The Dead Sea Deception

1

The photo showed a dead man sprawled at the foot of a staircase. It was perfectly framed and pin-sharp, and nobody seemed to have noticed the most interesting thing about it, but it still didn’t fill Heather Kennedy with anything that resembled enthusiasm.

She closed the manila folder again and pushed it back across the desk. There wasn’t much else in there to look at anyway. ‘I don’t want this,’ she said.

Facing her across the desk, DCI Summerhill shrugged: a shrug that said into each life a little rain must fall. ‘I don’t have anyone else to give it to, Heather,’ he told her, in the tone of a reasonable man doing what needed to be done. ‘Slates are full across the department. You’re the one with the most slack.’ He didn’t add, but could have done, you know why the short straw is your straw, and you know what has to happen before that stops.

‘All right,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m slack. So put me on runaround for Ratner or Denning. Don’t give me a dead-ball misallocation that’s going to sit open on my docket until five miles south of judgement day.’

Summerhill didn’t even make the effort of looking sympathetic. ‘If it’s not murder,’ he said, ‘close it. Sign off on it. I’ll back your call, so long as you can make it stick.’

‘How am I meant do that when the evidence is three weeks old?’ Kennedy shot back, acidly. She was going to lose this. Summerhill had already made up his mind. But she wasn’t going to make it easy for the old bastard. ‘Nobody worked the crime scene. Nobody did anything with the body in situ. All I’ve got to go on are a few photos taken by a bluebell from the local cop-shop.’

‘Well, that and the autopsy report,’ Summerhill said. ‘The north London lab came back with enough open questions to bring the case back to life — and possibly to give you a few starting points.’ He pushed the file firmly and irrevocably back to her.

‘Why was there an autopsy if nobody thought the death was suspicious?’ Kennedy asked, genuinely puzzled. How did this even get to be our problem?

Summerhill closed his eyes, massaged them with finger and thumb. He grimaced wearily. Clearly he just wanted her to take the file and get the hell out of his morning. ‘The dead man had a sister, and the sister pushed. Now she’s got what she wanted — an open verdict, implying a world of exciting possibilities. To be blunt, we don’t really have any alternative right now. We look bad because we signed off on accidental death so quickly and we look bad because we stonewalled on the autopsy on the first request. So we’ve got to reopen the case and we’ve got to go through the motions until one of two things happens: we find an actual explanation for this guy’s death or else we hit a wall and we can reasonably say we tried.’

‘Which could take for ever,’ Kennedy pointed out. It was a classic black hole. A case that had had no real spadework done at the front end meant you had to run yourself ragged for everything thereafter, from forensics to witness statements.

‘Yes. Easily. But look on the bright side, Heather. You’ll also be breaking in a new partner, a willing young DC who’s only just joined the division and doesn’t know a thing about you. Chris Harper. Straight transfer from St John’s Wood via the academy. Treat him gently, won’t you. They’re used to more civilised ways over at Newcourt Street.’

Kennedy opened her mouth to speak, closed it again. There was no point. In fact, on one level you had to admire the neatness and economy of the stitch-up. Someone had screwed up heroically — signed off way too fast and then got bitten on the arse by the evidence — so now the whole mess was being handed off to the most expendable detective in the division and a poor piece of cannon fodder drafted in for the occasion from one of the boroughs. No harm, no foul. Or if it turned out there was, nobody who mattered was going to be booked for it.

With a muttered oath, she headed for the door. Leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, Summerhill stared at her retreating back. ‘Bring them back alive, Heather,’ he exhorted her, languidly.

When she got back to her desk, Kennedy found the latest gift from the get-her-out-by-Friday brigade. It was a dead rat in a stainless steel break-back trap, lying across the papers on her desk. Seven or eight detectives were in the bear pit, sitting around in elaborately casual groupings, and they were all watching her covertly, eager to see how she’d react. There might even be money riding on the outcome, judging from the mood of suppressed excitement in the room.

Kennedy had been putting up quietly with lesser provocations, but as she stared down at the limp little corpse, a ruff of blood crusted at its throat where it had fallen on the trap’s baited spike, she acknowledged instantly what she ninety-per-cent already knew — that she wasn’t going to make this stop by uncomplainingly carrying her own cross.

So what were the options? She ran through a few until she found one that at least had the advantage of being immediate. She picked the trap up and pulled it open, with some difficulty because the spring was stiff. The rat fell on to her desk with an audible thud. Then she tossed the trap aside, hearing it clatter behind her, and picked up the body, not gingerly by the tail but firmly in her fist. It was cold: a lot colder than ambient. Someone had been keeping it in his fridge, looking forward to this moment. Kennedy glanced around the room.

Josh Combes. It wasn’t that he was the ringleader — the campaign wasn’t as consciously orchestrated as that. But among the officers who felt a need to make Kennedy’s life uncomfortable, Combes had the loudest mouth and was senior in terms of years served. So Combes would do as well as anyone, and better than most. Kennedy crossed to his desk and threw the dead rat into his crotch. Combes started violently, making his chair roll back on its castors. The rat fell to the floor.

‘Jesus!’ he bellowed.

‘You know,’ Kennedy said, into the mildly scandalised silence, ‘big boys don’t ask their mummies to do this stuff for them, Josh. You should have stayed in uniform until your cods dropped. Harper, you’re with me.’

She wasn’t even sure he was there: she had no idea what he looked like. But as she walked away, she saw out of the corner of her eye one of the seated men stand and detach himself from the group.

‘Bitch,’ Combes snarled at her back.

Her blood was boiling, but she chuckled, let them all hear it.

2

Harper drove, through light summer rain that had come from nowhere. Kennedy reviewed the file. That took most of the first minute.

‘Did you get a chance to look at this?’ she asked him, as they turned into Victoria Street and hit the traffic.

The detective constable did a little rapid blinking, but said nothing for a moment or two. Chris Harper, twenty-eight, of Camden Ops, St John’s Wood and the SCD’s much-touted Crime Academy: Kennedy had taken a few moments in-between Summerhill’s office and the bear pit to look him up on the divisional database. There was nothing to see, apart from a citation for bravery (in relation to a warehouse fire) and a red docket, redacted, for an altercation with a senior officer over a personal matter that wasn’t specified. Whatever it was, it seemed to have been settled without any grievance procedure being invoked.

Harper was fair-haired and as lean as a wire, with a slight asymmetry in his face that made him look like he was either flinching or favouring you with an insinuating wink. Kennedy thought she might have run across him once in passing somewhere, a long way back, but if so, it had been a very fleeting contact, and it hadn’t left behind any strong impression for good or bad.

‘Haven’t read it all,’ Harper admitted at last. ‘I only found out I was assigned to this case about an hour ago. I was going over the file, but then … well, you turned up and did the dead rat cabaret, and then we hit the road.’ Kennedy shot him a narrow look, which he affected not to notice. ‘I read the summary sheet,’ he said. ‘Flicked through the initial incident report. That was all.’

‘All you missed was the autopsy stuff, then,’ Kennedy told him. ‘There was sod all actual policing done at the scene. Anything stay with you?’

Harper shook his head. ‘Not a lot,’ he admitted. He slowed the car. They’d run into the back end of a queue that seemed to fill the top half of Parliament Street: roadworks, closing the street down to one lane. No point using the siren, because there was nowhere people could move out of their way. They rolled along, stop-start, slower than walking pace.

‘Dead man was a teacher,’ Kennedy said. ‘A university professor, actually, at Prince Regent’s College. Stuart Barlow. Age fifty-seven. Place of work, the college’s history annexe on Fitzroy Street, which is where he died. By falling down a flight of stairs and breaking his neck.’

‘Right.’ Harper nodded as though it was all coming back to him.

‘Except the autopsy now says he didn’t,’ Kennedy went on. ‘He was lying at the bottom of the staircase, so it seemed like the logical explanation. It looked like he’d tripped and fallen badly: neck broken, skull impacted by a solid whack to the left-hand side. He had a briefcase with him. It was lying right next to him, spilled open, so there again, there was a default assumption. He packed his stuff, headed home for the night, got to the top of the stairs and then tripped. The body was found just after 9 p.m., maybe an hour after Barlow usually clocked off for the night.’

‘Seems to add up,’ Harper allowed. He was silent for a few moments as the car trickled forward a score or so of yards and then stopped again. ‘But what? The broken neck wasn’t the cause of death?’

‘No, it was,’ Kennedy said. ‘The problem is, it wasn’t broken in the right way. Damage to the throat muscles was consistent with torsional stress, not planar.’

‘Torsional. Like it had been twisted?’

‘Exactly. Like it had been twisted. And that takes a little focused effort. It doesn’t tend to happen when you fall downstairs. Okay, a sharp knock coming at an angle might turn the neck suddenly, but you’d still expect most of the soft tissue trauma to be linear, the damaged muscle and the external injury lining up to give you the angle of impact.’

She flicked through the sparse, unsatisfying pages until she came to the one that — after the autopsy — was the most troubling.

‘Plus there’s the stalker,’ Harper said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘I saw there was another incident report in there. Dead man was being followed.’

Kennedy nodded. ‘Very good, Detective Constable. Stalker is maybe overstating the case a little, but you’re right. Barlow had reported someone trailing him. First of all at an academic conference, then later outside his house. Whoever signed off on this the first time around either didn’t know that or didn’t think it mattered. The two incident sheets hadn’t been cross-referenced, so I’d go for the former. But in light of the autopsy results, it makes us look all kinds of stupid.’

‘Which God forbid,’ Harper murmured, blandly.

‘Amen,’ Kennedy intoned.

Silence fell, as it often does after prayers.

Harper broke it. ‘So that stuff with the rat. Is that part of your daily routine?’

‘These days, yeah. It pretty much is. Why? Do you have an allergy?’

Harper thought about that. ‘Not yet,’ he said at last.

Despite its name, the history annexe of Prince Regent’s College was aggressively modern in design: an austere concrete and glass bunker, tucked into a side street a quarter of a mile from the college’s main site on Gower Street. It was also deserted, since term had finished a week before. One wall of the foyer was a floorto-ceiling notice board, advertising gigs by bands Kennedy didn’t know, with dates that had already passed.

The harassed bursar, Ellis, came out to meet them. His face was shiny with sweat, as though he’d come straight from the bureaucratic equivalent of an aerobic workout, and he seemed to see the visit as a personal attack on the good name of the institution. ‘We were told the investigation was closed,’ he said.

‘I doubt you were ever told that by anyone with the authority to say it, Mr Ellis,’ Harper said, deadpan. The official line at this point was that the case had never been closed: that had only ever been a misunderstanding.

Kennedy hated to hide behind weasel words, and at this point felt like she owed little loyalty to the department. ‘The autopsy came back with some unusual findings,’ she added, without looking at Harper. ‘And that’s changed the way we’re looking at the case. It’s probably best to say nothing about this to anyone else on the faculty, but we’ll need to make some further investigations.’

‘Can I at least assume that all this will be over before the start of our summer school programme?’ the bursar asked, his tone stuck halfway between belligerence and quavering dread.

Kennedy wished it with all her heart, but she believed that giving people good news that hadn’t been adequately crash-tested was setting them up for more misery later. ‘No,’ she said, bluntly. ‘Please don’t assume that.’

Ellis’s face fell.

‘But … the students,’ he said, despite the self-evident lack of any. ‘Things like this do no good at all for recruitment or for our academic profile.’ It was such a strikingly fatuous thing to say that Kennedy wasn’t sure how to respond. She decided on silence, unfortunately leaving a void that the bursar seemed to feel obligated to fill. ‘There’s a sort of contamination by association,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you know what I mean. It happened at Alabama after the shootings in the biology department. That was a disgruntled teaching assistant, I understand — a freak occurrence, a chance in a million, and no students were involved at all. But the faculty still reported a drop in applications the next year. It’s as though people think murder is something you can catch.’

Okay, that was less fatuous, Kennedy thought, but a lot more obnoxious. This man had lost a colleague, in circumstances that were turning out to be suspicious, and his first thought was how it might affect the college’s bottom line. Ellis was clearly a selfserving toerag, so he got civility package one: just the basics.

‘We need to see the place where the body was found,’ she told him. ‘Now, please.’

He led them along empty, echoing corridors. The smell in the place reminded Kennedy of old newsprint. As a child she had built a playhouse in her parents’ garden shed from boxes of newspapers. Her father had collected them for arcane reasons (maybe, even that far back, his mind was beginning to go). It was that smell, exactly: sad old paper, dead-ended, defeated in its effort to inform.

They turned a corner and Ellis stopped suddenly. For a moment Kennedy thought he meant to remonstrate with her, but he half-raised his hands in an oddly constrained gesture to indicate their immediate surroundings.

‘This is where it happened,’ he said, with an emphasis on the ‘it’ that was half-gingerly, half-prurient. Kennedy looked around, recognising the short, narrow hallway and the steep stairs from the photographs.

‘Thank you, Mr Ellis,’ she said. ‘We’ll handle this part on our own. But we’ll need you again in a little while, to let us into Mr Barlow’s study.’

‘I’ll be at reception,’ Ellis said, and trudged away, the cartoon raincloud over his head all but visible.

Kennedy turned to Harper. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s walk this through.’ She handed him the file, open and with the photos on top. Harper nodded, a little warily. He staggered the photos like a poker hand, glancing from them to the stairs and then back again. Kennedy didn’t push him: he needed to get his eye in and it would take as long as it took. Whether he knew it or not, she was doing him a favour, letting him put it together in his own mind rather than hitting him with her thoughts right out of the gate. He was fresh out of the box after all: in theory, she was meant to be training him up, not using him as a footrest.

‘He was lying here,’ Harper said at last, sketching the scene with his free hand. ‘His head … there, around about the fourth stair.’

‘Head on the runner of the fourth stair,’ Kennedy cut in. She wasn’t disagreeing, just wrapping it in her own words. She wanted to see it, to transfer the image in her head to the space in front of her, and she knew from experience that saying it would help. ‘Where’s the briefcase? By the base of the wall, right? Here?’

‘Here,’ Harper said, indicating a point maybe two yards out from the foot of the stairs. ‘It’s open and on its side. There are a whole lot of papers, too, just strewn around here. Quite a wide spill, all the way to the far wall. They could have slipped out of the briefcase or out of Barlow’s hands as he fell.’

‘What else? Anything?’

‘His coat.’ Harper pointed again.

Kennedy was momentarily thrown. ‘Not in the photos.’

‘No,’ Harper agreed. ‘But it’s here in the evidence list. They moved it because it was partially occluding the body and they needed a clear line of sight for the trauma photos. Barlow probably had it over his arm or something. Warm evening. Or maybe he was putting it on when he tripped. Or, you know, when he was attacked.’

Kennedy thought about this. ‘Does the coat match the rest of his outfit?’ she demanded.

‘What?’ Harper almost laughed, but he saw that Kennedy was serious.

‘Is it the same colour as Barlow’s jacket and trousers?’

Harper flicked through the file for a long time, not finding anything that described or showed the coat. Finally he realised that it was in one of the photos after all — one that had been taken right at the start of the examination but had somehow been shuffled to the bottom of the deck. ‘It’s a black raincoat,’ he said. ‘No wonder he wasn’t wearing it. He was probably sweating just in the jacket.’

Kennedy climbed part of the way up the stairs, scanning them closely. ‘There was blood,’ she called over her shoulder to Harper. ‘Where was the blood, Detective Constable?’

‘Counting from the bottom, ninth and thirteenth stairs up.’

‘Right, right. Stain’s still visible on the wood here, look.’ She circled her hand above one spot, then the other, triangulated to the bottom of the stairs. ‘He hits, bang, bounces …’ She turned to face Harper again. ‘Not robbery,’ she said, to herself more than to him.

He referred to the file again — the verbal summary this time, not the photos. ‘No indication that anything had been taken,’ he agreed. ‘Wallet and phone still in his pocket.’

‘He’s worked here for eleven years,’ Kennedy mused. ‘Why would he fall?’

Harper flipped a few pages, was silent for a while. When he looked up, he pointed past Kennedy to the head of the stairs. ‘Barlow’s office is at the other end of that first-floor corridor,’ he said. ‘This was pretty much the only way he could take when he left the building, unless he was going all the way back to reception to drop off some outgoing mail or something. And it says here the bulb had gone, so the stairwell must have been dark.’

‘Gone? As in removed?’

‘No, gone as in burned out. Bulb had blown.’

Kennedy ascended the rest of the stairs. At the top was a very narrow landing. A single door, set centrally, led to another corridor — from what Harper had said, the corridor that led to Barlow’s office. To either side of the door were two windows of frosted glass that looked through on to the corridor, extending from the ceiling down to about waist height. The remaining three feet or so from the windows to the ground were white wooden panels.

‘So he comes to the top of the stairs in the dark,’ she said. ‘Stops to turn on the light, but it doesn’t go on.’ It was to the left of the door, a single switch. ‘And someone who’s waiting here, on the right-hand side, moves in on him while his back is turned.’

‘Makes sense,’ Harper said.

‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘It doesn’t. That’s not where you set an ambush, is it? Anyone standing around out here is visible both from the bottom of the stairs and from the upper corridor, through these windows. It’s stippled glass, but you’d still see if someone was standing there.’

‘With the light out?’

‘The light might be out on the landing, but we’ve got to assume that it’s on in the upstairs corridor. You wouldn’t miss someone standing right there in front of you, on the other side of the glass.’

‘Okay,’ said Harper. He paused, thinking. ‘But this is a college. You wouldn’t necessarily assume it was sinister for someone to be waiting here at the top of the stairs.’

Kennedy raised her eyebrows, let them fall again. ‘The murderer would know it was sinister,’ she said. ‘So it would be an odd place to choose. And Barlow had reported being followed, so he might be more alert than usual. But there’s a better answer for all this anyway. Go on.’

‘A better answer?’

‘I’ll show you in a minute. Go on.’

‘Okay,’ Harper said. ‘So whoever it was hangs around on the landing here for however long it takes, lets Barlow walk past, then grabs him from behind. Twists his head until his neck snaps, and pitches him down the stairs.’

Even as he was saying this, Harper was smiling. He snorted derision at his own summary. Kennedy looked a question at him, and he pointed to the top of the stairs, then to the bottom. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t make any sense at all. I mean, talk about overkill. The guy was fifty-seven years old, for Christ’s sake. The fall would probably have killed him in any case. Why not just give him a push?’

‘Interesting point,’ Kennedy said. ‘Maybe Mister Somebody doesn’t want to take the chance. Also, let’s not forget that Mister Somebody knows how to break someone’s neck with a single twist. Maybe he doesn’t get to show his skills off too often and this was his night to strut.’

Harper joined in the game. ‘Or they could have struggled, and the twist was a headlock that went wrong. Both that and the fall could have been accidents, more or less. Even if we find the guy, we might not be able to prove intent.’

Kennedy had descended again as he was talking. She passed him, went all the way back to the foot of the stairs. The banister rail ended there, curving down into a thicker wooden upright. She was looking for a specific feature, which she knew had to be there. It was about two feet off the ground, on the outside of the upright — the side that faced the lower corridor, rather than the stairs themselves.

‘Okay,’ she said to Harper, pointing. ‘Now look at this.’

He came down and squatted beside her, saw what she was seeing. ‘A nick in the wood,’ he said. ‘You think it was done on the night Barlow died?’

‘No,’ said Kennedy. ‘Before. Probably a long time before. But it was definitely there on the night. It shows up in some of the forensics photos. Look.’

She took the prints back from him and flicked through them, came up with the image she’d first seen earlier that day, sitting across from Summerhill as he gave her the poisoned chalice. She passed it to Harper, who looked at it with cursory interest at first, then carried on looking.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said at last.

‘Yeah. Bloody hell indeed.’

What the photo showed was a small shred of light-brown cloth caught on the jagged lip of that tiny imperfection in the wood. The forensic photographer had been careful to get it in very clear focus, presumably assuming at that point that he was participating in what could be the start of a murder inquiry.

The ragged tuft of cloth had been logged as evidence, too, and was therefore still sitting in a labelled bag in a labelled box on a shelf back in the division’s forensic support wing. But nobody seemed to have given any real thought to it since. After all, you usually didn’t have to work too hard to establish the presence of the victim at the scene of the crime.

Also in the photo, in the background but still more or less in focus, was Stuart Barlow himself, in a tan jacket with leather pads sewn in at the elbows — the stereotypical bachelor academic, except with his neck bent at an impossible angle and his staring face livid in death.

‘I looked through the pack, but I didn’t really register this,’ Harper admitted. ‘I was mostly just looking at the body.’

‘So was the investigating officer. You see what it means, though, right?’

Harper nodded, but his face showed that he was still working through the implications. ‘It’s from Barlow’s jacket,’ he said. ‘Or maybe his trousers. But … it’s in the wrong place.’

‘Jacket or trousers, Barlow shouldn’t be anywhere near here,’ Kennedy agreed, tapping the spot itself with her finger. ‘It’s a good seven or eight feet, laterally, from where he ended up, and it’s on the wrong side of the stair rail — the outside. The jag in the wood is angled downwards, too. You’d more or less have to be moving upwards into the sharp edge to tear your clothes on it, and that’s assuming you’re standing where we are. I don’t see any way this could happen as the body fell from above.’

‘Maybe Barlow flails around after he hits bottom,’ Harper speculated. ‘Not quite dead. Trying to get up and get help or—’ He stopped abruptly, shook his head. ‘No, that’s ridiculous. The poor bastard has a broken neck.’

‘Right. If the loose thread had been from the street coat, then I’d maybe buy that. You can’t figure the angles on something that’s flapping around loose in someone’s hand. But the street coat is black. This came from the clothes the victim was wearing, which wouldn’t move upwards when his body was moving down, or do elaborate pirouettes around solid objects. No, I’m thinking Barlow met his attacker right here, at the bottom of the stairs. The guy waited out of sight here, probably in this alcove under the stairs, then when he heard the footsteps coming down he got into position, stepped out as Barlow walked by and grabbed him from behind.’

‘And then arranged the body to look as though he fell,’ Harper finished the thought. ‘That would explain him hauling Barlow upright and catching his clothes on that jag.’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘Remember the blood on the upper stairs, Harper. The body did fall. I just think it fell later. The attacker kills Barlow down here, because down here is safer. No windows, less chance that Barlow will see him coming — or recognise him, maybe, if they’ve met before. But he’s thorough and he wants to make sure all the physical evidence is right. So once Barlow is dead, he drags the body up the stairs so he can throw it down again and add that extra touch of authenticity. In that process, as he’s manhandling the body, the jacket catches on this jagged edge and a little shred of it gets caught.’

‘That’s way too complicated,’ Harper protested. ‘You just have to hit the guy with a pipe wrench, right? Everyone will assume it was a mugging that went wrong. You could walk right out of here with the murder weapon under your coat and nobody would ever know. Dragging the body up the stairs, even late in the evening when there’s no one around, is a stupid risk to take.’

‘It could be he preferred that risk to the risk of an investigation,’ Kennedy said. ‘There’s the bulb, too.’

‘The bulb?’

‘On the upper landing. If I’m right, Barlow wasn’t killed or even attacked up there. But the light is blown, to make it look that bit more likely that he fell. Could just be a weird coincidence, but I don’t think so. I think our killer takes care of that little detail too. Unscrews the bulb, shakes it until the filament snaps, puts it back.’

‘Afterwards.’

‘Yes. Afterwards. I know, it sounds insane. But if that is what happened, then maybe …’

She started up the stairs again, on hands and knees this time, head bent low to examine the edges of the stair runners. But it was Harper who found it, seven steps up, after she’d already gone past it.

‘Here,’ he called to her, pointing.

Kennedy turned and leaned in close to peer. Caught on the head of a nail that had been hammered in at a slight angle and remained proud of the wood, there was another wisp of light-brown cloth. It had survived because it was right in close to the wall, where people using the stairs were least likely to tread. Kennedy nodded, satisfied. ‘Bingo,’ she said. Corroborating evidence. Barlow’s body had been dragged up the stairs, prior to falling down them but presumably after death.

‘So,’ Harper summarised, ‘we’ve got a killer who strikes from the shadows, breaks a guy’s neck with a single twist, then lugs him all the way up a flight of stairs that’s in public use, and hangs around long enough to do a bit of stage dressing, all so he can fake an accident and duck a murder investigation. That takes an insane amount of balls.’

‘Late in the evening,’ Kennedy reminded him, but she didn’t disagree. It suggested a cold-blooded and self-possessed performance, not a crime of passion or a fight that just got out of hand.

She straightened up. ‘Let’s take a look at Barlow’s study,’ she suggested.

3

In Leo Tillman’s dreams, his wife and kids were both alive and dead at the same time. Consequently, the dreams could pivot on almost nothing — some tiny detail that sparked the wrong association in his defenceless subconscious — and career off into nightmare. There were very few nights where he made it through all the way to morning. Very few dawns that didn’t find him already awake, sitting on the edge of his bed to disassemble and clean his Unica, or reading through online databases in the hope of a sighting.

This morning, though, it wasn’t his bed. He was sitting on the seat of a complicated exercise machine in a stranger’s bedroom, watching the sun come up over Magas. And it wasn’t a gun in his hand, it was a printed A4 sheet with a couple of hundred words of slightly blurry copy. The Unica was tucked into his belt, with the safety on.

A colossal picture window in front of him framed the presidential palace at the other end of a narrow avenue lined with wrought-iron fencing. It looked exactly how the White House would look if you dropped a mosque right in the middle of it and then walked away. Beyond that, Main Street, and beyond that — opening directly off the main drag — the Caucasus Highway. It was a joke to call Magas a town, in Tillman’s opinion, in the same way that it was a joke to call Ingushetia a country. No army. No infrastructure. Not even any people. The latest census gave the whole republic a smaller population than, say, Birmingham.

People mattered to Tillman. He could hide in a crowd, and so could the man he was looking for. That made Magas both attractive and dangerous. If his quarry was here, which admittedly was a longshot, there weren’t very many places for him to go to ground. But the same thing would be true for Leo if things went bad.

There was movement from the bed behind him: the faint, purposeless stirrings that come with waking up.

Almost time to get to work.

But he watched the sunrise for a few moments longer, caught — despite himself — in a waking dream. Rebecca was standing in the sun, like the angel from the Book of Revelation, and with her, cradled in her arms, Jud, Seth and Grace. All of them as they were on the last day he saw them: not aged, not touched by time. They were so real that they made Magas look like a cardboard cut-out of a town, a bad movie set.

Tillman indulged these moments because they kept him alive, kept him moving. And at the same time he feared them because they softened him, made him weak. Love wasn’t part of his present, but it was real and vivid in his past, and the memories were like a sort of voodoo. They made dead ground inside him yawn and gape open, made parts of his own nature that were almost dead rise up. Most of the time, Tillman was as simple as a nail. Remembering made him complex, and contradictory.

He heard a sigh and a fuzzy mumble from the bed. Then a more concerted movement. Reluctantly, Tillman closed his eyes. When he opened them again a few seconds later the sun was just the sun, not really capable any more of warming his world: just a spotlight, shining from a guard post in the sky.

He got up and crossed to the bed. Kartoyev was fully awake now and was coming to terms with his situation. He strained against the ropes, but only once with each one, testing the tension. He wasn’t going to waste any energy in pointless struggle. He stared up at Tillman, his teeth bared as the muscles in his arms flexed.

‘Kto tyi, govn’uk?’ he demanded. His voice had a gravelly burr to it.

‘English,’ Tillman told him, tersely. ‘And lie still. That’s a friendly warning.’

There was a moment’s silence. Kartoyev glanced off towards the door, listening and calculating. No sound of approaching footsteps. No sound at all from the rest of the house. So had this intruder killed his bodyguards or just sidestepped them? It made a difference. Either way, his best option would be to play for time — but the amount of time would be different in each case.

‘Ya ne govoryu pa-Angliski, ti druchitel,’ he muttered. ‘Izvini.’

‘Well, that’s clearly not the case,’ Tillman said, mildly. ‘I heard you last night, talking to your girlfriend.’

Belatedly, Kartoyev cast a glance to his left. He was alone in the massive bed. There was no sign of the redhead who’d shared it with him the night before.

‘She’s downstairs,’ Tillman said, reading the Russian’s expression. ‘Along with your muscle. No sense in making her go through all the unpleasantness that you and me are about to experience. No, she didn’t betray you. It was the booze that got you, not the girl.’ He reached into his pocket and brought out a small bottle, now mostly empty. It would look to the Russian like gloating, but in fact Tillman was just letting him see how deep Shit Creek was running. ‘One comma four,’ he said. ‘Butanediol. When it hits your stomach, it turns into GHB, the date-rape drug — but if you drink it along with alcohol, it takes its own sweet time to kick in. They’re both competing for the same digestive enzyme. So that’s why you slept so deeply. And why all your people are tied up in the bathroom right now like so many cords of wood.’

