“Why?” Lynley asked. “Were you anticipating as much?”
“Is it different?” Robson persisted. “Because, you see, with profiling, we often see-”
“With respect, Dr. Robson, your profiling has got us nowhere so far. Nowhere important, and not one step closer to the killer.”
“Are you sure?” Before Lynley could answer, Robson leaned forward in his seat. He went on, his voice kind. “I can’t imagine having your job. It must be more draining than anyone can picture. But you must not blame yourself for this death, Superintendent. You’re doing your best. No one could ask more of you than that, so you mustn’t ask more than your best of yourself. That’s the road to madness.”
“Professional opinion?” Lynley asked sardonically.
Robson took the two words at their face value and ignored Lynley’s tone, saying, “Completely. So let me give you a fuller opinion. Let me see the crime scene. Let me give you some guidance that you’ll be able to use. Superintendent, in a psychopath the compulsion to kill only grows stronger. With each crime, it escalates; it does not subside. But each time, to achieve pleasure it takes more and more of whatever the killer’s been doing during the commission of the crime to fulfill himself. So understand me. There’s profound danger here. To young men, to boys, to little children, to…we don’t know for sure, so for God’s sake let me help you.”
Lynley had been watching Robson through his rearview mirror, Havers from her seat where she’d turned to observe the psychologist as he spoke. The man looked as if he’d shaken himself with the passion of his words, and he turned from them to look out of the window when he’d finally finished speaking.
Lynley said, “What’s your own background, Dr. Robson?”
Robson was gazing to his left, in the direction of a yew hedge dripping small pools of water onto the pavement. He said, “Sorry. I can’t abide what’s done to children in the name of love. Or play. Or discipline. Or whatever.” Then he was silent. Only the soft whirr of the wipers brushing off the windscreen and the purr of the Bentley’s engine broke the quiet. He finally said, “For me it was my maternal uncle. Wrestling, he called it. But it wasn’t. That sort of thing rarely is between an adult and a male child when it’s the adult’s idea. But the child, of course, never understands.”
“I’m sorry,” Lynley said. He too turned in his seat then and looked at the psychologist directly. “But perhaps that makes you less objective than-”
“No. Believe me, it makes me someone who knows exactly what to look for,” Robson said. “So let me see the crime scene. I’ll tell you what I think and what I know. The decision to act is up to you.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“God damn it-”
“The body’s been moved, Dr. Robson,” Lynley cut in. “The only crime scene for you to look at is a fallen beech tree and a hollow beneath it.”
Robson sank back into the seat. He gazed out at the street, where an ambulance had come along Wood Lane up to the barrier erected by the police. It drove without lights whirling or siren blaring. One of the constables went out into the street and halted traffic-already slowed to a curious crawl anyway-long enough for the ambulance to pass. It did so unhurriedly; there was no urgency to get its burden to hospital quickly. This gave the photojournalists time to record the moment for the newspapers. Perhaps it was the sight of them that prompted Robson to ask his next question.
“Will you let me look at the photos, then?”
Lynley considered this. The police photographer had completed his work by the time he and Havers had arrived on the scene, and a videographer had been recording the body, the site, and the ensuing activity round the body and the site when they’d descended the slope. The incident caravan was not that far from where they were sitting at this moment. Doubtless, in that caravan there would be a visual record of the crime scene already suitable for Robson’s viewing.
It wouldn’t hurt at this point to let the profiler look at what they had: video footage, digital pictures, or whatever else the murder squad had so far produced. It would also act as a compromise between what Hillier wanted and what Lynley was determined not to give him.
On the other hand, the psychologist wasn’t wanted here. No one at the scene had requested him and it was only down to Hillier’s interference and his desire for something to feed to the media that had brought Robson here in the first place. If Lynley gave in to Hillier now, the AC would probably bring in a psychic next. And after that, what? Someone to read tea leaves? Or the entrails of a lamb? It couldn’t be allowed to happen. Someone had to gain control over the lurching, runaway wagon of this entire situation, and this was the moment to do it.
Lynley said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Robson.”
Robson looked deflated. He said, “Your last word on the subject?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain that’s wise?”
“I’m not certain of anything.”
“That’s really the hell of it, isn’t it?”
Robson got out of the car, then. He headed back towards the barricade. He passed DI Widdison on his route, but he made no attempt to speak to him. For his part, Widdison saw Lynley’s car and raised a hand as if to stop him from leaving the scene. Lynley lowered the window as the DI hurried over.
“We’ve had a call from the Hornsey Road station,” Widdison said when he reached the car. “A boy’s gone missing, reported by his parents last night. He fits the general description of our victim.”
“We’ll take it,” Lynley said as Havers emptied her shoulder bag on the floor to find her notebook and take down the address.
IT WAS IN Upper Holloway, on a small housing estate just off Junction Road. There, round the corner from William Beckett Funeral Directors and Yildiz Supermarket, they found a serpentine stretch of tarmac splendidly called Bovingdon Close. It was a pedestrian precinct, so they left the Bentley on Hargrave Road where a bearded vagrant with a guitar in one hand and a wet sleeping bag dragging on the pavement behind him offered to keep an eye on the car for the price of a pint. Or a bottle of wine, if they felt so inclined and he did a good job of keeping the local riffraff away from “s’ch a fine motor as yairs is, master.” He wore a large green rubbish bag as a mackintosh in the rain, and he sounded like a character from a costume drama, someone who’d spent far too much of his youth tuned in to BBC1. “They’s ferrinners plenty round here,” he informed them. “You can’t leave nothin’ lying ’bout what they don’t put their mitts on it, sir.” He appeared to search vaguely in the direction of his head for something to tug respectfully as he concluded. When he spoke, the air became heavy with the scent of teeth in need of extraction.
Lynley told the man he was welcome to keep his eyes glued to the car. The vagrant hunkered down on the nearest stairs to one of the terrace houses, and-rain or not-he began to pluck at the three strings remaining on his guitar. Sourly, he eyed a pack of young black kids wearing rucksacks on their backs, trotting along the pavement across the street.
Lynley and Havers left the man to it and set off into Bovingdon Close. They accessed this by means of a tunnel-like opening in the cinnamon-coloured brick buildings that comprised the housing estate itself. They were looking for number 30, and they found it not far from the estate’s sole recreational area: a triangular green with dormant rosebushes languishing in each of the three corners and a small bench set against one side. Other than four saplings struggling for life in the green’s patch of lawn, there were no trees in Bovingdon Close, and the houses that didn’t face the tiny recreational area faced each other across a width of tarmac that didn’t measure more than fifteen feet. In the summer when the windows were open, everyone would doubtless be into everyone else’s business.