end of the day.” She waited for a reaction from Robson and she got it in the movement of his Adam’s apple. “Cat hair on Davey’s body,” she said. “When we link that to little Mandy the squalling Siamese-God, that cat makes a bloody racket when she’s thirsty, doesn’t she-you’re done for, Dr. Robson.”
Robson was silent. Nice, Barbara thought. He had less and less to argue about. He’d hedged his bets with the profile and he’d given 2160 as his moniker when he’d moved on from Colossus to Barry Minshall at MABIL. But there was the phone number of Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane right on the letterhead of the stationery that covered his lying report: with 2160 the final four numbers that a credulous caller-like the Inspectors Plod whom Robson no doubt believed worked at the Met-could punch in to be connected to the place.
She said, “Two-one-six-oh, Dr. Robson. We’ve had Barry Minshall-but I think you know him as Snow-locked up for a bit in the Holmes Street station. We took this over and let him study it for a while.” She removed the photo of Robson and his mother that she’d found in Esther Robson’s flat. “Our Barry-that’s your Snow, remember-turned it this way and that but he always came up with the same conclusion. This is the bloke he handed Davey Benton over to, he tells us. At the Canterbury Hotel. In Lexham Gardens where the registration card’s going to hold interesting fingerprints and the clerk will be only too happy-”
“You damn well listen to me. I didn’t-”
“Oh right. I damn well expect you didn’t.”
“You’ve got to see-”
“Shut up,” Barbara said. She shoved herself away from the table in disgust. She walked out of the room and left Winston Nkata the pleasure of reciting the caution before they arrested the piece of filth.
HE WATCHED first from across the street. Rain had fallen while He’d made His way across town, and now the lights from the hospital shone against the pavement. They made streaks of gold and when He squinted, He could almost think it was Christmas again: gold and then the red of tail lights on the cars as they passed by.
Not that Father Christmas’ll be coming to visit the likes of you, you know.
He groaned. He did the tongue thing again, pressure against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. Safe again, gone again. He could breathe as normal because normal is as normal does.
The reporters were gone, He saw. And wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t that a mark of the meant-to-bes? The story was still a sensational one, but now it could be covered from a distance. Profiles of all the principals, if you will. Because what, after all, needed to be said about a body in a bed? Here we are in front of St. Thomas’ Hospital on day number whateveritwas and the victim still lies within, so back to you in the studio for the weather report, which is far more interesting to the general public than this nonsense, so why don’t you give me a bloody new assignment please. Or words to that effect.
But for Him, it was endlessly fascinating. Events had conspired to illustrate over and over again that supremacy was more than a chance of birth. It was also a miracle of timing, embraced by the willingness to seize the moment. And He was the god of moments. In fact, it was He who made moments. This was the quality-one among many-that made Him different from everyone else.
Think you’re special? That it, little sod?
He used his tongue. Whoosh and whoosh. Release the pressure to check and-
You get away from him, Charlene. Jesus, it’s time he learned his lesson because special is as special God damn does and what the hell has ever been special about…I said step away. Who wants some of this? Bugger the both of you. Get out of my sight.
But in His sight was the future. It lay before Him in the streak of gold from the hospital lights. And in what the lights meant, which was broken. Broken. One of them was broken. One of them was destroyed. One of them was a shell that had cracked at first and now lay smashed in a hundred pieces. And He’d been the one to crush that egg beneath the heel of His shoe. He and no other. Look at me now. Look. At. Me. Now. He wanted to crow, but there was danger in this. And equal danger in remaining silent.
Attention? That it? You want attention? Develop some personality, and that’ll give you attention, if that’s what you want.
Lightly, He hit His fist against His forehead. He forced the air against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. If He didn’t take care, the maggot would eat away His brains.
At night in bed, He’d started plugging orifices against the invasion of the worm-cotton in ears and nostrils, plasters across His arsehole and at the end of His prong-but He still had to breathe and that was where He failed in His prophylactic measures. The worm got in with the air He took into His lungs. From His lungs, it crawled into His bloodstream where it swam like a deadly virus to His skull and munched and whispered and munched.
Perfect adversaries, He thought. You and I and who would’ve thought it when all of this started? The maggot chose to feast upon the weak, but He…Ah, He’d chosen an opponent worthy of the struggle for supremacy.
And that’s what you think you’ve been doing, little bugger?
Maggots ate. That was simply what maggots did. They operated solely on instinct and their instinct was to eat until they metamorphosed into flies. Blowflies, bluebottles, horseflies, houseflies. It didn’t matter. He merely had to wait out the period of eating, and then the maggot would leave Him in peace.
Except there was always the chance that this particular maggot was an aberration, wasn’t there, a creature that would never sprout wings in which case, He did have to rid Himself of it.
But that was not why He had begun. And that was not why He was here just now, across the street from the hospital, a shadow waiting to be dispersed by light. He was here because there was a coronation that needed to happen, and it would happen soon. He would see to that.
He crossed the street. This was chancy, but He was ready and willing to take that chance. To show Himself was to make a mark of preeminence upon a time and a place, and that was what He wanted to do: to begin the process of carving history from the stone of now.
He walked inside. He did not seek His adversary, nor did He even try to locate the room in which He knew he would be found. He could walk directly to it if He’d wanted to, but that was not His purpose in coming here.
At this hour of night breaking into morning, there were few enough people in the hospital corridors and those who were present did not even see Him. From this He knew that He was invisible to people in the way that gods were invisible. Moving among ordinary men and knowing that He could smite them at any moment illustrated irrefutably to Him what He was and would always be.
He breathed. He smiled. It was soundless in His skull.
Supremacy is as supremacy does.