‘The boy from the bar,’ Kartoyev said, grimly, lapsing into English at last. ‘Jamaat. He’s dead. I know his name, his family, where he lives. He’s dead. I promise you.’

Tillman shook his head. He didn’t bother to deny the young Chechen’s complicity: the booze was the only common factor and Kartoyev was no fool. ‘Too late for that,’ he told the Russian. ‘The kid’s long gone. I gave him a couple of million roubles out of your safe. Not a fortune, but enough to give him a start-up in Poland or the Czech Republic. Somewhere out of your reach.’

‘There is nowhere out of my reach,’ Kartoyev said. ‘I know all the flights out of Magas and I’ve got friends in the interior ministry. I’ll trace him and I’ll take him apart. I’ll take you both apart.’

‘Possibly. But maybe you’re overestimating your friends. Once the funeral’s over, they’ll probably be too concerned about carving up your little empire to worry much about who it was that took you out.’

Kartoyev gave Tillman a long, hard stare, appraising him, taking his measure. Clearly he found something there that he took for weakness. ‘You’re not going to kill me, zhopa. You got that big pistol tucked into your belt, there, like a gangster, but you don’t have the stones. You look like you’re about to start crying like a little girl.’

Tillman didn’t bother to argue. Maybe his eyes had watered a little when he stared into the sun, and the Russian was welcome to read into that whatever the hell he liked. ‘You’re right,’ Tillman said. ‘As far as the gun’s concerned anyway. It stays where it is, for now. Most of what I had in mind to do to you, it’s already done. Except I may untie you if you give me what I came here for.’

‘What?’ Kartoyev sneered. ‘You hot for me, American? You want to suck my cock?’

‘I’m British, Yanush. And I’ll pass, thanks.’

Kartoyev tensed at the use of his given name and strained against the ropes again. ‘You are going to bleed, asshole. You better kill me. You better make sure you kill me because if I get my hands around your—’

He broke off abruptly. Even over his rant, the click had been clearly audible. It had come from the bed, from directly underneath him.

‘I told you to lie still,’ Tillman said. ‘What, you didn’t feel that bulge under the small of your back? But you feel it now, obviously. And maybe you know what it is, since it’s in your catalogue. In the special offer section.’

Kartoyev’s eyes widened and he froze into sudden, complete stillness.

‘There you go,’ Tillman said, encouragingly. ‘You got it in one.’

Kartoyev swore long and loud, but he was careful not to move.

Tillman raised the sheet of paper he was holding and read aloud from it. ‘The SB-33 minimum metal anti-personnel mine is a sophisticated battlefield munition combining ease of use, flexibility of deployment and resistance to detection and disarming. Emplaced by hand or by the dedicated air-dispersal SY-AT system — page 92 — the mine’s irregular outline makes it hard to locate on most terrain, while its MM architecture (only seven grams of ferrous metal in the whole assembly) renders most conventional detection systems useless.’

‘Yob tvoyu mat!’ Kartoyev screamed. ‘You’re insane. You’ll die, too. We’ll both die!’

Tillman shook his head solemnly. ‘You know, Yanush, I really don’t think so. It says here the blast is highly directional: straight up, to rip open the balls and maybe the guts of the poor bastard who steps on it. I’m probably okay standing way over here. But you stopped me before I got to the good part. The SB-33 has a double pressure plate. If you lean down on it hard the way you just did, it doesn’t detonate, it just locks. That’s so you can’t make it blow long-distance, with a mine-clearing charge. It’s the next move you make that’s going to unlock the plate and introduce you to a life lived like a football match — in two halves.’

Kartoyev swore again, as vigorously as before, but the colour had drained out of his face. He knew this item of his inventory very well, and not just by reputation: during his army days, he had probably had plenty of opportunity to see what the SB-33’s maiming charge could do to a human body at point blank range. Probably he was weighing up in his mind the many different ways in which that shaped charge could mess him up, short of killing him. With the mine’s upper surface pressed right against his lower spine, it was virtually certain that it would kill him. But there were some truly sickening alternative scenarios.

‘So,’ Tillman continued, ‘I was looking for some information on one of your clients. Not a big account, but a regular one. And I know he’s been by to see you quite recently. But I don’t know which of your many products and services he was interested in. Or how to reach him myself. And I’m very keen to do that.’

Kartoyev’s gaze flicked up, down, sidelong, then back to Tillman by the longest possible route. ‘What client?’ he asked. ‘Tell me his name.’ The Russian was too smart and too disciplined to let anything show in his face, but Tillman saw it all the same in those restless eyes — the visible sign of a complex calculation. You didn’t get to be as successful as this man was in so many different rackets — illegal arms sales, drugs, people trafficking, the buying and selling of political influence — by ratting out your customers. Everything he said would have to sound plausible and everything he said would have to be a lie. Small, inconsequential details would be closest to the truth, while key information about place and time and transactions would be lies on a spectacular and heroic scale. Kartoyev was building an inverted pyramid of falsehood in his mind.

Tillman waved the question away brusquely. ‘Name’s slipped my mind,’ he said. ‘Don’t even worry about it. I need to get some coffee, and maybe a little breakfast. We’ll talk later.’

Kartoyev’s eyes widened. ‘Wait—’ he began, but Tillman was already heading for the door. When he was halfway along the upper hallway, he heard the Russian say ‘Wait!’ again, in a slightly more urgent tone. He went on down the spiral staircase, treading heavily on the inlaid wooden steps so his footsteps resounded.

He checked on the other captives before doing anything else. Kartoyev’s girlfriend and many bodyguards weren’t in the bathroom: it would have taken too long to drag them all from the various places in which they’d fallen into the drug sleep. Tillman had just tied and gagged them in situ or lugged them a little way and dumped them behind furniture if there was any chance that they could be glimpsed from the building opposite. Most of them were groggily awake by now, so he went around with syringes of Etomidate, a dope-fiend Santa with gifts for all. He injected the drug into the men’s — and the woman’s — left or right cubital veins because their tightly bound arms made them stand out like ropes. Soon enough they were all sleeping again, more profoundly than before.

When it came to killing, Tillman was precise and professional, and his choice of drugs reflected this. The difference between an effective dose of Etomidate and a lethal one was about thirty to one for a healthy adult. These people would wake up sicker than parrots and weaker than puppies, but they’d wake up.

With that business concluded, Tillman went and sat by the window for a while, watching the street. The house was set back in its own grounds, the gates high and the walls topped with razor wire. To discourage uninvited guests no doubt. But he didn’t want to be surprised by an invited one, or a colleague or acquaintance coming around to find out why Kartoyev hadn’t shown up at some appointment or other. Once that happened, the house, the city and the entire Republic of Ingushetia would quickly become an escape-proof trap for Tillman. He had every reason to act fast.

But he had even better reasons to wait, so that was what he did. And because he was too tense to eat or drink, to read or to rest, he waited in stillness, staring out of the window into the bull grass and the monkey puzzle trees.

Tillman had been a mercenary for nine years. He’d never done interrogation work — he had no particular taste for it, and in his experience the men who specialised in it were profoundly damaged — but he’d seen it done and he knew the big secret, which was to make the subject do most of the heavy lifting for you. Kartoyev was a tough bastard, who’d clawed his way to his current position of eminence using the balls and throats of lesser mortals as handholds. But now he was lying on top of a contact mine, and his imagination would be feeding on itself in ferocious, toxic fast-forward. When a strong man is helpless, strength becomes weakness.

Tillman gave it two and a half hours before he went back up to the bedroom. Kartoyev hadn’t moved a muscle, as far as Tillman could see. The man’s face had gone white, his eyes were wide, his lips slightly parted so you could see the clenched teeth within. ‘What was the name?’ he asked, in a low and very distinct tone. ‘Who do you want to know about?’

Tillman patted his pockets. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I wrote it down somewhere. Let me go check my jacket.’

As he turned back towards the door, Kartoyev made a horrible, ragged sound — as though he was trying to talk around a caltrop in the middle of his tongue. ‘No,’ he croaked. ‘Tell me!’

Tillman made a big show of thinking it over, coming to a decision. He crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, placing his weight with exaggerated care. ‘The first time you lie to me,’ he said, ‘I’m giving up on you. You understand me? There are other guys on my list, other people this guy uses, so you’re completely expendable — to me, as well as to him. You lie to me, or you even hesitate in telling me everything you know, and I’m gone. In which case, it’s going to be a very long day for you.’

Kartoyev lowered his chin to his chest, then brought it up again, a slow-mo nod of acquiescence.

‘Michael Brand,’ Tillman said.

‘Brand?’ Kartoyev’s tone was pained, uncomprehending. Clearly he’d been expecting a different name. ‘Brand … isn’t anybody.’

‘I didn’t say he was important. I just said I want to know about him. So what have you got, Yanush? What does he come to you for? Weapons? Drugs? Women?’

The Russian drew a ragged breath. ‘Women, no. Never. Weapons, yes. Drugs … yes. Or at least, things that can be used to make drugs.’

‘What sort of volume are we talking about?’ Tillman was careful to keep his voice level, not to let the urgency show, because the strength had to be all on his side. Any chink in his armour might make the Russian baulk.

‘For the weapons,’ Kartoyev muttered. ‘Not so very many. Not enough for an army, but enough — if you were a terrorist — to finance a medium-sized jihad. Guns: hundreds, rather than thousands. Ammunition. Grenades, one or two. But not explosives. He doesn’t seem to care much for bombs.’

‘And the drugs?’

‘Pure ephedrine. Anhydrous ammonia. Lithium.’

Tillman frowned. ‘So he’s brewing meth?’

‘I sell meth.’ Kartoyev sounded indignant. ‘I said to him once, if that’s what you want, Mr Brand, why take away these bulky and inconvenient raw materials? For a small surcharge, I’ll give you crystal or powder in any amount you like.’

‘And he said?’

‘He told me to fill his order. He said he had no need of anything else I could offer him.’

‘But the amounts?’ Tillman pursued. ‘Enough to sell, commercially?’

Kartoyev began to shake his head, winced. He’d been holding to a position of paralysed rigidity for several hours, and his muscles were agonisingly locked. ‘Not really,’ he grunted. ‘Recently, though — this last batch — much, much more than usual. A thousand times more.’

‘And it’s always Brand who collects and pays?’

Again, the look. Why is he asking this? ‘Yes. Always … the man uses that name. Brand.’

‘Who does he represent?’

‘I have no idea. I saw no reason to ask.’

Tillman scowled. He stood up suddenly, rocking the bed a little and making Kartoyev cry out — a choked, premonitory wail of anguish. But there was no explosion. ‘Bullshit,’ Tillman said, leaning over his captive. ‘A man like you doesn’t fly blind. Not even on small transactions. You’d find out everything you could about Brand. I already warned you about lying, you brain-dead scumbag. I think you just used up the last of my goodwill.’

‘No!’ Kartoyev was desperately earnest. ‘Of course, I tried. But I found nothing. There was no trail that led to him, or from him.’

Tillman considered, keeping his face impassive. As far as it went, that matched his own experience. ‘So how do you contact him?’

‘I don’t. Brand tells me what he needs, then he appears. Payment is in cash. He arranges his own transport. Cars, usually. Once, a truck. Always these are hired, under assumed names. When they’re returned, they’ve been scrubbed clean.’

‘How does Brand contact you?’

‘By telephone. Cellphones, always. Disposables, always. He identifies himself by a word.’

Tillman caught on this detail. It seemed unlikely: amateurish and unnecessary. ‘He doesn’t trust you to recognise his voice?’

‘For whatever reason. He identifies himself by a word. Diatheke.’

‘What does that mean?’

Kartoyev shook his head slowly, with great care, once only. ‘I don’t know what it means to him. To me it means Brand. That’s all.’

Tillman looked at his watch. He felt almost certain that the Russian had nothing more to tell, but time was against him. It was probably time to start packing up. But Kartoyev was the best lead he’d had in three years and it was hard to walk away without squeezing the last drop out of him.

‘I still don’t believe you’d let it go that easily,’ Tillman said, staring down at the rigid, sweating man. ‘That you’d do business with him, year in and year out, without trying to figure out what he’s about.’

Kartoyev sighed. ‘I told you. I tried. Brand comes in on different routes, from different airports, and leaves, likewise, in different directions: sometimes by air, sometimes driving. He pays in a number of currencies — dollars, euros, sometimes even roubles. His needs are … eclectic. Not just the things you mentioned, but also, sometimes, legal technology illegally acquired. Generators. Medical equipment. Once, a surveillance truck, new, designed for the SVR — for Russian intelligence. Brand is a middle man, obviously. He fronts for many different interests. He acquires what is needed, for whoever is prepared to pay.’

A tremor went through Tillman, which he couldn’t suppress or keep from the Russian. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘That’s what he does. But you say you’ve never sold him people.’

‘No.’ Kartoyev’s voice was tight. He could read the emotion in Tillman’s face and he was obviously concerned about what that loss of control might mean. ‘Not people. Not for work or for sex. Perhaps he sources those things elsewhere.’

‘Those things?’

‘Those commodities.’

Tillman shook his head. He was wearing a hangman’s dead-pan now. ‘Not much better.’

‘I’m a businessman,’ Kartoyev muttered, tightly, sardonic even in extremity. ‘You’ll have to forgive me.’

‘No,’ Tillman said. ‘There’s nothing that says I have to do that.’ He leaned down and reached underneath Kartoyev’s body. The Russian yelled again, in despair and rage, stiffening in a whole-body rictus as he braced for the blast.

Tillman pulled the squat, plastic box out from under him, letting the Russian see the blank, inert digital display and the words — ALARM, TIME, SET, ON-OFF — printed in white on the black fascia. A foot of electric cable and a Continental-style plug dangled from the device, on which the maker’s name, Philip’s, was also prominently emblazoned. The alarm clock was of eighties vintage. Tillman had bought it under Zyazikov Bridge, from a Turk who had his meagre wares spread out on the plinth of the President’s statue.

Kartoyev’s incredulous laugh sounded like a sob. ‘Son of a whore!’ he grunted.

‘Where did Brand go this time?’ Tillman asked, slipping the question in fast and brisk. ‘When he left you?’

‘England,’ Kartoyev said. ‘He went to London.’

Tillman took the Unica from his belt, thumbed the safety in the same movement and shot Kartoyev in the left temple, angling the shot to the right. The mattress caught the bullet, and some of the sound, but Tillman wasn’t worried about the sound: the windows of the house had been triple-glazed and the walls were solid.

He packed his things quickly and methodically — the clock, the gun, the xeroxed sheet and the rest of the money from the safe. He’d already wiped the room for prints, but he did so again. Then he gave the dead man on the bed a valedictory nod, went downstairs and let himself out.

London. He thought about that dead ground in his mind, in his soul. He’d been away for a long time, and that hadn’t been an accident. But maybe there was a God after all, and his providence had a symmetrical shape.

The shape of a circle.

4

Stuart Barlow’s study had already been examined by the first case officer, but there were no evidence notes in the file and nothing had been taken. Searching it was going to be a daunting proposition: every surface was stacked with books and papers. The strata of folders and print-outs on the desk had spread out to colonise large areas of the floor on both sides, which at least had the effect of hiding some of the goose-turd-green carpet tiles. Prints of Hellenic statues and Egyptian karyatids, rippled inside their glass frames by seasons of damp English weather and bad central heating, stared down at the shambles with stern, unforgiving faces.

The small, cluttered space was claustrophobic, and indefinably sad. Kennedy wondered whether Barlow would have been ashamed to have his private chaos exposed to public scrutiny in this way, or if the heaped ramparts of notebooks and print-outs were a professional badge of pride.

‘Mr Barlow was in the history faculty,’ she remarked, turning to the bursar. Ellis had returned as promised to let them in, and now stood by with the key still in his hand, as if he expected the detectives to admit defeat when they saw the intractable mess of the dead man’s effects. ‘What did that entail? Did he have a full teaching schedule?’

‘Point eight,’ Ellis said, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Five hours remission for administrative duties.’

‘Which were?’

‘He was second in department. And he ran Further Input — our gifted and talented programme.’

‘Was he good at his job?’ Kennedy demanded, bluntly.

Ellis blinked. ‘Very good. All our staff are good, but … well. Yes. Stuart was passionate about his subject. It was his hobby as well as his profession. He’d appeared on TV three or four times, on history and archaeology programmes. And his revision website was very popular with the students.’ A pause. ‘We’ll all miss him very much.’ Kennedy mentally translated that as: he put arses on seats.

Harper had picked up a book, Russia Against Napoleon, by Dominic Lieven. ‘Was this his specialism?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Again, Ellis was categorical. ‘His specialism was palaeography — the earliest written texts. It didn’t come into his teaching very much, because it’s a tiny part of our undergraduate syllabus, but he wrote a lot on the subject.’

‘Books?’ Kennedy asked.

‘Articles. Mostly focused on close textual analysis of the Dead Sea and Rylands finds. But he was working on a book — about the Gnostic sects, I think.’

Kennedy had no idea what the Gnostic sects were, but she let it pass. She wasn’t seriously considering the possibility that Professor Barlow had been murdered by an academic rival.

‘Do you know anything about his private life?’ she asked instead. ‘We know he wasn’t married, but was he involved with anyone?’

The bursar seemed surprised by the question, as though celibacy was a necessary side effect of the scholarly life. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It’s possible, obviously, but he didn’t mention anybody. And when he came to departmental functions, he never had anybody with him.’

That seemed to let out wronged husbands or jealous ex-lovers. The odds on finding a suspect were getting longer. But Kennedy had never had high hopes. In her experience, most of the work that solved a case was done in the first couple of hours. You didn’t return to a case that was three weeks cold and expect to jump the gap in one amazing bound.

All this time, Harper had been skirmishing around in the books and papers — a token effort, but maybe he felt that having missed the mark with Napoleon, he had nothing to lose by bobbing for insights a second time. This time he held up what looked like a picture, but turned out to be a news clipping, pasted neatly on to card and then framed. It had been leaning against one of the legs of the desk. The headline read, ‘Nag Hammadi Fraud: Two Arrested’. The man in the accompanying photo was recognisable as a much younger Stuart Barlow. His face wore an awkward, frosty smile.

‘Your man had a criminal record?’ Harper demanded.

Ellis actually laughed. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘not at all. That was his triumph — about fifteen years ago, now, perhaps longer. Stuart was called in as an expert witness in that case because his knowledge of the Nag Hammadi library was so extensive.’

‘What was the case?’ Kennedy asked. ‘And while we’re on the subject, what’s Nag Hammadi?’

‘Nag Hammadi was the most important palaeographical find of the twentieth century, inspector,’ Ellis told her. She didn’t bother to correct him on her rank, though out of the corner of her eye she saw Harper roll his eyes expressively. ‘In Upper Egypt, just after the end of the Second World War, near the town of Nag Hammadi, two brothers went digging in a limestone cave. They were only interested in finding guano — bat excrement — to use as fertiliser for their fields. What they found, though, was a sealed jar containing a dozen bound codices.’

‘Bound what?’ Harper asked.

‘Codices. A codex is a number of pages sewn or fastened together. The first books, essentially. They began to be used in the early Christian era, where up to that time, the norm would have been to write on scrolls or single sheets of parchment. The codices in the Nag Hammadi find turned out to be texts from around the first and second century AD: gospels, letters, that sort of thing. Even a heavily rewritten translation of Plato’s Republic. An incredible treasure trove from a period just after Christ’s death, when the Christian church was still struggling to define its identity.’

‘How did that become a court case?’ Harper asked, cutting off the lecture just as the bursar took a deep breath for what looked like another, bigger info drop. Deflected, he looked both indignant and slightly at a loss.

‘The court case came much later. It concerned forged copies of Nag Hammadi documents, which were being sold online to dealers in antiquities. Stuart appeared as a witness for the prosecution. I think he was there mainly to give an opinion on the physical differences between the original documents and the forgeries. He knew every crease and ink stain on those pages.’

Harper put the article down and rummaged some more. Ellis’s face took on a pained expression. ‘Detective, if you’re planning to conduct an extensive search, can I please get on with my duties and come back later?’

Harper looked a question at Kennedy, who was still thinking about the court case. ‘What was the verdict?’ she asked the bursar.

‘Equivocal,’ Ellis said, a little sullenly. ‘The dealers — a husband and wife, I think — were found guilty of handling the fraudulent items, and of some technical infringements relating to proper documentation, but innocent on the forgery charge, which was the main one. They had to pay a fine and some of the court’s costs.’

‘As a result of Professor Barlow’s testimony?’

Ellis made an ‘oh!’ face, finally seeing where she was going. ‘Stuart wasn’t that big a part of the case,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘To be honest, everybody thought it was funny that he set so much store by it. I think most of the relevant evidence came from the people who’d bought the forged documents. And as I said, it only resulted in a fine. I don’t really think …’

Kennedy didn’t either, but she filed the point away for later. It would be worth following up if they drew a blank on everything else. Not that everything else amounted to very much, so far. ‘Why hasn’t Professor Barlow’s sister collected all this?’ she asked. ‘She’s the only surviving relative, isn’t she?’

‘Rosalind. Rosalind Barlow. She’s in our files as next of kin,’ Ellis agreed. ‘And we’ve corresponded with her. She said she wasn’t interested in any of Stuart’s things. Her exact words: “Take what you want for the college library and give the rest to charity.” That’s probably what we’ll do, eventually, but it will take some time to sort through it all.’

‘A lot of time,’ Harper agreed, adding after a beat, ‘All good here, Inspector?’

She shot him a warning look, but his expression was as bland as runny custard. ‘All good,’ she said, ‘Detective Constable. Let’s go.’

She was heading for the door as she spoke, but she hesitated. Something had registered on her inner eye, without her realising it, and was now clamouring to be admitted to her conscious attention. Kennedy knew better than to ignore that fish-hook tug. She slowed to a halt and looked around once more.

She almost had it, when Ellis jangled his keys and broke the slender thread by which she was pulling the thought up into the daylight. She shot him a glare, which made him falter slightly.

‘There are other things I need to do,’ he said, with no conviction at all.

Kennedy breathed out deeply. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Ellis,’ she said. ‘We may have to ask you some further questions later, but we won’t need to take up any more of your time today.’

They headed back to the car, Kennedy turning over in her mind the little they knew about this already badly mangled case. She needed to talk to the dead man’s sister. That was priority number one. Maybe Barlow really did have a nemesis in the palaeographical arena; or a student he’d gotten pregnant, or a younger brother he’d stiffed in some way that might have left a festering grudge. You were about ten times more likely to catch a killer by having his name given to you directly than you ever were by climbing a ladder of clues. And they didn’t have a ladder as yet. They didn’t even have a rung.

Yes, they did. The stalker, the guy who Barlow had said was following him. That was the other way into this. Harper was going to hate her, because she was determined to talk to the sister herself, so most of the grunt work in all of this would fall on him.

In the car, she laid it on the line for him, forwards and backwards.

‘When Barlow said he was being followed,’ she said, reading from the file notes, ‘he was at some kind of an academic conference.’

‘The London Historical Forum,’ Harper said. He had been flicking through the file at odd moments in the course of their visit, evidently to some effect. ‘Yeah. He said the guy was hanging around in the lobby and then he saw him again in the car park.’

‘I’m wondering if anyone else saw him. Barlow didn’t give us much of a description, but maybe we could fill in the gaps. Maybe someone even knew the guy. There would have been dozens of people there after all. Maybe hundreds. The organisers would have a contact list. Phone numbers. Email addresses.’

Harper gave her a wary look.

‘We share the cold-calling, right?’

‘Of course we do. But I’m going to see Barlow’s sister first. You’ll have to chase it by yourself until I get back.’

Harper didn’t look happy, but he nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What else?’

Kennedy was mildly impressed. He’d read her expression accurately, knew there was more to come. ‘You’re going to take a lot of shit for working with me,’ she said. ‘That’s just the way it is right now.’

‘So?’

‘So you can get out of it really easily. Go to Summerhill and say we’ve got personal differences.’

There was a pause.

‘Do we?’ Harper asked.

‘I don’t even know you, Harper. I’m just doing you a favour. Maybe doing myself one, too, because if you’re in with those monkeys, I’d rather have you outside the tent than inside — and you’d rather be there, because I’ll sure as hell pass the pain along when it comes.’

Harper tapped the steering wheel idly with a thumbnail, blowing out first one cheek and then the other. ‘This is my first case as a detective,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘Two hours in and you’re already trying to kick me off it.’

‘I’m giving you the option.’

Harper turned the key and the engine of the antiquated Astra roared gamely — an old house cat pretending to be a tiger.

‘I’ll keep it open,’ he said.

5

As he’d planned to do, Tillman drove the rental car to the outskirts of Erzurum, where he left it way off the road hidden under a few tree branches and armloads of scrub. He’d hired it using a false name, which was different from the false name on the passport he’d shown at the Georgian and Turkish borders.

From a bar on Sultan Mehmet Boulevard, he placed a call — untraceable as far as local law enforcement was concerned — to the police in Magas, making sure they knew about the body. They’d find the bound and gagged guards, if someone else hadn’t already, and nobody would die except Kartoyev. Not mercy, obviously: just a habit of mind that Tillman put down to neatness or professional pride.

He wasn’t planning to stick around long, but he wanted to make a couple more calls before he went off the radar again. The first was to Benard Vermeulens — a cop, but a cop who, like Tillman, had done both regular military and mercenary service before coming back into civilian life. Now he worked for the UN mission in Sudan, and he had access to all kinds of unlikely but topical information, which he was sometimes prepared to share.

‘Hoe gaat het met jou, Benny?’ Leo asked, the one Flemish phrase that Vermeulens had ever succeeded in teaching him.

‘Mother of god. Twister!’ Vermeulens’ hoarse, burring voice made the phone vibrate in Tillman’s hand. ‘Met mij is alles goed! What about yourself, Leo? What can I do for you? And don’t bother saying nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing,’ Tillman admitted. ‘It’s the usual thing.’

‘Michael Brand.’

‘I heard he was in London. Could still be there. Can you turn over the usual stones? I want to know if his name turns up on anything official. Or anything at all, for that matter.’

‘Joak. I’ll do that, Leo.’

‘And the other usual thing?’

‘Now there, I have bad news.’

‘Somebody’s looking for me?’

‘Somebody is looking for you very hard. For two weeks now. Lots of searches, lots of questions. Mostly three or four elbows in the chain, each time, so I can’t get a glimpse of who’s asking. But they’re asking like they mean it.’

‘Okay. Thanks, man. I owe you.’

‘This is for friendship. If you owe me, we’re not friends.’

‘Then I owe you nothing.’

‘That’s better.’

Leo hung up and dialled Insurance. But Insurance just laughed when she heard his voice. ‘Leo, you’re not a risk that anyone’s willing to take any more,’ she told him, with what sounded like genuine fondness in her voice.

‘No? Why is that, Suzie?’ he asked. It did no harm to remind her that he was one of the three or four people still around who’d known her when she had a real name.

‘If you kill someone on a side street in Nowhere-on-Sea, honey, that’s one thing. But killing someone at a major intersection in the big city where we all live … well, that’s different.’

Tillman said nothing, but he covered the mouthpiece with his hand for a moment anyway, afraid that he might swear or just suck in his breath. Hours. Just a few hours. How could the news have run ahead of him? How could anyone have tied his name to a death that had only just been discovered?

‘I thought the world was a village,’ was all he said.

‘You wish. In a village, it would just be MacTeale’s big brother you had to worry about. As it is, it’s everyone on his Rolodex.’

‘MacTeale?’ For a second Tillman had trouble even placing the name. Then he remembered the big, angry Scot who’d headed up his squad for the last year of his stint at Xe. ‘Somebody killed MacTeale?’

‘You did, apparently. At least, that’s the word that’s going around.’

‘The word’s wrong, Suzie.’

‘So you say.’

‘I didn’t kill MacTeale. I killed some no-account Russian middle-man who thought he had friends in high places, but I reckon they were the kind of friendships you rent on a short lease. Listen, all I want is another passport, in case this one got a stain on it. I can pay up front, if that will make things easier.’

‘You can make things as easy as you like, Leo. Nobody is going to sell to you, employ you or share intel with you. The community has closed its doors.’

‘And that includes you?’

‘Leo, of course that includes me. If I start offending the sensibilities of my clients, I’ll have a lonely, impoverished old age. Which will still put me ahead of you, sweetheart, because from what I hear, you’re on borrowed time now. No hard feelings.’

‘Maybe a few,’ Tillman said.

‘Good luck.’ Insurance sounded as though she meant it, but she hung up without waiting for him to answer.

