HARROW ROAD’S REPUTATION AS A POLICE STATION wasn’t a good one, but cops had a lot to contend with in West Kilburn. They were dealing with everything from the usual social and cultural conflicts one found within a multiethnic community, to street crime, drugs, and a thriving black market. They found themselves perpetually coping with gangs as well. In an area dominated by housing estates and grim tower blocks built in the sixties when architectural imagination was moribund, legends abounded of cops being outrun, outmanoeuvred, and outsmarted in places like the interlocking and tunnel-like corridors of the notorious Mozart Estate. The police had been outnumbered forever in this part of town. They knew it, which didn’t improve their tempers when it came to meeting the needs of the public.
When Barbara and Nkata arrived, they found a heated argument going on in reception. A Rastafarian accompanied by a hugely pregnant woman and two children was demanding action of a special constable-“I wan’ that fuckin’ car back, man. You t’ink dis woman plan on giving birth in the street?”-who claimed things to be “out of my power, sir. You’ll have to talk to one of the officers who’re working on the case.”
The Rasta said, “Shit, then,” and turned on his heel. He grabbed his woman’s arm and made for the door, saying, “Blood,” to Nkata with a nod as he passed him.
Nkata identified himself and Barbara to the special constable. They were there to see Detective Sergeant Starr, he said. Harrow Road had a boy in lockup, fingered as the shooter in a street crime in Belgravia.
“He’s ’xpecting us,” Nkata said.
Harrow Road had reported to Belgravia, who’d reported, in turn, to New Scotland Yard. The snout in West Kilburn had proved reliable. He’d named a kid who resembled the one seen on the CCTV films from Cadogan Lane, and the cops had found him in very short order. He hadn’t even been on the run. The job on Helen Lynley done, he’d merely repaired to his home, via underground to Westbourne Park because his mug had been visible on their CCTV tapes as well, sans companion this time. Nothing could have been easier. All that remained was matching his fingerprints to those on the gun found in the garden near the scene of the crime.
John Stewart had told Nkata to take it. Nkata had asked Barbara to accompany him. By the time they got there, it was ten o’clock at night. They could have waited till morning-they’d been working fourteen hours at that point and they were both knackered-but neither one of them was willing to wait. There was a chance that Stewart would hand this job over to someone else, and they didn’t want that.
Sergeant Starr turned out to be a black man, slightly shorter than Nkata but bulkier. He had the look of a pleasant-faced pugilist.
He said, “We’ve already had this yob in for street brawling and arson. Those times, he’s pointed the finger elsewhere. You know the sort. It wasn’t me, you fucking pigs.” He glanced at Barbara as if to ask pardon for his language. She waved a weary hand at him. He went on. “But the family’s got a whole history of trouble. Dad got shot and killed in a drug dispute in the street. Mum toasted her brain with something, and she’s been out of the picture for a while. Sister tried to pull off a mugging and ended up in front of the magistrate. The aunt they live with hasn’t been willing to hear shit about the kids being on the fast track to trouble, though. She’s got a shop down the road that she works in full-time and a younger boyfriend keeping her busy in the bedroom, so she can’t afford to see what’s going on under her nose, if you know what I mean. It was always just a matter of time. We tried to tell her first time we had the kid in here, but she wasn’t having it. Same old story.”
“He talked before, you said?” Barbara asked. “What about now?”
“We’re getting sod all out of him.”
“Nothing?” Nkata said.
“Not a word. He’d probably not’ve told us his name if we hadn’t already known it.”
“What is it?”
“Joel Campbell.”
“How old?”
“Twelve.”
“Scared?”
“Oh yeah. I’d say he knows he’s going away for this. But he also knows about Venables and Thompson. Who bloody doesn’t? So six years playing with bricks, finger-painting, and talking to shrinks and he’s finished with the criminal-justice system.”
There was some truth in this. It was the moral and ethical dilemma of the times: what to do with juvenile murderers. Twelve-year-old murderers. And younger.
“We’d like to talk to him.”
“For what good it’ll do. We’re waiting for the social worker to show.”
“Has the aunt been here?”
“Come and gone. She wants him out of here directly or she’ll know the reason why. He’s going nowhere. Between her position and ours, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to discuss.”
“Solicitor?”
“I expect the aunt’s working on that angle now.”
He gestured for them to follow him. On their way to the interview room, they were met by a worn-out looking woman in a sweatshirt, jeans, and trainers, who turned out to be the social worker. She was called Fabia Bender, and she told Sergeant Starr that the boy was asking for something to eat.
