“If he left with him,” Barbara added.
“I know nothing,” Tatlises insisted. He rapped on the door of room 41. His nephew opened it so quickly that it was obvious he’d been standing directly behind it listening to every word. Tatlises began speaking to him rapidly in their language. His voice was loud. He pulled the boy over by his pyjama jacket, and he snatched the sketches and the pictures, forcing the young man to study them.
It was a nice performance, Barbara thought. He actually meant them to believe that his nephew, and not himself, was the paedophile here. She glanced at Lynley, seeking permission. He nodded. She stepped up to business.
“Listen to me, you little wanker,” she said to Tatlises, grabbing his arm. “If you think we’re going to jump on the wagon you’re driving, you’re even stupider than you look. Leave him bloody alone and tell him to answer our questions and you can answer them as well. Got it? Or do I need to help you with your understanding?” She released him, but not before she ended her question with a twist of his arm.
Tatlises cursed her in his language, or so she assumed he was doing from the passion of his words and the expression on his nephew’s face. He said finally, “I will report you for this,” to both of them, to which Barbara answered, “I’m wetting my knickers in terror. Now translate this for your ‘nephew’ or whatever the hell he really is. This kid…Was he here?”
Tatlises rubbed his arm where Barbara had manhandled it. She expected him to start shouting something meaningful, like “Unconscionable brutality!,” so assiduous were his ministrations to his limb. He finally said, “I do not work nights.”
“Brilliant. He does, though. Tell him to answer.”
Tatlises nodded at his “nephew.” The younger man looked at the picture and nodded in turn.
“Fine. Now let’s get on to the rest, okay? Did you see him leave the hotel?”
The nephew nodded. “He leaves with the other. I see this. Not the albin one, how you named him?”
“Not with the albino man, the man with yellowish hair and white skin.”
“The other, yes.”
“And you saw this? Them? Together? The boy walking? Talking? Alive?”
The last word set them both off in a babble of their own language. Finally, the nephew began to keen. He cried, “I did not! I did not!,” and a damp spot appeared in the crotch of his pyjama bottoms. “He leaves with the other. I see this. I see this.”
“What’s going on?” Lynley demanded of Tatlises. “Have you accused him-”
“Worthless! Worthless!” Tatlises broke in, smacking his nephew round the head. “What evil are you using this hotel for? Did you not think you would be caught?”
The boy sheltered his head and cried, “I did not!”
Lynley pulled the men apart, and Barbara planted herself between them. She said, “Get this straight and tattoo it on your eyeballs, both of you. This bloke brought the boy to the hotel, and this bloke left with him. Point the finger at each other and everyone in between, but there’s not a rat in this place not going down for pimping, pandering, paedophilia, and anything else that we can make stick to you. So I suggest you might want ‘cooperative as the dickens’ to be what gets written in red across your paperwork.”
She saw she’d got through. Tatlises backed off from his nephew. His nephew shrank back into his room. Both of them were reborn before their eyes. Tatlises might have had a dodgy arrangement with his MABIL friends about the use of the Canterbury Hotel, and he might have also collected a trunkful of lolly from allowing its rooms to be used for underage homosexual trysts, but it did seem he drew the line at murder.
He said, “This boy…” and took up the picture of Davey Benton.
“That’s right,” Barbara said.
“We’re fairly certain he left here alive,” Lynley told the man. “But he might have been killed in one of your rooms.”
“No, no!” Nephew’s English was improving miraculously. “Not with the albino. With the other man. I see this.” And he turned to his putative uncle and spoke at some length in their mutual tongue.
Tatlises translated. The boy in the picture had come with the albino and they had gone up to room 39, which had been booked earlier and checked in to by another man. The boy left with that man some hours later. Two, perhaps. No more than that. No, he had not appeared ill, drunk, drugged, or anything else for that matter, although Ibrahim Selçuk had not studied the boy, to tell the truth. He’d had no reason to. It was not the first time a boy had come with the albino man and left with another man.
The night clerk added that the identity of the boys changed and the identity of the men booking the room changed, but the man who coupled them was always the same: the albino from the picture that the police had with them.
“That is all he knows,” Tatlises finished.
Barbara showed the night clerk the sketches again. Was the man who booked the room either of these two blokes? she wanted to know.
Selçuk studied them and chose the younger of the two. “Maybe,” he said. “It is something like.”
They had the confirmation they needed: Minshall was apparently telling the truth insofar as the Canterbury Hotel went. So there was a slim hope that the hotel itself still had more it could reveal. Lynley asked to see room 39.
“There will be nothing,” Tatlises said hastily. “It has been thoroughly cleaned. As is every room once it has been used.”
Lynley was firm on this point, however, and they descended a floor, leaving Selçuk behind them to return to his sleep. Tatlises brought a master key from his pocket and admitted Lynley and Havers to the room in which Davey Benton had met his killer.
It was a dismal enough chamber of seduction. A double bed was its centrepiece, covered with the sort of quilted floral counterpane that would hide a multitude of mankind’s transgressions, from liquids spilt to bodily fluids leaked. Against one wall, a blond wooden chest served double duty as a desk, with a kneehole into which a mismatched chair was thrust. On top of this, a plastic tray held the requisite tea-making equipment, with a grubby tin pot to use for the brew and a grubbier electric kettle for boiling the water. Dingy curtains covered the single transom window, and brown fitted carpet bore streaks and stains, stretching across the floor.
“The Savoy must be in real agony over the competition,” Barbara remarked.
Lynley said, “We’ll want SOCO over here. I want a thorough going-over.”
Tatlises protested. “This room has been cleaned. You will find nothing. And nothing occurred in here that-”
Lynley swung on him. “I don’t particularly care to have your opinion at this point,” he said. “And I suggest you don’t care to give it.” And to Barbara, “Phone SOCO. Stay in this room till they get here. Then get whatever registration card was signed for this”-he seemed to seek a word-“place and check the address on it. Put Earl’s Court Road into the picture about everything going on here, if they aren’t already. Talk to their chief super. No one less.”
Barbara nodded. She felt a rush of pleasure, both at the sensation of progress being made and at the responsibility given her. It was almost like old times.
She said, “Right, will do, sir,” and took out her mobile as he directed Tatlises from the room.
LYNLEY STOOD outside the hotel. He tried to shake off the sensation that they were blindly swinging their fists at an enemy more adept at dodging than they were at forcing him into submission.
He phoned Chelsea. St. James would have had time to read and to assess the next group of reports he’d sent over to Cheyne Row. Perhaps, Lynley thought, there would be something uplifting he had to share. But instead of his old friend answering, it was Deborah’s voice Lynley heard. No one at home. Leave a message at the tone, please.
Lynley rang off without doing so. He phoned his friend’s mobile next and had luck there. St. James answered. He was just heading into a meeting with his banker, he said. Yes, he’d read the reports and there were two interesting details… Could Lynley meethim in…what, about half an hour? He was up in Sloane Square.