Tillman snapped the phone shut and put it away. He nodded to the barman, who came and brought him another Scotch and water. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to shut him down, and whoever it was, they’d achieved miracles in a very short time. He tipped back the whisky in a silent toast to his unseen adversary. Your first mistake, Mr Brand, he thought, was letting me find out your name. Now here we are, just thirteen years later, and you slipped up again.

You let me know I’m on the right track.

Tillman was nobody. He’d be the first to admit that: more so as he’d gotten older, as he’d moved further and further away from the one time in his life when everything had come into clear focus and — briefly — made a kind of sense.

It was the mystery on which he was nailed up, these days. The hunt was what gave shape and meaning to his life, and so he was defined by an absence: four absences, in fact. The only things that were real for him were the things that weren’t there. Such a long time ago, now. So much blood under the bridge, and more to come, definitely, because the alternative was to stop looking. If he stopped looking, Tillman wouldn’t just be nobody, he’d be nothing, and nowhere. Might as well be dead as admit that he’d never see Rebecca again, or the kids. Never come home, was how he put it to himself; admit, finally, that the world was empty.

It had been different when he was a younger man. Being nobody was the easy option back then. Born in Preston, Lancashire, where he lived until he was sixteen, he grew up with a drifter’s nature and a drifter’s skill set, too lazy to be dangerous or even effective. He wandered into things, wandered out of them again, cared about nothing.

At school, Tillman had been good at most subjects, the academic stuff as well as workshops and sports, but was too uncommitted to any one thing to turn good into great. Good came without effort, and it was enough. Consequently, he dropped out at sixteen, despite earnest interventions from his teachers, and took a job at a garage that paid sufficiently well to supply a lifestyle of casual vices — drinking, women, occasional gambling — indulged without all that much conviction.

Eventually, though, and maybe inevitably, he’d drifted out of his accustomed orbit. He became part of a generational exodus from the north of England to the south, where there just seemed to be more going on. It wasn’t even a decision, really: in the decades after the Second World War, Lancashire’s mills and factories had foundered like so many torpedoed trawlers, and the waves thrown up by their collapse had pushed a million people to the opposite end of the country. In London, Tillman had done a lot of things, been ambitious in none of them: a strong man whose strengths were hidden from him. Garage mechanic, plasterer, roofer, security guard, joiner. Jobs that required skills, certainly, and Tillman seemed to acquire those skills very readily. What he didn’t do was to stick to any one path for long enough to find out what he was underneath those quotidian disguises.

Perhaps, in retrospect, it ought to have been obvious that a man like that would find his centre of gravity in a woman. When he met Rebecca Kelly, at an after-hours lock-in party given by one of his former bosses in an east London pub, he was twenty-four and she was a year younger. She looked out of place against dark-pink flock wallpaper, but she was so extraordinary that she probably would have looked out of place anywhere.

She wore no make-up, and she didn’t need any: her brown eyes contained all colours and her pale skin made her lips look redder than any lipstick could make them. Her hair was like the hair described in the Song of Solomon, which Tillman vaguely remembered from a religious studies lesson: clusters of black grapes. Her stillness was like the stillness of a dancer waiting for the overture to start.

Tillman had never encountered beauty so perfect, or passion so intense. He’d never encountered a virgin, either, so their first night of lovemaking was unexpectedly traumatic for both of them. Rebecca had wept, sitting amid the bloodied sheets with her head buried in her folded arms, and Leo had been terrified that he had injured her in some profound and irrevocable way. Then she embraced him, kissed him fiercely, and they tried again and made it work.

They were engaged three weeks later, and married a month after that in a registry office in Enfield. Photos from that time invariably showed Tillman with his arm protectively around his wife’s waist, his smile tinged with the solemnity of a man carrying something precious and fragile.

Work had never been entirely real for him. He prospered without effort, meandered without a tether. Clearly, though, love was real: marriage was real. Tillman’s life had folded inward on another’s life, to make a focus where none had been.

Happiness was something he’d never missed because he believed he already had it. Now he understood the difference, and accepted the stark miracle of Rebecca’s love with uneasy wonder. There was nothing you could do to deserve a gift like that, so on some level you always half-expected the boom to drop and the gift to be snatched away.

Instead, the children had come along, and the simple miracle had become a complex one. Jud. Seth. Grace. The names had a biblical ring. Tillman had never read the Bible, but he knew that there was a garden in it, before the Devil showed up and the shit hit the fan. He felt as though he were living there: for six years he felt that.

Part of being happy was that he’d learned to focus his skills and his intellect. He’d set up his own company, selling central heating systems, and he was doing pretty well — well enough to rent a warehouse with a small office attached, and take on a secretary. He worked six days a week, but didn’t stay late unless there was an emergency. He always wanted to be there to help Rebecca put the kids to bed, even though she never allowed him to read them bedtime stories. It was the one thing about her that he didn’t understand. She had a horror of stories, never read fiction herself, and shut him down within a sentence if he ever ventured on a ‘Once upon a time’.

She was a mystery, he had to admit that. He’d explained himself to her in a dozen sentences or so, without the aid of diagrams, but Rebecca was reticent about her past, even more so about her family. She only said that they were very close, and very inward-looking: ‘We were everything to each other.’ She became quiet when she said these things, and Tillman suspected some tragedy that he was too afraid to probe.

Had he married a picture? A façade? He knew so little. But you could know nothing about gravity and still remain fastened to the earth. He was fastened to her, and to the children, that tightly. Gentle, nervous Jud; boisterous, crude Seth; furious, loving Grace. Rebecca, against whom adjectives leaned askew because there was no way to describe her. If he needed to know anything more, she’d tell him. And whether she told him or not, gravity would still operate.

One evening in September, when the summer had stopped as suddenly as a car crash and the trees were burning bright red and yellow, Tillman came home, not one minute later than usual, to find the house empty. Completely empty. Jud was five, and had just started school, so he thought at first that maybe he’d got the date mixed up and missed a parents’ evening. Contrite, he checked the calendar.

Nothing.

Then he checked the bedrooms and his contrition turned to abject terror. Rebecca’s side of the wardrobe was empty. In the bathroom, the vanity unit was bare and his toothbrush stood alone in a purple plastic mug that bore the face of Barney the Dinosaur. The children’s rooms had been even more thoroughly stripped: clothes and toys, sheets and duvets, posters and friezes and pinned-up kindergarten paintings, everything had gone.

Almost everything. One of Grace’s toys — Mr Snow, a unicorn who smelled of vanilla essence — had fallen behind the sofa and been forgotten.

Then he found the note, in Rebecca’s handwriting, consisting of four words.

Don’t look for us.

She hadn’t even signed it.

Tillman was walking wounded, working through the shock of what felt like an amputation. He called the police, who told him he should just wait. You didn’t become a missing person by walking out of the house: time has to elapse before you can be awarded that status. Tillman could maybe call around his wife’s friends and family, the desk sergeant suggested, and see if she was with anyone she knew. If the kids didn’t show up for school the next day, then Tillman should call again. Until then, it was much more likely that the whole family were safe and well somewhere close by than that they’d been abducted en masse. Particularly since there was a note.

Rebecca didn’t have any friends, that Tillman knew of, and he had no idea where her family lived, if they were still alive at all. These options were closed to him. All he could do was walk the streets on the very remote off-chance that he might run into her. He walked, even though he already knew it was an empty hope. Rebecca and the children were far away by this time; the purpose of the note was to make sure that he didn’t follow or to persuade him — as if that were even possible — that they’d left of their own accord.

They hadn’t. That was his starting point. As he stalked the streets of Kilburn like an automaton, he replayed the events of the day again and again: the children kissing him goodbye, with as much spontaneity and love as usual; Rebecca telling him the car might be in the garage for its MOT, so if he needed a lift home she probably wouldn’t be able to pick him up (he called the garage and checked: Rebecca had driven the car in at noon, asked them to replace the spare tyre at the same time, and arranged to pick it up the following morning unless it failed its test). Even the contents of the fridge were a speaking testimony: she’d stocked up for the week, presumably in the morning before dropping the car off.

So the note had been written under duress — a prospect that he had to force his mind away from immediately because the dangerous rage it evoked threatened to tear its way out of him in some crazy way.

The police had been no more helpful the next morning. The note, they explained, made it very clear that Mrs Tillman had left him of her own volition and taken the children with her because she no longer trusted him with them.

‘Was there some marital dispute the night before?’ the desk officer asked him. He could see naked dislike in her eyes: of course there was a dispute, that look said. Women leave their husbands all the time, but they don’t up and run with three kids unless there’s something seriously wrong.

There was nothing, Tillman said, and kept on saying, but the same question surfaced again and again, accompanied each time by an absolute refusal to list Rebecca as a missing person. The kids, yes: school-age and pre-school-age children can’t be allowed to just disappear. Descriptions were taken and photofits put together. The kids would be looked for, Tillman was told. But when found, they would not be taken from their mother, and the police would not necessarily cooperate in putting Tillman and his wife back in contact with each other. That would depend on the story Rebecca told and the wishes she expressed.

At some point in this vicious circle of patronising indifference and bald suspicion, Tillman lost control. He spent a night in the cells, having had to be wrestled away from an impossibly young constable, screaming obscenities, after the little rodent asked him if Rebecca had been having an affair. It was fortunate that he hadn’t got his hands around the kid’s throat: he’d certainly been about to.

As far as Tillman could tell, there was never any real investigation. He got progress reports, at odd intervals; sightings, which according to the Met were always followed up but always turned out to be false alarms; sporadic news articles, which seemed at one point to be building into some kind of conspiracy theory in which he’d murdered his wife and kids or else murdered his wife and sold his kids to Belgian paedophiles. But that kind of phenomenon has to have something to feed on, and since there was no news after the first day, it petered out without reaching critical mass.

Tillman contemplated the ruin of his life. He might have gone back to work, tried to forget, but he never seriously considered it an option. To forget would be to leave Rebecca, and their children, in the hands of strangers whose agenda he couldn’t even begin to guess at. If they hadn’t gone willingly, and he knew they hadn’t, then they’d been taken, from a populous city without so much as a trace. And they were waiting now to be rescued. They were waiting for him.

The problem with this, as Tillman was intelligent enough to appreciate, was that he wasn’t even close to being the man they needed: the man who could find and free his family from the hands of their captors. He didn’t even know where to start.

Sitting in the kitchen of their home, a week after the disappearance, he thought it out with ruthless and clear-headed logic. What needed to be done could not be done by him and could not be trusted to anyone else.

He had to change. He had to become the man who could find and fight and liberate and do whatever else was required to restore equilibrium to the world. The resources he had at his disposal were fourteen hundred pounds’ worth of savings and a mind that had never yet been tested to its limits.

He took Rebecca’s note from his pocket. Don’t look for us. For the thousandth time he read those words, for surface and then for hidden meanings. Maybe, but only maybe, the space after the first word was wider than the other spaces: Rebecca’s yearning for him projected into that minuscule void, begging him to see what her heart was really shrieking as her hand wrote.

Don’t

look for us.

I’m coming, he told her in his mind, his hand balling into a fist. It won’t be soon, but I’m coming. And the people who took you away from me are going to bleed and burn and die.

The next day he joined the army — the 45th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery — and began, methodically, to rebuild himself.

6

Back in the bear pit, later, Harper’s fellow officers were keen to debrief him on his day out with the ball-breaker. He disappointed them by having nothing of substance to say.

‘We were together in the car for like, ten minutes,’ he pointed out. ‘The rest of the time we were squeezing the scene, two weeks late. We barely even talked. It’s not like we were out on a date.’

‘If you were,’ Combes pointed out, ‘she’d just go around afterwards telling everyone you shot off too early.’ This got big laughs all round, despite being just another limp variation on the default Kennedy joke that had been running the circuit for the past six months. As jokes went, it earned its keep, turning up in anonymous emails, graffiti in the toilets, bottom-of-the-barrel drunken rambles at the Old Star. Why did Kennedy leave her boyfriend? What did Kennedy tell the marriage guidance counsellor? Why does Kennedy never reach orgasm?

They told Harper the story. He knew it already, intimately, as every officer in the Met knew it by this time, but the detectives recounting the legend did it for their own enjoyment more than for his. Kennedy had been an ARU, an armed response unit. She’d gone in as part of a team of three. Guy outside a terraced house in Harlesden at two in the morning, shouting, waving a gun. Neighbours had heard windows smash. One said she’d heard a shot.

Kennedy took point, approaching the guy head-on while Gates and Leakey, her two colleagues, moved in behind parked cars to flank him. The guy in question, one Marcus Dell, aged thirty, was as high as a kite on something or other, and the thing he was waving in his right hand did look like a gun. But his left hand was bleeding like a bastard, and according to Kennedy’s statement after the fact, she’d had a suspicion that he’d broken the window by punching it in rather than with a bullet.

So she’d gone in a little closer, talking, talking, talking all the way, till she was ten feet away and she’d seen what Dell was carrying: a broken clamshell phone, its top half sticking out at a suggestive angle.

She called the all-clear and the other two officers came out of covert, full of that mixed adrenalin, relief, anger and slightly surreal buzz that comes with being close to a life-or-death decision and then being told to stand down.

Dell threw the phone at Leakey, hitting him square in the eye. Then both Gates and Leakey cut loose, firing off eleven bullets between them in the space of six crowded seconds. Four of those shots were direct hits: arm, leg, torso, torso.

Amazingly, though, Dell didn’t go down. He went for Kennedy instead, and since by this time she was just a few feet from him, he only had to take a step forward to fasten his hands around her neck.

Consequently, it was Kennedy who fired the bullet that put him down: through the left ventricle at a distance succinctly noted on the incident file as ‘zero feet’. She’d blown his heart out through his back, more or less, and then stood there robed in his blood while Gates and Leakey confirmed the kill.

This was the story as told by the dead man’s wife, the single eyewitness willing to come forward. It turned out Dell had been trying to break into his own house, a result of a marital disagreement that had its roots in the dope he’d ingested and his unwillingness to share. Lorina Dell was very clear about the sequence of events and the respective roles that the three armed officers had played.

Gates and Leakey told the story differently, of course. They claimed they’d fired before Dell threw the phone, and in the still-unaltered belief that it was a handgun.

The story got a little muddy here. Leakey also offered as evidence a handgun, a cheap Russian GSh-18, with a full magazine, which he claimed to have found tucked into the back of Dell’s belt. Gates confirmed that this was the gun’s provenance, even when it turned out not to have a single fingerprint of Dell’s on it.

The testimony that was going to nail them, when this finally came to trial, wasn’t that of the dead man’s stoner wife. It was Kennedy’s. She denied that the GSh-18 had been found at the crime scene (a great many guns had recently arrived in the evidence lockers from a raid on a container ship that had turned out to be smuggling weapons, hashish and — incongruously — cloned viagra pills). She accused both of her fellow officers of having fired on Dell when he manifestly offered no threat.

Kennedy’s decision to play the George Washington gambit took everyone by surprise. It meant her own ARU licence got trashed, along with those of Gates and Leakey, and it set her against the department in a fight that ultimately she couldn’t win. The guy had died with his hands around an officer’s throat: it didn’t even have to come to court if they all kept their stories straight.

In successive interviews, Kennedy had been invited to repeat her version of events probably a dozen times, without a single word being written down. Tactful interviewers invited her to consider the order in which key events had superseded each other, and the full extent of the danger posed by Mr Dell’s attack on her own person. These review sessions had been used in other controversial cases with positive outcomes for the force and all officers concerned. But you could only do so much for a cop with no sense of self-preservation. Kennedy continued to assert that she, Gates and Leakey had used lethal force against a confused drug addict who could barely stay upright. She invited the crown prosecutor to throw the book at her.

So far, that hadn’t happened. The case had now become a three-way running skirmish between the Met, the CPS and the Police Complaints Commission. A full inquiry was underway and would have to report before any charges were preferred. Until then, Gates and Leakey were suspended on full pay, while Kennedy got to stay on in the division, sans gun licence, plying her normal trade.

Except that nothing had come back to normal for anyone concerned. Kennedy was in Coventry: a pariah in the bear pit, a walking target for anything the DCIs felt like throwing at her, and maybe, Harper thought, damaged in less tangible ways — holed below the waterline. When she’d warned him off, he’d gotten the sense that it was cold pragmatism rather than quixotic generosity. Something like the way the officers trapped on the Titanic had finally told the rescue boats to stand off so they wouldn’t get sucked down when the big liner went under.

Harper realised that Combes was still looking at him, waiting for a response to the cautionary tale.

‘She doesn’t seem like the easiest person in the world to work with,’ Harper said, throwing a sop to Cerberus.

‘You got that right,’ someone — Stanwick? — agreed.

‘But I guess she felt pretty strongly about how those other guys messed up the arrest.’

The mood in the room turned a little colder. ‘What did the little bastard expect?’ Stanwick demanded. ‘He assaulted an officer, he went down. Good riddance.’

‘Fine,’ Harper said. ‘And they’ll all probably walk on that basis. So Kennedy’s not hurting anyone by sticking to her story.’

‘Fancy your chances, do you?’ Combes enquired, with a definite edge. ‘She’s a real looker, isn’t she?’

Considered objectively, Kennedy had everything you’d need to merit that description: a figure that went in and out in the right places, striking acid-blonde hair that she wore pulled severely back in a way that suggested she could loosen it and shake it out as a prelude to sex, and that this would be something to see, and a face that — although maybe a little too emphatic at nose and chin — still had an intensity of expression you’d have to call attractive.

But she was ten years older than Harper’s girlfriend, Tessa, and that relationship was new enough to skew his judgement on all other women. He shrugged non-committally.

‘He fancies his chances,’ Combes announced to the room. ‘Well, you can forget it, son. She’s a dyke.’

‘Yeah?’ Harper was interested now, but only as a detective. ‘How’d you know?’

‘We did a day-at-the-races thing last March, the whole department,’ Stanwick told him, as though he was talking to an idiot, ‘and she brought a bird with her.’

‘Wouldn’t that make half of you dykes as well?’ Harper asked, innocently. His tone was light and friendly, but the chill in the room grew: on some level, this was a test, and he wasn’t doing well.

‘Anyway, you’d better get your jollies while you can, mate,’ one of the other DCs summed up. ‘She’s not going to be around for much longer.’

‘No,’ Harper agreed. ‘Probably not.’

The conversation turned to other things, and flowed around him, leaving him out. He let it. He had a lot of phone calls to make, and he might as well make a start while Kennedy was off interviewing Barlow’s sister.

The London Historical Forum was a biannual event hosted by the university. He tracked down the relevant office, which was at Birkbeck, and after doing the phone-tag runaround with a job lot of receptionists and assistants, he was able to requisition a copy of the contact list from the last conference. It came through as an email attachment half an hour later — but instead of a word-processed document, they’d sent jpegs. Each page had been separately mounted on to the copier plate and scanned in, in some cases very sloppily, so that first letters of surnames were clipped off on the left, and the bottom two or three lines of each sheet appeared to have been missed out.

Harper emailed back to ask if there was a Word version of the list somewhere in the system, then printed the scans out. He could work with what he’d been given for now.

As he walked down the corridor to the printer, Harper thought about the conversation he’d just had. Why had he stood up for Kennedy, or at least refused to join in the general condemnation? She was far from likeable and she’d made it abundantly clear that she was happy to work the case solo.

But it was Harper’s first case and some atavistic part of him rebelled against backing out of it: the angel who looked down on police work had to take a pretty dim view of officers recusing themselves for fear of rocking the boat. And Kennedy seemed to have good instincts, too: not flashy, but methodical and thorough. Harper had seen flash, preferred the core skill set intelligently applied. However far her mind was off the vertical as a result of the Dell shooting, the pending court case and having to live in exile within the department, she was still trying to do her job.

So he was going to work with Kennedy and give her the benefit of the doubt — for now, at least. If she busted his balls too much, or if she turned out to be more unstable than he’d guessed, he still had the option of shouting up the ladder and pleading PD, as she’d suggested.

In the meantime, being on the other side of an argument from the likes of Combes and Stanwick — who he had already identified as self-serving dicks — was single malt for the soul.

He took the print-out back to his desk and started the arduous and unpleasant task of chasing up some eyewitness testimony that might not even exist.

He was seven names into the list when he found the next dead body.

7

Rosalind Barlow’s address was Stuart Barlow’s address. The brother and sister lived together — had lived together — in a cottage-style bungalow, just outside the M25 ring in the probably-used-to-be-a-village of Merstham. Like William and Caroline Herschel, or the Wordsworths, or Emily, Anne and Charlotte with Bramwell. Kennedy had a brother of her own and therefore had her doubts about these domestic arrangements. Live-in boyfriends were bad enough: having a brother hanging around the place was an even more cast-iron guarantee of arrested development and neurotic co-dependency.

Ten minutes into the visit, she’d shifted that initial estimate a fair distance. Ros Barlow was a tough, confident woman, tall and solidly built, with a head of auburn hair designed to be sculpted into something big and heraldic — the kind of woman who gets called ‘handsome’ a lot. She was fifteen years younger than her brother, and the house was hers, inherited from their parents. Stuart Barlow had been living in it rent-free for years while Ros held down a job in the securities department of a New York bank. She’d moved back to London only recently, to take up a better position in the City, and so had ended up sharing with her brother for a few months while he sorted something else out. Now, though, she said, she was looking for somewhere else herself.

‘I’ve got a friend I can bunk in with, for a few nights. After that, I’ll try to find somewhere a bit closer to the centre. If there’s nothing on the market, I’ll rent for now. I’m certainly not staying here.’

‘Why not?’ Kennedy asked, surprised by the woman’s vehemence.

‘Why not? Because it’s Stu’s. Every single thing here is his, and it took him years to get it just the way he wanted. I’d rather sell it to someone else who likes this kind of thing than spend the next two years changing it over piecemeal to something that works for me. I’d feel like …’ she groped for a simile ‘… like he was still trying to hang on to me and I was breaking his fingers one by one. It would be horrible.’

Ros had taken the news that the investigation had reopened very much in her stride. ‘Good,’ was all she’d said.

They were sitting in the living room of the cottage, which had nineteenth-century Punch cartoons on the walls and a drinks cabinet that someone had retro-fitted from a Victorian roll-top desk. An open staircase in a modern design, with no risers, divided the room in two — not something you expected to see in a bungalow. Presumably Barlow had had some extension work done in the loft space and there was now a room up there.

‘You asked for the autopsy,’ Kennedy said, putting down the small but extremely potent cup of espresso that Ros had given her when she arrived. ‘Was that because you suspected that your brother’s death wasn’t an accident?’

Ros clicked her teeth impatiently. ‘I knew it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘And I told the constable who came out here exactly why. But I could see he wasn’t listening, so I had to demand an autopsy, too. I’ve been around overworked people long enough to know the signs. You have to make a noise — make yourself really bloody loud and obvious — or else they file you under business as usual and sod all gets done.’

Kennedy agreed, as far as that went, but didn’t say so. She wasn’t here to play ‘ain’t it awful’. ‘That was a local officer, I’m assuming?’ she said. ‘In uniform?’

‘In uniform, yes.’ Ros frowned, remembering. ‘And I called him a constable, but actually I didn’t ask his rank. He had a number — a number and letters — on his shoulder, but no pips or stripes or stars. I’ve been abroad for a fair few years, but I think that makes him a constable unless they’ve changed the uniform regs.’

‘Yes,’ Kennedy said, ‘it does.’ She liked that Ros could call those details to mind after two weeks. It meant she might remember other things with the same clarity.

‘So what did you think had happened to Stuart?’ she asked.

Ros’s expression hardened. ‘He was murdered.’

‘All right. Why do you say that?’

‘He told me.’ Kennedy’s surprise must have shown through her professional poker face because Ros went on more emphatically, as though she’d been contradicted. ‘He did. He told me three days before it happened.’

‘That he was going to be murdered?’

‘That someone might attack him. That he felt under threat and didn’t know what to do.’

Ros was becoming more strident. In the face of her heightened emotion, Kennedy became deliberately emollient. ‘That must have been terrible for both of you,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you contact the police?’

‘Stu had already done that, when he realised he was being followed.’

‘At the conference.’

‘Yes. Then.’

‘But if he was actually threatened …’ Kennedy was tentative. She could see that the other woman disliked being interrogated, was likely to see any question as a challenge unless it was phrased as neutrally as possible. ‘Did he explain all this at the time?’ she asked. ‘I mean, when he called the police and told them that he was being followed?’ Or was there something more? Something he kept to himself? I’m asking because I’ve read the case file now and there was no mention of any actual threats.’

Ros shook her head, frowning. ‘I said he felt threatened, not that he’d actually been threatened. He told the police everything he could tell them, everything that was verifiable. The rest was … impressions, I suppose. But I know that he was afraid. Not generally afraid. Afraid of something specific. Sergeant Kennedy, my brother wasn’t a level-headed sort of man. When we were kids, he was always the one who’d have the sudden enthusiasms — the collecting crazes, the addictions to comics or cult TV shows, all that sort of thing. And emotionally, too, he was always … just all over the place. So I had every reason to think he was exaggerating, making something out of nothing. But that’s not how it was. This time was different.’

‘How was it different?’

‘Someone broke in here, late at night, and went through all of Stuart’s things. That wasn’t imaginary.’

Kennedy’s response was automatic. ‘Did you report it?’ Meaning, is there an evidence trail? Is this documented anywhere?

‘Of course we reported it. We couldn’t claim on the insurance otherwise.’

‘So things were stolen?’

‘No. Nothing, as far as we could see. But we needed new locks and the back door had to be repaired. That’s how he got in, whoever he was.’

‘Was this before or after Professor Barlow noticed he was being followed?’

‘After. And that was when I started to take the whole thing seriously. But you evidently didn’t.’

Because nobody put the case-work together, Kennedy thought, even after Barlow turned up dead. Barlow’s reporting a stalker had only come to light after the autopsy results came in — and any file entries for this breaking and entering were probably still lost in the system. It was farcical. The central criminal register wasn’t exactly new, or complicated. It was supposed to operate automatically now, cross-referencing old cases as new ones were entered on the division’s database. So long as you filled in your fields correctly in the first place, the old stuff just got flagged up for you without you having to do anything.

But not this time.

‘We do seem to have been slow out of the gate,’ Kennedy admitted, trying to forestall Ros Barlow’s hostility by throwing her a bone of contrition. ‘But if you’re right, why didn’t the assailant attack your brother here, after getting entry to the house? Was he surprised in the act or something? Did you hear him come in?’

Ros shook her head. ‘No, we didn’t,’ she said. ‘We only found out someone had broken in when we came down in the morning.’

So assuming there was any through-line at all here, the motive had to go beyond just killing Barlow. He could have been murdered as easily here as at the college; more easily, if he’d been surprised in his sleep.

Kennedy thought again about the spectacular mess in Barlow’s office. Maybe that wasn’t the normal state of things: someone could have broken in there, too. She looked at the slanted column of sunlight coming in through the parted curtains, the dust motes suspended in the still air. The word murdered seemed a bit unreal in this room — and the scenario she’d imagined, of Barlow’s corpse being dragged up the stairs at the history annexe to be thrown down again, ridiculous and melodramatic. But unlike Stuart Barlow, she wasn’t acting on feelings. She was responding to the evidence, and the evidence was pointing towards something complicated and nasty. A murder preceded by a completely separate break-in meant a plan or a motive that went beyond just wanting someone dead.

‘Did you discuss with your brother what this intruder might have been looking for?’ she asked. ‘If Professor Barlow was afraid, was it because he had something specific in his possession? Something valuable that he thought people might come looking for?’

Ros hesitated this time, but finally shook her head again — an admission of ignorance. ‘It’s possible, but Stu almost never discussed his work with me because he knew it bored my arse off. He’d been talking to the Ravellers a lot lately. So he was working on something old. But mostly they work from photos or transcriptions, not from originals. There’d be no reason why he’d have valuable artefacts in the house.’

‘The Revellers?’ Kennedy echoed.

‘Not Revellers. Ravellers. It’s an internet community, for palaeographers — people who work with old manuscripts and incunabula.’

‘Professional academics, then, like your brother?’

‘And hobbyists. A lot of them do it for fun.’

‘How would I get in touch with them?’

Ros shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know. I only use computers for spreadsheets and email. They’re … a forum? A website? I don’t even know. You’d have to ask one of Stu’s colleagues. But I think they’re definitely where you should start. I can’t think of anything else in Stuart’s life that could possibly have motivated anyone to follow him, or attack him.’

Kennedy remembered something that Ellis had said. ‘He was writing a book. Could there have been anything sensational or controversial in that? A new theory or a refutation of an old one? Something that might have harmed someone else’s reputation?’

