drive home to Hillier the point that the assistant commissioner of police was not running the investigation.
There was a tight little silence during which Hillier appeared to be evaluating Lynley for his level of insubordination. He finally said, "Hamish, if you'll wait here for a moment," and he ushered Lynley and Nkata not to an office, not to the stairs, not to the lift to take them above to his own quarters, but into the men's toilet where he told a uniformed constable in the act of emptying his bladder to vacate the premises and stand before the door, allowing no one to enter.
Before Lynley could speak, Hillier said pleasantly, "Don't do that again, please. If you do, you'll find yourself back in uniform so fast that you'll wonder who zipped your trousers."
Seeing what the temperature of this conversation was likely to become despite Hillier's momentarily affable tone, Lynley said to Nkata, "Winston, would you leave us, please? Sir David and I need to have some words I'd prefer you not hear. Go back to the incident room and see where Havers has got to with Missing Persons, particularly with the one that looks like a possibility."
Nkata nodded. He didn't ask if he was meant to take Hamish Robson with him as previously ordered by Hillier. Instead, he looked glad of the command that gave him the opportunity to demonstrate where his loyalties lay.
When he was gone, Hillier was the one to speak. "You're out of order."
"With due respect," Lynley returned, although he felt little enough of it, "I believe you are."
"How dare you-"
"Sir, I'll bring you up to the minute daily," Lynley said patiently. "I'll face the television cameras if you like and sit at your side and force DS Nkata to do the same. But I'm not going to hand over the direction of this investigation to you. You need to stay out of it. That's the only way this is going to work."
"Do you want to be up for review? Believe me, that can be arranged."
"If you need to do it, you'll have to do it," Lynley replied. "But, sir, you've got to see that at the end of the day, there has to be only one of us heading this inquiry. If you want to be that person, then be him and have done with pretending I'm in charge. But if you want me to be that person, you're going to have to back off. You've blindsided me twice now, and I don't want a third surprise."
Hillier's face went the red of sunset. But he said nothing as he evidently registered the lengths Lynley had gone to to remain calm as he simultaneously evaluated the ramifications of Lynley's words. He finally said, "I want daily briefings."
"You've been getting them. You'll continue to get them."
"And the profiler stays."
"Sir, we don't need psychic mumbo jumbo at this point."
"We need all the help we can get!" Hillier's voice grew loud. "The papers are twenty-four hours away from starting the hue and cry. You damn well know that."
"I do. But we also both know that's going to happen eventually, now that the other murders have been mentioned."
"Are you accusing me-"
"No. No. You said what had to be said in there. But once they start digging, they'll go after us, and there's plenty of truth in what they're going to allege about the Met."
"Where the hell are your loyalties?" Hillier demanded. "Those buggers are going to go back and look up the other murders and then they'll put it down to us-not to themselves-that not one of them ever made the front page. At which point they'll wave the racism flag, and when they do, the whole community's going to blow. Like it or not, we have to stay one step ahead of them. The profiler's one way to do it. And that, as you might say, is that."
Lynley considered this. He hated the idea of having a profiler onboard, but he had to admit that his presence did serve the purpose of buoying up the investigation in the eyes of the journalists who were covering it. And while he ordinarily had no use for either newspapers or television-seeing the collection and dissemination of information as something that was yearly becoming more opprobrious-he could understand the necessity of keeping their focus on the progress of the current investigation. If they started to rave about the Met's failure to see the relationships among three prior killings, they would put the police in