"Could be the Queen Mum's for all I care," Nkata remarked. "We got the bastard."
The families could be given the news now. There would be no satisfactory justice for them; there never was. But there would be a conclusion.
Nkata drove Barb back to St. Thomas' Hospital to arrange for her car to be towed away and put into running order again. There, they parted, and when they did, neither of them looked at the hospital itself.
Nkata headed towards New Scotland Yard. It was nine in the morning by then, and traffic was slow. He was negotiating Parliament Square when his mobile rang. He reckoned it was Barb, all attempts at coping with her car a failure. But a glance told him the number was not one he knew, so he said, "Nkata," and nothing else.
"You arrested him, then. It was on the news this morning. Radio One." A woman's voice spoke, familiar, but not one he'd heard on the phone before.
"Who's this?"
"I'm glad it's over. And I know you meant good towards him. Towards us. I know that, Winston."
Winston. "Yas?" he said.
"I knew it before but I d'in't want to look at what that meant, unnerstan? I still don't. Want to look at it, I mean."
He considered this, considered the fact she'd phoned at all. "C'n you give it a glance, you think?"
She was silent.
"A glance's not much, innit. Just a flick when you move the eyes. Tha's all. Not looking at nothin, really, Yas. Just sneaking a look. Tha's it. Tha's all."
"I don't know," was what she finally said.
Which was better than things had been before. "When you do know, you ring me, then," he told her. "Waitin's not a trouble to me."
LYNLEY RECKONED that one of the reasons they forced him to stay in Casualty was their worry that he would do something to Kilfoyle if they released him. And the truth was that he would have done something, although not what they obviously thought he would do. Instead, he would merely have asked a question of the man: Why? And perhaps that question would have led to others: Why Helen and not me? And why in the way he had done it, with a boy in his company? What sort of statement did that make? Power? Indifference? Sadism? Pleasure? To destroy as many lives as possible in as many ways as possible in one swift blow because he knew the end was coming? Was that why? He'd be famous now, infamous, notorious, with all the attendant bells and whistles. He'd be up there with the best of the best, those names like Hindley that would forever light the firmament of iniquity. Avid followers of crime would flock to his trial and writers would document him in their books and he would thus never fade from public memory like an ordinary man or, for that matter, like an innocent woman and her unborn child, both dead now and soon to become yesterday's news.
Obviously, those in power had believed that Lynley would spring to the attack if he came face-to-face with the monster again. But springing to the attack suggested a life force within, driving one forward. That was gone from him now.
They said they would release him to a relative and, since they had his clothing tucked away somewhere, he was forced to wait until a member of his family arrived. They had no doubt suggested in their phone call to Eaton Terrace that that person take as long as possible in making the trip to the hospital, so it was midmorning when his mother came to fetch him. She had Peter with her. A taxi, she said, was just outside.
"What's happened?" She looked older to him than she had days earlier. He understood from this that the experience in living chaos, which they all were enduring, was taking a toll on her as well. He hadn't thought of that before. He wondered what it meant that he thought of it now.
Beyond their mother, Lynley's brother stood, lanky and ill at ease, as always. They'd been close once, but that was years in the past, with cocaine and alcohol and fraternal abandonment leering like spectres in the space between them. Too much disease ran through his family, Lynley thought, part of it of the body, the rest of it of the mind.
Peter said, "You all right, Tommy?," and Lynley saw his brother's hand reach out, then drop uselessly to his side. "They