LYNLEY REMAINED WITH HER THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT and long into the day that followed. He used the time largely to disengage her face-so pale upon the pillow-from what she was now, from the body to which she had been reduced. In this, he tried to tell himself that it was not Helen he was looking upon. Helen was gone. In that instant in which everything had been transformed for them both, she had fled. The Helen of her had soared from the framework of bone, muscle, blood, and tissue, leaving behind not the soul, which defined her, but the substance, which described her. And that substance alone was not and could never be Helen.
But he couldn’t make a go of that because when he tried, what came to him were images, for he had known her simply far too long. She’d been eighteen years old and not his in any way but rather the chosen mate of his friend. Meet Helen Clyde, St. James had told him. I’m going to marry her, Tommy.
D’you think I’ll do for a wife? she had asked. I haven’t a single wifely talent. And she’d smiled a smile that had engaged his heart, but rather in friendship than in love.
Love had come later, years and years later, and in between the friendship and the love what had bloomed was tragedy, change, and sorrow, altering all three of them unrecognisably. Madcap Helen no more, St. James no longer the fervent batsman in front of the wicket, and himself knowing he’d been the cause. For which sin there was no forgiveness. One did not alter lives and simply walk away from the damage.
He’d been told once that things are at any given moment just as they are supposed to be. There are no mistakes in God’s world, he’d been told. But he could not believe that. Then or now.
He saw her in Corfu, a towel spread beneath her on the beach and her head thrown back so that the sun could strike her face. Let’s move to a sunny climate, she’d said. Or at least let’s disappear into the tropics for a year.
Or thirty or forty?
Yes. Brilliant. We’ll Lord Lucan it. With less cause, of course. What do you think?
That you’d miss London. The shoe sales if nothing else.
Hmm, there is that, she said. I am a lifelong victim of my feet. The perfect target for male designers with ankle fetishes, I’m the first to admit it. But have they no shoes in the tropics, Tommy?
Not the sort you’re used to, I’m afraid.
The silly stuff of her that made him smile, the very maddening Helen of her.
Can’t cook, can’t sew, can’t clean, can’t decorate. Honestly, Tommy, why do you want me?
But why did one person ever want another? Because I smile with you, because I laugh at your banter, which you and I both know very well is designed just for that…to make me laugh. And the why of that is that you understand and have done from the first: who I am, what I am, what haunts me most and how to banish it. That’s why, Helen.
And there she was in Cornwall, standing before a portrait in the gallery, his mother at her side. They were looking upon a grandfather with too many greats in front of him to know exactly how far back he was in time. But that didn’t matter because her concern was centred on genetics and she was saying to his mother, D’you think there’s any chance that terrible nose could pop up again somewhere along the line?
It’s rather ghastly, isn’t it? his mother murmured.
At least it shades his chest from the sun. Tommy, why didn’t you point this picture out to me before you proposed? I’ve never seen it before.
We kept it hidden in the attic.
That was very wise.
The Helen of her. The Helen.
You cannot know someone for seventeen years and not have a swarm of memories, he thought. And it was the memories that he felt might kill him. Not that they existed but that there would be no more of them from this point forward and that there were others he’d already forgotten.
A door opened in the room, somewhere behind him. A soft hand took his, shaping his fingers round a hot cup. He caught the scent of soup. He looked up to see his mother’s tender face.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered. “Tell me what to do.”
“I can’t do that, Tommy.”
“If I let her…Mum, how can I let her…them? And if I do that, is it ego? Or is it ego if I don’t? What would she want? How can I know?”
She came close to him. He turned back to his wife. His mother curved her hand round his head so she cradled his cheek. “Dearest Tommy,” she murmured. “I would take this from you if I could.”
“I’m dying. With her. With them. And that’s what I want, actually.”
“Believe me. I know. No one can feel what you feel, but all of us can know what you feel. And, Tommy, you must feel it. You can’t run away. It won’t work like that. But I want you to try to feel our love as well. Promise you’ll do that.”
He felt her bend and kiss the top of his head, and in that action, although he could hardly bear it, he also knew there was healing as well. But that was even worse than what lay before him in the immediate future. That he might stop feeling this agony someday. He didn’t know how he could live through that.
His mother said, “Simon’s come back. Will you speak to him? I think he has news.”
