The first report came from the officers who had been gathering information from the commuters who parked on Wood Lane and then walked the path down the hill, through Queen’s Wood, and up to the Highgate underground station on Archway Road. None of these people on their way to work had seen anything unusual on the morning of the day that Davey Benton’s body had been found. Several of them mentioned a man, a woman, and two men together-all of them walking dogs in the woods-but that was the extent of what they had to offer, and it did not include any descriptions, of either man or beast.
From the houses along Wood Lane leading up to the park, similarly nothing had been gleaned. It was a quiet area in the dead of night, and nothing had apparently altered that silence on the night of Davey’s murder. This information was disheartening to everyone on the team, but better news came from the officer who’d taken the assignment to interview everyone in Walden Lodge, the small block of flats on the edge of Queen’s Wood.
It was nothing to celebrate, the officer told everyone, but a bloke called Berkeley Pears-“There’s a name for you,” one of the other constables muttered-had a Jack Russell terrier that had started barking at three forty-five in the morning. “This was inside his flat, not outside,” the constable added. “Pears thought someone might be on the balcony, so he took up a carving knife and went to see. He’s sure he saw a flash of light down the hillside. On and off and on again, but shielded, like. He thought it was taggers or someone making their way to or from Archway Road. He got the dog quiet, and that was the end of it.”
“Three forty-five explains why none of the commuters saw anything,” John Stewart said to Lynley.
“Yes. Well. We’ve known from the first that he operates in the small hours,” Lynley said. “Anything else from Walden Lodge, Kevin?”
“A woman called Janet Castle says she thinks she heard a cry or a shriek round midnight. Operative word thinks. She watches a lot of telly, crime dramas and the like. I think she’s a frustrated DCI Tennison, without the sex appeal.”
“Just one cry?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Man, woman, child?”
“She couldn’t tell.”
“The two men in the woods…those who were walking the dog in the morning…they’re a possibility,” Lynley said. He didn’t elucidate but rather told the reporting constable to go back for further information from the commuter who’d sighted them. “What else?” he asked the others.
“That old bloke the tagger saw in the allotments?” came the reply from another of the Queen’s Wood constables. “Turned out to be seventy-two years old and no way the killer. He can barely walk. Talks, though. I couldn’t shut him up.”
“What did he see? Anything?”
“The tagger. That’s all he wanted to talk about as well. Seems he’s phoned the cops over and over again about the little bugger but, according to him, they never do a damn thing because they have better things to occupy their time than catching vandals who happen to be defacing public property that’s enjoyed by all.”
Lynley turned to the Walden Lodge constable curiously. “Anyone inside talk about that tagger, Kevin?”
Kevin shook his head. He glanced at his notes, however, and said, “I only talked to residents of eight of the flats, though. As to the other two, one is newly empty and for sale and the other belongs to a lady taking her annual holiday in Spain.”
Lynley considered this and saw the possibility. “Get on to the estate agents in the area. See who’s been shown that empty flat.”
He shared with the team a further report from SO7 that had been waiting for him on his desk when he’d arrived that morning. The hair on Davey Benton’s body belonged to a cat, he told them. Additionally, there was no match between the tyres of Barry Minshall’s van and the tracks left in St. George’s Gardens. But there was a van out there that they were still seeking, and it looked as if it may have been purchased precisely for the use to which it was being put: a mobile killing site.
“At the time of Kimmo Thorne’s death, it appears that the van was still registered to the previous owner, Muwaffaq Masoud. Someone out there has possession of that vehicle, and we’ve got to find it.”
“You want the details released now, Tommy?” It was John Stewart who asked the question. “If we put that van in the public eye…” He made a gesture that said, You can figure out the rest.
Lynley thought it over. The reality was that van was going to contain a treasure trove of evidence. Find it and they had their killer. But the trouble was that the situation remained unchanged: Publicising the van’s exact description, its number plates, and the writing on its side also allowed the killer to see their hand. He would either hide the vehicle in any one of the thousands of lockups round the city or he would clean and abandon it. They had to pursue the middle course in this matter.
He said, “Get the details out to every station in town.”
He made additional assignments, then, and Barbara received hers with as much good grace as she could muster, considering that the first half of the assignment required her to compile her report on John Miller, the bath-salts vendor at the Stables Market. The second half got her out in the street where she preferred to be, however. Canterbury Hotel in Lexham Gardens. Find the night clerk and talk to him about who paid for a room for a single night on the evening that Davey Benton died.
Lynley was going on to the other assignments-everything from obtaining Minshall’s mobile phone records to tracing the attendees at the last meeting of MABIL in St. Lucy’s Church, by fingerprints if necessary-when Dorothea Harriman ushered Mitchell Corsico into the incident room.
She looked apologetic about it. Her expression clearly said, Orders from above.
Lynley said, “Ah. Mr. Corsico. Come with me please,” and he left the squad to get back to work.
Barbara heard the steel in his voice. She knew that Corsico was about to get an earful.
LYNLEY HAD A copy of The Source. It had been supplied him by the guard in the kiosk when he’d arrived a short while earlier. He’d looked it over and had seen the error of his ways: How much hubris had he actually demonstrated, he wondered, in assuming he could outsmart a tabloid? The tabloids’ bread and butter was produced through the means of digging up useless information, so he’d expected the lordship business, the Cornwall business, and the Oxford and Eton business as well. But he hadn’t expected to see a photograph of his London home gracing the paper, and he was determined that the reporter would put no other officers in jeopardy by giving them the same treatment.
“Ground rules,” he said to Corsico when he and the reporter were alone.
“You didn’t like the profile?” the young man asked, hitching up his jeans. “There wasn’t even the ghost of a suggestion about the incident room or what you’ve got on the killer. Or haven’t got,” he added with a sympathetic smile that Lynley wanted to smear across his face.
“These people have wives, husbands, and families,” Lynley said. “Back off from them.”
“Not to worry,” Corsico said helpfully. “You’re by far the most interesting of the lot. How many cops can boast an address a stone’s throw from Eaton Square? I had a phone call this A.M. from a DS up in Yorkshire, by the way. Can’t give you his name, but he said he had some information we might want to print as a follow-up to today’s piece. Care to comment?”
That would be DS Nies, Lynley thought, of the Richmond police. He would no doubt have loved to bend the reporter’s ear about time spent rubbing elbows with the Earl of Asherton in the nick. And the rest of Lynley’s squalid past would come oozing out of the woodwork as welclass="underline" drink driving, a car wreck, a crippled friend, all of it.
He said, “Listen to me, Mr. Corsico,” and the phone rang on his desk at that moment. He snatched it up, said, “Lynley. What?”