With No One As Witness Page 14

  “That sounds good.” But it didn’t, really. The idea of the boy’s being attached to a church group gave Fu pause because the disenfranchised were what He wanted. A moment later, however, the boy clarified the level—or lack thereof—of both his virtue and his connection with others. “Rev Savidge’s got me in care at his house.”

  “The…vicar is it?…of the church group?”

  “Him and his wife. Oni. She’s from Ghana.”

  “From Ghana? Recently?”

  The boy shrugged. It seemed a habit with him. “Don’ know. It’s where his own people’re from. Rev Savidge’s people. It’s where they came from before they got sent to Jamaica on a slave ship. Oni, she’s called. Rev Savidge’s wife. Oni.”

  Ah. The second and third time he’d said her name. Here, then, was a real something to be mined, several nuggets at once. Fu said, “Oni. That’s a brilliant name.”

  “Yeah. She’s a star.”

  “Like to live with them, then? Reverend Savidge and Oni?”

  The shoulders again, that casual lift of them that hid what the boy no doubt was feeling, not to mention what he was wanting. “All right,” he said. “Better than with my mum anyway.” And before Fu could press, asking the boy questions that would reveal his mum’s imprisonment, thereby allowing Fu to forge yet another false bond with him, the boy said, “So where’s your car, then?” in a restless manner, which could be interpreted as a very bad sign.

  Thankfully, though, they were nearly upon it, parked in the shadows of an enormous plane tree. “Right there,” Fu said, and He gave a look round to make sure the street was as deserted as it had been on His every recce of the site. It was. Perfect. He tossed his cigarette into the street, and when the boy had done the same, He unlocked the passenger door. “Hop in,” He said. “You hungry? I’ve some takeaway in that bag on the floor.”

  Roast beef, although it should have been lamb. Lamb would have been richer with appropriate associations.

  Fu shut the door when the boy was inside and going for the bag of food as required of him. He tucked right in. Happily, he didn’t notice that his door had no interior handle and that his seat belt had been removed. Fu joined him, heaving Himself into the driver’s seat and thrusting the ignition key into its home. He started the van, but He did not put it into gear, nor did He release its hand brake. He said to the boy, “Grab us something to drink, okay? I’ve a cooler back there. Behind my seat. I could do with a lager. There’s Cokes if you want one. Or have a beer yourself if you’d rather.”

  “Cheers.” The boy twisted in his seat. He peered into the back where, because the van was carefully panelled and thoroughly insulated, it was conveniently dark as the devil’s bum. He said, “Behind where?” as required of him.

  Fu said, “Hang on. I’ve got a torch here somewhere,” and He made much of searching round His seat till He put His hands on the torch in its special hidden spot. He said, “Got it. Have some light, then,” and He flicked it on.

  Focused on the cooler and the promise of beer within it, the boy didn’t notice the rest of the van’s interior: the body board firmly in its brackets, the wrist and ankle restraints curled to either side on the floor, the stove from the vehicle’s former days, the roll of tape, the washing line, and the knife. Especially that. The boy saw none of this because like the others who’d preceded him, he was just a male adolescent with the male adolescent’s appetites for the illicit and in this moment the illicit was represented by beer. In another moment, an earlier moment, the illicit had been represented by crime. It was that for which he now stood doomed to punishment.

  Turned in his seat and bending to the back of the van, the boy reached towards the cooler. This exposed his torso. It was a movement designed to aid what followed.

  Fu turned the torch and pressed it into the boy. Two hundred thousand volts scrambled his nervous system.

  The rest was easy.

  LYNLEY WAS STANDING at the work top in the kitchen, downing a cup of the strongest coffee he’d been able to manage at half past four in the morning, when his wife joined him. In the doorway, Helen blinked against the overhead lights as she tied the belt of her dressing gown round her. She looked extremely weary.

  “Bad night?” he asked her and added with a smile, “All that worry over christening clothes?”

  “Stop,” she grumbled. “I dreamed our Jasper Felix was doing backflips in my stomach.”

