“Yes,” Lynley said.
“Are you all right?”
Lynley considered this question. He looked at St. James. All right. What did it really mean?
The door opened, and Deborah joined them. “You must go home now,” Lynley said to her. “There’s nothing you can do.”
He knew what he sounded like. He knew she would misread him, hearing the blame, which was there but not directed towards her. Seeing her merely reminded him that she’d been with Helen last, heard her talk last, laughed with her last. And it was the last of it that he couldn’t stand, just as earlier he’d not been able to tolerate the first of anything else.
She said, “If you like. If it’ll help you, Tommy.”
“It will,” he said.
She nodded and went to collect her things. Lynley said to St. James, “I’m going to her now. Do you want to come? I know you’ve not seen…”
“Yes,” St. James said. “I’d like to, Tommy.”
So they went to Helen, dwarfed in her bed by everything that kept her working as a womb. She looked waxen to him, Helen yes but even more Helen no and never again. While within her, damaged beyond hope or repair but who knew how much-
“They want me to decide,” Lynley said. He took his wife’s lifeless hand. He curled her flaccid fingers into his palm. “I can’t stand it, Simon.”
WINSTON DROVE, and for this Barbara Havers was grateful. After a day in which she’d determinedly not thought about what was happening at St. Thomas’ Hospital, she felt she’d been punched in the gut with the news about Helen Lynley. She’d known it was going to be a grim prognosis. But she’d told herself that people survived being shot all the time, and medicine being as advanced as it was meant Helen’s chances had to be good. But there was no current advance in medicine that compensated for a brain deprived of oxygen. A surgeon didn’t just go in and repair that damage like the Messiah laying hands on a leper. There was literally no coming back once the word vegetative was applied to a situation. So Barbara hunched against the door in Winston Nkata’s car and clenched her teeth so hard together that her jaw was pulsing and sore by the time they reached their destination in the darkness.
Funny, Barbara thought as Nkata parked the car with his usual quasi-scientific precision, she’d never thought of the City as a place people lived. They worked here, true. They went to events at the Barbican. Tourists came here to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral, but after hours the place was supposed to be a ghost town.
That was not the case at the corner of Fann and Fortune Streets. Here Peabody Estate welcomed home its residents at the end of their working day, a pleasant, upmarket area with blocks of flats that faced a perfectly groomed garden of winter-pruned rosebushes, shrubbery, and lawn across the street.
They’d phoned first. They’d decided they would go in the back door on this one, no storm-trooping but rather a collegial approach. There were facts to check and they’d come to check them.
The first thing Hamish Robson said to them when he answered the door was, “How is Superintendent Lynley’s wife? I’ve seen the news. They’ve apparently got a witness. Did you know? There’s some sort of film footage as well, although I don’t know from where. They say they may have an image to broadcast…”
He’d come to the door wearing rubber gloves, which seemed odd till he ushered them into the kitchen where he was doing the washing up. He appeared to be something of a gourmet cook, because there were pots and pans on the work top in amazing abundance, and crockery, cutlery, and glassware for at least four people, already standing wetly in the dish drainer. Suds galore mounded in the sink. The place looked like a set for a Fairy Liquid commercial.
“She’s brain dead.” Winnie was the one to tell him. Barbara could not bring herself to use the term. “They got her hooked up to machines because she’s pregnant. You know she was pregnant, Dr. Robson?”
Robson had plunged his hands into the sink, but he took them out and rested them on the edge of it. “I’m so sorry.” He sounded sincere. Perhaps he was at some level. Some people were good at creating compartments for the various parts of themselves. “How is the superintendent? He and I had made an arrangement to meet the day…the day this all occurred. He never turned up.”
“He’s trying to cope,” Winston said.
“How can I help?”
Barbara brought out the profile of the serial killer that Robson had provided for them. She said, “Can we…?” and indicated a neat chrome-and-glass table that defined a dining area just beyond the kitchen.
“Of course,” Robson said.
She laid the report on the table and pulled out a chair. She said, “Join us?”
Robson said, “You don’t mind if I carry on with the washing up?”
Barbara exchanged a glance with Nkata, who’d joined her at the table. He gave an infinitesimal shrug. She said, “Why not. We can talk from here.”
She sat. Winston did likewise. She gave the ball to him. “We took some second and third looks at this profile,” he told Robson, who went back to washing a pot he brought forth from the suds. He was wearing a cardigan and he hadn’t bothered to roll the sleeves up, so where the gloves ended, the wet began, weighing down the wool of his sweater. “I had a look at some of the guv’s handwritten notes ’s well. We got some conflicting information. We wanted to sort that with you.”
“What kind of conflicting information?” Robson’s face was shiny, but Barbara put that down to the steamy water.
“Le’ me put it this way,” Nkata said. “Why’d you come up with the age of the serial killer as twenty-five to thirty-five?”
“Statistically speaking-” Robson began, but Nkata interrupted.
“Beyond statistics. I mean, the Wests wouldn’t’ve fitted that part of a statistical description. And tha’s just for starters.”
“It’s never going to be foolproof, Sergeant,” Robson told him. “But if you’ve doubts about my analysis, I suggest you bring in someone else to do another. Bring in an American, an FBI profiler. I’d bet the results-the report you get-is going to be nearly the same.”
“But this report here-” Nkata gestured to it, and Barbara slid it across the table to him. “I mean, come down to it, all we got is your word that it’s even authentic. I’n’t that right?”
Robson’s glasses winked in the overhead lights as he looked from Nkata to Barbara. “What reason would I have to tell you anything but the truth of what I saw in the police reports?”
“That,” Nkata said, with a lift of his finger to stress the point, “is one very good question, innit.”
Robson went back to his washing up. The pot he was scrubbing didn’t appear to need the attention he was giving to it.
Barbara said to him, “Why don’t you come over here to the table, Dr. Robson? It’ll be a little easier to talk.”
He said, “The washing up…”
“Right. Got it. Only there’s a hell of a lot of washing up, isn’t there? For just one bloke? What’d you fix up for dinner?”
“I admit to not washing up every night.”
“Those pots don’t look used to me. Take off the gloves and join us, please.” Barbara turned to Nkata. “You ever see a bloke wear rubber gloves to do the washing up, Winnie? Ladies do, sometimes. I do, being a lady myself. Got to keep the manicure manicured. But blokes? Why d’you think…? Ah. Thanks, Dr. Robson. It’s cozier like this.”
“I’m protecting a cut,” Robson said. “There’s no law against that, is there?”
“He’s got a cut,” Barbara said to Nkata. “How’d you get that, Dr. Robson?”
“What?”
“The cut. Let’s have a look at it, by the way. DS Nkata here is something of an expert on cuts, as you can probably tell by his mug. He got his…How’d you get that impressive scar, Sergeant?”
“Knife fight,” Nkata told her. “Well, I used the knife. Other bloke had a razor.”