They didn’t know. But he said he’d be messing about with Blinker.
“Blinker?” Barbara and Nkata said together.
Blinker, they confirmed. They didn’t know the boy’s last name-apparently Blinker was male and of the human species-but what they did know was that he was definitely the cause of any trouble their Kimmo ever got into.
The word trouble struck Barbara, but she let Nkata do the honours. “What sort of trouble?”
No real trouble, Aunt Sal assured them. And nothing he’d ever started on his own. It was just that that bloody Blinker-“Sorry, Mum,” she said hastily-had passed along something of some kind to their Kimmo, which Kimmo had flogged somewhere, only to be caught out selling stolen property. “But it was that Blinker responsible,” Aunt Sal said. “Our Kimmo’d never been in trouble before.”
That certainly remained to be seen, Barbara thought. She asked if the Thornes could direct them to Blinker.
They had no phone number for him, but they knew where he lived. They said it shouldn’t be hard to find him on any morning because the one thing they knew about him was that he was up all night hanging about Leicester Square and he slept till one in the afternoon. He kipped on his sister’s sofa, and she lived with her husband on Kipling Estate, near Bermondsey Square. Aunt Sal didn’t know the sister’s name-nor did she have the first idea of Blinker’s Christian name, but she expected if the police went round asking where a bloke called Blinker might be, someone would know for certain. Blinker was someone who always managed to get known.
Barbara asked if they might have a look through Kimmo’s belongings, then. Aunt Sal took them to his room. This was crowded with bed, dressing table, wardrobe, chest of drawers, television, and music system. The dressing table held a display of makeup that would have done Boy George proud. The top of the chest of drawers served as a location for wig stands, of which there were five. And the walls held dozens of professional head shots of Kimmo’s sources of apparent inspiration: from Edith Piaf to Madonna. The boy was nothing if not eclectic in his taste.
“Where’d he get the dosh for all this?” Barbara asked once Aunt Sal had left them to look through the dead boy’s lumber. “She didn’t mention anything about employment, did she?”
“Makes you think about what Blinker was really giving him to sell,” Nkata replied.
“Drugs?”
He waggled his hand: maybe yes, maybe no. “A lot of something,” he said.
“We need to find that bloke, Winnie.”
“Shouldn’t be tough. Someone’ll know him on the estate, ask round enough. Someone always does.”
Ultimately, they got little joy from their efforts in Kimmo’s room. A small stack of cards-birthday, Christmas, and the odd Easter thrown in, all signed “Lovekins, darling, from Mummy and Dad”-were hidden away in a drawer along with a photo of a well-tanned thirtysomething couple on a sunny, foreign balcony. A yellowed newspaper article about a transgender professional model who’d been outed by the tabloids in the distant past surfaced beneath a knot of costume jewellery on the dressing table. A hair-styling magazine-at least in other circumstances-could have indicated a future career.
Otherwise, much of it was what one would expect in the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old boy. Malodorous shoes, underpants screwed up beneath the bed, stray socks. It would have been ordinary, except for the presence of all the items that made it into a hermaphroditic curiosity.
When they’d seen it all, Barbara stood back and said to Nkata, “Winnie, what d’you reckon he was really into?”
Nkata joined her in assessing the room. “I got a feeling this Blinker can tell us.”
They both knew there was no point in looking up Blinker at the moment. They’d be better off trying in the morning just about the time those who had jobs would be setting off for work from the housing estate where Blinker lived. They returned to Aunt Sal and Gran, then, and Barbara asked about Kimmo’s parents. It was the small and pathetic hoard of postcards in the boy’s room that prompted her question, rather than a need to know for purposes of their investigation. It was also what that hoard of postcards said about people’s priorities in life.
Oh, they were in South America, Gran said. They’d been there since just before Kimmo’s eighth birthday. His dad was in the hotel business, you see, and they’d gone there to manage a luxury spa. They intended to send for Kimmo when they got settled in. But Mum wanted to learn the language first, and it was taking her longer than she’d thought it would.
Had they been informed of Kimmo’s death? Barbara asked. Because-
Gran and Aunt Sal had exchanged a look.
– surely there were arrangements they’d want to be making to come home straightaway.
She said this in part because she wanted them to have to acknowledge what she assumed: Kimmo’s parents were parents only because of an egg, a sperm, and an accidental inception. They had more important concerns than what had come of that flesh-rubbing moment between them.
Which led her to think of the other victims. And of what it was that might tie all of them together.
CHAPTER FIVE
BY THE NEXT DAY, TWO PIECES OF NEWS FROM SO7 GAVE cause for what went for good cheer. The two tyre prints at the scene of the St. George’s Gardens body had been identified by manufacturer. They’d also been characterised by a peculiar wearing pattern on one of them that was going to please the Crown prosecutors, when and if the Met made an arrest of someone in possession of those tyres and a vehicle to which they might be attached. The other piece of news had to do with the residue on the pedals and the gears of the bicycle in St. George’s Gardens as well as the residue on all four of the bodies they were dealing with: It was all identical. From this, the murder squad concluded that Kimmo Thorne had been picked up somewhere-bike and all-and murdered somewhere else, after which his killer dumped the body, the bike, and probably the silver photo frames in St. George’s Gardens. All of this constituted meagre progress, but progress all the same. So when Hamish Robson returned to them with his report, Lynley was inclined to forgive him for showing up three and a half hours later than the promised twenty-four hours he’d thought it would take him to assemble some usable information.
Dee Harriman fetched him from reception and returned him to Lynley’s office. He said no to the offer of an afternoon cup of tea and instead he nodded towards the conference table rather than taking one of the two chairs in front of the desk. It seemed a subtle way of telegraphing equality to Lynley. Despite his apparent reticence, Robson didn’t appear to be a man who was going to be easily cowed by anyone.
He carried with him a legal pad, a manila folder, and the paperwork Lynley had given him on the previous day. He folded his hands neatly across the top of it all and asked Lynley what he knew about profiling. Lynley told him he’d never yet had an occasion to use a profiler, although he was aware of what profilers did. He didn’t add any comments about his reluctance to use one or about his belief that, in truth, Robson had only been called in in the first place to give Hillier something to hand to that ravenous dog the media.
“Would you like some background on profiling, then?” Robson asked.
“Not particularly, to tell you the truth.”
Robson observed him evenly. His eyes behind his spectacles looked shrewd, but he made no remark other than to say obscurely, “Right. We’ll see about it, won’t we.” He took up his legal pad without further ado.
They were looking, he told Lynley, for a white male between twenty-five and thirty-five. He would be neat in his appearance: close shaven, short haired, in good physical condition, which was possibly the result of weight training. He would be known to the victims, but not well known. He would be of high intelligence but low achievement, a man with a decent school record but with disciplinary problems stemming from a chronic failure to obey. He would likely possess a history of job losses, and while he would probably be working at this time, it would be in employment below his capabilities. They would find criminal behaviour in his childhood and adolescence: possibly petty arson or cruelty to animals. He would be at this time unmarried and living either alone or with a dominant parent.