“Did he ask or did you offer?” Starr inquired. Which meant, of course, had he opened his mouth to say something at last?
“He asked,” she replied. “More or less. He said, ‘Hungry.’ I’d like to fetch him a sandwich.”
“I’ll organise it,” he said. “These two want a word. You see to that.”
Arrangements made, Starr left Nkata and Barbara with Fabia Bender, who didn’t have much more to add to what the detective had already told them. The boy’s mother, she said, was in a mental hospital in Buckinghamshire, where she’d been a repeat patient for years. During this most recent round of institutionalisation, her children had been living with their grandmother. When the old lady decamped for Jamaica with a boyfriend who was being deported, the children got passed off to the aunt. Really, it was no surprise that kids found their way into trouble when their circumstances were so unsettled.
“He’s just in here,” she said and shouldered open a door.
She went in first, saying, “Thank you, Sherry,” to a uniformed constable who apparently had been sitting with the boy. The constable left, and Barbara entered the room behind Fabia Bender. Nkata followed, and they were face-to-face with the accused killer of Helen Lynley.
Barbara looked at Nkata. He nodded. This was the boy he’d seen on the CCTV film taken in Cadogan Lane and in the Sloane Square underground station: the same head of crinkly hair, the same face blotched with freckles the size of tea cakes. He was about as menacing as a fawn caught in the headlamps of a car. He was small, and his fingernails had been bitten to the quick.
He was sitting at the regulation table, and they joined him there, Nkata and Barbara on one side and the boy and the social worker on the other. Fabia Bender told him that Sergeant Starr was fetching him a sandwich. Someone else had brought him a Coke although it remained untouched.
“Joel,” Nkata said to the boy. “You killed a cop’s wife. You know that? We found a gun nearby. Fingerprints on that’ll turn out to be yours. Ballistics’ll show that gun did the killing. CCTV film places you on the scene. You and ’nother bloke. What d’you got to say, then, blood?”
The boy slid his gaze over to Nkata for a moment. It seemed to linger on the razor scar that ran the length of the black man’s cheek. Unsmiling, Nkata was no teddy bear. But the boy drew himself in-one could almost see him call upon courage from another dimension-and he said nothing.
“We want a name, man,” Nkata told him.
“We know you weren’t alone,” Barbara said.
“Th’ other bloke was an adult, wasn’t he? We want a name out of you. It’s the only way to go forward.”
Joel said nothing. He reached for the Coke and closed his hands round it, although he did not attempt to pop it open.
“Man, where you think you’re going for this one?” Nkata asked the boy. “You think we send blokes like you to Blackpool for a holiday? Going away is what happens to the likes of you. How you play it now determines how long.”
This wasn’t necessarily true, but there was a chance that the boy wouldn’t know it. They needed a name, and they would have it from him.
The door opened then and Sergeant Starr returned. He held the triangle of a plastic-wrapped sandwich in his hand. He unwrapped it and passed it over to the boy. The child picked it up but did not take a bite. He looked hesitant, and Barbara could tell he was struggling with a decision. She had the sensation that the alternatives he was considering were ones that none of them would ever be able to understand. When he finally looked up, it was to speak to Fabia Bender.
“I ain’t grassing,” he said and took a bite of his sandwich.
That was the end of it: the social code of the streets. And not only of the streets, but the code that pervaded their society as well. Children learned it at the knees of parents because it was a lesson essential to their survival no matter where they went. One did not sneak on a friend. But that alone told them volumes in the interview room. Whoever had been with the boy in Belgravia, there was a strong possibility that he was considered-at least by Joel-a friend.
They left the room. Fabia Bender accompanied them. DS Starr remained with the boy.
“I expect he’ll tell us eventually,” Fabia Bender assured them. “It’s early days yet, and he’s never been inside a youth facility before. When he gets there, he’ll have another think about what’s happened. He isn’t stupid.”
Barbara considered this as they paused in the corridor. “He’s been in here for arson and a mugging, though, hasn’t he? What happened about that? A wrist slapping by the magistrate? Did things even go that far?”
The social worker shook her head. “Charges were never brought. I expect they didn’t have the evidence they wanted. He was questioned, but then he was released both times.”
So he was, Barbara thought, the perfect candidate for some sort of social intervention, of the kind provided in Elephant and Castle. She said, “What happened to him then?”
“What do you mean?”
“When he was released. Did you recommend him to any special programme?”
“What kind of programme?”
“The kind designed to keep kids out of trouble.”