Ros looked suddenly bleak. She didn’t answer for a moment and had a tremor in her voice when she did. ‘Stu had been working on that bloody book for the last ten years. He used to say he’d probably be writing the acknowledgements on his deathbed.’ She paused and then added, in a colder, flatter tone, ‘It didn’t help that he couldn’t make up his mind what his bloody subject was.

‘For a good five years, it was going to be about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Stu was convinced there were still big things to find in there, even though everybody in the field had been all over them for the last sixty-odd years. Do you know how many books there’ve been on the scrolls already? Hundreds. Literally, hundreds. When I asked Stu why anyone would want to read his, he’d get all mysterious and quote some lines from William Blake.’

‘What lines?’ Kennedy asked.

‘Umm … something about “we both read the Bible, day and night. But you read black and I read white”. Stu thought it was terribly clever, whatever it was. But then he lost interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls altogether. He went into his Gnostic period. All the weird early Christian cults — Arians and Nestorians and the other assorted happy clappers. Then it was about Bishop Irenaeus. And then finally it was about the Rotgut. I think the last time we talked about it, that was where it was at. The Rotgut. It was going to be a complete re-evaluation of the Rotgut.’

Kennedy made a ‘go on’ gesture, which saved her from having to admit verbally that she had no idea what the other woman was talking about. She assumed it wasn’t illicit alcohol.

‘The Rotgut Codex,’ Ros explained. ‘It’s a medieval translation of a lost version of John’s gospel. About as obscure as you can get, unless you want to research something like punctuation marks. I don’t think anyone’s reputation was tied up in Stu’s book. Not even Stu’s. Some universities require you to publish to stay on-staff. Stu had tenure, so he was taking his own sweet time.’

Kennedy asked a few more questions, mostly about Barlow’s colleagues at Prince Regent and the friends he’d made online. Ros was vague about both. She clearly hadn’t been very much involved either in her brother’s public life or in his private enthusiasms.

As she was seeing Kennedy to the door, though, something occurred to her. ‘Michael Brand,’ she said, as though in answer to a question Kennedy had already asked.

‘Who is that?’

‘One of the Ravellers. He’s the only one Stu ever mentioned to me by name. You might not even have to go too far, if you wanted to talk to him. He’s working in London at the moment, or he was up to a few weeks back. Stu met up with him the night before he died.’

‘Just socially or …?’

Ros opened her empty hands. ‘I have no idea. But he was staying in a hotel somewhere in the West End, close to the college. Close enough for Stu to walk there from work. Maybe they talked about all this. Maybe it’s why Brand was here.’

They walked together to the door, Ros visibly still sorting through recent memories. ‘Not the Bloomsbury,’ she muttered. ‘And not the Great Russell. It was around there, though, and it was two words. Two short words.’

She opened the door. Kennedy stepped through, then turned back to face her.

‘Pride Court,’ Ros said. ‘The Pride Court Hotel.’

‘You’ve been a great help, Miss Barlow,’ Kennedy said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Ros, without warmth. ‘Just return the favour.’

Kennedy’s phone rang as she got back to the car. She recognised the number as being one of the bear-pit phones and was tempted to ignore it, but it might be Summerhill checking in on her. She thumbed it open one-handed as she fumbled for her keys with the other hand.

‘Kennedy.’

‘Hi. It’s Chris Harper.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘It’s going great. Seriously, sarge, my productivity rate is going through the roof here.’

The car made a digital clucking sound as Kennedy pressed the key stud, but she made no move to open the door. ‘What? What do you mean?’

Harper’s laugh carried a tremor of excitement, but he just about managed to get a bored, bravura tone into his voice. ‘When I sat down, we just had the one corpse. Now we’ve got three.’

8

The first zombie stories started to come in two days after the crash, but the real flood didn’t hit until day four. These things take time to get up their initial momentum, Sheriff Webster Gayle conjectured, but after they get to a certain point there’s no stopping them.

There was only one story on day two — one real sighting, if you wanted to call it that, although in fact that was the one thing it wasn’t. Sylvia Gallos, the widow of one of the men who’d died on Coastal Airlines Flight 124, had woken in the night, hearing noises downstairs. Though distraught with grief, she’d still had the presence of mind to rummage in the drawer of her bedside table and find the little .22 calibre mouse gun her husband Jack had bought for her. His business had called him away from home a lot, and he used to worry about her safety.

Gun in hand and hand more or less steady, Mrs Gallos had crept down the stairs to find the house empty and the door still securely locked. But the TV was on, a glass of whisky and water was standing half-drunk on the coffee table, and the air was full of the smell of her late husband’s favourite cologne, Bulgari Black.

That was it for day two, but it played well and got a lot of air-time, usually at the end of ten or twelve minutes of more serious and solemn coverage. The authorities were still trying to figure out who to blame the crash on. The black box hadn’t been retrieved yet, although a whole lot of people were out looking for it, and opinion was divided as to what exactly had happened up there. Was it a terrorist atrocity? Maybe a long-term after-effect of all the volcanic garbage sitting in the upper atmosphere after that eruption in Iceland a year or so back? Or worst of all, from the industry point of view, a design flaw that meant all planes of that make (it was an Embraer E-195, and only four years old) would have to be grounded for the foreseeable future.

By day three, according to the TV news, they had a part of an answer to that. Still no black box, but the insurance and FAA people had gone over most of the wreckage and it told a consistent if not yet quite complete story. One of the doors had blown open in mid-flight, causing a sudden and massive depressurisation. After that, a whole lot of other dominoes had gone and toppled over: the pressure bulkhead buckled, causing some hydraulic cables to snap, and a few seconds later the vertical stabilisers cut out. The engines stalled, the air flow broke, and the plane — which had an empty weight of thirty-two tons — was from that moment on about as aerodynamic as a great big bag of tyre irons. Gravity did its thing, enfolding Flight 124 into its ruinous embrace.

In Peason, there was still a feeling of shock and grief for the dead strangers who’d come tumbling out of the sky, but for the nation at large there seemed to be a sense that the event was a lot less interesting now it had an explanation. Consequently, on day three the human interest stories took over from the stories about the crash itself. The focus now turned on the woman flying into New York to be reunited with her sister after a twenty-year feud; the guy who was going to pop the question to his childhood sweetheart; the three passengers who, although travelling separately and seemingly unaware of each other, had all been part of the same intake at Northridge Community High School.

And in among all of these sell-by-the-inch soap opera tragedies there were the walking dead. On day four, they came out in force.

A clerk in the New York Department of Public Works, who took Flight 124 to get home from some junket in Mexico City, had swiped in at his office, sent a couple of emails, surfed a little porn and then — without swiping out again or being seen by security or reception staff — disappeared without a trace. He was lying on a morgue slab in Peason at the time, but evidently routine is a powerful thing.

A woman from New Jersey, also a casualty of 124, took her car out of the garage and drove to a local supermarket, where she drew out fifty dollars from her checking account and apparently bought a goldfish-on-a-string pet toy and a tin of anchovies, which were found in the trunk of the car later that day when the store closed and it was still there in the lot. Her boyfriend affirmed that she always bought her Burmese, Felix, treats of this kind when she’d been away.

And maybe the creepiest of all, another passenger, a Mrs Angelica Saville, had called her brother in Schenectady to complain that the plane had been circling for hours in a fog so thick that nothing could be seen outside the windows. The call had come a full sixty-one hours after 124 hit the ground.

‘Did you read this stuff?’ Webster Gayle asked Eileen Moggs, over their regular midweek lunch at the Kingman Best of the West café, two miles out of town on the 93. He showed her the story about the New Jersey woman and she winced as though it gave her physical pain.

‘This one gets trotted out every ten years or so,’ Moggs said. The look on her face was sour and Gayle was sorry he’d put it there. He found her face — lined, strong-featured, emphatic, topped with a frizz of red hair like low brush fire — an amazing and beautiful thing to look upon. ‘They wait just long enough for everyone to have forgotten the last time, and then damn it if they don’t go right ahead and do it again. It’s a hack tradition. Goes all the way back to the Boston Molasses Flood.’

Gayle thought he’d misheard. ‘The what, now?’

‘The Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Stop grinning, Web. It was a real disaster and two dozen people died. A storage tank burst. They drowned in molasses, which must be a pretty horrible way to die.’

Chastened, Gayle nodded, agreeing that it was. Moggs carried right on making her point. ‘For weeks afterwards, the papers carried stories about how the dead were still turning up for work. Or their ghosts were. They quoted survivors — colleagues and relatives — as giving all kinds of corroborating details. Yeah, that was John’s shirt, Mary always sat in that chair, and so on and so forth. Only they never said those things. Or maybe one or two of them did. After that it was just the hacks making it up and the nut-jobs and hoaxers playing along. That’s all it ever is.’

Sheriff Gayle said he took her word for it, as he usually did on most things outside his own very limited experience — which essentially meant outside the Coconino County limits. But it was sort of a lie: on some half-buried level he was drawn to these stories of strange revenants. A whole bunch of people had died all at once, suddenly and traumatically. Was it too much of a reach to imagine that some of them might come back? That maybe their spirits might have passed over so quickly that they didn’t even realise they were dead, so they kept right on doing the same-old-same-old until the news caught up with them and they faded away? It was a haunting image. He didn’t share it with Moggs, but he kept turning it over and over in his mind.

On the fifth day, the walking dead stories only got a limited airing in the mainstream media, but you could find a zillion of them on the internet. With the help of Connie, who was a lot less sceptical than Moggs, he went looking for them and began to compile a master list. It didn’t bother him that they weren’t always attributed and that details like names and ages changed from one report to the next. There’s no smoke without fire, he reasoned. And since that metaphor raised the hideous, indelible memory of the crash itself, it almost seemed to have something of a timeless truth about it. There were more things, in heaven and in earth. You just never knew, until it happened to you and you suddenly did.

All this time, the County Sheriff’s Department was involved in the investigation of the crash, but only in what you’d call a facilitating capacity. They kept the crowd away from the wreckage on the first day and coordinated access for the ambulances and paramedic crews. Journalists by and large were kept well away from the site, except for Moggs who was allowed to wander at will so long as she didn’t make a big deal out of it. Nobody begrudged her this privilege: Sheriff Gayle was highly regarded, and most of his deputies and troopers felt kind of a warm glow from the reflection that he was getting some.

Then when the airlines’ experts and the FAA’s experts and the insurance company experts came in, Gayle and his people took the lead in the search for the black box, which could have been a needle-in-a-haystack deal if it had been left to the out-oftowners. The thing was putting out a signal, and the locators were very fancy majiggers, locked to that one wavelength, so sensitive you could almost feel them pulling on your arm like a pointer dog. You still needed to know the area to get anything out of them, though. If you just kept to the right heading, you’d hit a mesa or a dry creek bed after a couple of miles or so, and have to go around. And then you’d be off of your line and you’d tear away in a different direction, jam your car in a box canyon and so on. So the Sheriff’s Department had four people working with those search parties, just helping them to negotiate the terrain, as it were.

They were also officially in charge of what came and what went, laboriously logging the writing-up and removal of physical evidence. It wasn’t glamorous policing — very little that fell within Gayle’s purview could be called that — but it did keep the crash in the forefront of his mind and brought him into daily contact with the people actually investigating it.

He took the opportunity of raising the walking dead sightings with anyone who’d stand still long enough to listen. Mostly people seemed to find the topic either funny or morbid, and either way they thought it was bullshit. One of the FAA people, though, was more receptive to the idea. She was a tall, nervous woman named Sandra Lestrier, and she was a member of the spiritualist church. That didn’t make her credulous, she was at pains to point out: spiritualist wasn’t another word for sucker, it meant someone who believed in and was in touch with another dimension of the endless plurality that was life. But she did have a theory about ghosts, and although reluctant at first, she eventually consented to share it. With his impressive height and his rough and ready good looks, Gayle had always had a certain charm with the ladies, which he had never abused: in his fifties now, with his hair turned to silver but still as full as ever, the charm had metamorphosed — to his sorrow — into something avuncular and safe. Women were happy to talk to him. Only Moggs seemed willing to take that further step to pillow talk.

‘Ghosts are the wounds of the world,’ Sandra Lestrier told Gayle. ‘We see the world as a big, physical thing, but that’s only a tiny part of what it is. The world is alive — that’s how come it can give birth to life. And something that big, if it’s alive, you’d expect it to have a big soul, too, right? When the world bleeds, it bleeds spirit. And that’s what ghosts are.’

Gayle was rocked. Religion had never been a big thing in his family, but he was aware of it, and he knew that it came in three flavours: regular, which was okay; Jewish, which was sort of okay too, because the Lord appeared to the Jews and gave them what amounted to an all-clear; and Muslim, which was the bad apple. He’d never realised up until then that there could be progress in religion just like in anything else, fashions that came and went.

He asked Ms Lestrier to tell him more about the wounds of the world, but the specifics turned out to be a little confusing and uninteresting. It was something to do with the persistence of life in the valley of death, and several different kinds of human soul that all had their own names and places in a hierarchy. The more technical it got, the more Gayle tuned out. In the end, he was left with the metaphor and very little else. But he did like the metaphor.

Things were getting a little crazy by this time: the black box from Flight 124 still hadn’t been found and that was becoming kind of an embarrassment to the federal guys. The signal had started to break up, apparently, and now it was hard for them to get a fix on it, even though they’d brought in a spy satellite of some kind to coordinate the search. The FAA guys on the ground were keen to pass some of the blame along to inadequate support from the Sheriff’s Department, and Gayle had harsh words with one of their bigwigs who came into the station to throw his weight around.

It was getting a little ugly and a little political. Gayle hated politics and wanted the box found before anyone from the governor’s office got involved. He started running the search recons himself, which had the incidental benefit that he sometimes got to ride shotgun for Ms Lestrier and hear a little more about her newfangled religion.

He was riding solo when he met the pale people, though. He was following the line of a broad arroyo with a whole lot of tributaries — badly broken ground that the feds had already hit and bounced off of. It was late afternoon but still hot, the kind of cloudless day where the shadows are as black as spilled ink and the sun hangs dead centre in the sky like a piece of fruit you could almost reach up and touch. Gayle stayed in the air-conditioned car as much as he could, but had to get out to walk down to the stream whenever the banks were high enough to hide it. Not that there was much of a stream at this time of year: just little puddles here and there on the creek bed, each with a few skinks around it like an honour guard.

There was nobody else in sight. Nobody much would have a reason to come out here in the heat of the day. Gayle had got out of the car a half-dozen times to trek down to the bottom of the arroyo, kick a few rocks around to prove he’d been there, and trek back up again.

Then one time he came scuffling and sliding down the steep bank to find himself abruptly face to face with two complete strangers. They weren’t hiding or anything: they didn’t jump out on him from cover. It was more like he’d been lost in his own thoughts and the first time he registered their presence they were right there in front of his damn nose, staring him down.

A man and a woman. Both young — maybe in their mid-twenties or so — tall, and lean in a way that suggested a whole lot of effort spent in a gym or on a track. They had incredibly pale skin, almost like albinos, but the man had dark red flashes high up on his cheekbones where he’d obviously caught a little too much sun. They both had jet black hair, the guy’s long and loose, the woman’s fastened up at the back of her head into a no-nonsense bun the size of a fist. Their eyes showed black, too, although they were probably just dark brown.

But the thing that Gayle noticed first of all, and most of all, was the symmetry: identical sand-coloured shirts, tan slacks, tan shoes, as though they were aiming to blend in with the surrounding desert; identical stares on identical faces, like he was looking at the same person twice, even though they were of different sexes and weren’t even physically alike at all. He thought of the Viewfinder toy he’d had as a kid, and how each picture was really two pictures, on opposite sides of the reel. It was like that — and for a second he was almost afraid to speak to them in case they answered in creepy unison.

But they didn’t. In answer to his belated ‘Howdy’, the woman nodded while the young guy gave him back a strangely formal ‘Good day to you’. Then they both went back to staring at him: neither of the two had moved an inch so far.

‘I’m looking for the black box from the airplane that went down,’ Gayle explained, unnecessarily. ‘About so big by yay long.’ He gestured with his hands, which of course took them away from his belt where his department-issue FN five-seven rested in its worn leather holster. He realised this a moment later, dropped his hands again awkwardly, and still neither of the strangers had moved. Gayle was at a loss to understand why he felt so ill at ease.

‘We haven’t seen anything like that here,’ the man answered. His voice was deep and it had a weird something to it that Gayle couldn’t quite get his head around. It wasn’t that he sounded foreign, although he did, just a little. It was the tempo, which was sort of sing-song, like someone reading from a book: slightly slower than normal speech, with a weight behind it that a casual remark like that just didn’t need. The man also put a slight but noticeable emphasis on the word here, which Gayle picked up on and thought was odd.

‘Well, I’ll take any clue I can get,’ he said. ‘You see any sign of it some place else?’

The man frowned, seeming momentarily troubled or irritated, then countered with a question. ‘Why are you looking for it? Is it important?’

‘Might could be, yeah. It’s got all the intel on it about how that plane come down. There’s a whole lot of people looking all over for this thing.’

The woman nodded. The guy didn’t react at all.

‘Well, keep your eyes open anyway,’ Gayle said, just to make a hole in the silence.

‘We’ll strive to do so,’ the woman promised. Again, as with her partner, there was that measuredness and that weight, like the words had been written down for her to say. And again, the accent was unplaceable but definitely not local. Gayle, for whom local was the measure of all things benign, experienced that strangeness as mild discomfort.

The young man reached up a hand to wipe his eye, as though there was a dust speck in it. When he lowered his hand again, there was a smear of red across his face, right under the eye. It gave Gayle a little bit of a shock. Forgetting his manners, he pointed.

‘You’ve got something,’ he said, inanely, ‘on your cheek there.’

‘I weep for witness,’ the man said. Or at least that was what it sounded like.

‘For what?’ Gayle echoed. ‘It looks like you … did you cut yourself or something? It looks like you’re bleeding.’

‘You could perhaps search over there,’ the woman broke in, ignoring Gayle’s solicitude. ‘Where the scree is. If the box had fallen there, it would have slid down into the weeds at the bottom of the bank. It would be out of sight unless you came very close to it.’

Now the measured pace sounded like a lawyer in court, picking his words to skirmish his way around something he wasn’t going to admit to. Gayle wondered whether these two knew something they weren’t saying. He didn’t have a damn thing to hold them on, though, and something about them was still giving him a crawly feeling at the nape of his neck. He just wanted this encounter to be over, and he was about to give them a nod and a thank you kindly, then move on.

The strangers moved first, both at the same time, and without there seeming to be any signal between them. As slow as they talked, when they moved it was like drops of water running on a greasy griddle. They were past Gayle in a split-second, parting to go around him. Wrong-footed, embarrassingly slow, he turned to watch them go. Saw them walking by his car and on up the road, fast and smooth, falling into step with one another like soldiers.

The nearest building — a gas station — had to be five miles up that road, and it wasn’t a walk that anyone would make by choice in the middle of the day. All the same, that seemed to be what the strangers were proposing to do. Was that how they’d gotten here? They just walked from somewhere? How could they do that without having their faces and hands burned all to hell and gone?

Gayle opened his mouth to call after them. A man could die of heatstroke just walking around out here like that, without a hat. But the words sort of died in-between his brain and his mouth. He watched the two figures top a slight rise and walk on out of sight.

With an effort, Gayle pulled his mind back to the task in hand.

This little stretch of the arroyo was empty, too, but he saw plenty of sign that those oddballs had walked around here some: footprints and scuff marks in the sand and the darker dirt of the creek bed, a bit of sage that had been torn up as they walked through it. It looked like they’d done pretty much what he was doing: come down from the road, walked as far as they could along the near bank, then stopped and turned around when they hit a gully they couldn’t cross.

Could just be an afternoon stroll. Drug transaction. Pay-off for some political backscratching. Sexual assignation. No, not the last. The two had something about them that made Gayle believe they were related — very closely related — and his imagination rebelled against the vision of stereo onanism that rose in his mind. He tidied it out of sight and tried to forget about the creepy duo. They hadn’t done anything out of place; had been extremely polite and helpful, in fact, and didn’t have to explain to the law any more than anyone else did what they were doing walking along a dry arroyo on a hot day.

He climbed the bank, abruptly aware that he was sweating like a pig. As he walked back to the car, he could hear Connie’s voice chattering on the radio-phone, asking him to pick up if he was there.

He hooked the handset out through the open window and pressed the talk button.

‘Checking in, Connie,’ he said. ‘I’m on Highwash three miles out from 66. Just working my way up the road, here. You need me?’

‘Hey, Web,’ Connie replied, her voice half broken up with the crackle from the tall rocks up here. ‘You can come back in. We’re all done on that black box thing.’

Gayle swallowed this information with a certain dour resignation. He’d put a lot of hours into this business. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Where’d they find it?’

‘They didn’t.’

‘What?’ Gayle stuck his head in through the car window to shut out the sound of the wind, which had sprung up at just the wrong moment. ‘What did you say?’

‘They didn’t find it. It just stopped transmitting, and they gave up on it. But that FAA woman you’re always talking to said they got everything they needed out of the wreck. The whole damn circus just up and rolled out. She said to tell you bye. Over and out.’

Gayle shoved the phone back on to its rest, feeling more perplexed than aggrieved — although he had to admit that he was pretty sore, when it came down to it. Just gave up? One second it’s crucial, the next it doesn’t matter a damn?

Gayle was a stubborn man and that didn’t sit right with him.

It wasn’t over until he said it was.

9

An incidental benefit of being a cop was that you got to ignore the congestion charge, central London parking restrictions and the speed limit. Kennedy drove back into London along the A23 with the windows open — not quite like a bat out of hell, but fast enough to air-cool her overclocked imagination.

Three dead historians at the same conference. In the words of Oscar Wilde, that seemed to be considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance. It could still be nothing, probably was nothing. Even now, an outrageous coincidence seemed more likely than a ruthlessly efficient killer, stalking and striking down people who had strong opinions about the Rotgut Codex and superannuated Christian sects.

But Stuart Barlow’s death hadn’t been an accident. That was obvious, both from the autopsy and from the physical evidence. Kennedy had mixed opinions about autopsies: sometimes they were more about politics than facts, and politics is the art of the possible. With the physical evidence, she trusted her instincts — and mourned all over again the fact that nobody had bothered to call in a forensics team on the night when Barlow had yoyoed up and down that stairwell. She could be sitting on DNA, fibres, fingerprints, any amount of serviceable stuff, instead of flailing around in the dark looking for a direction.

Maybe on some level, too, she wished this hadn’t come up right now. She’d been living in a kind of suspended animation since the night when Marcus Dell got shot. Or rather, since the night when she’d fired the bullet that put Dell down. It was important to get the grammar right. Heather, active subject, as in Heather pulled the trigger. Dell, passive object, as in the bullet hit Dell in the heart, and tore right on through.

When you came up for an ARU licence, they tested you for a whole lot of things and mental stability was most of them. They just called it by a lot of different names, like ability to handle stress, emotional intelligence, panic index rating, psychological integration rating and so on. It all came down to the one question: would you lose it if you had to shoot someone or if someone was shooting at you?

And the answer, to put it baldly, was that nobody knew. Kennedy had scored top end on all of those scales. She’d also drawn her weapon on three occasions, and fired it twice, in one case exchanging shots with an armed suspect — a bank robber named Ed Styler who she’d brought down with a bullet in the shoulder. She’d survived all that well enough and never lost a single night’s sleep over it.

Dell was different. She knew why, too, but didn’t want to go there just yet. It was a can of worms that, once opened, could prove to be impossible to square away again. So she soldiered on without a weapon; relieved, really, to be without it for the time being, until the whole mess got sorted out. The problem, though — the wider problem, which made the pending prosecution shrink into a wrong-end-of-the-telescope perspective — was that she might have lost something else along with the gun and the right to carry it: the iron faith in her own judgement that had made carrying it possible in the first place.

She found Harper in the canteen and hooked him right out of it into one of the interview rooms. There was no way she was having this conversation with anyone else from the division listening in. She closed the door and leaned against it. Harper sat on the desk, still with half a chicken sandwich in his right hand and a can of Fanta in his left. It was four in the afternoon and he was finally getting round to lunch. From his face, she could tell how happy he was with the way the case was going. The sweat-room smelled of piss and mildew, but Harper didn’t seem to mind.

‘Take it from the top,’ Kennedy said.

Harper, with his jaws working, gave her an ironic salaam but said nothing. Kennedy had to wait, with as much patience as she could manage, until he’d swallowed the mouthful and washed it down. ‘I got the list and started working through it,’ he said, finally. ‘Got nowhere on the stalker. Nobody else saw him. Nobody else even remembered Barlow talking about him.’

‘Tell me about the deaths,’ Kennedy said, bluntly.

‘Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Catherine Hurt and Samir Devani. They both attended that history conference and they’ve both died since. Amazing, yeah? And you know what’s even better? Hurt pegged it on the same night as Barlow, Devani the day after.’

Kennedy said nothing as she pondered on that timing. It was a very tight spread, by anybody’s reckoning. Out of nowhere, she remembered a garbled line or two from Hamlet: someone asking Death what the big occasion was in the underworld that caused him to take so many princes all on the same night.

‘How did they die?’ she asked.

‘Accidents in both cases. Or they were recorded as accidents. But so was Barlow, right?’ Harper raised his left hand, knocked down the index finger and then the forefinger as he recited the brief litany. ‘Catherine Hurt, hit and run. Devani, electric shock from a badly earthed computer.’

‘Did you get the files?’

‘There’s only a file for Hurt. It’s on my desk, but seriously, there’s sod all in it. No witnesses, no CCTV footage, no nothing.’

Kennedy took that on the chin. She’d heard on a TV documentary that the UK had twenty per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras, but it was a sad fact of twenty-first-century policing that they were never where you needed them to be. ‘Is it just those two?’ she asked Harper. ‘Or are you still working your way through the list?’

‘I’m about two-thirds done. Still waiting on a lot of people to get back to me, though — so I’ve talked to a little under half of them. Before you ask, I’ve been trying to find a link between the three victims, but I haven’t come up with anything so far. Well, apart from the convention itself. They’re not even all historians. Devani is the odd one out — he’s a modern languages lecturer at a community college in Bradford. Hurt is a teaching assistant at Leicester De Montfort. Their names don’t come up together anywhere when you feed them into a search engine.’

Kennedy was surprised at that. In her experience, if you typed any collection of random names into Google, you automatically got a million hits. Maybe the absence of a connection was suspicious and anomalous in itself. ‘Are you all right to keep working through the list?’ she asked Harper.

His chagrin showed on his face. ‘We’ve got two new victims,’ he pointed out. ‘Shouldn’t we go and do some site work?’

‘Possible victims. And the sites are as old as Barlow’s. Tomorrow we’ll go out and do some recce. First, let’s make sure we didn’t miss anybody else.’

‘What are you going to be doing?’ Harper demanded, suspicion in his voice.

‘I’m going back to Prince Regent’s, to have another look at Barlow’s office. His house was burgled a while back. I’m wondering if someone might have gone through his things at the college, too.’

‘What would that prove?’

Kennedy was going on instinct — the indefinable sense that she’d missed something the first time she was in that room — but she didn’t want to say that: it was too hard to defend. ‘For starters,’ she said instead, ‘it would prove that the stalker existed. And it might give us a line on a possible motive. Old artefacts, manuscripts, something like that. Smuggling them, forging them, stealing them. I don’t know. Barlow thought someone was following him and maybe he thought he knew why. I can ask about these other two at the same time — see if anyone at Prince Regent’s knows of any connection between them and Barlow.’ She paused. ‘Do something else for me?’

‘Oh, anything. I’ll be sitting here with all this time on my hands.’

‘Call a hotel — the Pride Court, in West one. Somewhere around Bloomsbury. Ask for contact information for someone who was staying there recently. Michael Brand.’

‘Yeah, okay. Who is he?’

‘He was in some sort of online club that Barlow belonged to. They call themselves the Ravellers. In fact, it would be great if you could get a membership list from somewhere. If either of these other two DOAs were in the same gang, we might be on to something.’

Harper made her spell the name out before she left. ‘When are you going back to Summerhill?’ he asked her, as they walked back along the corridor.

‘When we know what we’ve got. Not yet. The DCI threw this to us because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. When we bring it back to him, the first thing he’s going to think is that we’re trying to put one over on him. We’ll need to make a case.’

‘Three dead historians don’t make a case?’

‘They do if they were murdered. We don’t know that yet.’

‘Oh, they were murdered all right.’ Harper sounded almost cheerful. ‘Congratulate me, Kennedy.’

‘On what?’

‘This is my first case in Division. I hit a serial killer on my first case.’