“I can’t leave her.”
“I’ll stay. Or I’ll send Simon to you. Or I can get the message if you’d like.”
He nodded numbly and she waited in silence for him to make up his mind. He finally handed the cup back to her, the soup untouched. “I’ll go to him,” he said.
His mother took his place at the bed. He turned at the door and saw her lean towards Helen’s head and touch the dark hair that fell back from her temples. He left her to maintain a vigil over his wife.
St. James was just outside in the corridor. He looked less haggard than the last time Lynley had seen him, which suggested he’d gone home for some sleep. Lynley was glad of this. The rest of them were operating on nerves and caffeine.
St. James suggested they find the café and when they reached it, the smell of lasagne suggested the hour of the day to be somewhere between noon and eight o’clock at night. Inside the hospital, Lynley had long since lost track of time. Where Helen was, the lights were dim, but elsewhere it was forever fluorescent daytime, with only the changing faces of staff members with each new shift suggesting that hours were passing normally for the rest of the world.
Lynley said, “What time is it, Simon?”
“Half past one.”
“Not in the morning, though.”
“No. Afternoon. I’m getting you something.” He nodded to the stainless steel and glass of the buffet. “What would you like?”
“It doesn’t matter. A sandwich? I’m not hungry.”
“Consider it medicinal. It’ll be easier that way.”
“Egg mayonnaise, then, if they have it. Brown bread.”
St. James went to fetch it. Lynley sat at a small table in the corner. Other tables were occupied by staff, by members of patients’ families, by ministers, and in one case by two nuns. The café reflected the sombre nature of what went on in the building it served: Conversation was hushed; people seemed careful not to clatter their crockery and cutlery.
No one glanced his way, for which Lynley was grateful. He felt raw and exposed, as if he had no protection from the knowledge of others and the judgements that they could pass upon his life.
When St. James returned, he brought egg sandwiches on a tray. He’d bought one for himself as well, and he’d picked up a bowl of fruit and a Twix bar along with two cartons of Ribena.
They ate first, in companionable silence. They’d known each other for so many years-from their very first day at Eton, in fact-that words would be superfluous at the moment. St. James knew; Lynley could tell that in his face. Nothing needed to be said.
St. James nodded his approval when Lynley finished the sandwich. He moved the bowl of fruit in his direction and followed that with the chocolate bar. When Lynley had eaten as much of both as he could stand, his friend finally relayed his information.
“Belgravia have the gun. They found it in one of the gardens, along the route from the mews where that Range Rover had been dented, to the house where the au pair reported a break-in. They had to leap one brick wall after another to get away. They lost the gun along the route in some shrubbery, evidently. They wouldn’t have had time to go back for it, even if they knew it was missing.”
Lynley looked away from St. James’s face because he knew his friend was watching him carefully and gauging him with every word. He’d want to make sure he told Lynley nothing that might push him over the edge again. This told Lynley he knew about Hillier and New Scotland Yard, in what seemed now like another lifetime.
“I won’t storm the Belgravia station,” he said. “You can say the rest.”
“They’re fairly certain the gun they found is the one that was used. They’ll do the ballistics study on the bullet they took from…from Helen, naturally, but the gun-”
Lynley turned back to him. “What kind is it?”
“Handgun. Twenty-two calibre,” St. James said.
“Black-market special.”
“It looks that way. It hadn’t been there long, in the garden. The home owners claimed to know nothing about it, and a look at the shrubbery supported their claim. It was freshly broken up. In the other gardens along the way as well.”
“Footprints?”
“Everywhere. Belgravia are going to catch them, Tommy. Soon.”
“Them?”
“There were definitely two of them. One of them was mixed race. The other…They’re not sure yet.”
“The au pair?”
“Belgravia have spoken to her. She says she was with the baby she looks after when she heard a window being broken down below, at the back of the house. By the time she got down to see what was going on, they were inside and she met them at the bottom of the stairs. One of them was already at the front door, heading out. She thought they’d burgled the house. She started screaming, but she also tried to stop them from getting away, God only knows why. One of them lost his hat.”
“Is someone getting an e-fit made?”
“I’m not sure that’s going to be necessary.”
“Why?”