“You ever send a kid over to a group called Colossus?” Nkata asked. “’Cross the river, this is. Elephant and Castle.”
Fabia Bender shook her head. “I’ve heard of it, of course. We’ve had their outreach people here for a presentation as well.”
“But…?”
“But we’ve never sent any of our children over to them.”
“You haven’t.” Barbara made this a statement.
“No. It’s quite a distance, you see, and we’ve been waiting for them to open a branch closer to this part of town.”
LYNLEY WAS ALONE with Helen and had been so for the last two hours. He’d made the request of their respective families, and they’d agreed. Only Iris protested, but she’d been here at the hospital the least amount of time, so he understood how impossible she felt it that she would be asked to part from her sister.
The specialist had come and gone. He’d read the charts and the reports. He’d studied the monitors. He’d examined what little there was to examine. In the end, he’d met everyone because Lynley had wanted it that way. As much as a person could ever be said to belong to anyone, Helen belonged to him by virtue of being his wife. But she was a daughter as well, a beloved sister, a loving daughter- and sister-in-law. The loss of her touched every one of them. He did not suffer this monstrous blow alone, nor could he ever claim to grieve it alone. So all of them had sat with the Italian doctor, the neonatal neurologist who told them what they already knew.
Twenty minutes was not a vast span of time. Twenty minutes described a period in which very little could generally be accomplished in life. Indeed, there were days when Lynley couldn’t even get from his house to Victoria Street in under twenty minutes, and other than showering and dressing or brewing and drinking a cup of tea or doing the washing up after dinner or perhaps dead-heading the roses in the garden, one-third of an hour didn’t provide the leisure necessary to do much of anything. But for the human brain, twenty minutes was an eternity. It was forever because that was the nature of the alteration it could bring upon the life depending upon its normal functioning. And that normal functioning depended upon a regular supply of oxygen. Witness the victim of the gunshot, the doctor had said. Witness your Helen.
The difficulty, of course, was in the not knowing, which arose from the not seeing. Helen could be seen-daily, hourly, moment by moment-lifeless in the hospital bed. The baby-their son, their amusingly named, for want of a permanent decision by his indecisive parents, Jasper Felix-could not. All they knew was all the specialist knew and what he knew was dependent upon what was common knowledge about the brain.
If Helen had no oxygen, the baby had no oxygen. They could hope for a miracle, but that was all.
Helen’s father had asked, “How likely is that ‘miracle’?”
The doctor shook his head. He was sympathetic. He seemed generous and good hearted. But he would not lie.
None of them looked at one another at first, once the specialist left them. All of them felt the burden, but only one of them experienced the weight of having to make a decision. Lynley was left with the knowledge that everything rested with him and upon him. They could love him-as they did and as he knew-but they could not move the cup from his hands to theirs.
Each one of them spoke to him before they left for the night, somehow knowing without being told that the moment for resolution had arrived. His mother remained longer than any of them, and she knelt before his chair and looked up into his face.
“Everything in our lives,” she said quietly, “leads up to everything else in our lives. So a moment in the present has a reference point, both in the past and in the future. I want you to know that you-as you are right now and as you ever will be-are fully enough for this moment, Tommy. One way or the other. Whatever it brings.”
“I’ve been wondering how I’m meant to know what to do,” he said. “I look at her face and I try to see on it what she’d want me to do. Then I ask myself if even that is a lie, if I’m merely telling myself that I’m looking at her and trying to see what she’d want me to do when all the time I’m just looking at her and looking at her because I can’t face the coming moment when I won’t be able to look at her at all. Because she’ll be gone. Not only gone in spirit but gone in flesh as well. Because right now, you see, even in this, she’s giving me a reason to keep going on. I’m prolonging that.”
His mother reached up and caressed his face. She said, “Of all my children, you were always the hardest on yourself. You were always looking for the right way to behave, so concerned you might make a mistake. But, darling, there are no mistakes. There are only our wishes, our actions, and the consequences that follow both. There are only events, how we cope with them, and what we learn from the coping.”
“That’s too easy,” he said.
“On the contrary. It’s monumentally difficult.”
She left him then and he went to Helen. He sat at her bedside. He knew that no matter how he disciplined his mind to this moment, the image of his wife as she was just now would fade with time, just as the image of her as she had been days ago would also fade, had indeed already begun to fade, until ultimately, there would be nothing of her left in his visual memory. If he wanted to see her, he’d be able to do so only in photographs. When he closed his eyes, however, he’d see nothing but the dark.
