“Doesn’t know how it got there,” Havers said. “Wasn’t him put it there. He’s completely innocent. It’s some mistake. Yadda yadda more yadda.”

“He could be telling the truth.”

“You’re joking.”

Lynley looked round the flat. “So far there’s no child pornography in here.”

“So far,” Havers said. She indicated the VCR and its accompanying cassettes. “You can’t tell me those videos are by Disney, sir.”

“I’ll give you that. But tell me: Why would he have a photo in his van and none where it’s infinitely safer for him to have it: here inside his flat? And why would all indication of what he’s been up to sexually be referenced to women?”

“Because he won’t take a trip to the nick for that. And he’s smart enough to know it,” she replied. “As for the rest, give me ten minutes to find it on that computer. If it takes that long.”

Lynley told her to have at it. He went down a corridor beyond the sitting room and found a grimy bathroom and beyond it a kitchen. More of the same in both of the locations. A SOCO team would have to delve into it. There were going to be fingerprints galore, in addition to trace evidence deposited by anyone who’d been inside the place.

He left Havers to the computer and went back outside, following the path to the front of the house. There, he climbed the steps to the porch and rang each of the bells for the flats within. Only one yielded an answer. Flat C on the first floor was occupied, and the voice of an Indian woman told him to come up. She would be happy to talk to the police as long as he had identification that he would be willing to slide under her door when he got there.

This sufficed to gain him entry to a flat with a view of the street. A sari-clad middle-aged woman admitted him, handing back his warrant card with a formal little bow. “One cannot be too careful, I find,” she told him. “It is the way of the world.” She introduced herself as Mrs. Singh. She was a widow, she revealed, of no children, straitened circumstances, and little opportunity to marry again. “Alas, my child-bearing years are over. I would serve only to care for someone else’s children now. Would you have tea with me, sir?”

Lynley demurred. Winter was long and she was lonely and he otherwise would have stopped long enough to give her a pleasant half hour or so. But the temperature in her flat was tropical and even if that hadn’t been the case, what he needed from her was a matter of a few minutes’ conversation, and he could afford no more time than that. He told her he’d come to inquire about the gentleman in the basement flat. Barry Minshall, by name. Did she know him?

“The odd man with the stocking hat, oh yes,” Mrs. Singh replied. “Has he been arrested?”

She asked the question as if the word finally were understood between them.

“Why do you ask that?” Lynley said.

“The young boys,” she said. “They came and they went from that basement flat. Day and night. I did phone the police three times about it. I believe you must investigate this man, I told them. Something clearly is not right. But I fear that they saw me as a meddlesome woman, getting into business that was not my own.”

Lynley showed her the picture of Davey Benton he’d had from the boy’s father. “Was this boy one of them?”

She studied it. She carried it to the window overlooking the street and she gazed from the picture to the ground below, as if trying to see Davey Benton in memory as he might have been: entering the front garden and going down the steps to the path to the basement flat. She said, “Yes. Yes. I have seen this boy. One day that man met him out there on the street. I saw this. He wore a cap, this boy. But I saw his face. I did.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Oh yes. I am certain. It is the headphones in this picture, you see. He had them as well, from a player of some kind. He was quite small and very pretty, just like this boy in the picture.”

“Did he and Minshall go into the basement flat?”

They went down the stairs and round the side of the house, she told him. She hadn’t seen them go into the flat, but one could assume…She had no idea how long they were there. She didn’t spend all of her time at the window, she explained with an apologetic laugh.

But what she’d said was enough, and Lynley thanked her for it. He turned down yet another offer of tea and descended the outer stairs to the basement flat once more. Havers met him at the door. She said, “Got him,” and led Lynley to the computer. On the screen was a list of the sites that Barry Minshall had visited. It didn’t take a degree in cryptology to read their titles and know what they were all about.

“Let’s get SOCO over here,” Lynley said.

“What about Minshall?”

“Let him languish till morning. I want him to think about us crawling round his flat, uncovering the slime trail of his existence.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

WINSTON NKATA WAS IN NO HURRY TO GET TO WORK THE next morning. He knew he was going to take good-humoured heat from his colleagues over his appearance on Crimewatch, and he didn’t feel like facing it yet. Nor did he really have to because Crimewatch had actually produced a possible break in the case, and he would be tracking that break down before he headed over the river for the day.

From the sitting room, his mother’s usual morning fare-BBC Breakfast-was doing its regular bit of recycling the news, traffic, weather, and special reports every thirty minutes on the telly. They’d reached the part where they were informing the public of what was on the front page of every national broadsheet and tabloid. From this, he was able to assess the temperature of the press regarding the serial killings.

According to BBC Breakfast, the tabloids were making the most of the Queen’s Wood body, which at least had driven Bram Savidge and his accusations of institutional racism off their front pages. But Savidge still had a spot relegated to him, and those reporters not attempting to unearth more data about the body in the woods appeared to be conducting interviews wherever they could find them with people bearing grievances against the police. Navina Cryer shared space with the Queen’s Wood body on the front of the Mirror, telling her tale of being ignored when she reported Jared Salvatore missing shortly after his disappearance. Cleopatra Lavery had managed to conduct a telephone interview from inside Holloway Prison with News of the World, and she had much to say on the subject of the criminal-justice system and what it had done to “her lovely Sean.” Savidge and his African wife had been interviewed at home by the Daily Mail, complete with half-page photos of the wife playing a musical instrument of some sort under the fond eye of her husband. And according to what he was able to pick up from the presenters’ comments on the telly as they nattered on about the other papers, Nkata could tell that the rest of the press were not going softly on the Met in the face of another boy’s murder. One killer and how many cops? was the rhetorical question being asked by the news media with lofty irony.

Which was why Crimewatch and the manner in which the programme depicted the Met’s endeavours in the investigation had been so crucial. Which was also why AC Hillier had attempted to usurp the director’s job prior to the broadcast on the previous evening.

He wanted a split-screen effect, he’d told the men in the studio. DS Nkata would be identifying the dead boys by name and by photograph during the course of the programme, and having a head shot of Nkata speaking on one side of the screen while he identified photos of the victims of the serial killer on the other side of the screen would drive home to the viewers-by means of DS Nkata’s sombre demeanour-how seriously the Met was taking the situation and the pursuit of this killer. That, of course, was utter cock. What Hillier wanted front and centre was what he and the Directorate of Public Affairs had wanted front and centre from the first: a black face attached to a rank senior to that of detective constable.