“The house on Cadogan Lane with the CCTV cameras? They’ve got images. They’re being enhanced. Belgravia are going to run them on television and the papers will print the best of the lot. This is…” St. James raised his head ceilingward. Lynley saw how difficult this was for his friend. Not only the knowledge of what had happened to Helen but also the gathering of information to pass on to Helen’s husband and her family. The effort left him no time for grief. “They’re putting everything they have into this, Tommy. They’ve more volunteers than they can use, from stations all over town. The papers…You’ve not seen them, have you? It’s been an enormous story. Because of who you are, who she is, your families, everything.”
“Just the sort of thing the tabloids love,” Lynley said bitterly.
“But they’re carrying the public along with them, Tommy. Someone is going to see the pictures from the CCTV camera and turn the boys in.”
Lynley said, “The boys?”
St. James nodded. “At least one of them, apparently, was a boy. The au pair says he looked about twelve years old.”
“Oh my God.” Lynley looked away, as if this would prevent his mind from making the inescapable connection.
St. James made it anyway. “One of the Colossus boys…? In the company of the serial killer but without knowing his companion is the serial killer?”
“I gave him-them-an invitation to my home. Right in the pages of The Source, Simon.”
“But there was no address, no street name. A killer looking for you couldn’t have found you through that article. It’s impossible.”
“He knew who I was, what I look like as well. He could have followed me home from the Yard on any day. And then all that would be left for him was laying his plan and waiting for an appropriate time.”
“If that’s the case, why take a boy with him?”
“To give him a sin. So he could be his next victim when the job on Helen was done.”
THEY’D DECIDED to let Hamish Robson stew for a night in lockup. It would be something of a taste of the future. So they’d taken the profiler to the Shepherdess Walk police station which, while it wasn’t the closest lockup to his flat near the Barbican, allowed them to avoid negotiating a route which would take them deeper into the City to get to the Wood Street station.
Search warrant in hand, they spent most of the following day in Robson’s flat, building their case against the psychologist. One of the first bits of evidence they found was his laptop computer squirreled away in a cupboard, and Barbara made short work of tripping along the trail of electronic bread crumbs that Robson had left upon it.
“Kiddy porn,” she said to Nkata over her shoulder when she found the first of the images. “Boys and men, boys and women, boys and animals, boys and boys. He’s a real piece of work, our Hamish.”
For his part, Nkata found an old A to Z with the location of St. Lucy’s Church circled on the corner of Courtfield Road. And tucked into its pages was the name and address of the Canterbury Hotel as well as a business card with “Snow” and a phone number printed on it.
This, along with Barry Minshall’s earlier identification of Robson’s photograph and 2160 as part of the phone number of the doctor’s employer, was enough to bring a SOCO team onto the scene and to send another to Walden Lodge. The first would be looking for further evidence in Robson’s car. The second would be gathering what it could from his mother’s flat. It seemed unlikely that he’d have brought Davey Benton or anyone else into his digs here near the Barbican. But at least Davey would have ridden over to Wood Lane with Robson and, once there, he would have left his mark inside Esther Robson’s flat.
When they had enough to put him away as a paedophile if nothing else, they went to the station. He’d already phoned for his solicitor, and after a wait for her to turn up from the magistrate’s court, Barbara and Nkata met them both in an interview room.
It was, Barbara thought, a nice touch for Robson to employ a female solicitor. She was called Amy Stranne, and she appeared to have achieved an advanced university degree in impassivity. She matched her utter lack of expressive reaction with a severe, short haircut, an equally severe black suit, and a man’s tie knotted at the throat of her white silk shirt. She took a pristine legal pad from her briefcase, along with a manila folder whose contents she consulted before speaking.
“I’ve advised my client of his rights,” she said. “He wishes to cooperate with you in this interview because he feels there are significant aspects of the current investigation that you don’t understand.”
Too right, Barbara thought. Bless his black little heart. The psychologist knew he was going to be locked up for years. Like Minshall, the slimy sod was already trying to position himself for a lesser sentence.
Nkata said, “We got SOCO sifting through your vehicle, Dr. Robson. We got SOCO sifting through your mum’s flat. We got a team at the Yard searching for the lockup you got to have somewhere in town, because we ’xpect that’s where you got the van hidden, and we got ’bout half a dozen officers treading through your background to find anything anyone else might miss.”