It was the dark that he feared. It was everything that represented the dark, which he could not face. And Helen was at the centre of it all. As was the not-Helen that would come about the instant he acted in the only way he knew his wife would have wanted.
She’d been telling him that from the first. Or was even that belief a lie?
He did not know. He lowered his forehead to the mattress and he prayed for a sign. He knew he was looking for something that would make the road an easier one for him to walk. But signs did not exist for that purpose. They served as guides, but they did not smooth the way.
Her hand was cool when he felt for it where it lay at her side. He closed his fingers round it and he summoned hers to move as they might have done had she only been what she looked, asleep. He pictured her eyelids fluttering open and he heard her murmured “Hullo, darling,” but when he raised his head, she was as before. Breathing because medical science had evolved to that extent. Dead because it had evolved no further.
They belonged together. The will of man might have wished it otherwise. The will of nature was not so vague. Helen would have understood that even if she had not phrased it that way. Let us go, Tommy would have been how she put it. At the heart of matters, she had always been the wisest and most practical of women.
When the door opened some time later, he was ready.
“It’s time,” he said.
He felt his heart swelling, as if it would be torn from his body. The monitors deadened. The ventilator hushed. The silence of parting swept into the room.
BY THE TIME Barbara and Nkata arrived back at New Scotland Yard, the news was in. The gun bore the boy’s prints on the barrel and on the grip, and ballistics showed the bullet to have come from the same pistol. They made their own report to John Stewart, who listened stone faced. He looked as if he believed his own presence in the Harrow Road station might have made a difference, shaking the name of the other perpetrator out of the kid. Sod all he knew, Barbara thought, and she told him what they’d learned from Fabia Bender about the boy and about Colossus.
At the end, she said, “I want to tell the superintendent, sir.” When Stewart’s expression suggested that he smelled something bad, she altered her declaration to, “I’d like to tell him, that is. He thinks Helen’s shooting has to do with this investigation, with that profile in The Source as the way the shooter found her. He needs to know…It’ll give him one less thing to think about, I expect.”
Stewart appeared to look at this from every angle before he finally agreed. But, he told her, she was to do the paperwork related to their call in Harrow Road, and she was to do that before setting off for St. Thomas’ Hospital.
It was past one in the morning, then, when she finally staggered down to her car. Then the blasted Mini choked on her, and she sat with her head on the steering wheel, willing the damn engine to turn over properly. In her head, she heard that same admonition from some mystical automotive dimension suggesting that she might want to get the car seen to before it conked out altogether. She muttered, “Tomorrow. All right? Tomorrow,” and hoped that promise was enough.
It was. The engine finally started.
At this time of night, the streets of London were virtually empty. No sane taxi driver was out, trying to get a fare in Westminster, and the buses ran far less frequently. An occasional car was passing by, but largely the streets were as vacant as the pavements where the homeless tucked themselves into doorways. So she made quick time to the hospital.
As she drove, she realised that he might not be there, that he might have gone home and tried to get some sleep, in which case she would not disturb him. But when she arrived and pulled into a drop-off point directly down from Lambeth Palace Road, she saw his Bentley at the far end of the carpark. He was with Helen, then, as she’d reckoned he would be.
She gave passing thought to the risk of shutting the Mini’s engine off after she’d finally got it going. But the risk was necessary because she wanted to be the one to tell Lynley about the boy. She felt a need to relieve at least some small portion of the guilt he was carrying round, so she turned the key in the ignition and waited for the Mini’s hiccupping to come to an end.
She grabbed up her shoulder bag and got out of the car. She was just about to walk towards the entrance when she saw him. He’d come out of hospital, and the look of him-how he walked and how he held his shoulders-told her how permanently altered he was. She hesitated, then. How to approach a dearly loved friend…How to approach him in such a time of devastation? At the end, she didn’t think she could. Because, after all, what difference did it actually make with his life now, as it was, in ruins?
He trudged across the carpark to the Bentley. There he looked up. Not at her but at a spot in the carpark out of her range of vision. It was as if someone had called his name. And then a figure quickly emerged from the darkness and things happened very swiftly after that.
Barbara saw that the figure wore all black. He moved over to Lynley. There was something in his hand. Lynley looked round. Then he turned in a flash back to his car. But he got no farther. For the figure reached him and pressed the object that he carried into Lynley’s side. Not even a second passed before Barbara’s superintendent was on the ground and the hand that held the object pressed to him again. His body jerked and the figure in black looked up. Even from a distance, Barbara saw she was gazing on Robbie Kilfoyle.
