With No One As Witness

  He sighed. It was not just flat, of course. That could have been ascribed to anything: from a slow leak to a nail picked up in a street somewhere and dislodged after the damage was done. That sort of disagreeable start to his day would have been an irritant, but it wouldn’t have had the cachet that a knifing had. A knifing suggested that the car’s owner ought to watch his back, not only right now when he had to break out the jack and the spare but also anytime he was on the estate.

  Nkata looked round automatically before he set to changing the tyre. Naturally, there was no one about. This damage had been done on the previous night, sometime after he’d arrived home post Crimewatch. Whoever had done this didn’t have the bottle to face him squarely. At the end of the day, while he was a cop to them and consequently the enemy, he was also an alumnus of the Brixton Warriors, among whom he’d spilt his own blood and the blood of others.

  Fifteen minutes later and he was on his way. His route took him past the Brixton police station, whose interview rooms he knew only too well from his adolescence, and he made a right turn into Acre Lane, with little traffic moving in the direction he was traveling.

  This was towards Clapham, for it was from Clapham that the phone call had come at the end of Crimewatch. The caller was Ronald X. Ritucci—“It’s for Xavier,” he’d said—and he thought he had some information that might help the police in their investigation of the death of “that kid with the bicycle in the gardens.” He and his wife had been watching the show without thinking how it might relate to them when Gail—“that’s the wife”—pointed out that the night they’d been burgled corresponded to the night of that boy’s death. And he—Ronald X.—had had a glimpse of the little thug just before he leapt out of the first-floor bedroom window of their house. He’d definitely worn makeup. So if the police were interested…

  They were. Someone would call in the morning.

  That someone was Nkata, and he found the Ritucci home not far to the south of Clapham Common. It was in a street of similar post-Edwardian houses, distinguished from so many of those north of the river by being detached dwellings in a city where land was at a premium.

  When he rang the bell, he heard the sound of a child clattering along a corridor to the door. The inside bolt was messed about a bit, unsuccessfully, while a little voice called out, “Mummy! The doorbell! Did you hear?”

  In a moment, a man said, “Gillian, get away from there. If I’ve told you once about answering the door, I’ve told you a thousand…” He jerked it open. A small girl in patent-leather tap shoes, tights, and a ballerina’s tutu peered round his leg, one arm clinging to his thigh.

  Nkata had his identification ready. The man didn’t look at it. “Saw you on the telly,” he said. “I’m Ronald X. Ritucci. Come in. D’you mind the kitchen? Gail’s still feeding the baby. Au pair’s down with flu, unfortunately.”

  Nkata said he didn’t mind, and he followed Ritucci, after the man had closed, bolted, and tested the security of the front door. They went to a modernised kitchen at the back of the house, where a glassed-in nook held a pine table and matching chairs. There a harried-looking woman in a business suit was trying to spoon something into the mouth of a child perhaps one year old. This would be Gail, making a heroic attempt in the absence of her au pair to do the mother thing before she dashed off to work.

  She said, like her husband, “You were on the television.”

  The child Gillian put in a clear, bell-like observation. “He’s a black man, Daddy, isn’t he?”

  Ritucci looked mortified, as if the identification of Nkata’s race were akin to mentioning a social disease that polite individuals would know to ignore. He said, “Gillian! That’s quite enough.” And to Nkata, “Tea, then? I can brew you a cup in a tick. No problem.”

  Nkata told him no thanks. He’d just had his own breakfast and wanted nothing. He nodded towards one of the pine chairs and said, “C’n I…”

  “Of course,” Gail Ritucci said.

  Gillian said, “What did you eat, then? I had boiled egg ’n’ soldiers.”

  Her father said to her, “Gillian, what did I just say?”

  Nkata said to the child, “Eggs but no soldiers. My mum thinks I’m too old for them, but I ’xpect she’d make them if I asked nice enough. I had sausage ’s well. Some mushrooms and tomatoes.”

