Robson looked away, but there was nothing in the room for him to fix upon save the tape recorder making a history of his words. "I didn't intend to kill him," he said again. "I just wanted him to keep quiet while..."
"While you finished with him," Barbara said.
"You strangled him with your bare hands," Nkata pointed out. "How was that supposed to-"
"I didn't know how else to get him silent. He was only struggling at first, but then he began to scream and I didn't know how else to quieten him. And then as things were...were building for me...I didn't realise why he'd gone so silent and limp. I thought he was cooperating."
"Cooperating." Barbara couldn't help herself. "With sodomy. Rape. A thirteen-year-old. You thought he was cooperating. So you finished the job, only you found you were plugging away at a corpse."
Robson's eyes reddened. "My whole life," he'd said, "I tried to ignore...I told myself it didn't matter: my uncle, the wrestling and the touching. My mother wanting to sleep with her little man and the arousal that was natural to any boy only how could it have been natural when she was making it happen? So I ignored it and I eventually married, but I didn't want her, you see, the woman, fully formed and making demands of me. I thought pictures would help. Videos. Dodgy things that no one would know about."
"Kiddy porn," Barbara said.
"I could get aroused. Easily at first. But then later..."
"Takes more," Nkata said. "Always takes more, like a drug. How'd you get on to MABIL?"
"Through the Internet. A chat room. I went at first just to see, just to be round men who felt as I felt. I'd borne the burden so long. This obscene need. I thought it would cure me if I went and saw the sorts of men who...who actually engage in it." He brought a tissue out of his pocket and used it to scrub at his face. "But they were just like me, you see. That was the hell of it. They were like me, only happier. At peace. They'd arrived at a spot where they'd come to believe there is no sin in bodily pleasure."
"Bodily pleasure with little boys," Barbara said. "And why would that be? The no sin part of it."
"Because the boys learn to want it as well."
"Do they now. And how is it that blokes like you measure the wanting, Dr. Robson?"
"I can see you don't believe...that you think I'm-"
"A monster? A freak? A genetic mutant who needs to be wiped from the surface of the earth along with the rest of your ilk? Why the hell would I think that?" Finally, it was all too much for her.
"Barb," Nkata said.
He was so like Lynley, she thought. Capable of keeping cool when that was called for, the one thing she'd never been able to do because she'd always associated keeping cool with letting your insides get eaten by the horror you felt when you had to deal with monsters like this.
"Tell us about the rest," Nkata said to Robson.
"There's nothing more to tell. I waited as long as I could, far into the night. I carried the...his body into the woods. It was three...four in the morning? There was no one anywhere."
"The burning, the mutilation. Tell us about that."
"I wanted to make it look like the others. Once I saw I'd accidentally killed him, that was the only thing I could think. Make it look like the others so you would conclude the same killer was at work on Davey as on them."
"Hang on. Are you trying to claim you didn't kill the other boys?" Barbara asked.
Robson frowned. "You haven't thought...You haven't been sitting there thinking I'm the serial killer? How on earth can that be? How could I even have had access to those other boys?"
"You tell us."
"I did tell you. From the profile, I told you."
They were silent. He made the leap to what the silence implied.
"My God, the profile's real. Why would I ever have made that up?"
"Most obvious reason in the world," Nkata said. "Lays a nice trail away from yourself."
"But I didn't even know those boys, those dead boys. I didn't know them. You must believe-"
"What about Muwaffaq Masoud?" Nkata asked. "You know him?"
"Muwaf...? I've never...Who is he?"
"Someone who might be able to pick you out of an identity parade," Nkata said. "Been a while since he's seen the bloke who bought a van off him, but I 'xpect having