The Dead Sea Deception

22

Six days passed in a fog.

The wound to Kennedy’s shoulder had been mended with a great many stitches, but it seeped first blood and then clear fluid for the first three of those days. There was an anti-coagulant on the knife blade, the doctors told her. It was the only explanation. That was why Harper had died so quickly from a wound he ought to have survived. They hadn’t identified the substance so far, and therefore it was all but impossible to neutralise. All they could do was wait until it left her system, keeping her on a plasma drip and changing the dressings on the wound every few hours.

The lower half of her face had puffed up and become swollen to the point where talking was impossible until the fourth day, but she found the grotesque, lopsided aspect it gave her a lot harder to bear than the pain, dulled as it was with morphine. Most of the damage had been done by that final kick, which had cracked two of her ribs. The doctors had taped them up, running the tape from her sternum all the way around to her spine. It felt like being in a corset that she couldn’t take off or loosen.

Lying in the hospital bed, trying to think through the painkiller-fuzz, she brooded on the gaps in her memory — not of the fight, but of its aftermath. She remembered sitting with her back against the fallen desk, Harper’s head in her lap. His hand on the wound and her hand on his hand, pressing down, slowing the bleeding. They might have been that way for hours or only for a few minutes. The students had all fled, so the only company they’d had was Sarah Opie’s corpse, whose stare was not so much reproachful as incredulous.

She remembered talking to Harper and him talking back. But when she thought about what he’d said, she realised it wasn’t even his voice but her father’s. What do you want to be a cop for? Haven’t we given enough?

‘What counts as enough, Dad?’ she muttered, her voice made unintelligible by her swollen jaw.

Yeah, keep talking back to me, Heather. Make me come over there.

Then there was another gap.

And then someone was prising her hand from Harper’s stomach, where it was no longer needed, and she couldn’t unclench her fist because she had held it so tightly and for so long in the one position.

‘He’s a detective,’ she told the paramedics. ‘We’re both detectives.’ Her voice, forced out of the side of her mouth, sounded like the voice of a bellows, of Victor Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant. ‘Call it in.’

‘Can you stand?’ someone asked her. ‘Can you walk?’

She must have done both. She remembered stepping into the ambulance, sitting upright on the gurney, staring at Harper’s body as they laid it down opposite her in an opaque, unlovely plastic envelope thirty-six inches wide by ninety long.

Another gap. She was staring down into Harper’s face. Someone must have unzipped the body bag.

A voice said, ‘Oh. Hey. You’re not supposed to.’

Harper looked troubled, his eyes tight shut, his forehead creased, as if he were trying to remember something.

She stroked his cheek. His skin was too cool, with a waxy unresponsiveness.

I’m sorry, she told him, without speaking. I’m sorry, Chris.

And then, although she had no idea whether or not it was true, I’ll get them.

On the seventh day, God rested. Kennedy wasn’t God: she returned to her labours, and to the incident committee.

It was chaired by DCI Summerhill, who wore the face of a hanging judge but kept the questions softball for the first half-hour or so as he took her through the contents of the case file. Once he’d established for the benefit of the HR officer, Brooks, and the IPCC observer, a hard-nosed old battle-axe named Anne Ladbroke, that this was a case potentially involving at least three homicides, he moved in — with clinical and detached animosity — for the kill.

‘Why did you and Constable Harper go into this without support?’ he asked. ‘It must have been apparent that Dr Opie was at risk.’

‘No, sir,’ Kennedy said. ‘It wasn’t apparent at all.’ Her jaw still ached when she spoke, but she had a lot to say and she wasn’t going to let that stop her. ‘The three people known to have died had all been directly involved in Stuart Barlow’s research project on the Rotgut Codex. Dr Opie had expressly denied any connection to that project. It was only in questioning her that we realised she was a member of Barlow’s team — something that she herself, as you’ve heard on the tape, continued to deny.’

The room, basically a storeroom, was hot, without air conditioning. With every breath she was ingesting the sharp tang of toner cartridges. Talking about these things brought them back vividly, but with overlays of the time she’d spent remembering them in her hospital bed. After a while, all memories must metastasise in this way, until you were mainly recalling the emotions that accompanied each successive revisit and revision.

