“You’re saying my client killed Davey. I’m not. And yes, I’m expecting a second request from him,” Minshall said. “There usually is one. And a third and a fourth if the boy and the man haven’t reached a separate agreement on the side.”
“What sort of agreement?” Lynley asked.
Minshall took his time about coming up with an answer. He glanced at James Barty, perhaps trying to recall how much the solicitor had advised him to say. He went on carefully. “MABIL,” he said “is about love, Men and Boys in Love. Most children are eager for that, for love. Most people are eager for that, in fact. This isn’t about-this has never been about-molestation.”
“Just pandering,” Havers said, obviously able to restrain herself no longer.
“No boy,” Minshall plunged doggedly on, “has ever felt used or abused from an interaction I bring about through MABIL. We want to love them. And we do love them.”
“And what do you tell yourself when they turn up dead?” Havers asked. “That you loved the life right out of them?”
Minshall gave his answer to Lynley, as if believing Lynley’s silence implied tacit approval of his enterprise. “You have no proof that my client…” He decided to make a different point. “Davey Benton wasn’t meant to die. He was ready to have-”
“Davey Benton fought his killer,” Lynley cut in. “In spite of what you thought about him, Mr. Minshall, he wasn’t bent, he wasn’t ready, he wasn’t willing, and he wasn’t eager. So if he went with his killer at the end of your ‘performance,’ I doubt he did it willingly.”
Minshall said hollowly, “He was alive when I left them together. I swear it. I’ve never harmed a hair on a single boy’s head. No client of mine has done that either.”
Lynley had heard enough of Barry Minshall, his clients, MABIL, and the great project of love in which the magician apparently saw himself involved. He said, “What did this man look like? How did you contact each other?”
“He isn’t-”
“Mr. Minshall, just now I don’t care if he is or isn’t a killer. I mean to find him and I mean to question him. Now how did you contact each other?”
“He phoned me.”
“Land line? Mobile?”
“Mobile. When he was ready, he phoned. I never had his number.”
“How did he know when you had all the arrangements in place, then?”
“I knew how long it would take. I told him when to phone again. He kept in touch that way. When I had things set up, I just waited for him to phone and I told him when and where to meet us. He went first, paid for the room in cash, and we met him there. Everything else happened as I said. We performed, and I left Davey with him.”
“Davey didn’t question this? Being left alone in a hotel room with a stranger?” That didn’t sound like the Davey Benton that his father had described, Lynley thought. There had to be a missing ingredient to the mixture Minshall was describing. “Was the boy drugged?” he asked.
“I have never drugged one of the boys,” Minshall said.
Lynley was used to the man’s way of dancing round by this time. He said, “And your clients?”
“I do not drug-”
“Plug it, Barry,” Barbara cut in. “You know exactly what the superintendent is asking.”
Minshall looked at what he’d done to his plastic cup: rendered it into shreds and confetti. He said, “We’re generally offered refreshments in the hotel room. The boys are free to take them or not.”
“What sort of refreshments?”
“Spirits.”
“Not drugs? Cannabis, cocaine, Ecstasy, the like.”
Minshall actually reared up in offence at this question, saying, “Of course not. We’re not drug addicts, Superintendent Lynley.”
“Just buggerers of children,” Havers said. Then, she shot Sorry, sir in a look to Lynley.
He said, “What did this man look like, Mr. Minshall?”
“Two-one-six-oh?” Minshall thought about it. “Ordinary,” he said. “He had a moustache and goatee. He wore a peaked cap, like a countryman. Spectacles as well.”
“And did you never put all this down as a disguise?” Lynley asked the magician. “The facial hair, the glasses, the cap?”
“At the time, I didn’t think…Look, by the time a man’s ready to stop fantasising about it and to make it real, he’s beyond disguises.”
“Not if he plans to kill someone,” Havers pointed out.
“How old was this man?” Lynley asked.
“I don’t know. Middle-aged? He must have been because he wasn’t in very good shape. He looked like someone who doesn’t take exercise.”
“Like someone who might easily get out of breath?”
“Possibly. But look, he didn’t have on a disguise. All right, I admit that some blokes wear them at first when they show up at MABIL-the wig, the beard, the turban, whatever-but by the time they’re ready…We’ve built trust between us. And no one does this without trust. Because for all they know, I could be a cop undercover. I could be anyone.”
“And so could they,” Havers said. “But you never thought about that one, did you, Bar? You just handed Davey Benton to a serial killer, waved good-bye, and drove off with the money in your pocket.” She turned to Lynley. “I’d say we have enough, wouldn’t you, sir?”
Lynley couldn’t disagree. For now, they had enough from Minshall. They’d want a list of the calls he’d received on his mobile, they’d want to get over to the Canterbury Hotel, and they’d want to arrange for another e-fit to see if the one from Square Four Gym matched whatever image Minshall came up with of his client. From his description of two-one-six-oh, though, the points of comparison seemed to be not with the e-fit they already had from the gym, but rather with the description they’d been given earlier by Muwaffaq Masoud of the man who’d come to purchase his van. There hadn’t been a moustache and a goatee, to be sure. But the age was right, the lack of physical fitness was right, and the bald head Masoud saw could easily have been hidden by the peaked cap Minshall was familiar with.
For the first time, Lynley considered an altogether new idea.
“Havers,” he said to the constable when they were out of the interview room again, “there’s another way to go with this. It’s one that we’ve not looked at yet.”
“Which is?” she asked, stowing her notebook in her bag.
“Two men,” he said. “One procures and the other kills. One procures to give the other the opportunity to kill. The dominant and the submissive partners.”
She thought about this. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” she said. “A twist on Fred and Rosemary, on Hindley and Brady.”
“More than that,” Lynley said.
“How?”
“It explains why we’ve got someone buying that van in Middlesex while someone else waits for him in a ‘minicab’ just outside Muwaffaq Masoud’s house.”
WHEN LYNLEY arrived home, it was quite late. He’d stopped in Victoria Street for a word with TO9 about MABIL, and he’d given the child-protection-team officers what information he had about the organisation. He told them about St. Lucy’s Church, near Gloucester Road underground station, and he asked what the possibilities were of closing the group down.
The news he received in return was grim. A meeting of like-minded people to discuss their like-mindedness did not constitute a breach of the law. Was there something else going on besides talk in the basement of St. Lucy’s Church? If not, Vice had too few officers and too many other ongoing illicit activities with which they had to contend.
“But these are paedophiles,” Lynley countered in frustration upon hearing this assessment from his colleague.
“May be,” was the reply. “But the CPS aren’t going to drag anyone into court based on his conversation, Tommy.” Still, TO9 would send someone undercover to a meeting of MABIL when their burdens were lighter round the Yard. Barring a complaint or hard evidence of criminal activities, that was the best TO9 could do.