Lynley said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Robson.”
Robson looked deflated. He said, “Your last word on the subject?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain that’s wise?”
“I’m not certain of anything.”
“That’s really the hell of it, isn’t it?”
Robson got out of the car, then. He headed back towards the barricade. He passed DI Widdison on his route, but he made no attempt to speak to him. For his part, Widdison saw Lynley’s car and raised a hand as if to stop him from leaving the scene. Lynley lowered the window as the DI hurried over.
“We’ve had a call from the Hornsey Road station,” Widdison said when he reached the car. “A boy’s gone missing, reported by his parents last night. He fits the general description of our victim.”
“We’ll take it,” Lynley said as Havers emptied her shoulder bag on the floor to find her notebook and take down the address.
IT WAS IN Upper Holloway, on a small housing estate just off Junction Road. There, round the corner from William Beckett Funeral Directors and Yildiz Supermarket, they found a serpentine stretch of tarmac splendidly called Bovingdon Close. It was a pedestrian precinct, so they left the Bentley on Hargrave Road where a bearded vagrant with a guitar in one hand and a wet sleeping bag dragging on the pavement behind him offered to keep an eye on the car for the price of a pint. Or a bottle of wine, if they felt so inclined and he did a good job of keeping the local riffraff away from “s’ch a fine motor as yairs is, master.” He wore a large green rubbish bag as a mackintosh in the rain, and he sounded like a character from a costume drama, someone who’d spent far too much of his youth tuned in to BBC1. “They’s ferrinners plenty round here,” he informed them. “You can’t leave nothin’ lying ’bout what they don’t put their mitts on it, sir.” He appeared to search vaguely in the direction of his head for something to tug respectfully as he concluded. When he spoke, the air became heavy with the scent of teeth in need of extraction.
Lynley told the man he was welcome to keep his eyes glued to the car. The vagrant hunkered down on the nearest stairs to one of the terrace houses, and-rain or not-he began to pluck at the three strings remaining on his guitar. Sourly, he eyed a pack of young black kids wearing rucksacks on their backs, trotting along the pavement across the street.
Lynley and Havers left the man to it and set off into Bovingdon Close. They accessed this by means of a tunnel-like opening in the cinnamon-coloured brick buildings that comprised the housing estate itself. They were looking for number 30, and they found it not far from the estate’s sole recreational area: a triangular green with dormant rosebushes languishing in each of the three corners and a small bench set against one side. Other than four saplings struggling for life in the green’s patch of lawn, there were no trees in Bovingdon Close, and the houses that didn’t face the tiny recreational area faced each other across a width of tarmac that didn’t measure more than fifteen feet. In the summer when the windows were open, everyone would doubtless be into everyone else’s business.
Each of the houses had been given a sandwich-size plot of earth in front of its door that the more optimistic inhabitants were treating as their gardens. In front of number 30, the patch of earth in question was a rough triangle of dying grass, and a child’s bike lay on its side upon it, next to a green plastic garden chair. Near this a tattered shuttlecock looked as if a dog had been chewing on it. The accompanying racquets leaned against the wall by the front door, most of their strings broken.
When Lynley rang the bell, a man in miniature opened the door. He was not even eye to eye with Havers, top heavy with the look of someone who weight trained to compensate for his lack of height. He was red eyed and unshaven, and he glanced from them to the tarmac beyond them as if expecting someone else.
He said, “Cops,” like the answer to a question no one had asked.
“That’s who we are.” Lynley introduced himself and Havers and waited for the man-they knew only that his name was Benton-to ask them in. Beyond him, Lynley could see the doorway to a darkened sitting room and the shapes of people seated inside. A child’s querulous voice asked why couldn’t they open the curtains, why couldn’t he play, and a woman shushed him.
Benton said harshly over his shoulder in that direction, “You mind what I told you.” Then he gave his attention back to Lynley. “Where’s the uniform?”
Lynley said they weren’t part of the uniformed patrol but rather they worked in a different department and were from New Scotland Yard. “May we come in?” he asked. “It’s your son that’s gone missing?”
“Didn’t come home last night.” Benton’s lips were dry and flaky. He licked them.
He stepped back from the door and led them into the sitting room, at the end of a corridor of no more than fifteen feet. In the semidarkness there, five people were arrayed on chairs, the sofa, a footstool, and the floor. Two young boys, two adolescent girls, and a woman. She was Bev Benton, she said. Her husband was Max. And these were four of their children. Sherry and Brenda the girls, Rory and Stevie the boys. Their Davey was the one gone missing.
All of them, Lynley noted, were uncommonly small. To one degree or another, all of them also resembled the body in Queen’s Wood.
The boys were meant to be at school, Bev told them; the girls were meant to be at work in the food stalls at Camden Lock Market. Max and Bev themselves were meant to be serving the public from their fish van in Chapel Street. But no one was going anywhere from this house till they had word about Davey.
“Something’s happened to him,” Max Benton said. “They would’ve sent regular coppers otherwise. We’re none of us so thick ’s we don’t know that much. What is it, then?”
“It might be best for us to speak without the children here,” Lynley said.
Bev Benton keened two words, “Oh God.”
Max barked at her, “We’ll have none of that,” and then said to Lynley, “They stay. If it’s an object lesson they’re about to have, then I by God want them having it.”
“Mr. Benton-”
“There’ll be no Mr. Benton about it,” Benton said. “Give us the brief.”
Lynley wasn’t about to go at it that way. He said, “Have you a photograph of your son?”
Bev Benton spoke. “Sherry, pet, fetch Davey’s school picture from the fridge for the officer.”
One of the two girls-blonde like the body in the woods, and identically fair skinned, delicate featured, and small boned-left them quickly and just as quickly returned. She handed over the picture to Lynley, her eyes cast down to his shoes, and then returned to the footstool, which she shared with her sister. Lynley dropped his gaze to the picture. A cheeky-looking boy grinned up at him, his fair hair darkened by the gel that formed it into little spikes. He had a sprinkling of freckles across his nose and headphones slung round his neck, above his school-uniform pullover.
“Slipped them on at the last minute, he did,” Bev Benton commented, as if in explanation of the headphones, which were hardly part of his regulation school attire. “Likes his music, Davey. Rap music. Mostly those blacks from America with the p’culiar names.”
The boy in the photo resembled the body they had, but only an identification made by one of the parents could confirm this. Still, no matter what sort of lesson Max Benton wanted the rest of his children to have, Lynley had no intention of offering it to them. He said, “When was the last time you saw Davey?”
“Yesterday morning.” Max was the one to answer. “He got off to school like always.”
“Didn’t come home when he was due, though,” Bev Benton said. “He was meant to mind Rory and Stevie here.”
“I went to tae kwon do to see was he there,” Max added. “Last time he bunked off doing something he was meant to do, that’s where he claimed he went instead.”