‘Only in questioning her …’ Summerhill mused. ‘Something that you could have done on the previous afternoon. Why did you wait?’

Kennedy looked into his expressionless eyes. ‘For the same reason, sir,’ she said. ‘There seemed no reason to move quickly because Dr Opie had been identified as a useful witness, not as a potential victim. If she’d been more open with Constable Harper — if she’d told him that she was providing software and technical support for Barlow and his people — we would have come to a different conclusion and moved faster.’

‘So the fault lies partly with Constable Harper’s interview technique,’ Summerhill summarised, with envenomed casualness. ‘Still, as the case officer, you have to take some responsibility for that.’

The IPCC woman scribbled a note to herself.

Yeah, keep pushing me, you bastard. Back me into the corner and see where you get bitten.

‘I don’t accept that there were any shortcomings with Detective Harper’s questioning of Dr Opie,’ she said, and then after a slight pause, ‘sir. As you’re aware — as you were aware when you gave it to me — this case came down to Division as a mislabelled homicide. The investigation was reopened after the autopsy results failed to support the initial presumption of accidental death. Subsequently, we found evidence of a burglary and a stalking incident, both pertinent to the case. Both incidents had been reported, but neither had been attached to the case file. This accumulation of errors made it harder for us to identify a pattern in what we were seeing. In spite of this, Detective Harper succeeded in unearthing the other two suspicious deaths and in linking them to that of Professor Barlow. This in a single day. By any standards, his handling of the case was exemplary.’

Summerhill made a show of examining the accumulated papers in front of him, then looked at her again. ‘Perhaps you just have lower standards than the rest of us, Sergeant.’

‘Perhaps so, sir,’ Kennedy answered, without inflection.

‘At Park Square,’ Summerhill said, returning to his perusal of the documents, ‘you ascertained that Dr Opie was a potential victim, but still failed to call for back-up.’

‘We decided to bring her in ourselves. We considered that time was of the essence.’

‘And that therefore, standard operating protocols were negotiable.’

Kennedy thought before replying. ‘Your earlier questions were about unreasonable delay, sir,’ she said, meeting Summerhill’s gaze. ‘Are you now saying that in bringing Dr Opie into protective custody, I didn’t delay long enough? If so, please remember that her murderers were already in the building. Backup couldn’t have reached us before they did unless it teleported. We thought we were short on time, and my God, we were right.’

‘You could have remained in Dr Opie’s office,’ Brooks mused. ‘With the door locked.’

‘With the door locked?’ Kennedy echoed, deadpan.

‘Yes.’

‘The walls were made of glass, and the killers had guns.’ Have you even read the file, you pole-climbing bitch?

‘Still,’ Summerhill broke in, briskly, ‘we can safely assume there were other offices in that building whose walls were more solid. Hindsight is always perfect, Sergeant Kennedy, but we’re talking about your decision-making — which, ultimately, led to a situation where a fellow officer and a civilian informant both died.’

There was a heavy silence. Kennedy waited it out. Summerhill seemed to have run out of inspiration now, and Kennedy read that as a bad sign. It showed just how thin a veneer he was painting over his desire to be rid of her.

Brooks stepped into the breach again. ‘There was a further altercation,’ she said. ‘A further encounter, I mean. You followed the two men — the murderers — out into the car park.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where a third shooter appeared. And apparently wounded one of his own people.’

‘I don’t think they were his people. He was acting against them, not with them.’

‘Or else he was a very bad shot.’

‘He shot a knife right out of the hand of one of those mopes. Hit him again before he could get back into the getaway vehicle, and then hit the vehicle itself while it was in motion. I’d have to say he was pretty good.’

Brooks acknowledged this answer only with a rustle and gathering of papers. ‘And he was left behind, when the van drove away?’

‘Yes. Briefly. Then he pursued it.’

‘Did you attempt an arrest, Sergeant?’

Kennedy bit back her first answer, and her second. ‘As you’ll see from my report,’ she said at last, ‘I’d already tried to arrest the killers. The third man’s intervention came at that point, when they were turning on me and were about to attack me for a second time. Furthermore, I was unarmed. An unarmed officer, acting alone, is not required to accost an armed assailant if there’s no reasonable expectation that she can bring him down.’ Especially when he’s probably just saved her life.