  “All that?” the child asked.

  “I’m a growing boy.”

  “C’n I sit on your lap?”

  This was apparently the limit. The parents said Gillian’s name in simultaneous horror, and the father swept her into his arms and out of the room. The mother shoved a spoonful of porridge into the gaping mouth of the toddler and said to Nkata, “She’s…It’s not you, Sergeant. We’re trying to teach her about strangers.”

  Nkata said, “Mums and dads can’t ever be too careful in that department,” and geared up his pen to take down notes.

  Ritucci returned almost immediately, having deposited his older child somewhere in the house, out of sight. Like his wife, he apologised, and Nkata found himself wishing there were actually something he could do to make them more comfortable.

  He reminded them that they’d phoned the Crimewatch number. They’d reported a boy wearing makeup who’d burgled them…?

  Gail Ritucci was the one who told the first part of the story, handing over the spoon and the porridge to her husband who took up feeding their other child. They’d been out for the evening, she explained, having dinner in Fulham with old friends and their children. When they got back to Clapham, they found themselves behind a van in their street. It was moving slowly, and at first they’d thought it was looking for a space to park. But when it passed one space and then another, they became uneasy.

  “We’d got a notice about break-ins in the neighbourhood,” she said and turned to her husband. “When was that, Ron?”

  He paused in his feeding of the toddler, spoon poised in the air. “Early autumn?” he said.

  “I think that’s right.” She went back to Nkata. “So when the van crept along, it looked suspicious. I took down its number plates.”

  “Well done,” Nkata told her.

  She said, “Then we got home and the alarm was going off. Ron ran upstairs and saw the boy just as he went out of the window and onto the roof. Of course, we phoned the police at once, but he was long gone by the time they got here.”

  “Took them two hours,” her husband said grimly. “Makes you wonder.”

  Gail looked apologetic. “Well, naturally, there must have been other things…more important…an accident or serious crime…not that it wasn’t serious to us, to come home and find someone inside our house. But to the police…”

  “Don’t make excuses for them,” her husband told her. He set down the porridge bowl and the spoon and used the edge of a tea towel to wipe the residue from his young child’s face. “Law enforcement’s going down the toilet. Has been for years.”

  “Ron!”

  “No offence intended,” he said to Nkata. “It’s probably not down to you.”

  Nkata said no offence was taken, and he asked them if they’d given the number plates of that van to their local police.

  They had done, they said. The very night they phoned. When the police finally showed up on their doorstep—“Must have been two A.M. then,” Ritucci said—it was in the person of two female constables. They took a report and tried to look sympathetic. They said they would be in touch and in the meantime to come down to the station in a few days and pick up their report for insurance purposes.

  “That was the end of it,” Gail Ritucci told Nkata.

  “Cops didn’t do a bloody thing,” her husband added.

  ON HER WAY to meet Lynley in Upper Holloway, Barbara Havers stopped by the ground-floor flat, which she’d been passing assiduously with her eyes directed forward for ages by this point. She carried with her the peace offering she’d bought off Barry Minshall’s stall: the pencil-through-the-five-pound-note trick meant to amuse and delight on
e’s friends.

  She missed both Taymullah Azhar and Hadiyyah. She missed the casual friendship they shared, dropping by one another’s digs for a chat whenever the fancy took them. They weren’t family. She couldn’t even say they were the next best thing to family. But they were…something, a piece of familiarity and a comfort. She wanted both back, and she was willing to eat humble pie if that was what it was going to take to put things right between them.

  She knocked on their door and said, “Azhar? It’s me. Have you got a few minutes?” Then she stood back. A dim light shone through the curtains, so she knew they were up and about, perhaps shrugging into dressing gowns or something.

  No one answered. Music’s on, she told herself. A radio alarm that hadn’t been shut off after it awoke the sleeper. She’d been too quiet in her attempt. So she knocked again, harder this time. She listened and tried to decide if what she heard behind the door was the rustle of someone disturbing the curtains to see who’d come calling so early in the morning. She looked towards the window; she studied the panel of material that covered the panes of the French door. Nothing.