Robson’s haggard face suggested that his accommodation in Shepherdess Walk hadn’t been to his liking. He said, “I didn’t-”
“Please,” Barbara said. “If you didn’t kill Davey Benton, we’d be happy to hear what actually happened to him between the time you raped him and the time he ended up a body in the woods.”
Robson flinched at the baldness of the statement. Barbara wanted to point out to him that there was actually no palatable way to portray what had happened to the thirteen-year-old. Robson said, “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“Him?”
“The boy. Davey. Snow told me they always went willingly. He said they were well prepared.”
“Like a joint of beef?” Barbara asked. “All salt-and-peppered?”
“He said they were ready and they wanted it.”
“It?” Nkata said.
“The encounter.”
“The rape,” Barbara clarified.
“It wasn’t…!” Robson looked to his solicitor. Amy Stranne was taking notes, but she appeared to sense his glance in her direction, because she looked up. She said, “It’s up to you, Hamish.”
“You’ve got healed scratches on your hands and arms,” Barbara noted. “And we’ve got skin under Davey’s fingernails. We’ve evidence of forcible sodomy as well. So what is it about this scenario that we ought to be taking as a voluntary sexual encounter…not that sex with thirteen-year-olds is legal, by the way. But we’re willing to set that aside for a moment if only to hear your version of the romantic seduction which apparently-”
“I didn’t intend to hurt him,” Robson said. “I panicked. That’s all. He’d been cooperative. He’d been enjoying…Perhaps he was hesitant, but he wasn’t telling me to stop. He wasn’t. I swear he was liking it. But when I turned him round…” Robson’s face was grey. His thin hair drooped across his forehead. Spittle dried at the corners of his mouth, buried within his nicely trimmed goatee. “I just tried to keep him quiet after that. I told him the first time was always a little frightening, even a little painful, but he wasn’t to worry.”
“How nice of you,” Barbara noted. She wanted to rip the sorry bugger’s eyes out. Next to her, Nkata stirred. She told herself to back off, which she knew her colleague was also telling her through his body language. But she didn’t want this sod to think that their silence-her silence-implied approval, even though she knew her silence was crucial in order to keep him talking. She pressed her lips together and bit down to keep them in place.
“I should have stopped then,” Robson said. “I know it. But at the moment…I thought if he would just be quiet, it would be over quickly enough. And I wanted…” Robson looked away, but there was nothing in the room for him to fix upon save the tape recorder making a history of his words. “I didn’t intend to kill him,” he said again. “I just wanted him to keep quiet while…”
“While you finished with him,” Barbara said.
“You strangled him with your bare hands,” Nkata pointed out. “How was that supposed to-”
“I didn’t know how else to get him silent. He was only struggling at first, but then he began to scream and I didn’t know how else to quieten him. And then as things were…were building for me…I didn’t realise why he’d gone so silent and limp. I thought he was cooperating.”
“Cooperating.” Barbara couldn’t help herself. “With sodomy. Rape. A thirteen-year-old. You thought he was cooperating. So you finished the job, only you found you were plugging away at a corpse.”
Robson’s eyes reddened. “My whole life,” he’d said, “I tried to ignore…I told myself it didn’t matter: my uncle, the wrestling and the touching. My mother wanting to sleep with her little man and the arousal that was natural to any boy only how could it have been natural when she was making it happen? So I ignored it and I eventually married, but I didn’t want her, you see, the woman, fully formed and making demands of me. I thought pictures would help. Videos. Dodgy things that no one would know about.”
“Kiddy porn,” Barbara said.
“I could get aroused. Easily at first. But then later…”
“Takes more,” Nkata said. “Always takes more, like a drug. How’d you get on to MABIL?”
“Through the Internet. A chat room. I went at first just to see, just to be round men who felt as I felt. I’d borne the burden so long. This obscene need. I thought it would cure me if I went and saw the sorts of men who…who actually engage in it.” He brought a tissue out of his pocket and used it to scrub at his face. “But they were just like me, you see. That was the hell of it. They were like me, only happier. At peace. They’d arrived at a spot where they’d come to believe there is no sin in bodily pleasure.”
“Bodily pleasure with little boys,” Barbara said. “And why would that be? The no sin part of it.”
“Because the boys learn to want it as well.”