‘So we come back to the absence of back-up.’

‘I suppose we do.’

‘Your description of the third man is very sketchy.’

‘I must have been distracted by my broken ribs and the incised wound to my shoulder.’

Brooks raised her eyebrows in innocent amazement: the blameless victim of drive-by sarcasm.

‘Your tone isn’t helping you, Sergeant,’ Summerhill said.

‘I imagine not.’ She was running out of patience. Fortunately, they seemed to be running out of questions.

But the DCI had saved the best for last.

‘Let’s come back to the events in the IT lab,’ he said. ‘Specifically, the shooting of Dr Opie. DC Harper was already wounded at this point, yes?’

Kennedy nodded warily. ‘Yes.’

‘But the knife man — the one who’d attacked first him and then you — was down.’

‘That’s right.’

‘When the second man produced the gun and aimed at Dr Opie, where were you in relation to the two of them?’

She could see where this catechism was leading her, but she had no way to deflect it. ‘I was between them,’ she admitted.

‘Distance, what, about ten feet from the shooter?’

‘More or less.’

‘Which? More, or less?’

‘Less, probably. Eight or nine feet.’

‘A couple of steps, then. And the gun was aimed past you at someone else. In your assessment, was there a possibility there for you to step in and try to disarm the shooter before he fired?’

Kennedy remembered that moment of frozen horror, the draining away of her ability to think and move and act. It had been rooted in another memory: of Marcus Dell lurching towards her, locking his hands around her throat, and then of her own G22 kicking against the palm of her hand as she sent the.40 round on its short, eventful journey through Dell’s thoracic cavity.

Some things hurt too much already to lay them open still further with a lie. ‘It happened very fast,’ she said, aware of the slight hesitation, the tremor in her voice. ‘Maybe … maybe I hesitated, for a second. It’s hard to remember. But the shooter was very quick. Very professional.’

‘He fired three times. That must have taken a few seconds.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘But there wasn’t sufficient time for you to intervene?’

‘I’ve said I don’t remember.’

Summerhill began to collect up the papers and slip them back into the case file. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ll consider our recommendations. Please make yourself available to us for the rest of the day. We’ll give you a decision before you leave this evening.’

It was too sudden, and Kennedy’s mind was still too full of images that defied and accused her. She’d been waiting for this moment, but when it came she wasn’t ready. ‘Is that it?’ she demanded, her voice sounding stupid and sullen in her own ears.

‘For now, yes,’ Summerhill said. ‘You may want to speak to Human Resources, if you’ve got any questions about how this procedure works. Mrs Brooks will be available throughout the day.’

It was now or never: the hour of the knife. ‘Actually, sir,’ Kennedy said, ‘I’d like to speak to you. In private.’

Caught in the act of closing the case file and, with it, her career, the DCI looked up again, surprised. ‘I think we have all the information we need, Sergeant,’ he said.

‘This is information that relates to the conduct of the case,’ Kennedy persisted, her voice level and courteous. ‘However, it’s of a sensitive nature and can only be discussed with case officers.’

Summerhill’s face went through a range of emotions, all behind a slightly slipping mask of professional indifference. ‘Very well,’ he said at last, ‘we’ll discuss it in my office. And then,’ he added, addressing Brooks and Ladbroke, ‘I’ll rejoin you.’

With his office door closed on the world, Summerhill sank into a chair, but pointedly did not invite Kennedy to take the other. She sat down anyway.

‘What do you want to tell me?’ he demanded.

‘I’ve got gypsy blood,’ Kennedy said, her voice still far from steady.

Summerhill stared at her in faint bewilderment. ‘What?’

‘Straight up, Jimmy. I can tell your fortune. A couple of months from now, maybe three, I see you emptying out those desk drawers and walking off into the sunset. And it’s raining. It’s raining really hard.’

Summerhill’s expression indicated that this was still nonsense to him. ‘You said you had information pertinent to the case,’ he reminded her, coldly.

‘Pertinent to the conduct of the case,’ she corrected. ‘Yes. I do. It’s in your inbox already, where it’s been for a week. On the departmental mail server, too, and God knows where else. Central Support keeps copies of everything, right? So it’s all over the place, if anyone wants to look. Header: “Stuart Barlow case file”. Go ahead and look.’