Kennedy didn’t share his enthusiasm. That cluster pattern of supposed accidents was still troubling her a lot. One killer, working his way through a list? Not likely. Not likely at all. You’d need to be really lucky, or else to have done immaculate recon, to get three people in two days and come away clean. Serial killers were often obsessives, and they were very good at finding the victims that matched the needs of their particular psychosis, but they mostly treated each murder as a separate project. And spree killers just exploded, at a time and place of their own choosing. If she and Harper were dealing with a murderer, it was a murderer who didn’t seem to fall into either of those categories.

She stopped a couple of turns of corridor short of the bear pit, sparing Harper’s reputation, and turned to face him. He was looking at her expectantly. He made a beckoning motion with one outstretched hand, coaxing her.

‘Fine. Congratulations, Harper.’

‘Like you mean it.’

She punched him on the shoulder.

‘Good going, Chris. You rock. First of many, man.’

‘Thank you. Makes up for spending the day on the phone.’

‘Tomorrow will be different.’

She remembered that promise later and wondered whether he’d believed her.

10

Solomon Kuutma was a mystery, even to himself. A man who revered honesty and transparency, he moved in secret and hid the deepest truths in the deepest wells: seeing all life as sacred, he killed without compunction and ordered others to kill.

If anything about his life troubled him, it was the thought that these contradictions, seen from the outside, could look like mere hypocrisy. Other men might not trouble to think through the paradoxes to the simple truth at their core. They might judge him, and judge him unfairly, and though the judgements of men weighed as much as a feather weighs (those of women, infinitely less), the unfairness — purely hypothetical — was irksome to him.

He had thought, therefore, of writing a memoir, to be given to the world after his death. All names, all circumstantial details, would be removed, but the central fact of a good man bending his conscience to fit through the needle’s eye would be clearly explained, and so would be understood by those who read with open eyes and minds and hearts.

Obviously, this was madness. The memoir would never be written, the explanation never offered. Even without names, the truth would be apparent and all his labours of many years would be made meaningless at a stroke. His masters would be horrified to hear that Kuutma had indulged such a wild idea even for a second. They might even call him home — a homecoming without honour, and for that reason unbearable: the greatest joy turned into the most trenchant pain.

All the same, Kuutma composed, within the privacy of his mind, the explanation for his actions. He recited it to himself, not like a prayer, but like a prophylaxis — a ward against evil, because a man doing the things that Kuutma did was at risk of falling into evil without even knowing it. Sitting on the rooftop terrace of a café in Montmartre, with Paris sprawled wanton below him like a submissive lover, he considered the situation that had arisen because of the actions of Leo Tillman, and he explained, to no one but himself and perhaps God, what he intended to do to resolve that situation.

My greatest skill, he thought, my greatest gift, is love. You can’t defeat an enemy without knowing him, and you can’t know him without loving him, without letting your mind move into silent sympathy with his. Once that Herculean task is done, you will be ahead of him always and without effort, able to lie in ambush along all the pathways of his life.

But Kuutma could not love Tillman. And perhaps that was why Tillman was still alive.

Kuutma had been following the ex-mercenary ever since Turkey, trying to decide what approach might be appropriate, given that Tillman had now murdered Kiril Kartoyev and presumably, before murdering him, had spoken with him.

It was a dynamic problem, played out across four dimensions as Tillman moved across the face of the continent. Tillman moved very quickly, but that was not in itself a source of difficulties. Much more troublesome was the fact that he moved in a deliberately scattershot way, complicating pursuit and requiring Kuutma to withdraw and redeploy his teams many times over. Tillman would book a taxi and then walk, buy a train ticket and then steal a car. And as though he knew about the American debacle, which at this stage seemed impossible, he never, ever flew.

Tillman only stayed in Erzurum for a few hours, not long enough for Kuutma to move a team into place around him. Barely long enough, in fact, to change his clothes, to shave and perhaps to check whatever networks he used to see whether there was any fall-out from the raid on Kartoyev’s house in Ingushetia that might personally affect him.

Kartoyev’s death was inconvenient to Kuutma. The Russian was only a supplier, and a foulness unworthy even to be touched because the things he supplied served the basest impulses of men. Still, he’d been efficient and useful, and had learned long ago to keep to his assigned place in the scheme of things. Kartoyev asked no questions. He sourced difficult items quickly and untraceably. He kept his avarice within acceptable bounds.

Now a new Kartoyev would have to be found, and that was Tillman’s fault. Or perhaps the fault lay with Kuutma himself, for not addressing sooner the unique problems that Tillman presented.

I held back from killing you because I wanted to be sure beyond doubt that you needed to be killed: that there was no possibility my judgement was tainted. This was not cowardice but compunction. It does not diminish me.

Still, in Erzurum Kuutma held back a little more. Even if his worst presentiments were realised, there was time; time to move gently towards that synthesis of perspectives that was the heart of his mystery. Time to understand all, and to forgive all, and then to act.

From Erzurum, Tillman went to Bucharest, probably by way of Ankara. Most likely he’d taken the train, or rather a number of trains, doubling back through the mountains north of Bursa on foot. There was a place there where two branch lines passed within seven miles of each other, before veering away sharply to north and west. The traffic on the western line was mostly freight: it would have been relatively easy for Tillman to jump on board on a slow gradient and ride the rods, or force the door of a carriage, and be carried through three hundred bone-shaking miles, across two sloppily guarded borders, to the Romanian capital.

In Bucharest, though, he used his own passport — one of many passports, but one he’d used before and which was traceable to him — to obtain a room in the Calea Victoriei Hotel. Kuutma weighed his options with a fine discrimination. It was still far from clear what Tillman knew, or what his aims were, and in these rare, ambiguous instances the Messengers’ creed was Janus-faced. Do nothing that is not warranted. Do everything that is needful.

The killing of Kartoyev, Kuutma reasoned, had put Tillman over the invisible, wavering line into the second of those categories. He would need to be removed, and ideally he would need to be interrogated first. Kuutma would take care of the interrogation himself. He contacted local Messengers, and a team of four was despatched to the Calea Victoriei to detain Tillman long enough for Kuutma himself to arrive and take over.

But although Tillman had checked in at the hotel, and had paid for three nights in advance, it seemed to be yet another of the blind alleys he liked to set up wherever he went. When the Messengers moved in, it was to find the bed empty, the room untouched apart from a note that in due course found its way to Kuutma.

The note read, Cuts both ways.

Kuutma felt certain the note did not refer directly to him, even though it seemed to pun on his name. Tillman could not know his name. Only one person Tillman had ever met could possibly have told him, and that one person was secure, beyond reasonable or even unreasonable doubt. No, the note was a taunt — and therefore a juvenile and mistaken gesture on Tillman’s part. He meant only to say that Kuutma, and the powers he represented, could not move against him without revealing their hand and making his search easier.

He would learn that it did not cut both ways: it was only in the last and least era of human history, where the extraneous was sanctified, that razors were designed with a double edge.

From Bucharest Tillman went to Munich and from Munich to Paris, by paranoid and complicated means — the stolen car among them. Either he avoided border stations altogether or else he presented a false passport that Kuutma’s sources hadn’t yet linked to him. There were no official records of his journey, no footprints to follow, any more than there would have been if Kuutma had made the same pilgrimage himself.

In Paris a team had already been deployed, because Kuutma by this time had more than a presentiment of where his quarry was heading. The three Messengers there — chosen and assigned by Kuutma with due consideration for the nature of the task and the target — picked up Tillman’s trail on the Boulevard Montparnasse and moved in quickly. They assumed that Tillman was heading for the Metro station and had already decided to kill him there. Instead, Tillman walked into the underground parking garage of the Tour Maine. But when the team closed in to despatch him, he had disappeared. A thorough search of the area revealed no trace of him.

At this point, the team committed an enormous breach of protocol. Under their leader’s orders, they dispersed, as was right and proper, returning to their safe house by different routes. But they failed to use the check-reverse-check system instigated by Kuutma to ensure that none was followed.

The next time the Paris safe house was left empty, it was ransacked. Tillman had turned Kuutma’s sting back upon himself, with a certain grace. Fortunately, they kept no documents of any kind at the safe house. What documents did Messengers need? Tillman escaped, but he escaped with empty hands.

Kuutma felt he was learning from these failures. Tillman had been a mercenary for nine years and most of his experience had been in urban warfare. He was comfortable in cities, knew how to find invisibility in a crowd, or a doorway where someone else would see a dead end. So clearly, when they next sought to close the net on him, it should be somewhere those skills would be of no use.

Magas. Erzurum. Bucharest. Munich. Paris. The westward trend of Tillman’s journey was marked and unmistakable now, and it seemed inevitable that it would end in the one place where it was least convenient to have him go. Kuutma could be paranoid, too. He used all the resources he had ready to hand — not plentiful but certainly adequate — to watch the mainline stations northward from Paris and the ferry ports from Quimper to Hook of Holland.

In the meantime, he reviewed what he knew about the man who had become the most fascinating irritant in his far from serene existence. Most interesting to him, without a doubt, was the period of Tillman’s life that began with the day he returned home to find his family vanished and his house cold and empty.

Tillman could easily have gone back to what he was before — a man asleep, made docile first by his own idleness and then by bovine contentment. He could have found another woman, and been equally happy with her, since surely to a serious man all women were alike. But he did not do these things. He went in a different direction entirely and acquired a new set of skills. Seen in context, it formed an extreme but unsurprising response to grief and loss: to become a soldier, a man who kills without human feeling, since nothing in his own life seemed any longer to call for the exercise of such feeling. An extreme response, yes. But now, in retrospect, it was possible to read the same decision in another way.

Twelve years of soldiering, first in the regular army and then as a mercenary. For the first time, Tillman had seemed completely absorbed, completely committed. He had been promoted to corporal, then to sergeant. A commissioned rank had been offered him, but by then he was in a mercenary outfit, and ranks, in such an organisation, were a loose fit at the best of times. Tillman chose to remain a sergeant so he could stay in the field, and his employers were happy to let him stay there because in the field he excelled. The soldiers who served with him gave him their taciturn worship and the name Twister — a tribute to an ability to get out of any situation with his hide and any other hides that he was minding miraculously unscathed.

It seemed like Tillman had found a new focus, a new family. But Kuutma, reviewing the evidence now, suspected that this had always been an illusion. Tillman had no interest in acquiring a new family. He was intent, still, on finding the one he’d lost. Throughout these years, he was equipping himself for a specific task. Building up a skill set that would be supremely and minutely appropriate when he stepped aside from soldiering and launched himself — suddenly and without warning — into his current search.

Kuutma remembered a conversation, with unsettling vividness. The last time … no. Not the last time. There was another time, after that. But close to the terrible end, the indelible moment.

‘Will he forget you?’

‘Oh God! Why would you care?’

‘Will he forget you?’

‘Never.’

‘Then he’s a fool.’

‘Yes.’

Tillman’s starting point was a name: Michael Brand. Rebecca Tillman had met with a Michael Brand on the day of her disappearance, by prior assignation. Unfortunately, she’d left a note of the name, the time and the place on a pad next to the telephone in her kitchen, where she’d taken the call, and though she’d torn off the sheet and taken it with her, Tillman had been able to make out the impression of the characters on the sheet beneath.

The name led nowhere, of course. The hotel where Rebecca Tillman had arranged to meet Brand was the scene of no carnal or criminal actions, and forensic investigation would unearth nothing there. It was simply the place in which she had been told what she needed to be told, so that the necessary arrangements could be made. It was even late, past the time when she should have been told, and lateness was always to be deplored in such matters. Perhaps if Brand had been more mindful of his duty … but Brand was by necessity a blunt and uncertain instrument.

Still, it was a blind alley. That should have been the end as well as the beginning of Tillman’s quest. He had a name, but nothing to attach to the name. He had the fact of a meeting, but no hypothesis that made sense of the meeting. He should have given up.

Thirteen years later, he had not given up. He had emerged from the red spatter of the world’s battlefields, a man given over to violence and death, to resume with unexpected vigour a search that it now appeared he had never really abandoned. He was looking for his wife, who after so long an absence might not even be alive; for his children, who he would not even know if he saw them. He was trying to rebuild by force of will the one moment of real joy his life had ever harboured.

It was of the utmost importance to Kuutma, and to the people who employed and put their trust in him, that Tillman should fail. It was also, in a different sense, important to the fates of twenty million others.

Because if Tillman even got close to the truth, that was the number of people who would die.

11

The bursar wasn’t available when Kennedy got to Prince Regent’s. In fact, nobody was. The history annexe seemed to be deserted except for a sad-looking man at the front desk, framed against the backdrop of the bulletin board with its endless vista of the gigs of yesteryear: the Dresden Dolls, Tunng, the Earlies. She asked if the receptionist could open the room up for her himself: that was outside his brief. And nobody else was available on-site? Nobody. What about in the main building? The main building was outside his brief.

She flashed her ID. ‘Get someone over here now,’ she told him, grimly. ‘I’m not asking for an extension on my homework, I’m investigating a death.’

The sad man grabbed the phone and spoke into it with a certain urgency. A couple of minutes later, Ellis bustled through the door, annoyed and flustered. ‘Inspector Kennedy,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.’ His expression said a lot more, none of it complimentary.

‘I’d like to take another look at Professor Barlow’s office, Mr Ellis. Would that be possible?’

‘Now?’ The bursar’s lack of enthusiasm was palpable.

‘Ideally, yes. Now.’

‘It’s just that there’s a degree ceremony tomorrow and a lot to do if we’re to be ready. It would be much more convenient if you could wait until next week.’

She didn’t bother to repeat the speech about investigating a death. ‘I’m happy to just sign out the key and find my own way,’ she told him. ‘I know you’re a busy man. But of course, if it’s too late now, I can come back tomorrow morning.’ During your damned degree ceremony.

The bursar caved with alacrity. He had the sad man on reception bring the cleaner’s sub-master key from a locked cabinet on the wall behind him. ‘This will open all the doors in that corridor,’ Ellis told her. ‘But obviously I’ll need to be told if you intend to go into any other rooms. There are privacy implications.’

‘I’m only interested in that one room,’ said Kennedy. ‘Thank you.’

Ellis turned away, but Kennedy detained him with a touch on his arm. He turned back, wearing an aggrieved expression.

‘Mr Ellis, there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about before you go. Professor Barlow was a member of an online group or society of some kind. The Ravellers. Do you know anything about that?’

‘A little,’ Ellis admitted, grudgingly. ‘Not my field, as I said before, but yes. I know what they do.’

‘Which is?’

‘They translate documents. Very old, very difficult documents. Badly preserved codices, decontextualised fragments, that sort of thing. Some of them, like Stuart, are professionals in the field, but I think a lot of people in the group are just interested hobbyists. It’s a place where they exchange ideas, suggest hypotheses and get feedback. Stuart used to joke that when the CIA found out how good the Ravellers were, they’d either recruit them all or have them assassinated.’

Kennedy didn’t get the joke. In answer to her blank expression, Ellis elaborated. ‘Code-breaking, you see. Some of the early codices are so badly damaged, you’re trying to make out the whole message from about a third of the characters. You have to use X-rays, fibre analysis, all sorts of things, to guess at what’s missing.’

‘Where does the name come from?’ Kennedy asked. ‘The Ravellers?’

It was Ellis’s turn to look blank now. ‘I have no idea. Ravel isn’t actually a verb, is it? Just a back formation from “unravel”. To knit things together? To combine small pieces into bigger meanings? Or perhaps it’s a technical term. I really couldn’t say.’

‘Do you know who any of the other members of the group are or how I could contact them?’

The bursar’s interest, not huge to start with, was visibly waning. ‘You’d have to get in touch with whoever runs the forum, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it would be too hard.’ Another thought struck him and he raised his eyebrows. ‘Of course, that’s assuming the server and the moderators are based here in the UK,’ he mused. ‘It might be harder if they were in the United States, say, or somewhere in Europe. There’d be jurisdictional problems, wouldn’t there?’

‘Possibly. Thank you, Mr Ellis, you’ve been a great help.’

She took the key and headed for the stairs. Behind her, she heard the sad man’s woes being added to in low but ferocious tones. Clearly, the bursar felt that this could have been handled without his personal intervention.

Barlow’s study was exactly as she remembered it, except that it was later in the day and the sunlight was shining through the slatted blinds at a shallower angle. She stood in the doorway, trying to recall what it was she’d seen earlier, what had stood out from its surroundings enough to register on her subconscious. It was a line, she decided, a line out of place, and lower than her eye level. It didn’t seem to be there now, but maybe that was because of the changed light.

She picked up the framed newspaper article in both hands, glazed side facing outwards. Catching the light from the window, she reflected it round the room, a moving spotlight that stood in for the sunlight of that morning.

It took a while, but she got there in the end. One of the floor tiles was standing proud of its neighbours, creating a shadow along its trailing edge. As though it had been lifted and put back, but hadn’t settled into exactly the same position as before.

Kennedy knelt down. Sliding her fingernails under the edge of the tile, she lifted it gently. Underneath, lying unprotected on the dusty floorboards, was a rectangle of slightly glossy card. At the top the single word: Here? Blue biro, scrawled, double underlined. And then at lower right corner, several sets of characters written more neatly and carefully in black fineliner.

Turning the card over, she saw that it was a photograph.

It showed a building, from a distance: a factory, or more likely a massive warehouse of some kind. A grey-painted concrete wall reared up six storeys or more from the cracked asphalt of a weed-choked parking lot. A few small windows near the top, but otherwise an unbroken surface. A small strip of road visible at one corner of the photo. A chainlink fence that looked reasonably intact, but plenty of evidence of ruin elsewhere: the garbage piled up against the fence, the weeds squeezing up between the paving slabs, and at one edge of the photo the abandoned hulk of a car, its tyreless wheels up on bricks. The whole image was blurred and the angle was a little off: a picture taken very sloppily, or maybe very quickly, by someone in a car or a train. It looked like the test photo you’d take to bring the counter on your camera from zero to one at the start of a new reel of film. But who used film these days?

Kennedy flipped the card again to look at the figures on the back. A code of some kind? It couldn’t be a very long message, if so. Unless the figures referred to passages in a book, a prearranged code key, something like that. Or maybe they made up a combination for a digital lock or a password to unlock a file. She had no way of knowing without some other clue to point her in the right direction.

She tagged and bagged the photo, and scribbled a brief note to herself in her evidence pad about where she’d found it. Then she lifted up the adjacent tiles to make sure she wasn’t missing an obvious trick. Nothing there.

She hadn’t intended to do a thorough search of the room, only to scratch an itch, but all the same she found herself checking out other likely hiding places: behind the pictures on the walls, the backs of desk drawers, the undersides of furniture. Nothing else appeared, and the sheer volume of papers and books defeated her. Someone needed to look at this stuff with an informed eye, and the someone wasn’t her.

Her inner paranoiac was now fully awake, though, and in light of the intruder at the Barlows’ cottage, Kennedy thought to check the door this time. The lock was a standard five-pin, built into the doorknob. There were light scratch marks around the keyhole, and way too much play in the lock itself. Someone had picked it part-way with a tension tool and then turned the whole cylinder with a plug-spinner to make it open.

There was an upside and a downside to that. On the one hand, whoever had broken in here hadn’t found the hidden photo.

On the other, there was no telling what they had taken.

12

Chris Harper hated routine and repetitive tasks, and hated even more that he was good at them. Once he’d made initial calls to everyone on the London History Forum list, without turning up another corpse, he got on to the other two items on Kennedy’s things-to-do list.

Michael Brand was no longer staying at the Pride Court, the desk clerk regretted to inform him. Brand had left several weeks ago, checking out on the thirtieth of June. Three days after Barlow and Hurt had died, two days after Devani. Barlow’s sister had been right, then: Brand was in London through that whole time, while his fellow Ravellers were dying in colourful and ambiguous ways up and down the country. Then he’d waited a few days before shooting off to pastures new. Maybe he’d come to warn Barlow; or to bring him something, or take something from him. Maybe he knew the killer. Maybe he was the killer. Somehow, none of those hypotheses quite fitted with him hanging around in a cheap London hotel for two days after the shit hit the fan.

‘Did he leave a home address on file?’ Harper asked. The clerk became coy, but only until Harper mentioned an ongoing investigation. Then he volunteered without demur an address in Gijon, Spain, and a phone number to go with it.

Harper thanked him, hung up and dialled the number. He got the one-note whine that means no connection has been established, then a click and an irritatingly patrician voice cut in: ‘Sorry. Your number has not been recognised. Sorry. Your number has not—’

Harper hit the Spanish electoral rolls via the Interpol database and entered the Gijon address: 12, Campo del Jardin. The three names attached to it were Jorge Ignacio Argiz, Rosa Isabella Argiz and Marta Pacheco. No Michael Brand, and the phone number listed was different from the one that Brand had given. Harper called it, got Jorge Argiz on the first try. Did Jorge know a Michael Brand? Jorge’s English was good enough to assure the detective that he did not.

Harper put Brand to one side and started to zero in on the Ravellers.

The very first thing an internet search turned up was their online forum, Ravellers.org, whose respectable and glossy front page hid hundreds of pages of gibberish about variant readings and disputed identifications. Readings and identifications of what? There didn’t seem to be any way of telling. Threads on the forum typically had titles such as ‘Pigment spread link variant 1-100, NH papyri 2.2.1–3.4.6’, ‘PH 1071 imaged in infra-red spectrum — using 1000nm filter!’ and ‘Challenged zayin in DSS 9P1, line 14, position 12’. Harper might as well have been reading Sanskrit. Some of the posts certainly contained Sanskrit, and weren’t even apologetic about it.

There was a CONTACT US option on the menu bar, but the email address it linked to was in the defunct Freeserve domain, which probably meant that it hadn’t been changed in years and no longer led to an active server. Harper sent a message anyway, but didn’t trust it to get to anyone — and he couldn’t post anything on the forum without joining the group, which seemed like a long way to go about things.

He went back to the search results and refined the parameters, searching for the intersection of ‘Ravellers’ with ‘Barlow’. The first couple of items were obviously bot-based catch-alls. Read Ravellers Barlow stories and see Ravellers Barlow photos and videos! The third, though, was a short post on a different message board, announcing an award given to a Dr Sarah Opie for services to scholarship. Among the many follow-on posts on the thread was one from Stuart Barlow that read, ‘Well deserved, Sarah!’ The post was about eighteen months old. The item had come up in Harper’s list because Dr Opie had listed membership of the Ravellers among her interests and credits — and she was on staff at the University of Bedfordshire, not in their history faculty (which didn’t seem to exist) but in the school of computer science and technology.

Harper dialled the university’s switchboard and asked to speak to Dr Opie. When the receptionist asked him to leave a message, he identified himself and explained that this was in connection with a murder inquiry. One short flurry later, he was talking to Dr Opie herself.

‘I’m really sorry to bother you,’ he started off, ‘but I’m part of the team investigating the death of Professor Stuart Barlow. I understand that you belong to an organisation of which he was also a member. An organisation called the Ravellers.’

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Harper was about to speak again when Dr Opie finally answered him — with a question. ‘Who are you?’ Her voice, which sounded younger than he’d expected, was also brittle with strain and distrust.

He’d already told her, but he said it again. ‘My name is Christopher Harper. I’m a detective constable with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency of the London Metropolitan—’

‘How do I know that?’ She shot the question in before he’d even finished with the formalities.

‘You hang up and check,’ Harper suggested. Given the mounting body count, her paranoia seemed reasonable. ‘Call New Scotland Yard, ask for Ops, and then for Detective Division. Use my name, and say I asked you to call. I’ll still be here, and we can talk.’

He was expecting the line to go dead, but it didn’t. He could hear the distant half-noises that go with someone moving, breathing, just being there.

‘You said this is about Stuart.’

‘Well, not just that. A couple of other things, too.’

‘What things?’

Harper hesitated. I’m building a list of dead historians. Do you know any? That sounded like a loaded question, even inside his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘why don’t you hang up and call me back? I think you’ll feel better talking about this if you know it’s not a crank call.’

‘I want to know what this is about,’ the voice on the other end of the line said, the tension screwed up by half a notch or so.

Harper took a deep breath. Back when he wore uniform, which was right up until a year ago, he’d envied the detectives their cachet, the easy and natural authority they wore. But maybe it was a trick you had to learn. ‘It’s about a pattern of suspicious deaths,’ he said, and then added the lame amendment, ‘Potentially. Potentially suspicious.’

He heard a sound like a hollow knock — as though the phone had fallen out of her hand and hit the floor, or bumped into something as she turned.

‘Hello?’ Harper said. ‘Are you still there?’

‘What deaths? Tell me. What deaths?’

‘Stuart Barlow. Catherine Hurt. Samir Devani.’

Opie let out a disconcerting moan.

‘Oh God. They weren’t … they weren’t accidents?’

‘Wait,’ said Harper. ‘You knew them all? Dr Opie, this is important. How did you know them?’

The only answer was the click and burr of the phone being hung up. He waited, irresolute, for a minute and a half. If he called her switchboard again, his phone would be tied up while they patched the call through to her faculty building, and then to her extension. If she was calling him back, rather than just ending the call, he’d be shutting her out.

Just as he gave up and reached for the phone, it rang. He picked up. ‘External call for you,’ the comms clerk said. ‘A Dr Opie.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Harper. ‘Put her through.’

The noise of the despatch room gave way to the silence of another space.

‘Dr Opie?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you know those three people?’

He knew what the answer would be, which went some way to explain the prickle of déjà vu he felt as she said it. ‘They were Ravellers. They were all in the group. And …’

He waited. Nothing came. ‘And?’

‘They were working on the same translation.’

13

Tillman surfaced in Calais, where he booked a passage on a cross-Channel ferry to Dover. But of course, he would: the shortest sea route, the smallest window within which he would be enclosed and vulnerable. Still, Kuutma didn’t take anything for granted. He kept his anchors in place all along the northern coastline, and his mole in the offices of the SNCF on full alert, until he had visual confirmation of Tillman boarding the ferry.

Even then Kuutma moved methodically and meticulously. It was the last sailing of the day, leaving harbour at 11.40 p.m., but the Calais ferry terminal was still crowded. The Messengers — three of them again, as in Bucharest and Paris — boarded last and remained near the exits, which they watched until the bow doors closed and the vessel began to back out of its berth.

Kuutma stood at the quayside, watching. Would Tillman appear on deck at the last moment, claiming he’d left something behind and had to disembark after all? Was this to be another double or triple bluff?

It seemed not. No last-minute alarums came, no diversionary scuffles or panics, no false starts. The ferry left without incident, with Tillman on board. Tillman, and the three who were to kill him. Kuutma made the sign of the noose as it departed, calling for the hanged man’s blessing on his Messengers.

Belatedly but fervently, he yearned to be with them. Again, he found himself thinking unprofitable thoughts. Picking apart his own thought processes, fruitlessly and even dangerously. It did not do to be divided from oneself in this way. He was prepared to admit, now that it was all but done, that he hated Tillman and had waited too long to move against the mercenary because he doubted the purity of his own motives. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

There was nobody left to make it for.

Tillman watched the coast of France recede, with mixed feelings.

Kartoyev had confirmed a lot he already knew, had provided a few new clues and crucially had given him a fix on his next destination. He sensed for the first time that he was closing in on Michael Brand. That where he’d once chased a name, and then a phantom, now he was in pursuit of a man, who could almost be glimpsed running ahead of him.

On the other hand, he had fresh anomalies to consider. The drugs, for one. He’d never found a link before now between Brand and the drugs trade. He’d run covert ops in Colombia, and he was aware, in a general way, of how that trade was plied. Brand’s movements across the globe were not the movements of a salesman or a purchaser. An enforcer, possibly, but what was he enforcing? And why, if he was in the drugs business, would he travel so far to source ingredients that were readily available in most countries? The former Soviet Union was not Brand’s base, Tillman felt sure of that. His stays there were too short and too narrowly focused on a few specific contacts.

A smokescreen, then. Brand bought his chemicals in Ingushetia because he didn’t want to leave a trail that led any closer to his real base of operations. And he refused Kartoyev’s offer of refined methamphetamine, presumably because he wanted to mix his own. And he was about to mix a batch that was larger by factors of ten than his usual batch.

File that one for future thought. Tillman had more urgent things to think about right now.

In his journey westwards across Europe, he had become aware as never before that he was hunted as well as hunter. In Bucharest it had been pure luck that delivered him. Walking in Mătăsari, a place where everyone keeps one eye over their shoulder, he’d read from the reaction of a man he passed in the street that he might be being followed. He didn’t look back, but tested the theory by walking through a crowded street market, where his tailgunners had closed in out of sheer necessity. He’d tacked from stall to stall in random patterns, memorising the faces around him, and after half an hour had isolated one as a definite tail, another two as probable. Once he knew he was marked, it had simply been a case of choosing the best moment to shake them off. But he had no clue as to who they were or what they wanted.

