Lynley felt his spine stiffen. He realised he’d been blindsided yet again, having erroneously assumed during the press conference that Hillier had been lying through his teeth about an unnamed forensic psychologist. He went through the motions of shaking Dr. Robson’s hand, however, while he said to Hillier, “If we could have a word, sir,” in as agreeable a voice as he could manage.
Hillier made much of glancing at his watch. He made even more of telling Lynley that the deputy commissioner was waiting for a report on the conference they’d only just concluded.
Lynley said, “This will take less than five minutes and I consider it essential,” adding the word sir as a deliberate afterthought whose tone and meaning Hillier could not avoid comprehending.
“Very well,” Hillier said. “Hamish, if you’ll excuse us…? DS Nkata will show you where the incident room-”
“I’ll need Winston for the moment,” Lynley said, not because this was strictly the truth but because somewhere along the line he knew he was going to have to drive home to Hillier the point that the assistant commissioner of police was not running the investigation.
There was a tight little silence during which Hillier appeared to be evaluating Lynley for his level of insubordination. He finally said, “Hamish, if you’ll wait here for a moment,” and he ushered Lynley and Nkata not to an office, not to the stairs, not to the lift to take them above to his own quarters, but into the men’s toilet where he told a uniformed constable in the act of emptying his bladder to vacate the premises and stand before the door, allowing no one to enter.
Before Lynley could speak, Hillier said pleasantly, “Don’t do that again, please. If you do, you’ll find yourself back in uniform so fast that you’ll wonder who zipped your trousers.”
Seeing what the temperature of this conversation was likely to become despite Hillier’s momentarily affable tone, Lynley said to Nkata, “Winston, would you leave us, please? Sir David and I need to have some words I’d prefer you not hear. Go back to the incident room and see where Havers has got to with Missing Persons, particularly with the one that looks like a possibility.”
Nkata nodded. He didn’t ask if he was meant to take Hamish Robson with him as previously ordered by Hillier. Instead, he looked glad of the command that gave him the opportunity to demonstrate where his loyalties lay.
When he was gone, Hillier was the one to speak. “You’re out of order.”
“With due respect,” Lynley returned, although he felt little enough of it, “I believe you are.”
“How dare you-”
“Sir, I’ll bring you up to the minute daily,” Lynley said patiently. “I’ll face the television cameras if you like and sit at your side and force DS Nkata to do the same. But I’m not going to hand over the direction of this investigation to you. You need to stay out of it. That’s the only way this is going to work.”
“Do you want to be up for review? Believe me, that can be arranged.”
“If you need to do it, you’ll have to do it,” Lynley replied. “But, sir, you’ve got to see that at the end of the day, there has to be only one of us heading this inquiry. If you want to be that person, then be him and have done with pretending I’m in charge. But if you want me to be that person, you’re going to have to back off. You’ve blindsided me twice now, and I don’t want a third surprise.”
Hillier’s face went the red of sunset. But he said nothing as he evidently registered the lengths Lynley had gone to to remain calm as he simultaneously evaluated the ramifications of Lynley’s words. He finally said, “I want daily briefings.”
“You’ve been getting them. You’ll continue to get them.”
“And the profiler stays.”
“Sir, we don’t need psychic mumbo jumbo at this point.”
“We need all the help we can get!” Hillier’s voice grew loud. “The papers are twenty-four hours away from starting the hue and cry. You damn well know that.”
“I do. But we also both know that’s going to happen eventually, now that the other murders have been mentioned.”
“Are you accusing me-”
“No. No. You said what had to be said in there. But once they start digging, they’ll go after us, and there’s plenty of truth in what they’re going to allege about the Met.”
“Where the hell are your loyalties?” Hillier demanded. “Those buggers are going to go back and look up the other murders and then they’ll put it down to us-not to themselves-that not one of them ever made the front page. At which point they’ll wave the racism flag, and when they do, the whole community’s going to blow. Like it or not, we have to stay one step ahead of them. The profiler’s one way to do it. And that, as you might say, is that.”
Lynley considered this. He hated the idea of having a profiler onboard, but he had to admit that his presence did serve the purpose of buoying up the investigation in the eyes of the journalists who were covering it. And while he ordinarily had no use for either newspapers or television-seeing the collection and dissemination of information as something that was yearly becoming more opprobrious-he could understand the necessity of keeping their focus on the progress of the current investigation. If they started to rave about the Met’s failure to see the relationships among three prior killings, they would put the police in the position of having to waste time attempting to excuse the lapse. This served no one and nothing but the coffers of the newspapers, who might be able to increase their sales by fanning the flames of a public indignation that always lay like a dragon in repose.
“All right,” Lynley said. “The profiler stays. But I determine what he sees and what he doesn’t.”
“Agreed,” Hillier said.
They returned to the corridor, where Hamish Robson waited for them unaccompanied. The profiler had taken himself down to a notice board some distance from the toilets. Lynley had to admire the man for that.
He said, “Dr. Robson?,” to which Robson replied, “Hamish. Please.”
Hillier said, “The superintendent will take you in hand at this point, Hamish. Good luck. We’re relying on you.”
Robson glanced from Hillier to Lynley. Behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes looked wary. The rest of his expression was muted by his greying goatee, and as he nodded, a lock of thinning hair flopped onto his forehead. He brushed it off. The glint of a gold signet ring caught the light. “I’m happy to do what I can,” he said. “I’ll need the police reports, the crime-scene photos…”
“The superintendent will give you what you need,” Hillier said. And to Lynley, “Keep me up to speed.” He nodded to Robson and strode off in the direction of the lifts.
As Robson observed Hillier walking off, Lynley observed Robson and decided he looked harmless enough. There was, indeed, something vaguely comforting about his dark green cardigan and his pale yellow shirt. He wore a conservative, solid-brown tie with this, the same colour as his trousers, which were worn and lived in. He was podgy of body and looked like everyone’s favourite uncle.
“You work with the criminally insane,” Lynley said as he led the other man to the stairwell.
“I work with minds whose only outlet for torment is the commission of a crime.”
“Isn’t the one the same as the other?” Lynley asked.
Robson smiled sadly. “If that were only the case.”
LYNLEY BRIEFLY INTRODUCED Robson to the team before he took him from the incident room to his office. There he gave the psychologist copies of the crime-scene photographs, the police reports, and the preliminary postmortem information from the forensic pathologists who’d examined the bodies at the scene of each crime. He held back the autopsy reports. Robson took a cursory look through the material, then explained that it would take him at least twenty-four hours to evaluate it.