Summerhill did, found her email of a week before, and shrugged. ‘So?’

‘So check the dateline. That was the night before we went to Luton to see Sarah Opie. It was right there waiting for you when you clocked in the next day. Only you clocked in late. I know that because we waited for you for well over an hour before we finally gave up and went to interview the witness.’

Summerhill made a brusque gesture: get to the point.

‘Did you even read the email, Jimmy? I told you the case had blown up into something really scary. I suggested that you should review the size of the case team and the scope of the investigation. I asked you to make a ruling — urgently — on immediate priorities.’

‘All of which,’ Summerhill said, ‘makes no difference to the facts. You went in without back-up and a civilian died. So did your fellow officer, who was new to the job and taking his cue from you.’

Kennedy nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, grimly. ‘He did. He died in my arms, Jimmy. I’m not likely to forget that. But I thought your first question back there was why we waited so long. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that we waited for you.’

Summerhill was already shaking his head. ‘No, no, Sergeant. I’m sorry. That won’t do. I was absent because I was at Westminster, on divisional business. And in my absence, you’re required to go through another senior officer.’

This was as far as Kennedy had taken it in her mind. The rest was just a guess, and she was either right or wrong. She thought of Harper lying across her lap, bleeding out. The horror of that moment, still fresh, acted like a plumb line, keeping her level and composed in this one.

‘Maybe,’ she allowed. ‘Maybe you were at Westminster. But that’s about the fifth or sixth time I’ve heard that select committee story, and one of those times was in January, before Parliament even came back from recess. You used to have a booze problem, didn’t you, Jimmy? A couple of reprimands, almost a disciplinary hearing once, or so the story goes. I’m out of the loop now, for obvious reasons, but I don’t think a problem like that just goes away. So my theory is that WPC Rawl has two big crosses to bear around here: a general brief to cover up for you when you come in late, and a complete lack of imagination.’

She paused again. This was where the roof would fall in, if it was going to. It seemed a long time before Summerhill spoke. When he did, his voice was a lot more controlled than she’d been hoping for and a lot more aggressive: turning full on to the salvo, not wallowing and waiting for another broadside.

‘Detective Sergeant,’ he said, ‘you seem to think that you can take the heat off yourself by attacking me. Let me repeat, in case you didn’t hear me the first time: an officer is dead because of your actions. Attempting to blackmail me can’t possibly affect—’

‘I’ll bring you down too,’ Kennedy said. Summerhill carried on speaking over her, so she couldn’t be sure that he’d heard her, but most of the message was in her face and her tone.

‘—the decision of an independent tribunal of which I’m only—’

‘If Rawl was covering for you, I will sink you.’

‘—one member. The decision comes from all of us.’

‘Then give me a Viking funeral,’ Kennedy said, her throat tight. ‘Go ahead. Because that’s all I’ve got. But I swear to God, Jimmy, if you shit-can me, or even if you just try to keep me off this case, I’ll get my lawyer to shout it from the rooftops that Harper died because you were too drunk to show up for work. If I’m right, if you weren’t called to the Commons that day and you’ve got no MPs to vouch for you, then Rawl’s entry in the day book will be enough to prove you lied. They will crucify you. And that won’t bring Chris Harper back from the dead but it will mean a little bit of justice has been mixed in with the usual bullshit.’

They’d both ended up on their feet, facing each other, and he ran out of words before she did. ‘Let me know, either way,’ she muttered, suddenly disgusted with him and with herself.

She left Summerhill’s office without looking back, went to the bear pit to wait it out, but the atmosphere there was palpable. They all knew about the review, and they all knew what it was for. She’d gotten a detective killed. She’d gone from being someone they hated to something they wanted to disavow. No eyes met hers.

She wasn’t even sure that she could have met her own eyes right then, if there’d been a mirror handy. She knew, objectively, that Harper had already taken his wound when she froze in front of the gun. Moving quicker wouldn’t have saved him, but it might have saved Sarah Opie.

She’d been through it in her mind so many times now, the memories had stripped threads and came together in the wrong sequence, from the wrong angles, jumbled and incomprehensible. She endured them anyway.