It had all taken three seconds, perhaps less. Kilfoyle grabbed Lynley by his armpits and dragged him quickly to what Barbara should have bloody well seen, she thought, if she hadn’t been so focussed on Lynley. A van was parked deeply in the shadows, its sliding door open. In another second, he’d got Lynley inside.
Barbara said, “Bloody sodding hell,” weaponless and for a moment utterly directionless. She looked to the Mini for something she could use…She reached for her mobile to phone for help. She punched in the first nine as, across the carpark, the van roared to life.
She dived for her car. She threw her bag and her mobile inside, phone call incomplete. She would punch in the last two nines in a moment, but in the meantime she had to get going, had to get on his tail, had to follow and shout the direction she was traveling into the mobile so that an armed unit could be sent on its way because the van, the bloody van, was moving, it was coming across the carpark now. It was red, as they’d suspected, and on its side were the faded letters they’d seen in the film.
Barbara shoved her key into the ignition and turned it. The engine ground. It did not engage. Across from her, the van was rumbling towards the exit. Its lights swept her way. She ducked because he had to think he had an all clear so he’d keep his pace slow, steady, and unsuspecting. She could follow then and ring for the men with the nice big guns to take down this useless piece of human excrement before he did something to someone who meant everything to her to someone who was her friend her mentor and who at this moment would not fight back would not care to fight back and would think Do with me as you will and she could not let that happen to Lynley.
The car did not start. It would not start. Barbara heard herself shriek. She leaped out. She slammed the door behind her. She dashed across the carpark. She thought how he’d been heading to the Bentley, had been near to the Bentley, so there was a chance…
And he’d dropped the keys as he’d fallen. He’d dropped the keys. She grabbed them up with a sob of gratitude that she forced herself to quell and then she was in the Bentley. Her hands were shaking. It took a century to get the key into the ignition but then the car was starting and she was trying to get the damn seat into a place where she could reach the accelerator and the brake because his legs were long because he was nearly a foot taller than she. She jerked the car into gear and reversed it and prayed that the killer was being careful careful careful because the last thing he would want was to attract attention to his driving.
He’d turned left. She did the same. She revved the engine of the huge car, and it leapt ahead like a well-trained thoroughbred and she swore as she gained control over it control over her reactions control over her exhaustion which was no longer exhaustion at all but raging adrenaline and the need to stop this bugger in his tracks arrange a little surprise for the bastard bring out a hundred cops if necessary and all of them armed so that they could storm his bloody little mobile killing site and he couldn’t hurt Lynley while the van was in motion so she knew she was all right until it stopped. But she needed to let the cops know where she was heading, so the moment she finally caught sight of Kilfoyle’s van crossing Westminster Bridge, she reached for the mobile. And realised it was back in the Mini along with her bag, left where she’d thrown them when she’d leapt into her car, her call to 999 incomplete.
She shouted, “Shit! Shit!,” and knew that, barring a miracle, she was on her own. You and me, babe. Lynley’s life in the balance because that was it, wasn’t it, this was going to be the pièce de résistance, you bloody sod, this was going to put your miserable name in lights-you would kill the cop who was looking for you and you would do to him what you’d done to the others and as he was he could not fight back and as he’d been in the carpark he wouldn’t care about fighting to save himself and you know that, don’t you, just as you knew where to find him, you sod, because you’d read the papers and you’d watched the telly and now you were going to have real fun.
She didn’t know where they were. The bugger was good when it came to rat runs but he’d be good, wouldn’t he, because he bicycled and he knew the streets he knew the byways he knew the whole flaming town.
They were heading northeast. That was all she could tell. She stayed behind as far as she dared without losing him altogether. She drove without headlights, which he could not do if he wanted to look normal casual just going from point A to point B in all innocence at whatever time it was, which felt like two in the morning or later. She couldn’t risk stopping at a phone box or grabbing up a pedestrian-had there even been one-and demanding the use of his mobile. All she could do was remain in pursuit and think feverishly of what she could do when she got to wherever the hell they were going which she knew would be the spot where he’d killed the others. And then transported their bodies so where do you plan to place Lynley’s, you piece of filth? But that would not happen even if the superintendent welcomed it in his present state because she would not allow it because although that bugger had the weapons she had surprise and she bloody well intended to use it. Only what was it that was the surprise other than her presence which was going to mean sweet FA to this bastard with his stun gun his knives his duct tape his restraints his bloody sodding oils and his marks on the forehead.