In Paris he was ready for them. Expecting to be found, hair-trigger for any whiff of pursuit or surveillance, he was able to turn the tables on his shadowy followers and tail one of them back to base. But he had little to show for it. The house they’d been using out on the Périphérique had been unfurnished, apart from three bed rolls lying side by side on a bare wooden floor. These men were ascetics, clearly. Like the early Christian saints who spent years in the wilderness, mortifying their flesh. It troubled Tillman to think that the people chasing him were capable of such humourless and stern dedication. It troubled him, even, to find that they were so many. He had no idea why an organisation of this size and this degree of organisation would kidnap women and children from London streets.

But perhaps chasing was too strong a term. It was possible that they only wanted to see how far Tillman had got. Whether he was moving in the right direction at last, or still going round in circles. He wished, now that it was too late, that he’d gone on through Belgium and the Netherlands, tried harder to make a false trail. But at the end of the day, there were only so many ways to get to Britain from mainland Europe, if you didn’t want to take a plane. With even moderate resources, it was possible to keep watch on all of them.

And he had to go to Britain. He’d stayed in Paris long enough to contact some former friends and acquaintances in the private security business. Many of them were still active in that amphibian, quasi-legal world, and they had been able to give him some very interesting and very current nuggets of information about Michael Brand. For thirteen years the bastard had stayed below the water line. Now he’d breached, and Tillman had to be there. There just wasn’t any other option.

Tillman turned from the rail and made his way through the light sprinkling of passengers on the deck towards the double doors that led back inside. As he did so, he checked his watch. It was only a ninety-minute crossing, and he noted with approval that twenty of those minutes had already gone.

In the lounge area it was much more crowded. Families sat in inward-looking groups, their territory marked with handbags and rucksacks. They mostly looked either grim or tired, but happier families had been reproduced on the walls behind them in giant photographic prints, maintaining some kind of a karmic balance. In the absence of any free seats, people were sitting with their backs against a bulkhead, while others were propping up the bar that ran down the right-hand side of the room. A single barman stood serving draught Stella Artois from a single pump. The adjacent Guinness pump had been marked OUT OF ORDER. Further on, the bar gave way seamlessly to a food counter where people queued for baguettes and chips. The air smelled of stale beer and old frying fat.

Tillman didn’t feel hungry, and preferred whisky to lager. He looked at the optics of Bell’s, Grant’s and Johnny Walker lined up behind the bar, all perfectly drinkable. But in the army he had only drunk when he wanted oblivion, and these days he didn’t often afford himself such a luxury. He felt tempted for a second or two, slowed his stride, then dismissed the idea and walked on. Later, when he got to London, he might find a bar and reacquaint himself with that momentary chemical caress. For now, he preferred to stay awake and alert.

He was looking for a place to sit that fulfilled his usual criteria: a view of all exits, a wall at his back and something nearby like a wall or a counter that would block a sightline at need. In this crowded room, he knew that wouldn’t be possible. It was also, he was aware, faintly ridiculous to apply criteria like that in a setting where any attack would be hampered by the instant panic stampede it would trigger, and where the assassin would have no ready escape even if the attack succeeded. The people who had followed him in Bucharest and Paris had still done nothing to suggest they wanted to harm him. All they’d done, both times, was to tail him.

So was this paranoia? The carrying of his usual caution over the edge of the abyss at last into mania and psychosis? Or had he responded to some cue he hadn’t even consciously processed? Normally he trusted his instincts, but he’d been pushing himself hard for a long time. He felt a weight of weariness fall on him, so abruptly it was like a physical thing. With it came a revulsion against the crush of humanity all around — the babble of voices sounding like an externalisation of some confusion or plurality in his own heart and soul.

Tillman pushed on to the far end of the lounge and out into a much smaller lobby area with fruit machines on one side and toilets on the other. He dug into his holdall for one of the bags of loose currency he carried — one that held some euro coins. He found Mr Snow, the unicorn, and tucked the fluffy, vacant, sickly sweet thing into the pocket of his jeans by one front paw. It dangled there, an ineffectual mascot, as Tillman fed forty or fifty euros into the one-armed bandit. Pulling the levers and pressing the buttons at random ate away at the time without using up any of his attention, allowing him to watch the flow of those who passed and those who loitered. They passed and loitered with perfect conviction. No anomalies, no warning bells. But then, there hadn’t been any in Bucharest, either. He wasn’t going to stay the distance if he underestimated his enemies.

When Tillman finally ran out of coins, he checked his watch. They had to be already more than halfway over by this time. He went back into the lounge, stood in line and bought a coffee, but once again the noise and the claustrophobic press overwhelmed him. He walked out to the lobby before he’d taken more than two sips of the bland muck.

Not that many places left to go. He decided to spend the last half-hour of the crossing on deck, but he felt the tiredness catching up on him. In the absence of caffeine, he could at least splash some cold water in his face. He went through the door bearing the stylised man whose arms were thrown out from his sides like those of a gunslinger walking into a duel.

The restroom was a windowless twenty-by-twenty cube with urinals along one wall, sinks opposite, and three cubicles at the back. He stepped across a floor awash with water, which had slopped over from a sink that had been filled with toilet paper in lieu of a plug. A single flickering neon strip lit the depressing scene.

He draped his jacket over a condom machine, dropping his holdall at his feet, and ran the cold tap for a long time before finally accepting that the water wouldn’t run cold. Tepid as it was, he splashed it on his face anyway, then hit the hand drier and lowered his head into its jet of air. The door at his back sighed as it opened, sighed again as it closed.

When he straightened up, they were there. Two of them, side by side, already coming at him. Two suited men, startlingly handsome, clean cut and serious-looking. The kind who might knock on your door to ask if you’d found Jesus or whether they could count on your vote for the Conservative candidate. Tillman had time only to take in their uncanny synchronisation — something that had to be born out of endless drilling under the same trainer or commander. Then they raised their hands and the short blades they held flashed, one high one low, as they intersected the light from the neon strip overhead.

Tillman hooked his jacket off the condom machine with his left hand and whirled it in the air in front of him, retreating into the ten feet of space that the room allowed him. Behind that moving screen he hooked the squat, heavy Mateba Unica from its customary resting place, tucked into the back of his belt, and in the same movement thumbed the safety.

The two men seemed to anticipate him. Even as he brought the gun up, one of them half-turned away and kicked back against the turn: a perfect yoko geri. Tillman saw it coming, but the man moved so inhumanly fast that seeing it didn’t help him. The guy’s heel smacked into the inside of Tillman’s wrist before he could pull it away, knocking the gun from his grip. It clattered across the floor. Both knives came up in slashing feints, one aimed at Tillman’s heart and the other at his face. Caught out of position, he faked right and whipped the jacket down like a flail so that it wrapped around the wrist of the man on his left. The other man’s blade cut across his upper arm in a broad, deep slash, but he ignored the pain. Wrenching on the jacket brought the man within reach and Tillman headbutted him in the face, then — since he didn’t go down — circled behind him to use him as a shield and snatch a moment’s respite.

Again the two men moved and reacted in frictionless unison. The one tangled up in the jacket dropped into a crouch and the other leaned over him, launching another slashing attack. Tillman bent backwards from the knees like a contestant in a limbo competition, just about staying out of the blade’s reach.

The attacker jumped over his kneeling comrade and advanced again, the knife flicking back and forth at the level of Tillman’s stomach. Tillman instinctively lowered his hand to block a possible disembowelling thrust: the instinct almost killed him. The knife came up inside his guard, moving around his block as effortlessly as if it wasn’t there. Flinching aside, he felt as well as heard the air part as it passed by his face.

The other man was back on his feet now, moving in behind the first, and things were likely to go from bad to worse. Tillman weighed the odds. Karate skills didn’t impress him overmuch: both men were slighter in build than him, and even the knives didn’t count for so very much in the restricted space of the restroom. What made the situation impossible was the two-for-one deal and the men’s appalling speed. All things being equal, he was probably going to be dead inside the next ten seconds.

Tillman’s only hope was to change the odds. Reaching over his head, he drove his fist into the exact centre of the neon tube.

In the absence of windows, the fluorescent strip was the only light in the room. As the glass crunched against Tillman’s bare knuckles, the restroom was plunged into absolute darkness.

Tillman dropped to the ground and rolled. He groped for the gun, whose location he held in his memory. Nothing.

The splash of feet in spilled water. Something moving to his right. He kicked, made contact, rolled again. This time his fingertips brushed the familiar cold metal of the Unica. He found the grip, raised it and came upright firing in a wide arc: once, twice, three times, spaced to quarter the room.

It was a calculated risk. Firing blind revealed his location. In the perfect dark, nothing would be easier than throwing one of those wickedly sharp knives directly at the muzzle flash. But the Unica was loaded with.454 Casull, exceeding even the stopping power of the Magnum cartridge. Even if his attackers were both wearing Kevlar under those elegant suits, at this range it would make no difference. A single hit would take them out for the duration.

With the gun at head height, moving in a figure of eight, Tillman backed toward the door. His near-photographic memory came to his aid again, and after only three steps he felt the blunt bar of the door handle prodding the small of his back.

Another movement, this time to his left. Tillman fired in that direction — leaving a single bullet in the Unica’s cylinder — and kicked the door open behind him. A wedge of light invaded the room, as did the incongruous tinkling conversation of the fruit machines in the alcove opposite. Both men had been advancing on Tillman in the dark. One was clutching his arm, indicating a glancing impact from that last bullet. The other threw himself on Tillman, jabbing the knife at him in a straight stab.

Without that fortuitous light, Tillman would have taken the thrust full in the throat. Forewarned at the last moment, his krav maga training, acquired in his mercenary days from a wily old bastard named Vincent Less, kicked in automatically. As the two of them fell out into the corridor, he used his right hand, still gripping the gun, to turn the blow aside, then caught the man’s wrist with his free hand and twisted so that he dropped the knife. Bringing his gun hand back inside the man’s guard, he clubbed him in the face with the butt of the Unica to complete the move. He staggered free as the man fell, then he clambered to his feet, turned and ran. One of his opponents was down, the other at least hurt, but he had only the one round left — and win or lose, he couldn’t afford to stay for any kind of official investigation.

Tillman headed away from the lounge. He figured the shots must have been heard and the panicked crowd there would probably be impassable. Slowing to a quick walk, he turned the first bend in the corridor and immediately hit another crowd surging out of the duty-free shop. Clearly the sound of the ruckus had penetrated there, too, but it didn’t look like anyone knew where the shots had come from. Nobody had quite made their mind up which way to run. Tillman pushed his way through the skittish mob as quickly as he could. Right now, the biggest danger to them was proximity to him.

He found a stairway, went up it and came out on to the deserted upper deck. Immediately a woman came out through another door at the deck’s further end. She stopped when she saw him and stared at him in something that might have been perplexity or concern.

‘Go back inside!’ he called out to her. He went to the rail and looked out. Still a fair few miles from the Dover shore, but the ship had become non-viable so he really had no other choice. If he stayed here, he’d be questioned, and if he was questioned, he’d be arrested — for the unlicensed firearm, if nothing else.

He’d left most of the documentation he had with him in the jacket, which was back in the restroom. That meant trouble, too, since he was travelling under his own name this time. But it was trouble that could be postponed. He slipped his shoes off and kicked them away.

The pain that flared in his side took him completely by surprise. A blunt concussion that flowered suddenly into a chrysanthemum burst of pure agony. Turning, he saw the woman walking towards him, drawing a second knife from her hip and balancing it in her hand. The hilt of her first weapon now protruded from his thigh, where it had buried itself all the way to the guard.

The woman was beautiful, and very similar in features to the men in the washroom: pale-skinned, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with a solemnity in her face like the solemnity of a child in a classroom told to stand up and recite.

There was nothing he could do to prevent the second throw. She had already drawn her hand back, and as he raised the gun he knew he couldn’t aim and fire in the time he had. He tracked her arm anyway and squeezed the trigger as she let go. The knife was invisibly fast except for the small part of its trajectory where the light from a security lamp lit it up in incongruous gold.

His bullet hit the blade and sent it whispering away over his head. It was much more luck than judgement, and Tillman knew he couldn’t do it again in a million years, even if his gun hadn’t been empty.

He vaulted on to the rail and jumped. A third knife flew over his shoulder, very close, and accompanied him on his wild, parabolic leap. The main deck at this point jutted twelve feet further out than the upper one. The knife made the distance comfortably, Tillman by inches.

The cold water closed over him, and he kept on falling, through a denser, colder and altogether more hostile medium. Thirty feet down he slowed, stopped, began to rise again.

With some effort, his leg already stiffening, he somersaulted in the water and swam further down. There were no directions in the midnight-black of the water, so he couldn’t be sure where he was in relation to the ferry. Staying down as long as he could was the best way to get some distance from it.

When his breath began to give out he stopped swimming and let himself rise. At this moment, his lungs empty and screaming for air, he glimpsed something falling away from him into the depths below, where he couldn’t now follow it. Something pure white, which picked up the unsteady, murky gleam of the ferry’s stern lamp and flashed like the wing of a bird.

It was Mr Snow.

Tillman broke the surface a long way behind the ferry. He saw no figures on the deck looking or pointing back towards him. The night would hide him, and the assassins would hardly report that he’d jumped. There probably wouldn’t be a search. The intensely cold water would lessen the bleeding from his wounds, and he was unlikely to miss the south coast of England, given how big a target it was.

He also had an answer to his question, at last. The people who’d been following really did want him dead. Perhaps that meant Michael Brand was afraid of him. He hoped so.

But he couldn’t hope to find Mr Snow in the dark and the biting cold of the water. He needed every ounce of his strength if he was going to survive to make the shore. ‘I’m sorry,’ Tillman muttered, as the waves rocked and pawed him. Not to the toy, but to the daughter he’d lost so many years before. He felt as though he’d broken faith with Grace, in some way. And as though he’d lost a link that he really couldn’t afford to lose.

Survival. It was all that mattered now. He used the ferry’s wake to orient himself towards the north and the shore that was still ten miles distant.

14

When Kennedy called in from Prince Regent’s to check on Harper’s progress, he told her — with pardonable smugness — that he’d found a link between the three dead academics. It was spectacular news, but it shrank in the telling, as Kennedy kept coming up with other questions that he should have asked Sarah Opie while he had her on the line: were the three dead Ravellers only in direct contact through the website or did they know each other from elsewhere? How long had their shared project been going on, and who knew about it? Was anyone else collaborating with them, who wasn’t at the London History Forum? She wasn’t giving him a bollocking: it was just the way she operated, as he knew even from their brief acquaintance. She was putting things together in her mind, figuring out what they had, and what they needed.

‘I thought some of this could wait until we go to see her,’ Harper said, chagrined. ‘I mean, this is the breakthrough, right? We’ve got the link. If we’ve got the link, we must be really close to getting a motive. But I knew we’d need a full statement, and I didn’t want to put ideas into her head in advance.’

‘You did good, Harper. But tell me what this thing is that they were translating.’

‘The Rotgut Codex,’ Harper said. ‘It’s sort of a standing joke on the Ravellers board, apparently. Most people think it’s fake. But Barlow had a new take on it, Dr Opie said, something that came out of his research on those early Christians. The Acrostics.’

‘Gnostics.’

‘Or whoever. So it all comes back to Barlow. He started trying to translate this Rotgut thing and he brought the other two on board.’

‘Just the other two? I mean, there’s nobody else involved? Nobody who needs to be warned that someone might want to kill them?’

Harper was on firmer ground here. ‘No other collaborators. Barlow did approach one other guy, because he’s a big expert on all these early documents. Emil Gassan, his name is — works up in Scotland somewhere. But he refused point blank to have anything to do with Barlow. Told him to sod off, essentially.’

‘What about Opie herself? How does she know all this?’

‘Postings on the forum?’ Harper said, but he made it into a question. ‘Okay, I admit that was just a guess. I asked her a couple of times, straight out, but she managed to give me a body swerve both times. She’s a friend of Barlow’s. Well, he knew her anyway, because he posted on this message board when she got a big prize of some kind. But she said she wasn’t part of this. Very definitely. Nothing to do with the project. She said that twice.’

‘And yet she knew what the project was all about?’ Kennedy asked.

Harper began to feel that the subtext here was that he was an idiot and couldn’t debrief a suspect. ‘It’s not like it was a secret,’ he reminded Kennedy, trying not to sound truculent. ‘This woman is active on the Raveller site, so I didn’t think there was anything unusual about her being in the know. Anyway, you can ask her yourself. I should set up a meeting, right?’

He looked at his watch as he said it. It was after six, which meant that they probably wouldn’t catch Opie on campus now. Harper would have to get her home number or her mobile and try to reach her on the fly. Opie wouldn’t be happy. Her mood had darkened in the course of Harper’s very tentative questioning. She’d been afraid, and shaken, as anyone might be to learn that three people they knew well could all have been victims of the same killer. Her answers had become more and more terse and monosyllabic, not because she was refusing to cooperate, Harper suspected, but because she was having trouble even getting her mind to touch this stuff. Physical trauma induces clinical shock. Psychological trauma gums up the wheels of thought so they won’t turn — which was the real reason why he hadn’t pushed Opie too hard for further details. He’d been afraid he might be pushing her towards some sort of mental crisis that he wouldn’t be able — at long distance — to talk her down from.

‘Not tonight,’ Kennedy said, to his relief. ‘I think the next step is to go back to the DCI. When he gave this to us, he thought he was kicking it into the long grass. He needs to know what it’s turned into, so he can make a decision about resources.’

Harper was scandalised. ‘You mean give it to a different team? No bleeding way, Sarge. This is my serial killer. Ours, I mean. And I’ve got a name for him.’

‘Harper, I don’t even want to—’

‘The History Man. You have to think about these things, Kennedy. If you want big headlines, you’ve got to give the media something they can get their teeth into. I can’t wait for that first press conference.’

‘That’s nice, Harper. But if there’s a press conference, there’s a good chance we won’t be on it.’

‘I’ll be on it if it bloody kills me.’

Her sigh rustled down the line. The sigh of a mother with a wayward kid. ‘They probably won’t want to sound any fanfares about any of this because of the screw-up over the Barlow investigation first time around. If they do throw a media-fest, you can bet that Summerhill will be at the mike himself. Maybe we’ll get to sit there and look solemn. Have you written up everything you’ve got?’

‘Pretty much,’ Harper lied. He only had the indecipherable scribble he’d jotted down as he went along. He’d typed nothing and filed nothing as of yet.

‘Leave it on my desk. I’ll add my own stuff to it and drop it into Summerhill’s tray tonight. In the morning we go see him, get him to call it. If a major witness interview is still pending, it forces his hand: he won’t want to hold things up in ways that might show on the file. Let me have that other guy’s number, though, the one in Scotland who said no to Barlow. I’ll call him now — dot the i’s and cross the t’s.’

‘Okay.’ Harper recited the number he’d been given for Emil Gassan, so that Kennedy could take it down. He felt uneasy. ‘You don’t really think Summerhill will move us off this, do you?’

‘Not you, maybe. He’s definitely going to put a different case officer on it, though.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if it stops being time-wasting bullshit, it stops being my special property. On second thoughts, don’t leave your notes on my desk. Send me the file and I’ll print the whole lot off in one go.’ Kennedy didn’t say it, but he knew she was thinking about Combes and his posse. They wouldn’t scruple to pick up the stuff on Kennedy’s desk and read it over, whether out of mischief or just idle curiosity. If they saw something they wanted, they’d go all-out to get it, and suddenly he and Kennedy would be squeezed on two fronts. That was how Harper thought of it anyway: as though this multiple murder (triple slaying sounded even better) was a rosy apple that had fallen into his lap, proving the universal law, which he hoped would some day be named after him, that great detectives magically call forth cases worthy of their uncanny abilities.

After Kennedy had hung up, he realised that he’d forgotten to tell her about Michael Brand giving a false name and address. Dr Opie’s revelations had washed that little nugget clean out of his mind. Maybe Kennedy would have been more impressed if he’d led with the news that they might actually have a suspect. Well, she’d get it from the case notes, and then she could tell him what questions he should have asked the Spanish guy while he had him on the phone.

He typed up the notes — another tedious job he had a mildly embarrassing flair for — and started getting his stuff together to leave. But he hadn’t logged off. Stanwick ambled over and began to read the open file over his shoulder. Harper turned the monitor to an oblique angle, away from him.

‘Jesus, I was only looking,’ Stanwick grumbled. ‘Anyway, I thought your case was a turd that wouldn’t flush. That’s why they gave it to you and Calamity Jane. So where’s the big secret?’

‘The killer’s someone in the division,’ Harper said. ‘Could be the Super. Could even be you.’

Stanwick stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’

‘Yeah,’ said Harper. He reached down and pulled the plug on the computer with the file still open. ‘It’s supposed to mean mind your own damned business.’

He walked away, expecting a hand on his shoulder, expecting the big man to haul him round and plant one in his face. But Stanwick only whistled, the dipping-then-rising note that signifies surprise. If he hadn’t made a good impression earlier, refusing to join in the trashing of Kennedy’s reputation, that whistle clearly said that Harper had put himself into a file drawer now. One that everybody else in the division was going to be using as a urinal.

Harper truly didn’t care. He was ambitious, in a general way, but more for experience than for career rewards. He wanted to see and do extraordinary things. The uniformed branch had been too small for him, and maybe Detective Division would turn out the same. He just wanted it to be a wild ride.

After Harper left, the early evening currents swept a few more people through the bear pit, but mostly this was ebb tide. The DCs and DSs trickled away one by one or in small knots until, by the time Kennedy got there at around eight, the great room was empty. She didn’t mind that one bit.

It took her a while to write up the day’s work. It wasn’t that she’d covered a vast amount of ground: the findings, sensational though they were, could be condensed into a few explosive paragraphs. She was just covering her back. Even though the screw-ups on this case predated her involvement, that wouldn’t offer much protection if a head had to roll. And with three overlooked murders instead of one, a decapitation for the sake of morale was looking like less and less of a longshot.

So she made sure the case notes were immaculate. She and Harper had adhered punctiliously to every rule and protocol, had been unfailingly courteous and endlessly explanatory to witnesses, had paused in their diligent, by-the-book slogging only to keep full and simultaneous notes on everything they were doing. In short, they were saints of policework.

Reading through Harper’s notes, she discovered the Michael Brand bombshell and swore aloud. A false address? An invented phone number? Christ. Why hadn’t Harper put that to Opie, and asked her what Brand had to say for himself on the Ravellers forum? Was he still posting there? Did the site moderators hold any contact information on him? If Brand was lying about his address, there was no telling what else he might have lied about — and Rosalind Barlow had said that her brother met with Brand on the night before he died. This could be their man, or else a potentially vital witness, and he had a three-week head-start on them already.

What did that leave? It left the Scottish guy. Emil Gassan. She called him on the number that Harper had given her, but found it was just the university switchboard. She was told that Dr Gassan had left for the evening, and got the desk clerk — after the usual foofarah of identification — to release the doctor’s personal contact numbers to her. She tried him on his home phone, where she got no answer, and on his mobile, which was switched off. Out of options, she left her own contact information on his voicemail, along with a message saying that she wanted very much to talk to him in connection with a pending investigation. She made a mental note to try the home and mobile numbers again later.

Troubled and preoccupied, she printed up Harper’s notes and added them to her own. She hated this game of catch-up — the sense of being hamstrung by the bad policework of other officers. They were going to be three weeks too late for everything, all the way down the line. She forwarded the notes to Summerhill as an email attachment, then made the short walk up the corridor to his secretary’s desk and placed the hard copy, along with the rest of the case file, on top of his in-tray where he’d see it the next morning.

Done. There was nothing to keep her from going home now. No good reason to put it off any longer.

She collected her coat from the bear pit, noticing as she did so that the steel rat-trap had gone from her waste bin. Whoever brought it in to intimidate her must have wanted it back. Or maybe it would turn up in her file cabinet next, or her locker.

Compared with what awaited her now, those petty provocations shrank to their proper proportions.

15

It was ten o’clock before Kennedy got back to her flat at the cheaper end of Pimlico, and she got there in time to hear Izzy talking dirty in front of her father for the fourth time in a row. That meant she had to apologise to Izzy while simultaneously being pissed off with her. It was the kind of bitter-sour cocktail that left Kennedy bilious.

Izzy lived in the flat upstairs and was able to combine looking after Kennedy’s father — and the kids of their downstairs neighbour — with her regular job. But her regular job was being the receiving end of a sex phone line, and her shift started at nine most nights. If Kennedy came home late, Izzy just whipped her phone out and clocked on — and Peter got to hear a-hundred-and-some variants on ‘Would you like to, babe, would you like to stick it in me?’

Izzy seemed to cope with this a lot better than Kennedy did. It didn’t inhibit her at all to have the old man listening to her perform. It even kept her up to the mark, she said, trying to elicit some slight flicker of a reaction from Peter. She knew that her boss sometimes monitored the calls to make sure that his girls were pulling their weight while the customers, as it were, pulled theirs. She didn’t want to get a reprimand for the quality of her smut, and raising a ripple in Peter’s almost Zen-like calm gave her a target to aim for.

Kennedy found this disturbing on a lot of levels, and her feelings were complicated still further by the fact that she found Izzy insanely attractive. The woman was a petite brunette with a tiny waist and a huge butt, which was close to Kennedy’s perfect type. But because of the convenience of the dad-sitting arrangement, and because Izzy was almost ten years younger than her, she’d never felt able to make a pass.

Every time she had to hear Izzy conducting phone sex with lonely self-abusers, she experienced a bittersweet surge of arousal and frustration.

But it wasn’t as though she had much of a choice. The truth of it was that the intermittent supervision her father had always needed was becoming more and more continuous now. Kennedy apologised profusely to her neighbour. Izzy waved the words away, the phone still jammed to her ear even though she was between performances.

‘He’s already eaten,’ she said, as she pocketed the little sheaf of notes that Kennedy had given her. ‘Spaghetti Bolognese, because I was cooking it anyway, for the little monsters downstairs. Only I didn’t give him any spaghetti because he can’t handle it. So he’s just had meat sauce. Maybe you’d better see if he wants toast or something for supper.’

Kennedy walked Izzy to the door, listening with half an ear to the status report: Peter’s eating and drinking through the day, Peter’s mood, Peter’s incontinence pants. Izzy always considered the information dump as part of the contract, so Kennedy had to listen to it, or at least stand there while Izzy recited.

Finally Izzy left, and Kennedy went to check on Peter for herself. He had the lights out and the TV on — a Channel 4 documentary on the latest immunisation scare — and was sitting in front of it, watching it for the most part, although his gaze also wandered around the walls and floor quite a lot. He was dressed in trousers and a shirt, but only because Izzy had a phobia of old men wandering around in their pyjamas: she would have chosen the clothes for him and helped him to dress. Peter’s white hair looked wild, his chiselled face all inconstant shadows in the TV’s rippling spotlight, like speeded up footage of clouds scudding over a mountain.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Kennedy said.

Peter looked in her direction and nodded. ‘Welcome home,’ he said, vaguely. He rarely called her by name, and when he did he only had a one in four chance of getting it right. He called her Heather about as often as he called her Janet (her mother), Chrissie (her sister) or Jeannine (her niece). Occasionally he called her Steve (her older brother), even though nobody in the family had seen Steve since he turned eighteen and walked out the door.

Kennedy put the light on and Peter blinked a couple of times, troubled by the sudden glare. ‘You want some toast, Dad?’ she asked him. ‘A cup of tea? Maybe a biscuit?’

‘I’ll wait for dinner,’ Peter said, and returned his attention to the TV. She fixed him a couple of rounds of toasted rye anyway, and brought them in to him. He wouldn’t remember having said no, and he could definitely use the carbs if all he’d had to eat was a bowl of spaghetti sauce. She put the toast on a tray in front of him, along with a cup of instant coffee, and retreated to her bedroom, which had a TV set and a sound system and a desk. It was like the whole of the rest of the place was a granny flat and this one room was her territory. It was smaller than some of the rooms she’d lived in as a student, but it pretty much had all she needed — which at this point in her life sounded a lot more like an indictment than any kind of a boast.

But she felt bad about leaving Peter alone, after being out all evening. It was ridiculous, she knew. The phantom figure of her sister stood at her ear, delivering a phantom lecture. ‘After what that bastard put us all through …’ She had no defence: it was true. Peter had been a truly awful husband and father, was infinitely more bearable in his current condition, a placeholder for a personality that had gone AWOL. His cruelties, his failings, had shaped her, but so had his example and his expectations. In the long run, none of it mattered. It came down to whether you could walk away, and clearly she couldn’t.

