That was no problem, Lynley told him. There was plenty for the team to do while they were waiting for his…Lynley wanted to say performance, as if the man were a psychic come to bend spoons in their presence. He settled on information instead. Report gave Robson too much legitimacy.
“The investigators seemed…” Robson appeared to look for a word. “Rather wary to have me among them.”
“They’re used to the old-fashioned way of doing things,” Lynley told him.
“I believe they’ll find what I have to say useful, Superintendent.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Lynley said, and he called Dee Harriman to see Dr. Robson on his way.
When the profiler had departed, Lynley returned to the incident room and the work at hand. What did they have? he wanted to know.
DI Stewart was, as ever, ready with his report, which he stood to present like a schoolboy hoping for high marks from the teacher. He announced he’d subdivided his officers into teams, the better to deploy them in different areas. At this, a few eyes rolled heavenward in the incident room. Stewart did most things like a frustrated Wellington.
They were inching forward, engaging in the tedious plodwork of a complicated investigation. Stewart had two officers from team one-“They’ll be doing background,” he reported-covering the mental hospitals and the prisons. They had unearthed a number of potential leads that they were following up: paedophiles having finished their time in open conditions within the last six months, paroled murderers of adolescents, gang members in remand awaiting trial-
“And from youth offenders?” Lynley asked.
Stewart shook his head. Sod all appeared useful from that end of things. All the youth offenders recently released were accounted for.
“What are we getting from the door-to-doors at the body sites?” Lynley asked.
Little enough. Stewart had constables reinterviewing everyone in those areas, seeking witnesses to anything at all. They knew the drilclass="underline" It wasn’t so much the unusual that they were looking for, but the ordinary that, upon reflection, made one stop and think. Since serial killers by their very nature faded into the woodwork, the woodwork itself had to be examined, inch by tedious inch.
He’d directed enquiries to hauling companies as well, Stewart explained, and he’d so far come up with fifty-seven lorry drivers who would have been on Gunnersbury Road on the night when the first victim had been left in Gunnersbury Park. A DC was in the process of contacting them, to see if she could jump-start their memories about any kind of vehicle that might have been parked alongside the brick wall of the park, on the road into London. In the meantime, another DC was in touch with every taxi and minicab service, looking for much the same result. As to the door-to-door, a line of houses stood directly across the road from the park, albeit separated from it by four lanes of traffic and a central reservation. There were hopes of getting something from one of them. One never knew who might have been suffering insomnia and gazing out of the window on the night in question. The same went for Quaker Street, by the way, where a block of flats stood opposite the abandoned warehouse in which the third body had been found.
On the other hand, the multi-story carpark location-site of the second body-was going to be more difficult. The only person who might have seen anything inside it was the attendant on duty that night, but he swore he’d seen nothing between one in the morning and six-twenty, when the body was discovered by a nurse heading to an early shift at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. That didn’t, of course, mean he hadn’t slept right through the entire circumstance. The carpark in question had no central kiosk at which an attendant sat day and night, but rather an office tucked away deep in the interior of the structure and furnished with a reclining chair and a television set to make the long hours of the night shift seem moderately less so.
“And St. George’s Gardens?” Lynley asked.
That was somewhat more hopeful, Stewart reported. According to Theobald’s Road’s DC who’d canvassed the vicinity, a woman living on the third floor of the building at the junction of Henrietta Mews and Handel Street heard what she thought was the sound of the garden’s gate being opened sometime round three in the morning. She’d thought it was the park warden at first, but upon reflection she’d realised it was far too early for him to be unlocking the gates. By the time she got herself out of bed, swathed in her dressing gown, and in place at her window, she was just in time to see a van driving off. It passed beneath a streetlamp as she watched. It was “large-ish,” as she described it. She thought the colour of the van was red.
“That’s taken it down to a few hundred thousand vans across the city, however,” Stewart added regretfully. He flipped his notebook closed, his report complete.
“We need to get someone on to Swansea, pulling vehicle records anyway,” Barbara Havers said to Lynley.
“That, Constable, is a complete nonstarter, and you ought to know it,” Stewart informed her.
Havers bristled and began to respond.
Lynley cut her off. “John.” He said the DI’s name in a minatory tone. Stewart subsided, but he didn’t look happy to have Havers-lowly DC that she was-offering her opinion.
Stewart said, “Fine. I’ll see to it. I’ll put someone on to the old bat in Handel Street as well. We may be able to jog something else from her memory about what she saw from that window.”
“What about the piece of lace on body four?” Lynley asked.
Nkata was the one to reply. “Looks like tatting, you ask me.”
“What?”
“Tatting. That’s what it’s called. My mum does it. Knotting up string along the edges of a mat. For putting on antique furniture or under a piece of porcelain or something.”
“Are you talking about an antimacassar?” John Stewart asked.
“Anti-what?” one of the DCs asked.
“It’s antique lacework,” Lynley explained. “The sort of thing ladies used to do for their bottom drawers.”
“Bloody hell,” Barbara Havers said. “Our killer’s an Antiques Roadshow freak?”
Guffaws all round greeted this remark.
Lynley said, “What about the bicycle left in St. George’s Gardens?”
“Prints on it are the kid’s. There’s some sort of residue on the pedals and the gear shift, but SO7’s not done with it yet.”
“The silver at the scene?”
Aside from the fact that the silver comprised only photo frames, no one knew anything else about it. Someone made reference to the Antiques Roadshow once again, but the comment was less humorous the second time round.
Lynley told them all to carry on. He directed Nkata to continue trying to make contact with the family of the one missing boy who looked like a possible match, he told Havers to continue with the missing-persons reports-an order she did not embrace with a full heart, if her expression was any indication-and he himself returned to his office and sat down with the autopsies. He put on his reading spectacles and went over the reports with eyes that he tried to make fresh. He also created a crib sheet for himself. On this, he wrote:
Means of death: strangulation by ligature in all four cases; ligature missing.
Torture prior to death: palms of both hands burnt in three of four cases.
Marks of restraints: across the forearms and at ankles in all four cases, suggesting victim tied to an armchair of some kind or possibly supine and restrained another way.
Fibre analysis corroborates this: same leather fibres on the arms and ankles in all four cases.
Contents of stomach: a small amount of food eaten within an hour preceding death in all four cases.
Gagging device: duct-tape residue over the mouth in all four cases.