So, evidently, had the Grabinskis, who turned out to be a couple whose only son had died years in the past but at something near the same age as Kimmo Thorne. They’d quite taken to the boy, they explained, not so much because he reminded them physically of their dear Mike but because he had something of Mike’s enterprising nature. This quality the Grabinskis both admired in Kimmo and deeply missed in their departed son, so when Kimmo had turned up on occasion with the odd something or other or a bagful of somethings he wanted to sell, they shared their stall with him and he gave them a portion of his profit.
Not that they’d ever asked him for it, Mrs. Grabinski said hastily. Her name was Elaine and she wore sage green Wellingtons with red wool kneesocks gaily turned over their tops. She was polishing an impressive epergne, and the moment Lynley had said Kimmo Thorne’s name, she’d said, “Kimmo? Who’s come to ask about Kimmo, then? ’Bout time, innit,” and she made herself available to help them. As did her husband, who was hanging a display of silver teapots on strings that dangled from one of the horizontal poles of the stall.
The boy had come to them first, hoping they would buy from him, Mr. Grabinksi-“Call me Ray”-informed them. But he asked a price they weren’t willing to pay, and when no one else in the market was willing to pay it either, Kimmo had returned to them with another offer: to sell from the stall himself and to give them a portion of the takings.
They’d liked the boy-“He was that cheeky,” Elaine confided-so they gave him a quarter of one of the tables along the side of the stall, and there he did his business. He sold silver pieces-some plate, some sterling-with a speciality in photo frames.
“We’ve been told he got into some trouble with that,” Lynley said. “Evidently he sold something that shouldn’t have been on sale in the first place.”
“Having been lifted off someone else,” Havers put in.
Oh, they knew nothing about that, both Grabinskis hastened to say. As far as they were concerned, it was someone wanting to get Kimmo in trouble who told that tale to the local rozzers. Doubtless, in fact, it was their chief competitor in the market: one Reginald Lewis, to whom Kimmo had also gone trying to sell his silver before returning to them. Reg Lewis was that jealous of anyone wanting to set up business round early morning Bermondsey, wasn’t he? He’d tried to keep the Grabinskis out twenty-two years back when they first started, he’d done the same to Maurice Fletcher and to Jackie Hoon when they started up.
“So there was no truth to Kimmo’s goods being stolen?” Havers asked, looking up from her notebook. “Because, when you think of it, how else would a kid like Kimmo be coming across valuable pieces of silver for sale?”
They had assumed he was selling off family pieces, Elaine Grabinski said. They did ask him and that’s what he told them: He was helping out his gran by offering the family silver to the public.
To Lynley it looked like a case of the Grabinskis believing what they had wanted to believe because they liked the boy, rather than a case of Kimmo being a sophisticated liar who pulled the wool over the eyes of an elderly couple. They had to have known at some level that he wasn’t the legitimate article, but at that same level, they had to have not cared.
“We told the police we’d speak up for the boy if it came to court,” Ray Grabinski asserted. “But once they carted poor Kimmo off, we didn’t hear ’nother word about him. Till we saw the News of the World, that is.”
“An’ you ask Reg Lewis ’bout that, you lot,” Elaine Grabinski said, returning to the epergne with renewed vigour. She added ominously, “What I wouldn’t put past him fits in a teaspoon,” and her husband said, “Now, pet,” and patted her shoulder.
Reg Lewis turned out to be only slightly less antique than his wares. He wore bright tartan braces beneath his jacket and they held up a pair of ancient plus fours. His spectacles were as thick as the bottom of whisky tumblers. Overlarge hearing aids protruded from his ears. He fit the profile of their serial killer as well as a sheep fit the profile of a genius.
He “weren’t s’prised none” when the cops had come calling for Kimmo, he told them. Something was off with the bugger first time Reg Lewis laid eyes on the creature. Dressed half man, half woman he did, with them tights of his or whatever they were, and those poncey ankle boots and the like. So when the cops showed up with a list of stolen property in their mitts, he-Reg Lewis, mind you-was not gobsmacked that they found what they were looking for in the possession of one Kimmo Thorne. Carted him off then and there, they did, and good riddance it was. Besmirching the reputation of the market, he was, flogging pinched silver. And not any pinched silver, mind you, but pinched silver that he’d been too thick to notice had personal and immediately identifiable engraving upon it.
What happened to Kimmo after that, Reg Lewis didn’t know and didn’t much care. The only good thing the little nancy boy did at the end of the day was not drag the Grabinskis down with him. And weren’t those two blind as bats in the daylight? Anyone with sense would’ve known that boy was up to no good when he first showed his mug in the market. Reg warned the Grabinskis off him, he did, but would they listen to someone with their best interests at heart? Not bloody likely. Yet who turned out to be right at the end of the day, eh? And who never heard a word of you-were-right-Reg-and-we-apologise-for-our-nastiness from anyone, eh?
Reg Lewis had nothing more to add. Kimmo had vanished that day with the coppers. Perhaps he’d done a stretch in borstal. Perhaps he’d had the fear of God put into him at the police station. All Reg knew was that the boy hadn’t brought any more stolen silver to sell in Bermondsey Market, which was fine by Reg. Cops over in Borough High Street could fill anyone in on the rest, couldn’t they.
Reg Lewis said everything but “good riddance to bad rubbish,” and if he’d read about or heard about Kimmo Thorne’s murder, he made no mention of the fact. But it was clear that the boy had done nothing to enhance the reputation of the market in Reg’s eyes. More than that, as he had pointed out, they would have to suss out from the local police.
They were on their way to do so-wending their way through the market, back to Lynley’s car-when his mobile rang.
The message was terse, its meaning unmistakable: He was wanted immediately on Shand Street, where a tunnel beneath the railway took the narrow little thoroughfare to Crucifix Lane. They had another body.
Lynley flipped off the phone and looked at Havers. “Crucifix Lane,” he said. “Do you know where it is?”
A vendor at a nearby stall answered the question. Right up Tower Bridge Road, he told them. Less than half a mile from where they stood.
A RAILWAY VIADUCT shooting out from London Bridge station comprised the north perimeter of Crucifix Lane. Bricks formed it, so deeply stained with more than a century of soot and grime that whatever their original colour had been, it was now a distant memory. What remained in that memory’s place was a bleak wall done up in variations of carbonaceous sediment.
Into this structure’s supporting arches had been built various places of business: lockups for hire, warehouses, wine cellars, car-repair establishments. But one of the arches created a tunnel through which ran a single lane that was Shand Street. The north part of this street served as the address of several small businesses closed at this hour of the morning and the south part of it-the longer part-curved under the railway viaduct and disappeared into the darkness. The tunnel here was some sixty yards long, a place of deep shadows whose cavernous roof was bandaged with corrugated steel plates from which water dripped, soundless against the consistent rumble of early morning trains heading into and out of London. More water ran down the walls, seeping from the rusty iron gutters at a height of eight feet, collecting in greasy pools below. The scent of urine made the tunnel’s air rank. Broken lights made its atmosphere chilling.