  Then she felt embarrassed. She stood back another step. She said more quietly, “Well, all right then,” and she moved off to her car. If that was the way he wanted it…If she’d hit him so far below the belt with her remark about his wife taking off…But she’d said nothing but the truth, hadn’t she? And anyway, they’d both played dirty and he hadn’t been trotting to the bottom of the garden to apologise to her.

  She forced herself to shrug the matter off and she used even more determination to leave the vicinity without looking back to see if one of them was watching her from a parted curtain. She went to where she’d left her car, all the way over in Parkhill Road, which was the closest space she’d been able to find upon her return the previous night.

  From there she drove to Upper Holloway and found the comprehensive whose address Lynley had phoned to her while she’d still been in bed, trying to make herself rise to the irresistible oldies beat of Diana Ross and the Supremes ordering someone to “set me free why doanchew babe” on her radio alarm. She’d reached for the phone, attempted to sound chipper, and taken down the information on the inside bodice-ripping cover of Torn by Desire, which had kept her awake far into the night with the burning question of whether the hero and heroine would give in to their fatal passion for each other. That would take some heavy guesswork, she’d told herself sardonically.

  The comprehensive in question wasn’t too far from Bovingdon Close, where Davey Benton’s family lived. It looked like a minimum-security prison, one whose occasional visual relief had been supplied courtesy of a David Hockney wanna-be.

  Despite the distance he’d had to travel to get there in comparison with her own, Lynley was already waiting for her. He looked dead grim. He’d been to call upon the Bentons, he explained.

  “How’re they doing?”

  “As you’d expect. As anyone would be doing in the same situation.” Lynley’s words were terse, even more than she would have expected them to be. She looked at him curiously and was about to ask him what was up when he nodded at the front of the school. “Ready, then?” he asked her.

  Barbara was. They were there to talk to one Andy Crickleworth, supposed mate of Davey Benton. Lynley had said on the phone that he wanted as much ammunition as possible when they finally spoke to Barry Minshall in an interview room at the Holmes Street police station, and he had a feeling that Andy Crickleworth would be the person to supply it.

  He’d phoned ahead so the comprehensive’s administrators would be aware of the police interest in one of their pupils. Thus it was a matter of a few minutes only before Lynley and Barbara found themselves in the company of the school’s headteacher, his secretary, and a thirteen-year-old boy. The secretary looked grey and defeated, and the headteacher had the used-up appearance of a man for whom a pension couldn’t come too soon. For his part, the boy had braces on his teeth, spots on his face, and hair slicked back in the manner of a 1930s gigolo. By raising one half of his upper lip as he entered the room, he managed to look scornful about the whole matter of meeting the police. But the rehearsed snarl couldn’t stop the fidgeting of his hands, which pressed down into his groin throughout the interview, as if they wished to stop him from wetting himself.

  The headteacher—Mr. Fairbairn—made the introductions. They held their meeting in a conference room, round an institutional table that was itself surrounded by uncomfortable institutional chairs. His secretary sat in a corner, taking notes furiously, as if they’d need to be compared to Barbara’s in an eventual lawsuit.

  Lynley began by asking Andy Crickleworth if he knew that Davey Benton was dead. Davey’s name was due to be released to the press that morning, but the grapevine is a powerful plant. If the school had been informed of the murder via Davey’s parents, there was a high probability the word was out.

  Andy said, “Yeah. Everyone knows. Least everyone in year eight knows.” He didn’t sound regretful about the matter. He clarified this by saying, “He got murdered, right?,” and the tone of the question suggested being murdered was a higher form of leaving life than falling ill or dying in an accident, achieving a coolness unavailable to the others.

