Lynley told them all to carry on. He directed Nkata to continue trying to make contact with the family of the one missing boy who looked like a possible match, he told Havers to continue with the missing-persons reports-an order she did not embrace with a full heart, if her expression was any indication-and he himself returned to his office and sat down with the autopsies. He put on his reading spectacles and went over the reports with eyes that he tried to make fresh. He also created a crib sheet for himself. On this, he wrote:
Means of death: strangulation by ligature in all four cases; ligature missing.
Torture prior to death: palms of both hands burnt in three of four cases.
Marks of restraints: across the forearms and at ankles in all four cases, suggesting victim tied to an armchair of some kind or possibly supine and restrained another way.
Fibre analysis corroborates this: same leather fibres on the arms and ankles in all four cases.
Contents of stomach: a small amount of food eaten within an hour preceding death in all four cases.
Gagging device: duct-tape residue over the mouth in all four cases.
Blood analysis: nothing unusual.
Postmortem mutilation: abdominal incision and removal of navel in victim four.
Marking: forehead marked in blood in victim four.
Trace evidence on the bodies: black residue (under analysis), hairs, an oil (under analysis) in all four cases.
DNA evidence: nothing.
Lynley went through it all once, then a second time. He picked up the phone and called SO7, the forensic lab on the south bank of the Thames. It had been ages since the first of the murders. Surely by now they had an analysis of both the oil and the residue they'd found on the first of the bodies, no matter how overwhelmed with work they were.
Maddeningly, they had nothing yet on the residue, but "Whale" was the single answer he was given when he finally tracked down the responsible party in Lambeth Road. She was called Dr. Okerlund, and she was apparently given to monosyllables unless pressed for more information.
"Whale?" Lynley asked. "Do you mean the fish?"
"For God's sake, mammal," she corrected him. "Sperm whale, to be exact. Official name-the oil, not the whale-is ambergris."
"Ambergris? What's it used for?"
"Perfume. All you need from me, Superintendent?"
"Perfume?"
"Are we playing at echoes here? That's what I said."
"Nothing else?"
"What else d'you want me to say?"
"I mean the oil, Dr. Okerlund. Is it used for anything besides perfume?"
"Couldn't tell you," she said. "That's your job."
He thanked her for the reminder as pleasantly as he could manage. Then he rang off. He added the word ambergris in the section for trace evidence, and he returned to the incident room. He called out, "Anyone familiar with ambergris oil? It was found on the bodies. It's from whales."
"Cardiff, I reckon," a DC noted.
"Not Wales," Lynley said. "Whales. The ocean. Moby-Dick."
"Moby-who?"
"Christ, Phil," someone called out. "Try elevating your reading beyond page three."
Ribald remarks greeted this comment. Lynley let them feed off one another. To his way of thinking, the work they had to engage in was time consuming, wearisome, and gut wrenching, weighing on the shoulders of the officers involved and often causing trouble in their homes. If they needed to relieve the stress of it with humour, that was fine by him.
Nonetheless, what happened next was more than welcome. Barbara Havers looked up from a phone call she had just completed.
"We've got a positive ID on St. George's Gardens," she announced. "He's a kid called Kimmo Thorne and he lived in Southwark."
BARBARA HAVERS INSISTED that they take her car, not Nkata's. She saw Lynley's assigning her to the interview of Kimmo Thorne's relations as an opportunity for a celebratory cigarette, and she didn't want to pollute the interior of Winston's pristinely kept Escort with her ash or smoke. She lit up as soon as they hit the underground carpark, and she watched with some amusement as her colleague folded his six-feet, four-inch frame into her Mini. He was left grumbling, with his knees pressed into his chest and his head scraping the ceiling.
Once she finally got the car started, they lurched in the direction of Broadway. From there, Parliament Square opened onto Westminster Bridge and their route across the river. This was more Winston's territory than it was Barbara's, and he acted the part of navigator once York Road loomed in front of them on the left. From that point, she found it short work to weave over to Southwark,