  She came to him and slipped her arms round his waist, yawning as she rested her head against his shoulder. “What are you doing dressed at this hour? The Press Bureau haven’t taken to offering predawn press briefings, have they? You know what I mean: See how diligently we work at the Met; we’re up before the sun on the scent of malefactors.”

  “Hillier would ask for that if he thought of it,” Lynley replied. “Wait another week. It’ll occur to him.”

  “Misbehaving, is he?”

  “Just being Hillier. He’s parading Winston in front of the press like Rod Hull. Except poor Emu doesn’t get to speak.”

  Helen looked up at him. “You’re angry about this, aren’t you? It’s not like you not to be philosophical. Is this about Barbara? Winston’s getting the promotion instead of her?”

  “That was rotten of Hillier, but I should have seen it coming,” Lynley said. “He’d love to get rid of her.”

  “Still?”

  “Always. I’ve never known quite how to protect her, Helen. Even doing the superintendent bit temporarily, I feel at a loss. I haven’t a quarter of Webberly’s skill at this sort of thing.”

  She released herself from his embrace and went to the cupboard where she took out a mug, which she filled with skimmed milk and put into the microwave to heat. She said, “Malcolm Webberly has the advantage of being Sir David’s brother-in-law, darling. That would have counted for something when they knocked heads on an issue, wouldn’t it?”

  Lynley grumbled, neither agreement nor dissent. He watched his wife take her warmed milk from the microwave and stir a spoonful of Horlicks into it. He finished off his coffee and was rinsing out the cup when the front doorbell buzzed.

  Helen turned from the work top, saying, “Who on earth…?” as she looked towards the wall clock.

  “That’ll be Havers.”

  “You are going to work, then? Really? At this hour?”

  “Going to Bermondsey.” He left the kitchen and she followed, Horlicks in hand. “The market.”

  “Tell me it’s not to shop,” she said. “Bargains are bargains, and you know I’d never turn away from one myself, but surely one ought to draw the line at bargains reached before the sun comes up.”

  Lynley chuckled. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us? The odd piece of priceless porcelain for twenty-five pounds? The Peter Paul Rubens hidden beneath two centuries of grime, with nineteenth-century household cats painted over it by a six-year-old?” He crossed the marble tiles of the entrance and opened the door to find Barbara Havers leaning against the iron railing, a knitted cap pulled low on her brow and a donkey jacket wrapped round her stubby body.

  Havers said to Helen, “If you’re seeing him off at this hour, the honeymoon has definitely gone on too long.”

  “My restless dreams are seeing him off,” Helen said. “That and general anxiety over the future, according to my husband.”

  “Haven’t decided on the christening clobber yet?”

  Helen looked at Lynley. “Did you actually tell her, Tommy?”

  “Was it confidential?”

  “No. Just inane. The situation, that is, not your telling it.” And then to Barbara, “We may have a small fire in the nursery. It will, unfortunately, burn both sets of clothes beyond use and recognition. What do you think?”

  “Sounds just the ticket to me,” Havers said. “Why go for family compromise when you can have arson?”

  “Our very thought.”

  “Better and better,” Lynley said. He put his arm round his wife’s shoulders and kissed the side of h
er head. “Lock up behind me,” he instructed her. “And go back to bed.”

  Helen spoke to her small bump. “Do not haunt my dreams again, young man. Mind your mummy.” And then to Lynley and Barbara, “And you mind how you go,” before she shut the door behind them.

  Lynley waited to hear the bolts shoot into place. Next to him, Barbara Havers was lighting a cigarette. He eyed her with disapproval, saying, “At half past four in the morning? Even in my worst days, Havers, I couldn’t have managed that.”

  “Are you aware there’s nothing more sanctimonious than a reformed smoker, sir?”

  “I don’t believe it,” he replied, leading them down the street in the direction of the mews, where his car was garaged. “There must be something else.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “There’ve been studies done on it. Even your basic Mary Magdalenes living now as nuns don’t rate a sausage compared to your former weed fiends.”

  “It must be our concern for the health of our fellows.”

  “More like your desire to inflict your misery on everyone else. Give it up, sir. I know you want to rip this out of my hand and smoke it to the nub. How long have you gone without at this point?”