23

Kuutma was a long way from London when he took the call from Abidan’s team. In fact, he was in Moscow, patching up communications networks that had been damaged by Tillman’s murder of Kartoyev. He was standing in the antechamber of the Russian business minister, a hall half the size of a football stadium, travelling under his customary identity and waiting to find out whether he would be seen.

When Abidan told him about the mysterious shooter who had appeared only just too late to sabotage the mission, Kuutma knew at once from the description — the height, the build, the hair that was either the lightest of light browns or else pale red, and of course the accuracy of the shooting — that the man was Tillman. His concerns had proved only too well justified: Tillman had taken his time but he had been heading for London ever since Kartoyev’s death, and now he had picked up on the connection between Michael Brand and the recent deaths.

The problem was built into the very charter of the Messengers because it was the way they worked, and had always worked, and must continue to work until the thirty centuries were done (and it was getting late, already; the count could be argued, but the count was close). They took the drug, kelalit, and it gave them the blessings of strength and speed. It was a sacrament. Also, a neurotoxin, and in the end it either killed them or drove them mad. So Kuutma was constantly engaged in training new Messengers and had endless trouble finding team leaders of sufficient experience.

Mistakes had been made in the handling of the Rotgut project, just as mistakes had been made in the handling of Flight 124. Loose ends had been left untied, opportunities had been missed, convoluted methods used where simple ones were available. It fell to Kuutma, now, to manage these situations and to bring them to happy outcomes.

Being an honest man, he acknowledged, too, his own errors of judgement. Tillman still lived: Kuutma had to bear the responsibility for that disastrous circumstance and he had to put it right.

He could almost make the argument for going in himself at this point. But the strength of his desire to do so had to be taken as a warning that he must not: his emotions were involved, and therefore he couldn’t trust his judgement.

But Abidan’s team was depleted now. Hirah had been shot in the chest and in the hand. Both wounds had already partially healed, another side effect of kelalit, but in this, as in everything else, the drug both gave and took away. The chest wound was fine, but the bones and muscles in the hand had become twisted as they healed and set into an unnatural position. The hand was useless.

Kuutma pondered, and reached a decision. ‘You must take Hirah back to Ginat’Dania,’ he told Abidan. ‘He needs to rest and to be with his family. The injury done to him — to his soul, as well as his flesh — will heal faster there.’

Abidan looked dismayed. ‘But Tannanu,’ he said, ‘the mission …’

‘I know, Abidan. There’s work still to be done. A lot of work, perhaps, now that this Tillman is involved.’

‘Tillman?’

‘The man who shot Hirah. That was who it was.’

Abidan’s tone expressed shock and perhaps alarm. ‘But Tillman — Leo Tillman — was the man who—’

‘Abidan.’ Kuutma silenced his Messenger with that gentle rebuke.

‘Yes, Tannanu?’

‘Go back to Ginat’Dania. Take your team with you. I have another team in that country now. They pursued Tillman from France and will welcome another chance to engage with him.’

‘May I ask, Tannanu, what team is this?’ Abidan was cautious, but unhappy. It hurt to be taken out of the line, as Kuutma well understood.

‘Mariam Danat’s team. Mariam herself, Ezei and Cephas. Go well, Abidan, and be proud of what you’ve done.’

He switched off his phone and stared at the wall facing him. It was adorned with a painting of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow as imagined by a Soviet painter, whose signature at the bottom of the canvas was illegible. In the painting, Napoleon slumped in his saddle, staring hollow-eyed at an endless corridor of swirling snow. Behind him, a line of defeated, dying French soldiers stretched into infinity, all wearing variations on the same expression: the humiliation of the conqueror magnified and duplicated magically, as in a hall of mirrors.

Kuutma thought about seeing that expression on Tillman’s face.

‘Will he forget you?’

‘Never.’

‘Then he’s a fool.’

‘Yes. And you should be afraid of him. He’s far, far too stupid to know when he’s lost, or when to surrender. He’ll ignore that note. He won’t stop coming. He’ll look into your eyes, some day, Kuutma, and one of you will blink.’