Wheel brace in the boot of the Bentley. That was what it boiled down to and what the hell was she supposed to do with that? Don’t you fucking touch him or I’ll swing this thing at your miserable head while I’m dodging your stun gun and you’re leaping upon me with your carving knife? How was that going to work?
Up ahead, he turned once more and it looked like a final time. They’d been driving and driving, at least twenty minutes and possibly longer. Just before the turn, they’d crossed over a river which damn well wasn’t the Thames way up here when way up here was far north and east of where they’d begun. Then they’d passed an outdoor storage facility at the northeast edge of the river and she’d thought, He’s got a bloody lockup where he does the job, just like we’d thought at some point along the route that’s brought us to this miserable moment. But he passed the storage facility with its neat row of lockups lined up along the river and instead he pulled into a carpark just beyond. It was large, vast when she compared it to where he’d been parked at St. Thomas’ Hospital. Above it was a sign that finally told her where they were, Lea Valley Ice Centre. Essex Wharf. They were at the River Lea.
The ice centre was an indoor skating rink looking like an antique Quonset hut. It sat some fifty yards off the road, and Kilfoyle drove to the left of it where the carpark made a dogleg that possessed two distinct advantages for a killer: It was overgrown with evergreen shrubbery and the streetlamp above it was broken. When the van was parked there, it was completely in shadow. No one driving by would see it from the street.
The van’s lights went out. Barbara waited for a moment to see if Kilfoyle planned to emerge. If he dragged his victim out and did his stuff in the bushes…only how the hell could he burn someone’s hands in the bushes? No, she thought. He’d do it inside. He had no need to depart his mobile execution site. He just had to find a spot where no one was likely to hear any noise coming from the van, a spot where no one was likely ever to see the van. He’d do his stuff and then go on his way.
Which meant she had to do her business first.
She’d been idling the Bentley at the kerb, but now she slowly pulled into the carpark herself. She watched and waited for some sort of sign, like the slight motion of the vehicle as Kilfoyle moved round inside it. She got out of the car, although she left it running. She looked for something…for anything she could use. Surprise was the only thing she had, she reminded herself. What then constituted the biggest surprise she could give the sodding freak?
She went over the details feverishly. What they knew and everything they had tried to guess. He restrained them, so he’d be doing that now. For the drive, he’d have placed Lynley where he could zap him with the stun gun whenever he seemed to be coming to his senses. But now he’d be restraining him. And in the restraint came the hope of salvation. For as the restraints immobilised Lynley, so did they protect him. And that’s what she wanted.
Protection gave her the answer she needed.
LYNLEY WAS aware of his inability to order his body to move. What was gone from him was the message-to-action workings of his brain. Nothing was natural. He had to think about moving his arm instead of just moving it, but it didn’t move anyway. The same for his legs. His head felt unduly heavy, and somewhere his muscles were being told to short-circuit. It felt as if his nerve endings were in warfare.
He was aware also of darkness and movement. When he managed to focus his eyes on something, he was also aware of warmth. The warmth attached itself to movement-not his, unfortunately-and through a haze he saw that he was not alone. A figure lay in the gloom and he was sprawled upon it, half on a body and half on the floor of the van.
He knew it was a van. He knew it was the van. In the instant in which his name was called quietly from the shadows, in which he’d turned and thought it was a reporter who’d come to be the first to interview the non-husband and nonfather he had just become, one part of his brain told him something wasn’t right. Then he’d seen the torch in the extended hand, and he’d known whom he was looking at. After that, he’d been struck by the bolt of current and it was over.
He didn’t know how many times he’d been hit with the stun gun during the journey to wherever they were when the van finally stopped. What he did know was that the bolts hit him with a regularity that suggested the administrator knew how long a victim’s disorientation was likely to last.
When the van stopped and its engine shut off, the man who had called himself Fu climbed into the rear, stun-gun torch in his hand. He applied it to Lynley another time in the businesslike manner of a doctor administering a necessary injection, and the next time Lynley came to his senses and finally felt as if his muscles might be his own once more, he found that he was bound to the inside wall of the van, hanging downward by his armpits and his wrists, legs bent so that his ankles could also be bound to the wall behind him. The bindings felt like leather straps, but they could have been anything. He couldn’t see them.
What he could see was the woman, source of the earlier warmth he’d felt. She lay bound on the floor of the van, arms stretched out to either side in the manner of a horizontal crucifixion. The cross itself was there as well, represented by a board on which she was lying. She had duct tape patched across her mouth. Her eyes were open wide in terror.