  “So long I can’t even remember, actually.”

  “Oh, bloody right,” she said to the sky.

  They set off in the blessing of early morning London: There was virtually no other vehicle on the streets. Because of this, they zipped through Sloane Square with all traffic lights in their favour, and in less than five minutes they saw the lights of Chelsea Bridge and the tall brick smokestacks of Battersea Power Station rising into the charcoal sky across the Thames.

  Lynley chose a route along the embankment that kept them on the wrong side of the river as long as possible, where he was more familiar with the turf. Here too there were very few vehicles, just the odd cab heading into the centre of town for the day’s work and the occasional lorry getting a head start on deliveries. Thus they wended their way to the massive grey fortress that was the Tower of London before crossing over, and from there it was no difficult feat to find Bermondsey Market, not overly far along Tower Bridge Road.

  Using the illumination of tall streetlamps, as well as torches, fairy lights strung round the occasional stall, and other localised lights of dubious origin and weak wattage, vendors were in the final stages of setting up for business. Their day would begin shortly—for the market opened at five in the morning and was a thing of memory by two in the afternoon—so they were intent upon the assembly of the poles and tables that defined their stalls. Around them in the darkness waited boxes of countless treasures, which were stacked on carts that had been wheeled into position from vans and cars along the nearby streets.

  Already, there were people waiting to be the first to browse through everything from hairbrushes to high-button shoes. No one officially held them back, but it was clear from watching the vendors at work that customers would not be welcome until the goods were fully displayed beneath the predawn sky.

  As in most London markets, the vendors occupied the same general area every time Bermondsey was open for business. So Lynley and Havers began at the north end and worked their way south, asking for someone who could talk to them about Kimmo Thorne. The fact that they were police did not garner them the quick cooperation they had hoped for under circumstances that involved the death of one of the vendors’ own. But this they knew was likely due to Bermondsey’s reputation for being a clearing ground for stolen property, a place where the trade part of “in the trade” frequently meant breaking and entering.

  They’d spent more than an hour quizzing vendors when a seller of ersatz Victorian dressing-table sets (“This’s guaranteed one hunderd p’rcent the genuine article, sir and madam”) recognised Kimmo’s name, and after declaring both the name and the person in possession of it, “an odd l’tle sod, you ask me,” he directed Lynley and Havers to an elderly couple at a silver stall. “You talk to the Grabinskis over there,” he said, using his chin to indicate the direction. “They’ll be able to tell you what’s what with Kimmo. Dead sorry about wha’ happened to the l’tle sod. Read about it in the News of the World.”

  So, evidently, had the Grabinskis, who turned out to be a couple whose only son had died years in the past but at something near the same age as Kimmo Thorne. They’d quite taken to the boy, they explained, not so much because he reminded them physically of their dear Mike but because he had something of Mike’s enterprising nature. This quality the Grabinskis both admired in Kimmo and deeply missed in their departed son, so when Kimmo had turned up on occasion with the odd something or other or a bagful of somethings he wanted to sell, they shared their stall with him and he gave them a portion of his profit.

  Not that they’d ever asked him for it, Mrs. Grabinski said hastily. Her name was Elaine and she wore sage green Wellingtons with red wool kneesocks gaily turned over their tops. She was polishing an impressive epergne, and the moment Lynley had said Kimmo Thorne’s name, she’d said, “Kimmo? Who’s come to ask about Kimmo, then? ’Bout time, innit,” and she made herself available to help them. As did her husband, who was hanging a display of silver teapots on strings that dangled from one of the horizontal poles of the stall.

  The boy had come to them first, hoping they would buy from him, Mr. Grabinksi—“Call me Ray”—informed them. But he asked a price they weren’t willing to pay, and when no one else in the market was willing to pay it either, Kimmo had returned to them with another offer: to sell from the stall himself and to give them a portion of the takings.

  They’d liked the boy—“He was that cheeky,” Elaine confided—so they gave him a quarter of one of the tables along the side of the stall, and there he did his business. He sold silver pieces—some plate, some sterling—with a speciality in photo frames.