So she took her own coffee back into the living room and sat through the rest of the programme with her father. When it finished and the ads came up, she turned the TV off. ‘So how was your day?’ she asked him.

‘Pretty good,’ he said. ‘Pretty good.’ He never gave any other answer.

Kennedy told him about her murder investigation in a reasonable amount of detail. Peter listened quietly, nodding or murmuring an ‘oh’ from time to time, but when she stopped he didn’t offer any comments or questions. He just stared at her, waiting to see if there was any more to come. Well, she hadn’t expected a reaction. She just felt a compulsion — intermittently, and up to a point — to treat him as a human being, since there was nobody else around who was prepared to do that for him any more.

She went over to the stereo and put some music on: the Legendary Gypsy Queens and Kings, singing Sounds from a Bygone Age. Kennedy’s mother, Janet, whose claims to gypsy blood Peter had always declared to be utter nonsense, had listened to nothing but Fanfare Ciocărlia through the year of her final illness. Peter scorned this while she lived, as he scorned most things his wife did and the basis on which she did them, but when she died he cried, for only the second time in his life as far as Kennedy knew. And then he took to playing the album himself, late in the evening or in the early hours of the morning, in hypnotised silence. And then he started buying Balkan gypsy music in wholesale amounts. Kennedy had no idea whether he enjoyed it or not. She suspected, though, that sometimes, if they hit him at the right time and from the right angle, those albums could function for Peter as a sort of sound construct of his dead wife. The music had the power — intermittently anyway — to change him, both while it was playing and for a little while after it stopped.

Tonight it seemed to work. Peter’s eyes swam into a clearer focus as the skirling fiddle and bombastic accordion clashed with each other for domination of the tune. She only played three tracks, because clarity was a double-edged sword. If he remembered that Janet was dead, his mood would shift into something darker and more unpredictable, and he probably wouldn’t sleep that night.

‘You look tired, Heather,’ Peter said to Kennedy, while the last notes of ‘Sirba’ were still hanging in the air. ‘You’re working too hard. You should be a little more selfish. Look after yourself more.’

‘Like you always did,’ she countered. The bantering tone was wholly assumed. It was more painful than pleasant to hear him talk like himself again. It made her miss him, but it made her hate him, too, as it partially reconstructed him — took him some of the way back to being someone who was responsible for what he did, and could be hated.

‘I worked for you,’ Peter mumbled. ‘You and the kids. What are you working for?’

It was a good question, even if the way he phrased it seemed to confuse her with her mother. She gave a glib answer. ‘The public good.’

Peter snorted. ‘Right, right. The public will thank you the way it always does, sweetheart. The way it did me.’ He tapped his chest on the me. It had been his characteristic gesture once, as though the words I and me needed an extra assist when they referred to Peter Kennedy.

‘You do what you know how to do,’ she said. A better answer, and Peter accepted it with a laugh and a nod. His eyes were changing again, the light in them softening as his mind slipped off the little island of awareness into the sea of fuzz and static in which it usually floated.

Involuntarily, Kennedy raised her hand and waved goodbye to him.

‘Piss off, Dad,’ she said, gently, and she blinked in quick staccato, half a dozen times, determined that the tear wouldn’t fall.

From her own room, later, Kennedy tried Emil Gassan again. This time she got lucky: someone picked up on the home number. He had a high-pitched, querulous voice, and his accent was pure RP rather than Scots. ‘Emil Gassan,’ he said.

‘Dr Gassan, my name is Heather Kennedy. I’m a detective sergeant with the London Metropolitan Police.’

‘The police?’ Gassan immediately sounded both alarmed and slightly indignant. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m investigating the death of a former colleague of yours — Professor Stuart Barlow.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘It’s possible that there might be something suspect about his death. Particularly in light of the coincidental deaths of two other academics with whom Professor Barlow had dealings.’

‘Are you suggesting that Barlow was murdered? I thought he fell downstairs!’

‘I’m not suggesting anything at this stage, Dr Gassan. Just gathering information. I wonder if you have a little time to talk to me about Professor Barlow’s translation project.’

‘Barlow? Barlow’s project? Good god, you don’t mean the Rotgut?’

‘Yes. The Rotgut.’

‘Well, I’d hardly dignify that asinine proposal with the term “project”, Sergeant …’ He waited for the prompt.

‘Kennedy.’

‘And for that matter, I’d hesitate to call Stuart Barlow a colleague. He’s barely set his name to paper in the last two decades, did you know that? He floats wild hypotheses on his, what do you call it, Ravellers forum, but a few emails here and there don’t amount to serious scholarship. And as for the idea that anything new could be discovered about the Rotgut Codex at this stage … well, better minds than Barlow’s have foundered on that rock.’ The last statement was accompanied by a sour, supercilious laugh.

‘So when he approached you,’ Kennedy said, ‘and asked if you wanted to be part of his team …’

‘I said no. Emphatically. I didn’t have the time to waste.’

Kennedy chanced her arm. The entire case seemed to hinge on things way outside her comfort zone, and this guy’s arrogance had to be based on at least some degree of knowledge. ‘Do you have the time to explain to me exactly what the Rotgut is, Dr Gassan? I’ve heard various accounts now, but I’m still not clear.’

‘Well, read my book. Palaeographic Texts: Substance and Substrate. Leeds University Press, 2004. It’s available on Amazon. I can send you the ISBN number, if you like.’

‘I’m no expert, Dr Gassan. I’d probably get lost in the details. And while I’ve got your ear, so to speak.’

There was a slightly charged silence at the other end of the line. ‘What was it you wanted to know?’ Gassan demanded at last. ‘I don’t have time to give you a thorough grounding in palaeography, Sergeant Kennedy. Not from a standing start. And even for an introduction, I’d normally expect to charge.’

‘I wish I could afford you,’ Kennedy said. ‘But really, I don’t want to know much. Just what you think Professor Barlow was trying to do, and why it might have mattered — to him or to anyone else in your field. Obviously, from your standpoint, he was making some elementary mistakes. I just wish I had the context to understand where he was going wrong because right now I’m floundering in the dark.’

Another hesitation. Had she gone overboard with the implied flattery? Presumably Gassan wasn’t a fool, whatever he sounded like.

Fool or not, he took the bait. ‘To explain the Rotgut, I’ll need to explain a few basics about Biblical scholarship.’

‘Whatever it takes.’

‘A quick run-through then. Because really, I have other things I need to attend to.’

‘A quick run-through would be great. Is it okay if I record this? I’d like my colleagues to have the benefit, too.’

‘So long as I’m credited,’ Gassan said, warily.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Very well, Sergeant. How much do you know about the Bible?’

16

17

Kennedy slept, and dreamed of Judas. He wasn’t very happy. He sat in a field, underneath a bare tree from which a knotted rope hung, so she knew what moment this was. The moment before his suicide. He seemed preoccupied, though, with counting the money in his hand.

At a certain point, he noticed she was there. He glanced up, met her gaze with sad, dark eyes, and showed the coins to her. Thirty pieces of silver.

‘I know,’ Kennedy said. ‘I know it’s serious.’

It was a line from a Smiths song, and she felt inclined to apologise for it. But Judas was hanging from the tree now, dangling slowly to and fro like the world’s ugliest wind chime.

The moment had passed.

18

It took Tillman a long time to get himself together and on-track again after he finally crawled up on to the beach at Folkestone. Drenched, freezing, weak from exhaustion and loss of blood, he knew he couldn’t afford the luxury of checking in to a hospital. He had to keep moving, if he wanted to stay alive. Otherwise he’d succumb to hypothermia, and shock.

He was lucky in one respect. Folkestone at three in the morning was a relatively easy place to go shopping. He broke into a chemist’s for bandages and sulfadine, and raided the plastic bags dumped outside a charity shop for a change of clothes. A gents’ toilet next to a caravan park became his dressing room and his operating theatre.

The wounds in his shoulder and thigh were bleeding way too freely, and the sulfadine didn’t even slow the process down. Tillman suspected that the chill water, close enough to freezing to constrict his arteries, had saved his life. Something nasty — something coated on the knife blades presumably — was stopping his blood from coagulating. He made another break-in, to a small convenience store, where he looked in vain for BIC lighters, settled in the end for Swan Vestas. He used a few of the matches to light a broken branch from someone’s hedge of over-tall Douglas firs. Then he bit down on his wadded T-shirt as he cauterised the clean, straight-edged gashes with naked flame. The heady smell of the fir-tree resin mixed nauseatingly with that of his burning flesh. When it was done, he applied a whole lot more of the disinfectant salve with hands that trembled slightly, and dressed the wounds as best he could.

Getting to London was the next hurdle. At least he still had his wallet, which had been in his trouser pocket rather than in the jacket he had left behind on the ferry. Tillman stayed away from railway stations, knowing that he looked bad enough that someone might be tempted to call the police if he tried to buy a ticket. A night coach seemed like a better bet. He felt pretty sure Folkestone had a coach station, and the town was small enough that he found it without too much trouble. The first coach of the day was before sun-up. He bought a ticket from a tiny booth next to a colossal NCP car park, waited out of the reach of the street lights until he saw the driver get on board, and joined the small queue at the last possible moment. He excited no comment, but a few wary glances. He looked like an unusually well-built wino, and probably smelled like a fire in a pharmacy. Good. Nobody would want to meet his gaze, let alone talk to him. He could sleep, as far as his wounds would let him sleep.

At Victoria, things got a little easier. He ordered a huge fried breakfast from a café on Buckingham Palace Road whose proprietor was used to dealing with homeless guys from the adjacent hostels and didn’t give a damn how Tillman looked or smelled. The food made him feel a lot better, and the fiery ache from the knife wounds began easing off just a little. Enough for him to function anyway, and to think clearly.

He had to set up a base, until he heard from Vermeulens. He had to find out what Michael Brand had been doing in London, and if he was still here. He had to be ready to move, and move fast, if there was anyone or anything for him to move against.

Tillman still owned the house in Kilburn where he’d lived with Rebecca and raised a family with her, but didn’t even consider the possibility of going back there. Whoever had tried to kill him on the ferry had to know a lot about his current movements, which were complex and cryptic. So they’d also know everything there was to know about his past, which was transparent and obvious.

After visiting a storage facility at St Pancras, one of his many emergency stashes, he went by Underground out to Queen’s Park. There he checked into a bed and breakfast. He paid with cash, showing as ID a fake passport in the name of Crowther — one of the last batch he’d bought from Insurance before she cut him off. It occurred to him to wonder whether the passport was safe now. Maybe not, for any purpose that would involve checking it against a database. The next time he took a plane — if he ever decided it was safe to do so — he should probably go shopping for some new identities first.

Laying out his few surviving possessions, and making a tally of the things that would have to be sourced and replaced in the next few days, he remembered the drowning of Mr Snow. The memory was like a fisherman’s line with a great white shark clamped to the other end of it. Tillman hauled on it, felt the tension and quickly, desperately, turned his mind to other things.

He took off his clothes and the bandages, and had a cold shower. He didn’t want to risk hot or even warm water on the burned skin of his barely closed wounds. He placed a call to Vermeulens, and left a message on the voicemail giving him the new cellphone number. It was a bright, sunny morning, but the thick curtains shut out most of the light. He lay down — on his stomach, which seemed less aggravating to his shoulder — and slept for eighteen hours straight.

What woke him was the phone. He groped for it, trying to pull his thoughts together and dredge up a memory of where he was. ‘Hey,’ he croaked into the phone — a stop-gap until he found out who the hell was calling him.

‘Hoe gaat het met jou, Leo?’

‘Benny.’

‘Yes, it’s me. You went off the radar for a while. I called you on your usual number, but the man who answered I didn’t know. He said he was a friend. I chose to assume that he was not.’

His phone had been in the pocket of his jacket. The knife men and their Girl Friday must have taken it. They would have checked for a phone book or list of memorised numbers, but Tillman never kept one. So they were keeping the phone turned on, in the hope that friends or contacts of Leo might call him. It was a clumsy, opportunistic strategy, and it wasn’t going to get them very far. Only half a dozen people had the number, and none except Vermeulens was likely to call Tillman without prior arrangement.

‘No friend of mine,’ Tillman confirmed.

‘And yet he seemed very anxious to know that you were well. Or at least, if you were unwell, where he could visit you.’

Tillman laughed. ‘Yeah. Flowers would have been forthcoming. Probably white lilies.’

‘You’re upsetting people, Leo. I know this because rumours are circulating about you that seem unlikely to be true.’

‘MacTeale.’

‘And other things. You’re dealing in drugs now, apparently, but also your partners in these deals have twice been arrested in sting operations. You walk, each time. So clearly you’ve decided that selling out your own people is a lucrative sideline.’

‘I’m not dealing drugs, Benny. Or snitching.’

‘Of course not. You never had that much of a work ethic. But rumours like these cost money, Leo. Someone wants to cut you off from comfort and supply. From your friends.’

‘From oxygen, too. I just got off a ferry where they tried to carve me up like a turkey. Professional job.’

‘Professional,’ Vermeulens agreed. ‘Very. That was, in fact, my point. That they are professionals and they are well connected, with access both to money and to channels. You should watch yourself.’

‘Is that why you called?’

‘No, Leo. That is not why I called. Mostly, although we’re friends, I don’t fret about your well-being so much that I call you to tell you to wear a scarf in the cold winter evenings. And anyway, it’s probably summer where you are.’

‘How do you know where I am, Benny?’ He heard the edge of paranoia in his own voice, the unfocused fear underneath the aggression. Something had changed in Tillman’s mind, in his world. He experienced it as a change in gradient, as though the flat ground had become a slope that he stood on, so that he needed to shift his balance from one second to the next to keep his footing.

‘The phone, Leo. Your new number is a UK number. Most likely that means you’re back in Britain, but you notice that I’m not asking. In the meantime, and let me come to the point here, there is Michael Brand.’

Tillman sat up. ‘What about Michael Brand?’

‘He has been indiscreet. Very.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘He’s wanted for murder, Leo. For many murders. I think your luck may finally have changed.’

19

The next morning they waited outside Summerhill’s office for a good forty-five minutes, but Summerhill didn’t show. WPC Rawl, on despatch, said he was on his way but running late. Then a few minutes later, she amended that.

‘He’s been diverted. Had to go to Westminster first, to talk to some select committee. Funding and appropriations, something like that. He’ll be at least an hour.’

Kennedy and Harper considered and conferred. The argument about leaving Opie pending so as to add urgency to the DCI’s decision still held. Summerhill was more likely to keep them on the case if there was something that needed doing right there and then. On the other hand, debriefing Opie properly was something that did need doing, the sooner the better.

‘Have you had breakfast?’ Harper asked Kennedy.

‘No,’ she admitted. Breakfast was very rarely part of her routine.

‘Well, let’s grab something, then. Work up the questions while we eat, come back in half an hour. If he’s not back, we head out.’

Kennedy agreed, suppressing a qualm of reluctance. Her working day tended to be a straight sprint. Eating, like everything else in ordinary life, was relegated to the margins.

But someone had recently reopened the Queen Anne Café and Business Centre on the corner of Broadway, a whimsical enterprise that Kennedy had always had a certain amount of time for. So she agreed, and they went.

The place was a lot more crowded than she’d expected, and talking about the details of the case seemed awkward in the presence of so many possible rubber-neckers. They tried various circumlocutions, but murder sounds like murder through any number of gauzy veils. They gave up around about the time when Harper’s fried breakfast and Kennedy’s toast and butter arrived.

‘You know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right?’ Harper said, eyeing Kennedy’s monastic platter.

‘For me, that would be dinner,’ she replied.

‘So what, with dinner you add an extra slice? A muffin? Strawberry jam?’

Kennedy considered telling him it was none of his business what she ate, but she looked at his face and saw that the joke was meant as an ice-breaker, nothing more. He still didn’t know exactly how to talk to her, what basis their professional relationship was on. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since she told him to press the ejector-seat button.

‘Marmalade,’ she said. ‘With bits in.’

Harper whistled. ‘With bits in. Now you’re talking.’

He ate fast, and was a good way into his sausage, egg and bacon while Kennedy was still spreading butter.

‘So did you always want to be a detective?’ he asked, between forkfuls.

‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘Always.’ It wasn’t the literal truth but close enough that it would do. She’d always wanted to be something that earned her father’s approval, that took her out of the poisonous, perilous hinterland of his contempt. ‘What about you?’ she answered, instinctively turning the conversation away from that territory.

‘What about me?’

‘When did you decide this was the life for you?’

‘Year seven,’ Harper said, without hesitation.

The numbering system had changed since Kennedy’s day. She had to do a mental translation. ‘The first year of secondary school,’ she said. ‘You would have been twelve.’

Harper was polishing off his last piece of sausage, having used it to mop up some yolk from the fried egg. It occupied his full attention, although he seemed to be thinking, too, about the explanation he was about to give. ‘I was a skinny little kid,’ he said at last. ‘And a bit of a dreamer. One of the quiet ones. I was pretty wet, to be honest. So wet you could have shot snipe off my back, as my mum used to say in her nastier moods. I got picked on in primary school, but nothing too bad. The teachers were there to see that it didn’t get out of hand, and I used to hide behind their skirts. I had no shame.’

He pushed his empty plate away. ‘Then I moved up to Burnt Hill — to comprehensive school. And it all went bad. Little mummy’s boy, suddenly thrown right into the fiery furnace.’ He grinned at Kennedy, as though inviting her to laugh at the image. ‘The first time I saw a kid pull a knife in a fight, it was a real eye-opener. It was like … there’d been a balance before and now there wasn’t. The willingness of the kids around me to do harm — and their ability to do it — had escalated by about n per cent, where n is a really big number.

‘But the system of control hadn’t changed much at all. We were still being threatened with detentions, demerits, loss of privileges. Pint-sized Al Capones, malevolent little bastards with weasel minds and heavy weaponry, being told that if they didn’t buck their ideas up they’d have to stay behind after class. I realised right there and then what cops were for, and I started wanting to be one.’

He grinned at her again. ‘And eight years later, my dream came true. Don’t you love a story with a happy ending?’

Kennedy acknowledged the potted autobiography with a solemn nod. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I understand you a little better now, Harper. The strict disciplinarian keeping the naughty schoolchildren of the world at bay. Do uniforms figure in this fantasy at all?’

‘I only just got out of uniform,’ Harper reminded her. ‘Uniforms aren’t sexy for me. Plainclothes — that’s where it’s at, Kennedy.’

‘Of course.’ He was looking at her in a speculative way. She met that look squarely, a little irritated by it. ‘What? What’s on your mind?’

‘You are. I’m wondering about something, and maybe you can explain it to me. You seem pretty focused on the job — and you seem to be pretty good at it. I’ve only known you for a day or so, and I’ve already got you clocked, more or less, as career police. I mean, this isn’t even a little bit casual to you. You’d never describe it as “just a job”. Am I wrong?’

‘Is this relevant to anything?’

‘Well, maybe not. I’m just asking because it would be a good thing to know. I mean, since we find ourselves working together.’

‘It’s not just a job. So what?’

Harper threw out his hands. ‘So how do you find yourself in such a ridiculous mess? It’s like you chose it. Like you wanted to be shoved out on your own, and hated. I mean, going your own way instead of backing up the rest of your unit. Briefing against other officers, in an official inquiry. That’s a marked choice, isn’t it?’

Kennedy went through several answers in her mind. Most involved telling Harper to shove it up his arse and work it in really deep. She finally settled for: ‘The rest of my unit had just put four bullets into an unarmed man.’

‘That’s not the point, though, is it? Not really. I’m assuming that wasn’t the point.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be? You think Marcus Dell doesn’t matter because he was black and stoned?’

‘Jesus.’ Harper shrugged brusquely, as though the words had settled on his shoulder and he wanted to dislodge them. His tone became more serious. ‘Listen, I put my name down for ARU as soon as I got my transfer into Detective Division. The shortlist is three years, I knew that. But I didn’t even get short-listed because the psych tests are so sensitive — I mean, really hair-trigger. I didn’t score quite high enough on impulse control. So I think it pretty much follows that anyone who did get their hand on a gun has proved their fitness to carry one. You hear what I’m saying, Kennedy? You put yourself into an elite group. Self-selecting. Top of the class.

‘So once you’re in a situation like that, I’m thinking your team is first and last and everything. Doesn’t matter if this guy, Dell, was carrying or not. He looked like he was carrying, and he assaulted an officer. You don’t second guess the luckless bastards who have to make that call, right? I would have said that was basic. So what am I not getting?’

Harper fell silent, staring at her expectantly. They could have sat there like that until the crack of doom. Kennedy didn’t feel that she owed him an explanation, or care overmuch what he thought about her. But she did care about the false logic. She knew where it led.

‘You have any idea how many kills the Met has to its name, Harper?’ she asked him. ‘Total. Going all the way back to 1829, when they kicked out the Bow Street Runners and formed the modern service?’

Harper made a tutting sound. ‘No. And neither do you.’

‘Right. You’re right. But I can tell you how many we bag in an average year. Shootings, I mean. Not accidents. Officers shooting to kill.’

Harper chewed it over, along with a stray piece of fried bread. ‘Well, I’d be guessing, but I know it’s a lot less than—’

‘It’s one.’

Harper’s eyebrows did a dip and rise. He said nothing.

‘Yeah,’ said Kennedy. ‘Some years it bumps to two, or God forbid three, but some years there aren’t any. So on average, over the long haul, it’s just the one.’ She didn’t say: and last year, the one was me. It didn’t seem to need saying.

Harper nodded, accepting the figure, inviting Kennedy to get to the point.

‘Across the whole of the country — and I’m counting in Wales and Scotland — the worst year so far this century was 2005. That was a bad one, all right. A shame and a scandal. Three times the body count of the previous year. That brought it up to six. Six shootings in a year. In the country. You got that, Harper? But you know, we can drop the bar a little lower. All deaths arising from civilian contact with police officers — beatings in remand cells, dodgy restraint techniques, high speed chases that go that little bit too far. What’s the score now? Any guesses?’

‘No,’ Harper said. ‘No guesses, Kennedy. But I’m sure you can tell me.’

‘It’s less than a hundred a year. A whole lot less. Most years, say sixty and you’ll be close. There are cities in America — and not even particularly big cities — that have more deaths in police custody than our whole island. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because most cops aren’t out there to score points or fight wars. They’re out there to do a job. A job that’s hard. Blood, sweat and tears hard.’

‘Okay.’ Kennedy’s tone had a hard enough edge to it that it would have taken a brave man to disagree. But Harper wasn’t about to disagree in any case. ‘That was sort of my point before it was your point,’ he said. ‘That the job is really tough and if you’ve been doing it for any length of time, you maybe deserve a bit of love and understanding. But you draw a different conclusion, obviously.’

‘Not just a different conclusion, Harper. The opposite conclusion. If you’re proud of those figures, or if you just think they mean anything, then you hold serving officers to a higher standard, not a lower one. Because the worst thing anyone can do is let things go by on the nod. Between the three of us, my team and me, we killed a man, when there was no good reason to. If you think we should get away with that, then sit back and watch those numbers climb and climb. Sit and watch accountability go out the window while brain-dead cowboys like Gates and Leakey go back into the division and get clapped on the back as though they took one for the team.’

She was talking a little too loudly by the time she’d finished, and a few people at other tables were shooting her nervous glances. ‘All right,’ Harper said. ‘All right, Kennedy. Point taken. I guess that was what I wanted to hear. I guess I know where you’re coming from now.’

‘No, you don’t,’ she assured him, grimly. Because she’d left out the main point of the story. She hadn’t particularly meant to. She just found, when she came to it, that it was the hardest part to put it into words.

But Harper was still looking at her, waiting for the punchline. So she gave it to him, without quite knowing why.

Before there was Kennedy, H., Det Sgt 4031, there was Kennedy, P., Det Sgt 1117. He served twelve years in uniform and twenty-eight in Division. He got his ARU in 1993, although they didn’t call it that back then, they called it Open Carry, because that was an American phrase that was getting some currency and it sounded pretty damn cool.

On the 27th of February, 1997, openly carrying, Detective Sergeant Peter Kennedy pursued an armed man, Johnny McElvoy, who was fleeing the scene of a gangland shootout. The chase led Kennedy into an alley, where, in the dark and thinking — as it turned out, wrongly — that he was walking into an ambush, he fired three rounds at a pregnant woman at a range of twenty feet.

Amazingly, the woman survived. But the bullet that passed through her uterus and mulched its contents also passed through her lower spine and left her paraplegic.

Kennedy was devastated. His friends, though, were supportive, and agreed between them a version of events that spared both him and the force a great deal of pain and embarrassment. McElvoy, they said, had taken up a defensive position in the alley and was firing on them. Kennedy had returned fire, and the woman, panicked, had run into the path of his bullet.

Kennedy got to this point in her account and just stopped. Harper was looking at her, clearly expecting more, but this was where it got complicated and ugly and harder to explain. ‘They covered his back,’ she summarised.

‘I got that,’ Harper said. ‘But it was an accident, yeah? Just a horrible accident.’

‘Harper, it was an accident that wrecked one life and aborted another.’

‘So …?’ He looked blank.

Kennedy was exasperated that he didn’t get it. ‘So rallying around your mates isn’t the right response in a situation like that. If it was a reasonable mistake, the truth should be good enough. If it was a screw-up, then the truth has to come out and a copper has to lose his gun licence because he wasn’t good enough to have it in the first place.’

Harper settled back in his chair, staring at her shrewdly. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What’s the bit you’re leaving out?’

‘I’m leaving nothing out,’ Kennedy said.

‘Yes, you are. I’ll agree with you this far: what your dad did was terrible. It was really terrible. And I could see where that would leave a scar on you. But it didn’t stop you from joining the force, or going out for detective, or applying for your ARU. So where’s the scar, Kennedy? Which bit hurts?’

Kennedy didn’t answer. She left a tenner to cover the breakfasts and the tip, and they walked back to the yard. She was silent as they walked, and so was Harper. He seemed to have that interrogator’s knack of making a silence push against you, until you felt like you needed to do something to fill it.

‘Okay,’ Kennedy said at last. And she told him what was, for her, the worst thing. The thing that, even after all this time, she couldn’t describe in a level voice. How Peter Kennedy had lined up his wife and two kids and schooled them in the fine detail of the lie, in case anyone — a friend at school, a journalist, someone they met in Sainsbury’s — should ever ask. Because God forbid there should be a crack big enough for a stranger to pry a crowbar into and overturn the rock under which he was now hiding. Heather and Steve and little Chrissie, along with their mother, had to parrot back to Sergeant Peter Kennedy the exact sequence of events, in the right order, again and again, and when they got it wrong he shouted at them in a fury that came undiluted from the panic in his soul, and when they got it right he hugged them with fervent love.

‘It pretty much wrecked us, as a family,’ Kennedy said. Over the hump now, she could at least do the summing up dispassionately. ‘We had that big lie sitting in between us, then, all the damn time. You couldn’t talk around it, so you didn’t talk at all. What was saved, Harper? He never got past sergeant, because whatever the docket said, everyone knew what had happened. Everyone could see the monkey on his back. He started drinking like a maniac, and I think that brought his Alzheimer’s on. The stress — well, maybe it didn’t cause my mother’s cancer, but it seemed to make her give in to it a whole lot quicker. And none of us feel anything for each other any more. I haven’t seen my brother for ten years. I see Chrissie once in a blue moon. We … we stopped working, and we fell apart. Game over.’

‘And your dad’s dead?’

Kennedy thought about the shambling set of mannerisms she shared her flat with. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘My dad is dead.’

‘So. Did you become a lesbian to get even with him?’

Kennedy stiffened, stopped, turned to face Harper, ready to tear a number of thin strips off his facetious little ego. But Harper was grinning and he threw up his hands in surrender.

‘Trying to lighten the tone,’ he said.

‘Idiot.’

‘No, really. Sigmund Freud said—’

‘I’m probably going to get my gun licence back at some point, Harper. Bear that in mind.’

He nodded, still grinning, and bailed out of the joke right there.

Summerhill still hadn’t shown. Rawl said he hadn’t even gone into the committee room yet.

Kennedy called it. They’d head out to Luton and be back by lunchtime. Probably they’d still return before Summerhill surfaced. She went to retrieve the case file, so they could add in Opie’s statement if she said anything pertinent, and to leave a handwritten note for Summerhill explaining what they were doing. In the meantime, she asked Harper to shoot out an Interpol trawl for Michael Brand. You never knew your luck, after all.

The car they’d been driving the day before was unavailable for some reason, so they signed out another one from the pool and found it, after a short search, in the Caxton Street garage: a bottle-green Volvo S60, in good condition apart from a deep scratch down the full length of the driver’s side where somebody had keyed it. Opening the doors released a miasma of stale smoke, which made Harper swear and Kennedy wince. But it wasn’t worth the trouble of going back inside and working through two more sets of paperwork.