Terror was good, Lynley managed to think. Terror was much better than resignation. As he looked at her, she seemed to sense his gaze. She turned her head. He saw that she was the woman from Colossus, but in his present state, he couldn’t recall her name. That suggested to him that Barbara Havers had been right all along, in her inimitable, stubborn, bloody-minded way: The killer in the van with them was one of the men who worked for Colossus.
The man Fu was getting everything ready, primarily himself. He’d lit a candle and stripped, and he was anointing his naked body with a substance-this would be the ambergris, wouldn’t it?-that he took from a small brown vial. Next to him was the cooker that Muwaffaq Masoud had described to them in Hayes. It was heating up a large pan from which the scent of previously burnt meat gave off a faint odour.
He was actually humming. It was all in a night’s work for him. They were in his power, and the manifestation of power and the execution of power were what he wanted out of life.
On the floor of the van, the woman made a pitiful sound from beneath the duct tape. Fu turned at this, and in the light Lynley saw that he looked vaguely familiar, that he possessed that quintessential and very English face of substantial pointed nose, rounded chin, and bread-dough cheeks. He could have been a hundred thousand men on the street, but in him the strain had mutated somehow, so he was not a bland little individual working at an ordinary job and going home to the wife and the children every evening in a terrace house somewhere but, rather, he was who circumstances in life had altered him to be: someone who liked to kill people.
Fu said, “I wouldn’t have chosen you, Ulrike. I rather like you. It was actually my mistake ever to mention Dad. But when you started asking for alibis-and it was fairly obvious that was what you were doing, by the way-I knew I had to tell you something you’d be happy with. Sitting home alone would never have cut the mustard, would it? The alone part would have made you curious.” He looked down on her, completely friendly. “I mean, you would have been all over that, p’rhaps even telling the coppers about it. And then where would we be?”
He brought out the knife. He took it from the little work top where the propane cooker was merrily heating not only the pan but the van itself now. Lynley could feel the warmth undulating across to him.
Fu said, “It was meant to be one of the boys. I thought Mark Connor. You know him, don’t you? Likes to hang round in reception with Jack? Little rapist in the making, you ask me. He needs sorting, Ulrike. They all need sorting. Proper little gobshites, they are. Need discipline and no one gives that to them. Makes one wonder what kind of parents they have. Parenting, you know, is essential to development. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
He turned back to the cooker. He took up the candle and held it to various points on his body. It came to Lynley that this was a hieratic ritual he was watching. And he was meant to be watching, like a worshipper at church.
He wanted to speak, but his mouth too was covered with tape. He tested the bindings that held his wrists to the side of the van. They were immovable.
Fu turned again. He stood there quite naturally in his nudity, his body glistening where he’d used the oil on it. He held up the candle and saw that Lynley was watching him. He reached for something on the work top again.
Lynley thought it would be the torch to stun him once more, but it was instead a small brown bottle, not the one he’d been using but another that he took from a little cupboard and held up so that Lynley would be sure to see it.
“Something new, Superintendent,” he said. “After Ulrike, I’ll switch to parsley. Triumph, you see. And there’ll be much cause for it. For triumph. For me, that is. For you? Well, I don’t expect you’ve much to feel grand about at this moment, have you? But you’re curious, still, and who can blame you? You want to know, don’t you? You want to understand.”
He knelt by Ulrike, but he looked at Lynley. “Adultery. Nowadays it’s nothing she’d actually go to gaol for, but it’ll do nicely. She would have touched him-intimately, Ulrike? It would have been intimately, wouldn’t it?-so, like the others, her hands bear the stain of her sin.” He looked down at Ulrike. “I expect you’re sorry for that, aren’t you, darling?” He smoothed her hair. “Yes, yes. You’re sorry. So you’ll be released. I promise you that. When it’s over, your soul will fly to heaven. I’ll keep a bit of you with me…snip snip and you’re mine…but at that point, you won’t feel it. You won’t feel a thing.”
Lynley saw that the young woman had begun to cry. She struggled wildly against her restraints but the effort only exhausted her. Fu watched her, placid, and smoothed her hair once again when she was finished.
“It has to happen,” he said kindly. “Try to understand. And do know that I like you, Ulrike. Actually, I quite liked them all. You have to suffer, of course, but that’s what life is. Suffering through whatever we’re handed. And this is what’s been handed to you. The superintendent here will bear witness. And then he’ll pay for his own sins as well. So you’re not alone, Ulrike. You can take comfort from that, can’t you?”