“Do they now. And how is it that blokes like you measure the wanting, Dr. Robson?”
“I can see you don’t believe…that you think I’m-”
“A monster? A freak? A genetic mutant who needs to be wiped from the surface of the earth along with the rest of your ilk? Why the hell would I think that?” Finally, it was all too much for her.
“Barb,” Nkata said.
He was so like Lynley, she thought. Capable of keeping cool when that was called for, the one thing she’d never been able to do because she’d always associated keeping cool with letting your insides get eaten by the horror you felt when you had to deal with monsters like this.
“Tell us about the rest,” Nkata said to Robson.
“There’s nothing more to tell. I waited as long as I could, far into the night. I carried the…his body into the woods. It was three…four in the morning? There was no one anywhere.”
“The burning, the mutilation. Tell us about that.”
“I wanted to make it look like the others. Once I saw I’d accidentally killed him, that was the only thing I could think. Make it look like the others so you would conclude the same killer was at work on Davey as on them.”
“Hang on. Are you trying to claim you didn’t kill the other boys?” Barbara asked.
Robson frowned. “You haven’t thought…You haven’t been sitting there thinking I’m the serial killer? How on earth can that be? How could I even have had access to those other boys?”
“You tell us.”
“I did tell you. From the profile, I told you.”
They were silent. He made the leap to what the silence implied.
“My God, the profile’s real. Why would I ever have made that up?”
“Most obvious reason in the world,” Nkata said. “Lays a nice trail away from yourself.”
“But I didn’t even know those boys, those dead boys. I didn’t know them. You must believe-”
“What about Muwaffaq Masoud?” Nkata asked. “You know him?”
“Muwaf…? I’ve never…Who is he?”
“Someone who might be able to pick you out of an identity parade,” Nkata said. “Been a while since he’s seen the bloke who bought a van off him, but I ’xpect having the man in front of him might do to jog his memory a bit.”
Robson turned to his solicitor then. He said, “They can’t…Can they do this? I’ve cooperated. I’ve told them everything.”
“So you say, Dr. Robson,” Barbara put in. “But we’ve found liars and killers’re cut from similar cloth, so don’t mind us for not taking your word as gospel.”
“You’ve got to listen to me,” Robson protested. “The one boy, yes. But it was an accident. I didn’t intend it to happen. The others, though…I am not a murderer. You’re looking for someone…Read the profile. Read the profile. I am not the person you’re looking for. I know you’re under pressure to bring this case to a close, and now that the superintendent’s wife has been assaulted-”
“The superintendent’s wife is dead,” Nkata reminded him. “You forget that for some reason?”
“You’re not suggesting…” He turned to Amy Stranne. “Get me away from them,” he said. “I won’t speak to them further. They’re trying to make me something I’m not.”
“That’s what they all say, Dr. Robson,” Barbara told him. “In a pinch, blokes like you always whistle the exact same tune.”
TWO MEMBERS of the board of trustees came to see her, which told Ulrike that trouble was not just brewing, it was steaming in the carafe. The president of the board, dressed to the nines with everything but the requisite gold chain to illustrate his authority, had the board secretary in tow. Patrick Bensley was doing the talking, while his cohort tried to look like someone more substantial than an entrepreneur’s socialite wife, her recent face-lift on tight display.
It didn’t take long for Ulrike to understand that Neil Greenham had made good on the threats he’d uttered the last time they’d spoken. She’d reached that conclusion when Jack Veness told her that Mr. Bensley and Mrs. Richie were unexpectedly in reception, asking for a word with the Colossus director. What took her longer was sorting out exactly which one of the threats Neil had acted upon. Was she to be taken to task for her affair with Griffin Strong or for something else?
She’d seen Griff only briefly in the past few days. He’d kept himself busy with his new group of assessment kids and when he wasn’t involved with them, he was out of the way and busily engaged in outreach work, silk-screening work, or the sort of social work he’d been asked to do a thousand times since signing on at Colossus. He’d always been too busy to see to that latter aspect of his job before now. It was astounding how tragedies managed to illustrate for people exactly how much time they’d in fact had for preventing tragedies in the first place. In Griff’s case, it was taking the time to connect with his assessment clients and their families outside the regular Colossus hours. He was good about that now, or so he claimed. Truth was, he could have been bonking Emma the Brick Lane Bengali hostess every time he was gone from Colossus, for all Ulrike knew. Or cared, for that matter. She had larger concerns now. And wasn’t that an additionally intriguing twist in life? A man one would have sacrificed nearly everything for turned out to have the value of a dust mote when one’s head finally cleared.
