With No One As Witness

That was how it happened, and Barbara knew it. That was how cops made deadly mistakes. She returned the dressing gown to the clothes cupboard and forced her mind to stop painting pictures.

Out in the sitting room, she heard Morag’s key scratching at the lock. There was no time for anything else but a quick look at the bedsheets beneath the counterpane, catching the faint scent of lavender upon them. They offered no visible secrets to her, so she moved to the chest of drawers on the other side of the room.

And there it was: everything she needed. In one of the two photographs, a woman posed in her wedding gown with her bespectacled groom. In the other, a much older version of the same woman stood on Brighton Pier. With her was a younger man. He was bespectacled like his father.

Barbara picked this latter picture up and took it over to the window for a better look. In the sitting room, Morag’s voice called out, “Are you in here, Constable?” and Mandy gave her Siamese yowl.

In the bedroom, Barbara murmured, “Bloody hell,” at what she was looking at. Hastily, she shoved the Brighton Pier photograph into her shoulder bag. She composed herself as best she could and called out, “Sorry. Having a look round. Got reminded of my mum. She goes for this sixties stuff in a very big way.”

Complete casuistry but it couldn’t be helped. Truth was, in her present state, Mum wouldn’t know the sixties from a basket of potatoes.

“She’d run out of water,” Barbara said helpfully when she joined the building manager in the sitting room. The sound of Mandy lapping came from the kitchen. “I refilled her bowl. She’s got plenty of food, though. I think she’ll be set for a while.”

Morag gave Barbara a shrewd look, which suggested she wasn’t entirely convinced of the constable’s heartfelt concern for the cat. But she didn’t make a move to frisk Barbara’s person, so the end result was a round of farewells after which Barbara hotfooted it outside and dug round in her shoulder bag for her mobile.

It rang just as she was about to punch in the numbers for Lynley. A Scotland Yard extension was calling.

“Detective Con…Constable Havers?” Dorothea Harriman was on the other end. She sounded terrible.

“Me,” Barbara said. “Dee, what’s wrong?”

Harriman said, “Con…Detect…” And Barbara realised she was sobbing.

She said, “Dee. Dee, get a grip. For the love of God, what’s going on?”

“It’s his wife,” she cried.

“Whose wife? What wife?” Barbara felt the fear coming upon her in a rush because there was only one wife that she could conceive of in that moment, one woman only about whom the department’s secretary might be calling her. “Has something happened to Helen Lynley? Has she lost her baby, Dee? What’s going on?”

“Shot.” Harriman keened the word. “The superintendent’s wife has been shot.”

LYNLEY SAW that St. James had come to him not in his old MG but in a panda car, driven from St. Thomas’ Hospital with lights flashing and siren blaring. He assumed this much because that was how they returned to the other side of the river, riding in the back with two grim-faced Belgravia constables in the front, the entire journey made in a matter of minutes which nonetheless felt like hours to him, all the time with traffic parting like Red Sea waters before them.

His old friend kept a hand on his arm, as if expecting Lynley to bolt from the car. He said, “They’ve got a trauma team with her. They’ve given her blood. O-negative, they said. It’s universal. But you’ll know that, won’t you. Of course you will.” St. James cleared his throat and Lynley looked at him. He thought at that moment, u

“Where?” Lynley’s voice was raw. “Simon, I told Deborah…I said that she was to-”

“Tommy.” St. James’s hand tightened.

“Where, then? Where?”

“In Eaton Terrace.”

“At home?”

“Helen was tired. They parked the car and unloaded their parcels at the front door. Deborah took the Bentley round to the mews. She parked it, and when she got back to the house-”

“She didn’t hear anything? See anything?”

“She was on the front step. At first, Deborah thought she’d fainted.”

Lynley raised his hand to his forehead. He pressed in on his temples as if this would allow him to understand. He said, “How could she have thought-”

“There was virtually no blood. And her coat-Helen’s coat-it was dark. Is it navy? Black?”

Both of them knew the colour was meaningless, but it was something to cling to and they had to cling to it or face the unthinkable.

“Black,” Lynley said. “It’s black.” Cashmere, hanging nearly to her ankles, and she loved to wear it with boots whose heels were so high that she laughed at herself at the end of the day when she hobbled to the sofa and fell upon it, claiming she was a mindless victim of male Italian shoe designers with fantasies of women bearing whips and chains. “Tommy, save me from myself,” she would say. “Only foot binding could be worse than this.”

Lynley looked out of the window. He saw the blur of faces and knew they’d made it as far as Westminster Bridge, where people on the pavements were caught in their own little worlds into which the sound of a siren and the sight of a panda car zooming by caused them only an instant of wondering, Who? What? And then forgetting because it didn’t affect them.

“When?” he said to St. James. “What time?”

“Half past three. They’d thought to have tea at Claridge’s, but as Helen was tired, they went home instead. They’d have it there. They bought…I don’t know…tea cakes somewhere? Pastries?”

Lynley tried to absorb this. It was four forty-five. He said, “An hour? More than an hour? How can that be?”

St. James didn’t reply at once, and Lynley turned to him and saw how drawn and gaunt he looked, far more than normal for he was a gaunt and angular man by birth. He said, “Simon, why in God’s name? More than an hour?”

“It took twenty minutes for the ambulance to get to her.”

“Christ,” Lynley whispered. “Oh God. Oh Christ.”

“And then I wouldn’t let them tell you by phone. We had to wait for a second panda car-the first officers needed to stay at the hospital…to speak to Deborah…”

“She’s there?”

“Still. Yes. Of course. So we had to wait. Tommy, I couldn’t let them phone you. I couldn’t do that to you, say that Helen…say that…”

“No. I see.” And then he said fiercely after a moment, “Tell me the rest. I want to know it all.”

“They were calling in a thoracic surgeon when I left. They haven’t said anything else.”

“Thoracic?” Lynley said. “Thoracic?”

St. James’s hand tightened on his arm once again. “It’s a chest wound,” he said.

Lynley closed his eyes, and he kept them closed for the rest of the ride, which was mercifully brief.

At the hospital, two panda cars stood at the top of the sloping entrance to Accident and Emergency, and two of the uniformed constables who belonged to them were just coming out as Lynley and St. James entered. He saw Deborah at once, seated on one of the blue steel chairs with a box of tissues on her knees and a middle-aged man in a crumpled mackintosh talking to her, notebook in hand. Belgravia CID, Lynley thought. He didn’t know the man, but he knew the routine.

Two other uniforms stood nearby, affording the detective privacy. Apparently, they knew St. James by sight-as they would, since he’d already been at the hospital earlier-so they let both of them approach the interview that was going on.

Deborah looked up. Her eyes were red. Her nose looked sore. A pile of sodden tissues lay on the floor next to her feet. She said, “Oh, Tommy…,” and he could see her try to pull herself together.