Mariam’s team. He’d brief them personally. And although he wouldn’t go to London himself, he’d watch over their shoulder and steer them; not directly at Tillman because the Rotgut situation was the problem that demanded an immediate resolution. But clearly, Tillman had put himself on a collision course with Rotgut.

One way or another, whatever momentum he had accumulated and whatever resources he brought, he would be destroyed by that collision.

24

It was a partial victory, and if Kennedy had had anything left to lose in the department, it would have been a pyrrhic one. Whereas Summerhill had been content before to leave her to her own devices and to the not-so-tender mercies of the bear pit, now he was on her case in a much more committed, much less casual way.

The incident committee gave her a clean bill of health, and they kept her on the case, but there was no question now of a mere sergeant heading it up. Summerhill had already appointed himself as case officer, which meant she’d be working directly under him. Right in his gunsights, every hour of the day.

Rather than just replacing Harper, he’d widened the case team to five, not counting himself. The other sergeant, to rub her nose in her failure as thoroughly as possible, was Josh Combes. Three constables rounded out the roster, and she knew them all. Stanwick was Combes’s lap-dog, pure and simple; McAliskey was competent but ground-hugging, and had failed sergeant twice; Cummings was his own man, good at everything except sharing.

Kennedy printed out a hard copy of the case file and took it home with her that evening. After a long, hot bath she sat down on the sofa in a robe, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, to read it. The file wasn’t much thicker than she had left it the week before. The next briefing meeting — or shout, as they tended to be called in Division — was at nine the following morning. Summerhill would be looking to trip her up if he could, and everybody else there would enjoy the show.

Her father came and looked over her shoulder as she read, which was kind of unusual. He never picked up a book any more, or even a magazine. His attention span just wasn’t long enough to last out the average sentence. But the week she’d been away had left him unsettled. Her sister, Chrissie, had stepped in (with very bad grace) to look after him. She’d taken him down to her own place in Somerset, where nothing was where he remembered it being, and where he had last claim on the TV after her cricket-obsessed husband and teenage daughter. It must have been pretty miserable for him. Although if Alzheimer’s had an upside, it was that past miseries presumably stopped being real as soon as you forgot them.

‘Murder case, Dad,’ she said, deadpan. ‘Multiple. Multiple and then some. Four civilians dead and one cop.’

She thought he might react to that — to the death of an officer — but he didn’t seem to hear her. He wasn’t trying to read the file, either. He was just standing close to her, watching her intently. Maybe he’d missed her and was reassuring himself that she was back. Whatever it was, she didn’t like it much.

‘Swiss rolls in the kitchen, Dad,’ she said. He liked the little mini-rolls, the ones that came individually packed in foil, and his response to the phrase was Pavlovian. He shuffled off to look for them, leaving Kennedy to immerse herself in the file.

The working assumption on all three of the original deaths — Barlow’s, Hurt’s and Devani’s — was now murder. The car that had run Catherine Hurt down had been found by chance, abandoned a hundred miles away in Burnley, having (as it transpired) been stolen only a few streets from where Hurt was killed. It stank of disinfectant and proved to be clinically devoid of fingerprints or fibres. CCTV footage showed the journey north, but wouldn’t resolve far enough to show anything of the driver.

The clothes fibres she and Harper had found at Prince Regent’s had correlated exactly with what Barlow was wearing at the time of his death, so the hypothesis of him having been dragged up the staircase unconscious looked robust.

From ballistics reports, the gun that had killed Sarah Opie was a Sig-Sauer P226, a popular gun with armies and police forces around the world. The ammunition had been bought in Germany as part of a large shipment originally intended for the Israeli Defence Force. As far as could be determined, the container in which it had been shipped from Lübeck to Haifa had gone astray somewhere and was never unloaded.

Emil Gassan had now been placed in protective custody. When he’d heard about the events at Park Square, he hadn’t even protested much — although he seemed to be in shock at the thought that Stuart Barlow’s work had inspired something beyond mild contempt.

Some gesture had been made towards mounting a search for Michael Brand, but he hadn’t been found. He’d paid by cash at the Pride Court Hotel, had shown a fake photo ID identifying him as a lecturer at the University of Asturias in Gijon, where — of course — nobody had ever heard of him. Combes now had an alert out on him, but so far he hadn’t surfaced. Descriptions of the two men who killed Dr Opie and Chris Harper, and of the third man who appeared from nowhere in the Park Square car park to tackle them, had likewise been circulated: no takers.