But the clearing had come at too great a cost. And it turned out that was why Mr. Bensley and Mrs. Richie had come to call. Which visit in and of itself wouldn’t have been so bad had she not already been visited that day by the police.
This time it was Belgravia, not New Scotland Yard. They turned up in the form of an unfriendly detective inspector called Jansen with a constable in attendance, who remained nameless and wordless throughout the interview. Jansen had produced a photograph for Ulrike to inspect.
In the picture, which was grainy but not impossible to make out, two individuals were caught in the act of apparently jogging down a narrow street. The identical houses along it-all of them only two and three floors tall-suggested the action had occurred in a mews. The subjects of the photo were in an affluent part of town, as well: There was no rubbish or litter visible, no graffiti, no dead plants in decrepit window boxes.
Ulrike reckoned she was meant to say whether she recognised the individuals who were rushing by the CCTV camera that had produced their photo. So she studied them.
The taller of the two-and he seemed to be male-had sussed out the presence of the camera and wisely averted his face. He wore a hat pulled low over his head. He had his jacket collar turned up, wore gloves, and was otherwise dressed completely in black. He might as well have been a shadow.
The smaller one had not had the same foresight. His image, while not crisp, was still clear enough for Ulrike to be able to say with certainty-and no small measure of relief-that she didn’t know him. There was nothing about him that was recognisable to her, and she knew she would have been able to name him had they been acquainted because he had masses of unforgettably crinkly hair and enormous splotches-like monstrous, unrestrained freckles-on his face. He looked to be round thirteen years old, perhaps younger. And he was a mixed-race boy, she decided. White, black, and something in between.
She handed the picture back to Jansen. “I don’t know him,” she said. “The boy. Either one of them, although I can’t say for sure because of how the taller one is hidden. He saw the CCTV camera, I expect. Where was it?”
“There were three,” Jansen told her. “Two on a house, one across the street from it. This is from one of the cameras on the house.”
“Why’re you looking…?”
“A woman was gunned down on her doorstep. It may be down to these two.”
That was all he told her, but Ulrike made the leap. She’d seen the newspapers. The wife of the Scotland Yard superintendent, who’d come to Colossus to speak to Ulrike about the deaths of Kimmo Thorne and Jared Salvatore, had been shot on her doorstep in Belgravia. The hue and cry over this had been deafening, broadsheets and tabloids especially. The crime had been inconceivable to the inhabitants of that part of town, and they’d been making their feelings known in every venue they could find.
“He isn’t one of ours, this boy,” Ulrike replied to DI Jansen. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Are you sure about the other?”
He had to be joking, Ulrike thought. No one would be able to recognise the taller man. If it even was a man. Still, she took another look at the picture. “I am sorry,” she said. “There’s just no way-”
“We’d like to show this round the place, if you don’t mind,” Jansen told her.
Ulrike didn’t like what this implied-that she was somehow out of the loop at Colossus-but she had no choice. Before the officers left to flash the photo round, she asked them about the superintendent’s wife. How was she?
Jansen shook his head. “Bad,” he said.
“I’m sorry. Will you-” She nodded at the photo. “Do you expect to catch him?”
Jansen looked down at it, a slim slip of paper in his large chafed hands. “The kid? That’ll be no problem,” he replied. “This is in the Evening Standard’s latest right now. It’ll make the front of every paper tomorrow morning and it’ll be on the news tonight and again tomorrow. We’ll get him, and I expect it’ll happen soon. And when we get him, he’ll talk and then we’ll have the other. Absolutely no bloody doubt about it.”
“I’m…That’s good,” she said. “Poor woman.”
And she did mean that. No one-no matter how rich, how privileged, how titled, how fortunate, or how anything else-deserved to be gunned down in the street. But even as she told herself this and assured herself that the milk of human kindness and compassion had not utterly drained out of her when it came to the upper class of this rigid society in which she lived, Ulrike still felt relieved that Colossus could not be attached to this new crime.