The toying with her, Lynley saw, was giving the man pleasure, actual physical pleasure. This, however, seemed to embarrass him. It would doubtless make him feel like one of the “others” and he wouldn’t like that: the indication that he too was of warped human stock like every other psychopath who had gone before him, getting a sexual kick from another’s terror and pain. He picked up his trousers and donned them, pushing his phallus out of view.
But it seemed that the fact of his arousal altered him. He became all business, the friendly chat put behind him. He sharpened the knife. He spat into the pan to test the heat of it. From a rack, he took a length of thin line that he held-one end in each hand-and snapped expertly as if to test its strength.
“Down to work, then,” he said when he was fully prepared.
BARBARA STUDIED the van from the farthest end of the carpark, some sixty yards away. She tried to think what the inside might be like. If he’d killed the boys and sliced them open within the vehicle-which she was certain he’d done-that called for space, space in which to lay someone out, which meant the back of the van. Obvious, no? But how exactly was one of these bloody vehicles structured? she wondered. Where were its most vulnerable points and where the most secure? She didn’t know. And she didn’t have the time to find out.
She climbed back into the Bentley and she adjusted the seat, far back now, as far as it would go. This would make it difficult for her to drive, but she wasn’t going a great distance.
She fastened her safety belt.
She revved the motor.
She said, “Sorry, sir,” and changed the car from park to drive.
FU SAID to Ulrike, “We’ve had judgement already, haven’t we? And I can see both admission and repentance in your tears. So we’ll go on directly to punishment, darling. From punishment, you see, purification comes.”
Lynley watched as Fu removed the pan from the stove. He saw him smile kindly down at the struggling woman. He too struggled but it was to no avail. “Don’t,” Fu told them both. “It’ll make everything worse.” And then directly to Ulrike, “Anyway, darling, trust me on this. It’s going to hurt me far worse than it’ll ever hurt you.”
He knelt beside her and placed the pan on the floor.
He reached for her hand, untied it, and held it tight. He considered it for a moment, then kissed it.
And the side of the van exploded.
THE AIRBAG DEPLOYED. Smoke filled the car. Barbara coughed and fumbled frantically with the fastening on her safety belt. She managed to release it and she stumbled from the car, sore of chest and hacking to clear her lungs. When she got her breath back, she looked at the Bentley and realised then that what she’d thought was smoke was actually some sort of powder. The airbag? Who knew. The important thing was that nothing was on fire, neither the Bentley nor the van, although neither was the same as it had been.
She’d aimed for the driver’s door. She’d hit it dead centre. Thirty-eight miles an hour had done the job. The speed had destroyed the front of the Bentley and sent the van spinning into the shrubbery. What faced her now was the rear of the van, its single window staring and black.
He had the weapons, but she had surprise. She went forward to see what surprise had wrought.
The sliding door was on the passenger’s side. It was open. Barbara yelled, “Cops, Kilfoyle. You’re finished. Step outside.”
Nothing in response. He had to be unconscious.
She moved carefully. She looked round her as she went. It was dark as pitch, but her eyes were adjusting. The shrubbery was thick, gnarling from the ground right into the carpark, and she made her way along it to the open van door.
She saw figures, unaccountably two of them and a candle guttering on its side on the floor. She righted this and it shed light in a glow that allowed her to find him. Lynley hung limply from his arms and his wrists, bolted like a piece of meat to the side of the van. On the floor, Ulrike Ellis lay bound. She’d wet herself. The smell of piss was rank in the air.
Barbara stepped over her and got to Lynley. He was conscious, she saw, and she sent a broken prayer of gratitude heavenward. She ripped the piece of duct tape from his mouth, crying, “Did he hurt you? Are you hurt? Where is he, sir?”
Lynley said, “See to the woman, the woman,” and Barbara left him to go to her. She saw that a heavy frying pan lay next to Ulrike and for a moment she thought the bastard had bashed her with it and she was finished altogether. But when she knelt and felt for a pulse, it was fast and steady. She ripped the duct tape from Ulrike’s mouth. She unbound her left hand.
She said, “Sir, where is he? Is he here? Where-”
The van lurched.
Lynley shouted, “Barbara! Behind you!”
And the bastard was there. Back in the van and coming towards her and God damn but didn’t he have something in his hand. It looked like a torch but she couldn’t believe it was a torch since it wasn’t on and anyway he was storming at her and-
Barbara grabbed the only thing within reach. She leaped to her feet just as he lunged. He missed her, fell forward.
She was more fortunate.
She swung the frying pan and brained him on the back of the head.
He fell over Ulrike, but that didn’t matter. Barbara brained him a second time for good measure.