With No One As Witness Read Online Free PDF

thinking until the two of them managed to get alone somewhere.
    All right, Barbara thought. She would play it that way. She said in a careful, professional voice, “Who are they, then?”
    “A, B, C, and D. We haven’t any names.”
    “No one reported them missing? In three months?”
    “That’s evidently part of the problem,” Lynley said.
    “What d’you mean? Where were they found?”
    Hillier indicated one of the photographs as he spoke. “The first…in Gunnersbury Park. September tenth. Found at eight-fifteen in the morning by a jogger needing to have a piss. There’s an old garden inside the park, partially walled, not far off Gunnersbury Avenue. That looks to be the means of access. There’re two boarded-up entrances there, right on the street.”
    “But he didn’t die in the park,” Barbara noted, with a nod at the photo in which the boy had been positioned supine on a mattress of weeds that grew at the juncture of two brick walls. There was nothing that suggested a struggle had taken place in the vicinity. There was also, in the entire stack of pictures from that crime scene, no photograph of the sort of evidence one expected to find where a murder occurs.
    “No. He didn’t die there. Nor did this one.” Hillier picked up another batch of photographs. In it, the body of another slender boy was draped across the bonnet of a car, positioned as neatly as the first in Gunnersbury Park. “This one was found in an NCP car park at the top of Queensway. Just over five weeks later.”
    “What’s the murder squad over there saying? Anything from CCTV?”
    “The car park doesn’t have closed-circuit cameras.” Lynley answered Barbara’s question. “There’s a sign posted that there ‘may’ be cameras on the premises. But that’s it. That’s supposed to do the job of security.”
    “This one was in Quaker Street,” Hillier went on, indicating a third set of photos. “An abandoned warehouse not far from Brick Lane. November twenty-fifth. And this—” he picked up the final batch and handed them over to Barbara—“is the latest. He was found in St. George’s Gardens. Today.”
    Barbara glanced at the final set of pictures. In them, the body of an adolescent boy lay naked on the top of a lichen-covered tomb. The tomb itself sat on a lawn not far from a serpentine path. Beyond this, a brick wall fenced off not a cemetery—as one would expect from the tomb’s presence—but a garden. Beyond the wall appeared to be a mews of garages and a block of flats behind them.
    “St. George’s Gardens?” Barbara asked. “Where is this place?”
    “Not far from Russell Square.”
    “Who found the body?”
    “The warden who opens the park every day. Our killer got access from the gates on Handel Street. They were chained up properly, but bolt cutters did the trick. He opened up, drove a vehicle inside, made his deposit on the tomb, and took off. Stopped to wrap the chain back round the gate so anyone passing wouldn’t notice.”
    “Tyre prints in the garden?”
    “Two decent ones. Casts are being made.”
    “Witnesses?” Barbara indicated the flats that lined the garden just beyond the mews.
    “We’ve constables from the Theobald’s Road station doing the door-to-door.”
    Barbara pulled all of the photographs towards her and laid the four victims in a row. She immediately took note of the differences—all of them major ones—between the final dead boy and the first three. All of them were young teenagers who’d died in an identical fashion, but unlike the first three boys, the latest victim was not only naked but also had a copious amount of makeup on: lipstick, eye shadow, liner, and mascara smeared across his face. Additionally, the killer had marked his body by slicing it open from sternum to waist and by drawing with blood an odd circular symbol on his forehead. The most potentially explosive political detail, however, had to do with race: Only the final victim was white. Of the