Only now, here were Mr. Bensley and Mrs. Richie and they were sitting with her in her office-another chair having been procured from the reception area-intent upon talking about the one subject she had done everything in her power to keep from them.
Bensley was the one to introduce it. He said, “Tell us about the dead boys, Ulrike.”
She could hardly act the innocent with a “What boys would this be?” sort of reply. There was nothing for it but to tell them that five boys from Colossus had been murdered from September onward, their bodies left in various parts of London.
“Why weren’t we informed?” Bensley asked. “Why did this information have to come to us from someone else?”
“From Neil, you mean.” Ulrike could not keep herself from saying it. She was caught between the desire to let them know she was perfectly aware of her Judas’s identity and the equal need to defend herself. She went on with, “I didn’t know myself till after Kimmo Thorne was murdered. He was the fourth victim. The police came round then.”
“But otherwise…?” Bensley did one of those tie-adjustment moves, of the kind meant to illustrate an incredulity that might otherwise strangle him. Mrs. Richie accompanied this with a click of her teeth. “How is it you didn’t know the other boys were dead?”
“Or even missing,” Mrs. Richie added.
“We’re not organised to keep attendance tabs on the clients,” Ulrike told them, as if they hadn’t had this explained to them a thousand times or more. “Once a boy or girl gets beyond the assessment course, they’re free to come and go as they like. They can participate in what we have to offer or they can drop out. We want them to stay because they want to be here. Only those who’re here as a probationary measure are monitored.” And even then, Colossus didn’t tattle on the kids straightaway. There was a certain amount of leeway given even to them, once they had completed the assessment course.
“That,” Bensley said, “is what we expected you to say.”
Or were told to expect, Ulrike thought. Neil had done his best: She’ll make excuses, but the fact remains: the director of Colossus damn well ought to know what’s going on with the kids Colossus is meant to be helping, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, how much work are we talking about: to look in on the courses and ask the instructors who’s there and who’s fallen by the wayside? And wouldn’t it be wise for the director of Colossus to place a phone call and try to locate a child who’s dropped out of a programme designed-and funded, let’s not forget that-to prevent him from dropping out in the first place? Oh, he’d done his very best, had Neil. Ulrike had to give him high marks for that.
She found she had no ready response to Bensley’s comment, so she waited to see what the board president and his companion had really come to see her about, which she reckoned was only tangentially related to the death of the Colossus boys.
“Perhaps,” Bensley said, “you were too distracted to know that boys had gone missing.”
“I’ve been no more distracted than usual,” Ulrike told him, “what with the plans for the North London branch and the associated fund-raising going on.” On your instruction, by the way, was what she did not add, but she did her best to imply it.
Bensley, however, didn’t make the inference she wished him to make. He said, “That’s not exactly how we understand it. There’s been another distraction for you, hasn’t there?”
“As I said, Mr. Bensley, there’s no easy way to approach this work. I’ve tried to keep my focus spread evenly on all the concerns a director would have in running a place like Colossus. If I missed the fact that several boys stopped coming, it was due to the number of concerns that I had to deal with related to the organisation. Frankly, I feel terrible that none of us”-with delicate emphasis on the word none-“managed to see that-”
“Let me be frank,” Bensley interrupted. Mrs. Richie settled herself in her chair, a movement of the hips spelling out Now we’ve got to the point.
“Yes?” Ulrike folded her hands.
“You’re under review, for want of a better word. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Ulrike, because overall your work for Colossus has seemed unimpeachable.”
“Seemed,” Ulrike said.
“Yes. Seemed.”
“Are you sacking me?”
“I didn’t say that. But consider yourself under scrutiny. We’ll be conducting…Shall we call it an internal investigation?”
“For want of a better word?”
“If you will.”
“And how do you intend to carry out this internal investigation?”
“Through review. Through interviews. Let me say that I believe you’ve largely done a fine job here at Colossus. Let me also say, personally, that I hope you emerge unscathed from this look at your employment and personal history here.”
“My personal history? What does that mean, exactly?”
Mrs. Richie smiled. Mr. Bensley hemmed. And Ulrike knew her goose was in the oven.
She cursed Neil Greenham, but she also cursed herself. She understood to what extent she was going to be cooked if she didn’t bring about a significant alteration to the status quo.