that direction. Surely, he had lectured the team, someone had to have seen a vehicle parked on Gunnersbury Road in the early hours of the morning when victim number one had been left inside, for it remained that the only two means of access into the park after hours were over the wall-which at eight feet high seemed an unlikely route for someone carrying a body-or through one of the two boarded-up sections of that wall on Gunnersbury Road. But so far, a canvassing of houses across the street had given team two nothing, and interviews with nearly all the lorry drivers who would have been on that route hadn't unearthed anything either. Nor had conversations-still ongoing-with taxi and minicab companies.
They were left with the red van seen in the area of St. George's Gardens. But when Swansea delivered a list of such vehicles registered to owners in the Greater London area, the total was an impossible 79,387. Even Hamish Robson's profile of the killer-suggesting that they limit their interest to those vehicle owners who were male, single, and between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five-didn't make that number remotely manageable.
The entire situation made Lynley long for the cinematic version of the detective's life: a brief period of slog, a slightly longer period of cogitation, and then great scenes of action in which the hero chased the villain over land, over sea, through back alleys, and beneath elevated railway tracks, finally clobbering him into submission and securing his exhausted confession. But that wasn't how it was.
It was after yet another appearance in front of the press that three hopeful developments occurred within moments of each other, however.
Lynley returned to his office in time to pick up the phone and receive a call from SO7. The analysis of the black residue on all of the bodies and on the bicycle had coughed up a valuable piece of information. The van they were looking for was likely a Ford Transit. The residue came from the disintegration of a type of optional rubber lining that had been offered for use on the floor of this vehicle between ten and fifteen years ago. The Ford Transit detail was going to go some way towards narrowing down the list they'd received from Swansea, although they wouldn't know by how much until they fed the data into the computer.
When Lynley returned to the incident room with this news, he was greeted by the second development. They'd had a positive identification on the body left in the Bayswater carpark. Winston Nkata had taken a jaunt to Pentonville Prison to show photographs of their killer's second victim to Felipe Salvatore-doing time for armed robbery and assault-and Salvatore had sobbed like a five-year-old when he declared the dead boy to be his little brother Jared whom he'd reported missing the first time he'd skipped a regular visit to the clink. As for any other members of Jared's family...They were proving more difficult to locate, a fact apparently having to do with the cocaine addiction and peripatetic nature of the dead boy's mother.
The final development also came from Winston Nkata, who'd spent two mornings on Kipling Estate, attempting to unearth someone whom they knew only as Blinker. His perseverance-not to mention his good manners-had finally paid off: One Charlie Burov, aka Blinker, had been located and was willing to talk to someone about his relationship with Kimmo Thorne, the St. George's Gardens victim. He didn't want to meet up on the housing estate where he dossed at his sister's, though. Instead he would meet someone-not in uniform, he'd apparently stressed-inside Southwark Cathedral, five pews from the back on the left-hand side, at precisely 3:20 in the afternoon.
Lynley grasped the opportunity to get out of the building for a few hours. He phoned the assistant commissioner with an update that offered fodder for the next press conference, and he himself effected an escape to Southwark Cathedral. He tapped DC Havers to go along. He told Nkata to check Jared Salvatore's name with Vice in the last police borough in which he'd lived, and after that to get on to the present location of the boy's family. Then he set off with Havers in the direction of Westminster Bridge.
It was a straightforward affair to get to Southwark Cathedral once the general confusion round Tenison Way was mastered. Fifteen minutes after setting off from Victoria Street, Lynley and the detective constable were in the nave of the church.