They’d missed the worst of the rush hour by the time they hit the M1, but it was still slow going. Harper was all for mounting the roof light and turning on the siren. Having lost so much of the morning already, Kennedy didn’t see the point.

Unlike Prince Regent’s College, Park Square still seemed to be swarming with purposefully moving students despite the time of year, and the car park was pretty much full. They circled the asphalt twice, just ahead of a white Bedford van that was doing exactly the same thing, before Harper pulled into a faculty space on which the word RESERVED had been blazoned in big yellow letters. The van nosed past them and Heather caught a brief glimpse of its driver: a man in early middle age, strikingly handsome in an austere, patrician way. His black hair was tightly frizzed and short, as sleek as though it had been anointed with oil. His face, though, looked as pale as the face of a Greek statue, and his gaze as she briefly met it gave her an unwelcome jolt of recognition. It was like the look her father got in his eyes when he was drifting off into the inner landscapes of his dementia. A look that never quite made it as far as the outside world, or else went clear past it. Unnerved, she looked away.

20

From the main gate, they were directed to the computer science faculty, which was on the far side of a ragged, bleached expanse of lawn, and then up to a lab on the third floor where a hundred students were working silently on a hundred new, gleaming machines. No, silently was the wrong word. The room was filled with a susurrus of fingers tapping on soft-touch keyboards, like the clucking of a hundred birds in covert. Sarah Opie was sitting at a workstation that looked no different from any of the others, except that it faced them and was attached by a hanging cable to a huge LCD screen above her head. The screen was switched off.

Dr Opie looked younger than Harper had been expecting: younger, and a lot more attractive, with strawberry blonde hair worn shoulder-length and lightly tousled. She had to be in her mid-twenties, young enough that the doctorate must be a very recent achievement. Young enough that the students in the room, who she was presumably teaching or supervising in some way, looked more like her contemporaries than her charges. She’d tried to distinguish herself from them by going for a formal look, but the dark-blue pinstriped two-piece she had on came across almost like fancy dress — the outfit of a sexy secretary strippergram.

Opie was expecting them. She stood and went without a word into an inner office whose glass frontage formed the rear wall of the main lab. She waited with her hand on the doorknob until they joined her, then closed the door. Some of the students had glanced up from their work when the detectives arrived and were still covertly watching now. Dr Opie turned her back on them to face the two officers, her arms stiffly folded.

Her glance went to Harper first. ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ she said, quietly.

‘This is Detective Sergeant Kennedy,’ he said. ‘She’s in charge of the case, and she’d like to hear the story, too. I’ve also got some follow-up questions from our talk yesterday. I hope that’s okay.’

The set of Opie’s face indicated that it probably wasn’t, but she moved her head in what was almost a nod and a moment later sat down in one of the two chairs in the office. Kennedy took the other, leaving Harper to lean precariously against one of the aluminium uprights that separated the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass.

‘So we’ve got three fatalities,’ Kennedy said, as soon as she’d set up her voice recorder and got Opie’s permission to use it. ‘Stuart Barlow. Catherine Hurt. Samir Devani. They’re all interested in history — or at least, in old documents — and they’re members of this group of yours, that likes to discuss that stuff. Now, you say that they were all working on one particular project?’

Dr Opie frowned a little impatiently. She seemed to feel that this was ground that had already been covered.

‘Yes,’ was all she said.

‘And the project was something that they discussed on the message board? On your online forum?’ Kennedy pursued.

‘Yes.’

‘Which is a historical forum. But you’re not a historian, obviously.’

‘No.’

This time Kennedy waited, staring at Opie in silent expectation. Harper knew what she was doing, and was careful not to jump into the gap. Closed questions were good because they were focused, but if you weren’t careful, and if the witness wasn’t the loquacious type, you could fall into a pattern of closed question/one-word answer — and then you could end up chasing your own tail. The silence stretched for a few seconds, but in the end it had its intended effect.

‘It’s a hobby for me,’ Sarah Opie said. ‘I did classics at school, and I’m pretty good at Ancient Greek. People think that’s a bit weird, for an IT specialist, but I love languages. And I’m good at them. I had a Jewish boyfriend once, who taught me some Hebrew, and I worked backward from that to Aramaic. It fascinates me, with Aramaic and Ancient Greek, how the character sets are almost the same as for the modern languages but sometimes there’s been a phonic shift, so that the same sign designates very different sounds. Of course, in some cases we don’t even know how the living language actually sounded. The dry versus nasal pronunciation of mu plus pi — you know, where does that come in? You’ve got ancient texts and modern speakers, and it’s not easy to—’

‘Can you tell us what you know about Stuart Barlow’s Rotgut project,’ Kennedy interrupted. Harper almost grinned. Having coaxed Opie to move beyond monosyllables, the sergeant was now having to rein her in again. Always a feast or a famine.

‘Professor Barlow came on to the board to ask for collaborators,’ Opie told them. ‘That was how it all started. He said he wanted to look at the Rotgut again from a new angle, and he asked if anybody had an appetite for that. That was the title of the thread: “Does anyone have any appetite for a new look at the Rotgut?”’

‘And this was when?’

Opie shook her head, but answered anyway. ‘Two years ago at least. Maybe three. I’d have to go back and look at the threads. They’re all still available on the site.’

‘So who responded?’ Harper asked.

Opie’s voice trembled just a little as she reeled off the names. ‘Cath. Catherine Hurt. Sam Devani. Stuart went after Emil Gassan because he’s so good on New Testament Aramaic, but Gassan didn’t want to know.’

‘Why was that?’

‘He thought Stuart sort of lacked the academic credentials. Well, the whole team, really. He didn’t want to be associated with them.’

‘So it was just those three,’ Kennedy said. ‘Barlow. Hurt. Devani.’

‘Yes. Just those three.’

‘Nobody else you’ve forgotten?’

Opie let her irritation show. ‘No. Nobody.’

‘What about Michael Brand?’

‘Michael Brand …’ She repeated the name with no particular emphasis. ‘No. He was never part of this.’

‘But you know him?’

‘Not really. I think I’ve seen his name come up on the board once or twice. He’s never been part of any discussion that I was in. And I only turn up on the board, not at the symposia. I’m not a historian, obviously — so I couldn’t get funded to go to a history conference, and I couldn’t afford to do it out of my own salary.’

‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ Kennedy pursued. ‘That you could be part of the same message board group and not know each other?’

Opie shrugged. ‘Not really. How many registered members has the Ravellers board got? Last time I checked the counter, it was up over two hundred. There’s a counter on the front page so you can see when someone new joins — and a thread where they introduce themselves. They don’t all post regularly. I don’t. Not unless I’ve got an actual project on the go. I’d say I know maybe twenty or thirty of them well, and I could tell you the names of twenty more besides. Their screen names, I mean.’

‘You say “when you’ve got a project”,’ Harper began, but Kennedy clearly wasn’t interested in getting Dr Opie to talk about herself. She wanted to know about Stuart Barlow’s group and what they were doing. She rode over Harper’s question, which annoyed him a little — but she was ranking officer, and she had the right to take the lead in the questioning. ‘Did Professor Barlow ever talk to you about exactly what it was he was trying to do?’ she asked now. ‘What he meant by his new approach?’

‘Well, yes,’ Opie said, looking puzzled. ‘Of course he did.’

‘Why of course?’

‘Stuart and I were pretty good friends. I said I didn’t go to any of the conferences, and that’s true — but when the conferences were in London, sometimes I’d get a train down there and meet one or two of the people I knew after the sessions were over on the Friday or the Saturday. We’d go for a few drinks, maybe for dinner. I met Cath that way, and Stuart, too. He was really funny — like the cartoon of an absent-minded professor in a TV show. But he was one of the most intelligent people I ever met. I think that was why he never published. He found it hard to settle on one thing. He’d have an amazing idea, but then while he was working on it he’d have another amazing idea and just leave the first thing unfinished. He talked like that, too.’ She smiled, probably remembering some specific conversation, but then got serious again almost at once. ‘So, you know, there’s no way he wouldn’t at least mention something this big to me. He probably told me about it before he told anyone else.’

‘So you can sum up the project for us,’ Kennedy said, pulling Opie back on track again. ‘I think that might be useful at this stage.’

Opie looked — maybe a little longingly — out through the window at her class. Some of them were still shooting the occasional glance in the direction of the inner office, but for the most part they were working quietly. No riots in progress. They could all be surfing porn or playing minesweeper, but they were doing it discreetly.

‘Okay,’ Opie said, looking resigned. ‘Stuart said he wanted to use a brute force approach.’

‘Which means?’

‘Well, I’m not sure whether he knew what it meant when he said it, but what it came down to, in the end, was crunching the numbers. Digitising the Rotgut and then interrogating it using a really high-end software array that practically had to be written from scratch. That was why Stuart particularly wanted to have IT support. You see, he thought the best way to find the source document for the Rotgut was to—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Harper blurted. ‘Say that again. He wanted?’

Opie blinked, startled. ‘He wanted IT support. Because what he had in mind was going to involve hundreds of hours of—’

‘Does that mean you?’ Harper demanded, interrupting again. ‘Does IT support mean you?’

‘Of course it means me. I wrote the software and ran it. How else do you think I know about all this?’

‘But you said you weren’t in the team!’ Kennedy exclaimed, coming to her feet.

Dr Opie still looked mystified, but now she also looked scared and defensive. ‘I wasn’t,’ she said, involuntarily pushing her chair a little back from Kennedy, who was standing over her, evidently a little too close. ‘I was only doing search runs and filter runs for them. Support. Stuart, Cath and Sam were the team. They were the ones going to write the monograph, if it ever got to be published. I mean, you know, if they found what they were hoping to find. Stuart just asked me to do tech support, and I said yes. That doesn’t make me—’

‘What it makes you,’ Kennedy snapped, cutting Opie off, ‘is a target. If someone is killing the members of this group, why should they draw a distinction between you and the other three? You say you were only helping them out — but you talked to them, worked with them. From the outside, doesn’t it look like you were on the team?’

Opie shook her head, firmly at first, but the conviction drained away in three easy stages.

Shake to the left — you’re crazy in some very well-progressed ways.

Shake to the right — but then, there are a lot of people dead already.

Shake to the left — and you’re saying … oh dear.

She let loose an incredulous and slightly tortured-sounding laugh. Harper felt for her. Incredulity seemed like a reasonable response. If you live in the rarefied air of arcane theories and academic quibbles, you probably get to feel as though there’s at least a tower or two of good, clean ivory between you and the red, bleeding business of the world. But now the History Man was in town, and the walls were coming down. Just for a moment, he felt guilty about the part of himself that was enjoying this.

‘I’m not,’ Opie said again. ‘I’m not on the team.’ But it was a weak protest now. An appeal to a non-existent court of natural justice.

‘Tech support,’ Kennedy said, reminding her of her own words. ‘Professor Barlow wanted you to help him. Who else would know that? Did you talk about it on the board?’

‘Of course I did.’ Opie stood up herself now, confronting Kennedy for a moment or two with her fists clenching and unclenching in unfocused but strong emotion. ‘Of course I did. It wasn’t a secret. All I did was run the programs. I didn’t even read the print-outs. They didn’t mean anything to me.’

Kennedy opened her mouth, but changed her mind and closed it again. She turned to Harper, looking a question at him. He nodded. The specifics didn’t matter. What she was asking him was whether this party needed to change venues, and the answer had to be yes. They could be wrong about everything else: the accidents that had killed Hurt and Devani could just be accidents, and the break-ins at Barlow’s cottage and his office at Prince Regent’s amazing coincidences. The disappearing Michael Brand — Harper suddenly remembered that he still hadn’t mentioned any of that to Kennedy — could be a complete innocent who was just absent-minded about his address. It made no difference. They had only one priority here, and only one way to take it. They had reason to believe a witness was in immediate, physical danger. They had to bring her in.

‘Should I move the car around to the entrance?’ Harper asked Kennedy.

‘Yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘Thanks, Chris. Do that.’ Then she held up her hand — stop — and turned back to Opie. ‘Is there a back entrance?’ she asked.

‘What?’ Opie asked. She didn’t seem to see where this was going.

‘To this block. Is there another way out?’

‘Only the fire escape.’

To Harper again: ‘We’ll go that way, and we’ll go together. Dr Opie, we’re taking you into protective custody. Please collect any things you need to take with you right now. Obviously we’ll send someone round to your house later to pick up anything else you’d like to have — but it may be some time before you go back there yourself.’

‘I’m in the middle of a lesson,’ Opie pointed out, as though that was still an issue.

‘Dismiss the class,’ Kennedy said. ‘Or tell them to keep working unsupervised. Presumably they can be trusted to do that?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘We’ll explain to your employers — to the college authorities — that this was out of your hands. That it was our decision. And I’m sure they’ll find someone to cover your work while you’re away.’

Opie still looked unhappy, and she carried on arguing right up to the point where Kennedy picked up her handbag and placed it in her hands. Somehow that both galvanised and silenced her. She collected a few items from the desk — a flash-drive, a purse and a few thick whiteboard markers — and dropped them into the bag. Then she gave Kennedy a reproachful, bewildered look, which perhaps was intended for God or Nemesis, and took a step towards the door. Almost immediately she yelped as if stung and went back quickly to the desk. She turned a few papers over, rummaged through the contents of a red plastic in-tray, and at last came up with a single folded sheet of yellow paper. ‘Password,’ she said to Harper and Kennedy. ‘For my files. I change it every week.’

‘You write your password down?’ Harper asked, slightly scandalised.

‘Of course not,’ Opie snapped, nettled by the implied disapproval. ‘But I keep a mnemonic in case I forget it.’

She went through into the main workroom. Harper and Kennedy followed.

The students all looked up from their work, knowing that something out of the ordinary was going down and curious to see what it was going to be. ‘We’re winding the lesson up a little early,’ Dr Opie said. ‘Any of you who want to carry on working can do so, up until twelve-thirty. And the due date for the database assignment stays the same, so please do use the time sensibly. I’ll see you all next week.’

The students all turned back to their screens, but it was clear from their brisk movements and sweeping up of stray belongings that most were packing up. Kennedy hustled Opie towards the door, keen to get to it before the general exodus began. Harper brought up the rear, the narrow aisle between desks obliging them to stay in single file. They had to step over bags and books left in the aisle, so progress was slower than it might have been.

Abruptly, Kennedy stopped. She turned to look at Harper, or maybe past him, her expression a puzzled frown.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Those men looked—’

There was a sound like the scrape of a chair being pushed back. Something moved at Harper’s elbow. He turned and found himself staring into the face of a man maybe ten years older than he was, dark-haired and pale-skinned, dressed in a loose white shirt and light tan suit, their coarse fabric making them look hand-woven. The man was standing, had just come to his feet. He had an expression on his face of strange, detached calm, but the pupils of his eyes were enormous. Drugs, Harper thought: he has to be on something.

He put a hand on the man’s shoulder to make him sit down again. The man took Harper’s hand at the wrist, his grip like the inflexible bite of a handcuff, and twisted it suddenly, unexpectedly. Harper gasped and buckled at the knees as pain lanced up his arm.

He heard Kennedy shout, but didn’t catch the words. He struck out clumsily, with his left hand, and made contact, but the punch caught the man on the shoulder rather than the point of the jaw. The grip on Harper’s arm stayed as tight as before as the man returned the punch, catching Harper full in the stomach, forcing the breath out of him in an explosive grunt.

He found it hard to take an in-breath, to replace that lost air. The man let go of his arm, and to his own surprise Harper sprawled backwards, knocking over a computer on the desk behind him. He heard screams, and he could understand why. The man who’d just hit him was weeping, and his tears were dark red.

More screams. Harper tried to right himself, but his legs felt wobbly and didn’t want to take his weight. The man with the bleeding eyes, red runnels in his cheeks, stared at him for a moment longer — a stare of total contempt — before turning away.

Over the screams, Harper certainly couldn’t have heard the blood pattering to the ground between his feet. But he caught sight of one of the drops as it fell. He touched his stomach and felt the sticky wetness there, insinuating and terrible. He looked at his red fingers, and an incredulous laugh forced its way out of his throat.

The universe shrank to that redness. It was as hot as hell and tasted of iron.

21

Kennedy’s first and only warning was that doubled sense of déjà vu.

She walked past the man, feeling only a vague prickle of recognition. When she walked past him a second time, the memory clicked into place. He was the man she’d seen in the car park below, in the white Bedford van. But now there were two of him.

She stopped, forcing Harper to stop too, and turned. Almost instantly, she realised that her initial impression had been wrong. There were differences in the physiques of the two men, one being a little taller, a little bulkier than the other. A disparity in their ages — ten years, at least — and in their faces, too, or at least in their expressions. What looked like slightly trippedout calm in the face of the thinner man metamorphosed on the other’s broader features into a scarily robotic blankness. They were mostly alike in their complexion and the colour of their hair — and in the weirdness of their bearing, that wide-eyed stare that took in the whole world while barely acknowledging its presence.

Harper was looking at her expectantly, and she opened her mouth to say something, but hesitated, trying to frame in her mind a warning against a threat she wasn’t even sure was there. The second man, the one nearest to them, pushed his chair back and rose, the sound of the chair legs on the floor making Harper turn his head to look at him. After that, things happened so quickly they seemed to be pictures in a stroboscopic slide show, each impressing itself on Kennedy’s mind as a still image.

Harper was touching the man on the shoulder.

The man’s arm was out, connecting with Harper’s stomach.

Metal flashed, then didn’t because it was sheathed: sheathed in flesh.

Harper fell against a desk.

At some point in this flicker-book series, Kennedy yelled to the room at large, ‘Down! Everybody down!’ and stepped in to help Harper as he pitched over on to the floor. She aimed the simplest of karate punches at the man, the only one she’d ever practised: palm up, knuckles of the index and middle fingers forward, punching from the hip while advancing the same leg.

She didn’t even come close to touching him. The man leaned aside from the punch and stepped in closer to her, moving with terrifying, near-impossible speed while not seeming to be in any special hurry. For an instant Kennedy was staring into his face, and she realised that he was crying: red tears, like blood, running down his face. For some reason, the sight made her stomach lurch, and that instinctive revulsion saved her. She leaned back as though from some atavistic fear of contamination. The knife the man had used on Harper, its stubby blade obscenely crimsoned and trailing beads of blood like spray, parted the air in front of her chest and then, at the end of its arc, bit into her shoulder. The blade was so sharp that her shirt and jacket, the flesh and sinew beneath, didn’t even seem to slow it down.

Screams rose around her, sustained beyond all reason as though a rock star had entered a room full of teenaged fans. The man was off balance momentarily, and Kennedy kicked from the direction in which he was already moving, catching him way down on the leg. He lurched, his centre of gravity momentarily outside his base, and she clubbed him with her closed fist on the side of his jaw as he went down.

His twin — his twin who looked so very different from him, and yet so eerily alike — was standing behind him, at much the same angle to Kennedy. The effect was of peeling one layer of skin from an onion and finding the same structures, the same textures repeated underneath. But the second man had his arm out horizontally, straight from the shoulder, pointing at her. Not with an accusing finger, but with a long-barrelled handgun. His eyes, staring at her steadily over that matt steel barrel, were pale blue shot with red.

Kennedy had never before frozen up at the sight of a gun. Guns were familiar things to her: tools, dangerous but useful, and answerable to her will. In other people’s hands, they were to be feared, but she knew how to read a shooter’s body language and to get her dodging in early. You couldn’t move out of a bullet’s path once it was fired, but you had a reasonable window before then. Half a second between that tug on the trigger and the arrival of the payload: at the beginning of the half-second, the shooter committed himself. The interim was negotiable territory.

This time was different. Seeing the gun, Kennedy felt a sudden absence of will, a draining of thought. She stood still, not because she was frozen in place but because she couldn’t make herself decide to move.

‘Da b’koshta,’ the man said.

He fired three times, so quickly the sounds of the three shots seemed to overlap. Kennedy flinched and stiffened, expecting the arrival of death, expecting it to pass through her like a wind through corn.

Sarah Opie danced a short, brutal jig as the bullets all went home, and didn’t start to fall until the third had hit her.

The sound came later, mooching on to the scene like lazy thunder after the lightning had already gone by. Too late, much too late, Kennedy threw herself forward. The gun turned in a swift flick of motion to point at her head, but this time her punch was quicker and better aimed, and she knocked it aside. Stepping inside the man’s guard, she tried to lock her leg behind his and throw him, but the cramped space worked against her. She collided with the projecting edge of a desk and stumbled. Something caught her on her left temple and slammed her down. She hit the floor hard, random flashes of light and dark superseding each other in front of her eyes.

She tried to move, to lever herself up off the floor. As her sight came back in patches, the angles and the colours sickeningly wrong, she found herself staring into the eyes of Dr Opie. The woman’s lips, as white as her face, moved seemingly without sound, and her fingers trembled as they scratched at the tiled floor.

There was a lull in the screaming, and Kennedy heard, with dreamlike clarity, a small fragment of what Opie was saying. ‘A dove … a dove got …’

Occulted light warned Kennedy and made her flick her gaze upwards. The man with the gun loomed over her, then drew back his foot and kicked her hard in the chest. Pain expanded from a point in the middle of her ribcage like a synaesthetic fire-work. The kick lifted her and dropped her down again. She had no breath left, her flickering awareness rebuilt around the astonishing pain as though around a bulky, solid object.

With unhurried but precise movements, the murderer — the assassin, because that was what he was — helped his fallen colleague to his feet. The two stepped over Kennedy, out of her line of sight, and she heard their steps receding. Or perhaps she only felt the vibrations through her cheek as she lay on her side on the floor. The screaming had resumed with full vigour and volume, so it was hard for any other sound to get a purchase on the saturated air. And maybe, if she ever managed to suck in another breath around the bolus of agony in her chest, she’d add her own voice to the chorus.

She rolled over on to her back and then — laboriously, fighting nausea and the numb buoyancy of encroaching unconsciousness — struggled to her feet. She was taking oxygen in tiny sips and it hurt like swallowing half-chewed barbed wire.

A few students hadn’t been quick enough to get to the door and so had just pressed themselves into the corners of the room in terror as the hideous pantomime unfolded. ‘Call the police,’ Kennedy told them. The words came out wrong, or maybe it was just that she was hearing them wrong. Her tongue felt too big for her mouth, and her body swayed as though it couldn’t find the vertical.

She set off at a run anyway. The killers would be heading for the van. There was still time to stop them, or at least to get the goddamned licence plate.

She almost fell on the stairs, moving too quickly to keep her balance. Her balance was gone, in any case. Time was moving in a pizzicato rhythm, moments pinched out on taut strings to the irregular beat of her pulse. Blood soaked her sleeve, so dark it was more black than red. In the foyer, students stepped back in alarm from this drunken madwoman with a bloodied, swollen face. Kennedy hit the double doors, wrestled with them, staggered through into daylight.

She saw the van immediately. It was a few feet taller than the compact cars that filled every other space in the lot. She saw one of the men climbing into the driver’s seat. The other had opened the door on the passenger side, about to get in, but had turned to look at a security guard who, Kennedy guessed, had offered him some challenge. The man’s hand moved to his jacket. The guard was angry-faced, overweight, oblivious and about to die.

‘Police!’ Kennedy yelled. Or something that shared vowel sounds with that word. ‘You’re under arrest!’

The assassin turned to glance at her as she walked out on to the asphalt, among the parked cars, into a narrow avenue that contained nothing else but her and him. He stared at Kennedy, momentarily inactive as though he required a context in which to understand her, the guard temporarily forgotten, which was something at least. Kennedy strode towards him and he completed the movement he’d already begun, reaching into his jacket to remove what was ready to hand there. But it wasn’t the gun, which was what she’d been expecting. It was the knife. Incongruous relief flooded her. The knife might kill her, but it wouldn’t annul her the way a cross annuls a vampire. It didn’t even look particularly formidable, though she knew by now what it could do. It had a bizarre, asymmetrical shape, bulging out at one side. She kept on walking, as the security guard backed off with a muttered ‘Oh shit.’

The assassin’s arm unfolded, the movement abstract and perfect, the knife aligning precisely with her gaze, so that its slender blade became invisible.

‘You’re under arrest,’ Kennedy said again, with a fair bit more conviction this time even though it was getting harder to talk. ‘And you will lower that weapon or I swear to God I will take it away from you and peel you like a piece of fruit.’

‘Da b’koshta,’ the man said. The exact same sequence of sounds he’d made inside the lab. He drew his arm back and Kennedy tensed like a goalkeeper facing a penalty kick, already deciding which way to jump. If he missed her, she’d have a window of a second or so and she meant to use it.

There was a crisp, hollow boom that seemed to come from all directions at once and the knife exploded in the assassin’s hand like a steel firework. But he didn’t cry out: didn’t make a sound, in fact. He pressed his hand to his chest, the fingers curled strangely, and turned to gaze off to Kennedy’s left. The second shot thudded into his chest, visible because his light-coloured jacket developed suddenly a poppy-bright circle of red.

The shooter came into sight now, from the direction of the gates, running and firing at the same time. A bullet shattered one of the rear windows of the van, another hit nothing that Kennedy could see.

The assassin moved, diving — or maybe it was falling — into the vehicle through the already open passenger door. The engine snarled, sputtered, snarled.

The newcomer — a big man, bigger and more solid even than the heavier of the two killers — was a scant few feet away from the van when it slammed into reverse, forcing him to jump aside. It shot across the narrow aisle, punched into the back of another parked car, then veered around in a wide, drunken arc towards the gate.

The newcomer took careful aim and squeezed off two more shots. The first went nowhere. The second blew off one end of the Bedford’s rear bumper but missed the tyre. The van crashed through the closed barrier — the attendant at the gate ducking and flinching as jagged fragments spun end-over-end through the air — and was gone. The shooter lowered the gun, which looked like some outlandish kind of revolver, and turned to Kennedy.

Sandy-haired and rough-hewn, well over six feet tall, with big shoulders and ham-like hands, the man was built for bar fights and hard labour. He was hard to reconcile with that pinpoint shooting. There was something in his face, though: a grim stoicism that seemed to look inward as well as out, as though the man’s physical body was a stopper in the wall of an interior dam. Kennedy could imagine brave men flinching from that stare.

But the man’s washed-out blue eyes weren’t looking into Kennedy’s. He was focused on her wound, which he indicated with a brusque nod of the head.

‘Get it looked at quick,’ he said. The voice, a soft burr, didn’t go with the hatchet hardness of the face. ‘Really. Right now.’

And then he took off after the van. The security guard at the gate screwed his courage up and stepped into the man’s path, but stepped right back out of it again when he didn’t slow. Another instant and the shooter was gone, too. As though the whole thing had been a hallucination. As though she were asleep and dreaming this somewhere, maybe as she sat outside Summerhill’s office with Harper whistling tunelessly at her side.

Harper.

She staggered back inside and up the stairs. The stairwell and the corridor were full of milling people, most of whom got out of her way quickly when they saw the blood. She still had her badge in her hand and she flashed it whenever necessary to avoid having to speak. Her ears were full of a sickening, monotone hum like the sound you get when you bring a microphone too close to its own loudspeaker.

The crowd was thickest right outside the IT lab, mostly students who’d fled from the violence, now creeping back to peer at the aftermath. But she saw a fair few men in suits who had added themselves to the fringes and were vainly trying to restore calm by requesting it at high volume. Kennedy grabbed one of these and shouted into his face: ‘Dial 999. Get an ambulance. Get the police, and an ambulance.’ The man, who was bald and florid, stared stupidly at her bruised face, at her badge, at her face again, until she sent him on his way with a push. Her voice had thickened even more, her jaw grating agonisingly with each word, but only a congenital idiot would have failed to get the message from her tone.

Harper lay where he’d fallen, and he looked to be in a bad way. He was barely conscious, clutching his stomach from which blood welled and flowed in unfeasible amounts.

Kennedy knelt beside him, then slumped into a sitting position, resting her back against a fallen desk, as the last of her strength drained away. Harper turned his head to stare at her speechlessly.

‘Hang in there, Harper,’ she said. It was just a slurry of sound.

Faced with that inarticulacy, Kennedy did something that amazed her even in the midst of so much else that was amazing. She raised Harper’s head, awkwardly but carefully, and cradled it in her lap, stroking his hair and his white, sweat-slick forehead until his eyes finally closed.

They told her later that it shouldn’t have been a life-threatening wound. Deep as it was, it had missed all the major organs and — by a scant half-inch — the celiac artery. Harper might have been at risk, later, of peritonitis, as with any wound to the body cavity, but with immediate abdominal surgery and broad-spectrum antibiotics he ought to have made a full recovery.

He died in her arms, his blood a never-ending fountain.