  That belief would be typical of almost any thirteen-year-old boy, Barbara thought. Sudden death was a seven-day wonder to them, happening to someone else and never to you. She said lightly, “Throttled first, discarded second, Andy,” to see if that would shake him. “You know there’s a serial killer working round London, don’t you?”

  “He got Davey?” If anything, Andy sounded impressed, not chastened. “You want me to help you catch him or summat?”

  Mr. Fairbairn said to the boy, “You’re to answer their questions, Crickleworth. That will be the limit to the matter.”

  Andy gave him a sod you look.

  Lynley said, “Tell us about the Stables Market.”

  Andy looked wary. “Wha’ about it, then?”

  “We’re told by his parents that Davey went there. And if he went, I expect his whole crew went as well. You were part of his crew, weren’t you?”

  Andy shrugged. “Might’ve gone there. But it wouldn’t’ve been to do nothing wrong.”

  “Davey’s dad says he nicked a pair of handcuffs off a magic stall there. Do you know about that?”

  “I didn’t nick nothing,” Andy said. “If Davey did, he did. Wouldn’t surprise me, though. Davey liked nicking things. Videos from the shop in Junction Road. Sweets off the newsagent. Banana from the market. He thought it was cool. I told him he was asking to be caught sometime and dragged off to the nick, but he wouldn’t listen. Tha’ was Davey all over. He liked the lads to think he was hard.”

  “What about the magic stall?” Barbara put in.

  “Wha’ about it, then?”

  “Did you go there with Davey?”

  “Hey, I said I never nicked—”

  “This isn’t about you,” Lynley cut in. “It isn’t about what you did or did not steal and where you might or might not have stolen it. Are we clear on that? We have the word of Davey’s parents that he visited a magic stall in the Stables Market, but that’s all we have, aside from your name, which they also gave us.”

  “I di’n’t even know them!” Andy sounded panicked.

  “We realise that. We also realise that you and Davey had some difficulty getting on with each other.”

  “Superintendent,” Mr. Fairbairn said in a monitory tone, as if understanding how easily “difficulty getting on” could lead them into an accusation he did not intend to allow spoken in his conference room.

  Lynley held up his hand, stopping him from saying anything further. “But none of that is important now, Andy. Do you understand? What is important is what you can tell us about the market, the magic stall, and anything else that might help us find Davey Benton’s killer. Is that clear enough for you?”

  Andy said reluctantly that it was, although Barbara doubted it. He seemed mo
re fixed on the drama of the situation than on the grim reality behind it.

  Lynley said, “Did you ever accompany Davey to the magic stall in the Stables Market?”

  Andy nodded. “Once,” he said. “We all went down there. Wasn’t my idea or nothing, mind you. I can’t remember who said let’s go. But we did.”

  “And?” Barbara asked.

  “And Davey tried to pinch some handcuffs off that weird bloke runs the magic stall. He got caught and the rest of us scarpered.”

  “Who caught him?”

  “The bloke. The weird one. Dead weird, he is. He wants sorting, you ask me.” Andy seemed to make a sudden connection between the questions and Davey’s death. He said, “D’you think that wanker killed our Davey?”

  “Did you ever see them together after that day?” Lynley asked. “Davey and the magician?”

  Andy shook his head. “I never.” He frowned and then added after a moment, “’Cept they must’ve.”

  “Must have what?” Barbara asked.

  “Must’ve seen each other.” He squirmed in his seat to look at Lynley, and he told the rest of his tale to him. Davey, he said, did some magic tricks at school. They were dead-stupid tricks—prob’ly anyone could’ve done them, really—but Davey’d never done any tricks before the day the crew went to that stall in the Stables Market. After, though, he did a trick with a ball: making it disappear, although anyone with a brain bigger than a pea could’ve seen how he did it. And then he did a trick with a rope: He cut it in half and then produced it uncut. He might’ve taught himself off the telly or something or even out of a book, but p’rhaps that wanker magician’d taught him the tricks, in which case Davey had prob’ly seen him more than once.