With No One As Witness Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’re to go up and join them. D’you know the hem’s coming out of your trousers?”
    “Is it? Damn,” Barbara said.
    “I’ve a needle if you want it.”
    “No time, Dee. D’you have a safety pin?”
    Dorothea went to her desk. Barbara knew how unlikely it was that the other woman would have a pin. Indeed, Dee was always turned out so perfectly that it was tough to imagine her even in possession of a needle. She said, “No pin, Detective Constable. Sorry. But there’s always this.” She held up a stapler.
    Barbara said, “Go for it. But be quick. I’m late.”
    “I know. You’re missing a button from your cuff as well,” Dorothea noted. “And there’s…Detective Constable, you’ve got…Is this slut’s wool on your backside?”
    “Oh damn, damn,” Barbara said. “Never mind. He’ll have to take me as I am.”
    Which wasn’t likely to be with open arms, she thought as she crossed over to Tower Block and took the lift up to Hillier’s office. He’d been wanting to sack her for at least four years, and only the intervention of others had kept him from it.
    Hillier’s secretary—who always referred to herself as Judi-with-an-i-MacIntosh—told Barbara to go straight in. Sir David, she said, was waiting for her. Had been waiting with Acting Superintendent Lynley for a good many minutes, she added. She smiled insincerely and pointed to the door.
    Inside, Barbara found Hillier and Lynley concluding a conference call with someone who was on Hillier’s speakerphone talking about “preparing to engage in damage limitation.”
    “I expect we’ll want a press conference, then,” Hillier said. “And soon, so we don’t end up seeming as if we’re doing it just to appease Fleet Street. When can you manage it?”
    “We’ll be sorting that out directly. How closely do you want to be involved?”
    “Very. And with an appropriate companion at hand.”
    “Fine. I’ll be in touch then, David.”
    David and damage limitation, Barbara thought. The speaker was obviously a muckety-muck from the DPA.
    Hillier ended the conversation. He looked at Lynley, said, “Well?” and then noticed Barbara, just inside the door. He said, “Where the hell have you been, Constable?”
    So much, Barbara thought, for having a chance to polish anyone’s apples. She said, “Sorry, sir,” as Lynley turned in his chair. “Traffic was deadly.”
    “Life is deadly,” Hillier said. “But that doesn’t stop any of us from living it.”
    Absolute monarch of the flaming non sequitur, Barbara thought. She glanced at Lynley, who raised a warning index finger approximately half an inch. She said, “Yes, sir,” and she joined the two officers at the conference table where Lynley was sitting and where Hillier had moved when he’d ended his phone call. She eased a chair out and slid onto it as unobtrusively as possible.
    The table, she saw with a glance, held four sets of photographs. In them, four bodies lay. From where she sat, they appeared to be young adolescent boys, arranged on their backs, with their hands folded high on their chests in the manner of effigies on tombs. They would have looked like boys asleep had they not been cyanotic of face and necklaced with the mark of ligatures.
    Barbara pursed her lips. “Holy hell,” she said. “When did they…?”
    “Over the past three months,” Hillier said.
    “Three months? But why hasn’t anyone…?” Barbara looked from Hillier to Lynley. Lynley, she saw, looked deeply concerned; Hillier, always the most political of animals, looked wary. “I haven’t heard a whisper about this. Or read a word in the papers. Or seen any reports on the telly. Four deaths. The same MO. All victims young. All victims male.”
    “Please try to sound a little less like an hysterical newsreader on cable television,” Hillier said.
    Lynley shifted position in his chair. He cast a look Barbara’s way. His brown eyes were telling her to hold back from saying what they all were