been on His every recce of the site. It was. Perfect. He tossed his cigarette into the street, and when the boy had done the same, He unlocked the passenger door. "Hop in," He said. "You hungry? I've some takeaway in that bag on the floor."
Roast beef, although it should have been lamb. Lamb would have been richer with appropriate associations.
Fu shut the door when the boy was inside and going for the bag of food as required of him. He tucked right in. Happily, he didn't notice that his door had no interior handle and that his seat belt had been removed. Fu joined him, heaving Himself into the driver's seat and thrusting the ignition key into its home. He started the van, but He did not put it into gear, nor did He release its hand brake. He said to the boy, "Grab us something to drink, okay? I've a cooler back there. Behind my seat. I could do with a lager. There's Cokes if you want one. Or have a beer yourself if you'd rather."
"Cheers." The boy twisted in his seat. He peered into the back where, because the van was carefully panelled and thoroughly insulated, it was conveniently dark as the devil's bum. He said, "Behind where?" as required of him.
Fu said, "Hang on. I've got a torch here somewhere," and He made much of searching round His seat till He put His hands on the torch in its special hidden spot. He said, "Got it. Have some light, then," and He flicked it on.
Focused on the cooler and the promise of beer within it, the boy didn't notice the rest of the van's interior: the body board firmly in its brackets, the wrist and ankle restraints curled to either side on the floor, the stove from the vehicle's former days, the roll of tape, the washing line, and the knife. Especially that. The boy saw none of this because like the others who'd preceded him, he was just a male adolescent with the male adolescent's appetites for the illicit and in this moment the illicit was represented by beer. In another moment, an earlier moment, the illicit had been represented by crime. It was that for which he now stood doomed to punishment.
Turned in his seat and bending to the back of the van, the boy reached towards the cooler. This exposed his torso. It was a movement designed to aid what followed.
Fu turned the torch and pressed it into the boy. Two hundred thousand volts scrambled his nervous system.
The rest was easy.
LYNLEY WAS STANDING at the work top in the kitchen, downing a cup of the strongest coffee he'd been able to manage at half past four in the morning, when his wife joined him. In the doorway, Helen blinked against the overhead lights as she tied the belt of her dressing gown round her. She looked extremely weary.
"Bad night?" he asked her and added with a smile, "All that worry over christening clothes?"
"Stop," she grumbled. "I dreamed our Jasper Felix was doing backflips in my stomach."
She came to him and slipped her arms round his waist, yawning as she rested her head against his shoulder. "What are you doing dressed at this hour? The Press Bureau haven't taken to offering predawn press briefings, have they? You know what I mean: See how diligently we work at the Met; we're up before the sun on the scent of malefactors."
"Hillier would ask for that if he thought of it," Lynley replied. "Wait another week. It'll occur to him."
"Misbehaving, is he?"
"Just being Hillier. He's parading Winston in front of the press like Rod Hull. Except poor Emu doesn't get to speak."
Helen looked up at him. "You're angry about this, aren't you? It's not like you not to be philosophical. Is this about Barbara? Winston's getting the promotion instead of her?"
"That was rotten of Hillier, but I should have seen it coming," Lynley said. "He'd love to get rid of her."
"Still?"
"Always. I've never known quite how to protect her, Helen. Even doing the superintendent bit temporarily, I feel at a loss. I haven't a quarter of Webberly's skill at this sort of thing."
She released herself from his embrace and went to the cupboard where she took out a mug, which she filled with skimmed milk and put into the microwave to heat. She said, "Malcolm Webberly has the advantage of being Sir David's brother-in-law, darling. That would have counted for something when they knocked heads on an