“Were you by yourself tagging?” Lynley asked.
The boy’s eyes flashed. “Hey, I di’n’t say-”
“Sorry. Did you come into the park by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“See anything unusual? A car or van that didn’t look right, up on Wood Lane? Perhaps when you went to phone for help?”
“I di’n’t see fuck,” Ruff said. “Anyways, there’s lots ’f cars parked up there all the time in daytime. Cos people come into town from outside and they take the tube rest of the way, don’t they? Cos tube’s just over there. Highgate station. Look, I tol’ the dibble all this. They ack like I did summat. An’ they won’t let me go.”
“That might have something to do with your not giving them your name,” Havers told the boy. “If they want to talk to you again, they won’t know where to find you.”
Ruff looked at her suspiciously, a bloke trying to suss out a trick from among her words. She said reassuringly, “We’re from Scotland Yard. We’re not going to drag you to the nick for spraying your name about. We’ve bigger fish to fry.”
He sniffed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and relented. He was called Elliott Augustus Greenberry, he finally admitted, eyeing them sharply, as if watching for incredulous expressions to cross their faces. “Double ell, double tee, double ee, double ar. An’ don’ tell me how fuckin stupid, it is. I know, don’ I. Look, c’n I go now?”
“In a moment,” Lynley said. “Did you recognise the boy?”
Ruff brushed a greasy lock of hair off his face, tucking it into the hood of the sweatshirt. “Wha,’ him, you mean? The…it?”
“The dead boy, yes,” Lynley said. “Do you know him?”
“I never,” Ruff said. “Nobody I ever seen. Could be he’s from round here somewheres, like up on the street over there behind the ’lotments, but I don’t know him. Like I said, I don’t know fuck. C’n I go?”
“Once we have your address,” Havers said.
“Why?”
“Because we’ll want you to sign a statement eventually, and we need to know where to find you, don’t we.”
“But I said I di’n’t-”
“It’s routine, Elliott,” Lynley said.
The boy scowled but cooperated, and they released him. He shed the anorak, handed it over, and took off down the slope, west towards the path that would lead him up again to Priory Gardens.
“Anything from him?” DI Widdison said when Lynley and Havers joined him.
“Nothing,” Lynley said, handing over the anorak, which Widdison passed to a sodden constable, who donned it gratefully. “Aman digging in the allotments.”
“That’s what he told me as well,” Widdison said. “We’ve got a door-to-door going on up there now.”
“And along Wood Lane?”
“The same. I’m reckoning our best bet is Walden Lodge.” Once again, Widdison indicated a modern and solid-looking block of flats that squatted at the edge of the woods. It was the last building on Wood Lane before the park, and on every side it presented balconies. Most of them were empty save for the occasional barbecue and garden furniture covered for the winter, but on four of them, watchers stood. One of them held up binoculars. “I can’t think the killer brought the body down here without a torch,” Widdison said. “Someone up there might have seen that.”
“Unless he brought it just after dawn,” Havers pointed out.
“Too risky,” Widdison said. “Commuters park on the lane and use the underground to get into town from here. He’d have to know that and plan accordingly. But he’d still run the risk of being seen by someone who decided to make the journey earlier than usual.”
“He does his homework, though,” Havers pointed out. “We know that from where he’s left the rest of them.”
Widdison looked unconvinced. He took them under the shelter and over to the body. It lay on its side but was otherwise dumped carelessly in the hollow created by the unearthed roots of the fallen beech. Its head was tucked into its chest; its arms windmilled out like someone frozen in the act of giving a signal.
This boy, Lynley saw, seemed younger than the others, although not by much. He was white as welclass="underline" blond and extremely fair skinned, small and not particularly developed. At first glance, Lynley concluded-with relief-that he wasn’t one of theirs at all, that he and Havers needn’t have come this distance across London on someone’s whim. But when he squatted to have a better look, he saw the postmortem incision running down the boy’s chest and disappearing into the fold of his waist, while on his forehead, a crude symbol had been drawn in blood, brother to the symbol found on Kimmo Thorne.
Lynley glanced at the forensic pathologist, who was speaking into the microphone of a handheld tape recorder. “I’d like a look at his hands,” he said.
The man nodded. “I’ve done my bit. We’re ready to bag him,” and one of the team came forward to do so. They’d start by bagging the hands in paper, preserving any trace evidence from the killer that might be under the boy’s fingernails. From there they’d do the rest and when they moved the body, Lynley reckoned he’d get a better look at it.
That turned out to be the case. Rigor was present, but enough of the surface of the hands became visible when the body was lifted out of the hollow for Lynley to see that the palms were blackened from having been burnt. The navel was missing as well, chopped crudely out of the body.
“The Z that stands for Zorro,” Havers murmured.
She was right. They were indeed the signatures of their killer, despite the differences that Lynley could see were present on the body: There were no restraint marks on the wrists and the ankles, and the strangulation had been manual this time, leaving ugly dark bruises round the boy’s neck. There were other bruises as well, on the upper arms, extending down to the elbows, and along the spine, the thighs, and the waist. The largest bruise coloured the flesh from the temple down to the chin as well.
Unlike the others, Lynley concluded, this one boy had not gone gentle, which told him the killer had made his first error in his choice of victim. Lynley could only hope that the miscalculation left behind him a pile of evidence.
“He put up a fight,” Lynley murmured.
“No stun gun this time?” Havers asked.
They checked the body for the signature of that weapon as well. Lynley said, “It doesn’t appear so.”
“What d’you reckon that means? Would it be out of juice? Do they run out of it? They must, no?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps there wasn’t the chance to use it. It looks like things might not have gone according to plan.” He stood, nodded to those who stood waiting to bag the body, and returned to Widdison. “Anything in the area?” he asked.
“Two footprints beneath the boy’s head,” he said. “Protected from the rain. Could have been there earlier, but we’re taking casts anyway. We’re doing a perimeter search, but I reckon our real evidence is going to come from the body.”
Lynley left the DI with the instruction to get every statement from every house on Wood Lane over to him at New Scotland Yard as soon as possible. “That block of flats especially,” he said. “I agree with you. Someone has to have seen something. Or heard something. And have constables in place the rest of the day on either end of the street to grill commuters who come down from the underground station to fetch their cars.”
“Don’t expect to get much joy from that,” Widdison warned.
“Anything goes for joy at this point,” Lynley told him. He added the information about the van they were looking for. “Someone may have seen it,” he said.
Then he and Havers set off up the slope. Back on Wood Lane, they could see that the house-to-house was well in progress. Uniformed police were knocking on doors; others were standing in the shelter of porches, talking to inhabitants. Otherwise, no one else was on the pavement or in any front garden. The persistent rain was keeping everyone inside.