Read With No One As Witness for Free Online Page B

hates commitment. I’d’ve used Sellotape but Dee recommended this. I shouldn’t’ve bothered one way or the other.”
    Lynley rose from the step and extended his hand to help her up as well. “Apart from the staples, you’ve done yourself proud.”
    “Right. That’s me. Today the Yard, tomorrow the catwalk,” Havers said.
    They descended to his temporary office. Dorothea Harriman came to the door once he and Havers were spreading the case materials out on the conference table. She said, “Sh’ll I start phoning them in, Acting Superintendent Lynley?”
    “The secretarial grapevine round here is, as ever, a model of efficiency,” Lynley noted. “Bring Stewart off rota to run the incident room. Hale’s in Scotland and MacPherson’s involved with that forged-documents situation, so leave them be. And send Winston through when he gets down from Hillier.”
    “Detective Sergeant Nkata, right.” Harriman was making her usual competent notes on a sticky pad.
    “You know about Winnie as well?” Havers asked, impressed. “Already? Have you got a snout up there or something, Dee?”
    “The cultivation of resources should be the aim of every dutiful police employee,” Harriman said piously.
    “Cultivate someone across the river, then,” Lynley said. “I want all the forensic material SO7 has on the older cases. Then phone each police borough where a body was found and get every scrap of every report and every statement they have on these crimes. Havers, in the meantime, you’ll need to get on to the PNC—grab at least two DCs from Stewart to help you—and pull out every missing-persons report filed in the last three months for adolescent boys ages…” He looked at the photos. “I think twelve to sixteen should do it.” He tapped the picture of the most recent victim, the boy with makeup smeared across his face. “And I think we’ll want to check with Vice on this one. It’s a route to go with all of them, in fact.”
    Havers picked up on the direction his thoughts were taking. “If they’re rent boys, sir—runaways who happened to fall into the game, say—then it may be there’s no missing-person report filed for any one of them. At least not in the same month they were killed.”
    “Indeed,” Lynley said. “So we’ll work backwards in time if we have to. But we’ve got to start somewhere, so let’s keep it at three months for now.”
    Havers and Harriman left to see to their respective assignments. Lynley sat at the table and felt in his jacket pocket for his reading spectacles. He took another look at the photographs, spending the most time on those pictures of the final killing. They could not, he knew, accurately portray the understated enormity of the crime itself as he’d seen it earlier that day.
    When he had arrived at St. George’s Gardens, the scythe-shaped area held a full complement of detectives, uniformed constables, and scenes-of-crime officers. The forensic pathologist was still on the scene, bundled against the grey-day cold in a mustard anorak, and the police photographer and videographer had just completed their work. Outside the tall wrought-iron gates of the gardens, the public had begun to gather, and from the windows of the buildings just beyond the garden’s brick wall and the mews behind it, more spectators were observing the activity taking place: the careful fingertip search for evidence, the minute examination of a discarded bicycle that sprawled near a statue of Minerva, the collection of silver objects that were scattered on the ground round a tomb.
    Lynley hadn’t known what to expect when he showed his ID at the gate and followed the path to the professionals. The phone call he’d received had used the phrase “possible serial killing” and because of this, as he walked, he steeled himself to see something terrible: a disembowelment in the manner of Jack the Ripper, perhaps, a decapitation or dismemberment. He’d assumed it would be the horrific that