  “We’ve been told he got into some trouble with that,” Lynley said. “Evidently he sold something that shouldn’t have been on sale in the first place.”

  “Having been lifted off someone else,” Havers put in.

  Oh, they knew nothing about that, both Grabinskis hastened to say. As far as they were concerned, it was someone wanting to get Kimmo in trouble who told that tale to the local rozzers. Doubtless, in fact, it was their chief competitor in the market: one Reginald Lewis, to whom Kimmo had also gone trying to sell his silver before returning to them. Reg Lewis was that jealous of anyone wanting to set up business round early morning Bermondsey, wasn’t he? He’d tried to keep the Grabinskis out twenty-two years back when they first started, he’d done the same to Maurice Fletcher and to Jackie Hoon when they started up.

  “So there was no truth to Kimmo’s goods being stolen?” Havers asked, looking up from her notebook. “Because, when you think of it, how else would a kid like Kimmo be coming across valuable pieces of silver for sale?”

  They had assumed he was selling off family pieces, Elaine Grabinski said. They did ask him and that’s what he told them: He was helping out his gran by offering the family silver to the public.

  To Lynley it looked like a case of the Grabinskis believing what they had wanted to believe because they liked the boy, rather than a case of Kimmo being a sophisticated liar who pulled the wool over the eyes of an elderly couple. They had to have known at some level that he wasn’t the legitimate article, but at that same level, they had to have not cared.

  “We told the police we’d speak up for the boy if it came to court,” Ray Grabinski asserted. “But once they carted poor Kimmo off, we didn’t hear ’nother word about him. Till we saw the News of the World, that is.”

  “An’ you ask Reg Lewis ’bout that, you lot,” Elaine Grabinski said, returning to the epergne with renewed vigour. She added ominously, “What I wouldn’t put past him fits in a teaspoon,” and her husband said, “Now, pet,” and patted her shoulder.

  Reg Lewis turned out to be only slightly less antique than his wares. He wore bright tartan braces beneath his jacket and they held up a pair of ancient plus fours.
His spectacles were as thick as the bottom of whisky tumblers. Overlarge hearing aids protruded from his ears. He fit the profile of their serial killer as well as a sheep fit the profile of a genius.

  He “weren’t s’prised none” when the cops had come calling for Kimmo, he told them. Something was off with the bugger first time Reg Lewis laid eyes on the creature. Dressed half man, half woman he did, with them tights of his or whatever they were, and those poncey ankle boots and the like. So when the cops showed up with a list of stolen property in their mitts, he—Reg Lewis, mind you—was not gobsmacked that they found what they were looking for in the possession of one Kimmo Thorne. Carted him off then and there, they did, and good riddance it was. Besmirching the reputation of the market, he was, flogging pinched silver. And not any pinched silver, mind you, but pinched silver that he’d been too thick to notice had personal and immediately identifiable engraving upon it.

  What happened to Kimmo after that, Reg Lewis didn’t know and didn’t much care. The only good thing the little nancy boy did at the end of the day was not drag the Grabinskis down with him. And weren’t those two blind as bats in the daylight? Anyone with sense would’ve known that boy was up to no good when he first showed his mug in the market. Reg warned the Grabinskis off him, he did, but would they listen to someone with their best interests at heart? Not bloody likely. Yet who turned out to be right at the end of the day, eh? And who never heard a word of you-were-right-Reg-and-we-apologise-for-our-nastiness from anyone, eh?

  Reg Lewis had nothing more to add. Kimmo had vanished that day with the coppers. Perhaps he’d done a stretch in borstal. Perhaps he’d had the fear of God put into him at the police station. All Reg knew was that the boy hadn’t brought any more stolen silver to sell in Bermondsey Market, which was fine by Reg. Cops over in Borough High Street could fill anyone in on the rest, couldn’t they.

  Reg Lewis said everything but “good riddance to bad rubbish,” and if he’d read about or heard about Kimmo Thorne’s murder, he made no mention of the fact. But it was clear that the boy had done nothing to enhance the reputation of the market in Reg’s eyes. More than that, as he had pointed out, they would have to suss out from the local police.