Footprints. Number plates. Roadblocks. Searches. No fingerprints or clear sightings. Like trying to clutch at ghosts, but she couldn’t fault Summerhill’s methods. He seemed to be doing everything he could do, everything she’d be doing in his place.

The phone rang, breaking a train of thought that was going round in a tight, unavailing circle. She picked up, hooked the receiver absently under her jaw: it was probably going to be someone from Division, with some bullshit coming out of the incident committee.

‘Kennedy,’ she said, shortly.

‘Good name,’ said a male voice. ‘Any Irish in the family?’

It was a voice she knew, without being able to place it immediately. It was also a voice that made her come upright, sending some of the papers from the case file sliding from her lap on to the sofa and the floor.

‘Who is this?’ she asked. The answer came into her head even as the man told her.

‘We met at the Park Square campus. A week ago. I was the one who wasn’t trying to kill you.’

A pause, while she thought about how the hell to answer that. Go for the obvious. ‘What do you want?’

No pause at his end. ‘To talk.’

‘About what?’

‘The case.’

‘What case?’

The man breathed out loudly, sounding annoyed or impatient, she couldn’t tell. ‘I was a good Catholic boy,’ he said. ‘But nobody’s asked me to recite the catechism in a long time. I’m pretty much up to speed on what you’ve been doing, Detective. That’s why I was at Park Square in the first place, watching you try to make an unarmed arrest on two stone killers. I know about Barlow’s murder, and I know it’s part of a pattern — although you haven’t managed to sort out a motive yet or a link between the victims besides the obvious one that they all knew each other. I know that you’ve been in a firestorm because your partner died, and I know you’re not running the show any more. But I’m guessing you know more about what’s been happening than any of these other guys who jumped on board last week. Plus I like to think we’ve broken the ice already, so it seemed to make sense to call you first.’

It was Kennedy’s turn to breathe hard. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m grateful for what you did. It got me out of a tight spot. But with respect, all I know about you is that you can handle a gun and you don’t bother with a warning shot or a challenge. That could make you a lot of things, and cop isn’t one of them.’

‘I’m not a cop. Got some good friends who are, though, and a lot more who used to be.’

‘So you’re what? Somebody’s hired security?’

‘No.’

‘Military?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Corporate muscle of some kind?’

‘We’re getting into that catechism territory again. If we’re going to talk, the phone’s not the best way to do it.’

‘No? Where, then?’

‘There’s a café up by the Tube station. Costella’s. I’ll be there in five minutes. Gone in about seven.’

‘That doesn’t give me much time, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t. Specifically, it doesn’t give you the time to set up any surprises for me. Seriously, Detective, we could do each other some sizeable favours, but I’m not asking you to trust me and I’m not stupid enough to trust you. Wait for me outside the café, be alone, and bring your cellphone. We’ll take it from there.’

She heard a click and the line went dead.

Kennedy considered her options, but she was hauling on jeans and a sweater, street shoes, as she did it. Nothing she could do about her hair, which was only half-dry and as wild as a haystack. She corralled it into a baseball cap and ran upstairs to Izzy’s.

Izzy was on the phone, unsurprisingly. ‘Well, I like them big,’ she said, looking at Kennedy but talking to whoever was on the other end of the line. ‘I like them very big. Tell me you’re touching it now, lover.’ Kennedy held up both hands, fingers spread. Ten minutes. Izzy shook her head violently but Kennedy already had a twenty-pound note in her hand. Izzy changed her mind mid-shake, snatched the note and waved to Kennedy to go, go go.

Kennedy went.

25

Kennedy got to the Costella Café around about the end of the seventh minute. The place was empty — it was small enough so that there wasn’t anywhere someone could sit without being visible from the street — and nobody was waiting outside to meet her. She turned a slow circle on the pavement, scanning everyone in sight, but none of them looked remotely like the brick shithouse of a man who she’d met so briefly the week before.

Her mobile rang just as she was completing the circuit.

‘Kennedy.’

‘I know. I can see you. Walk to the end of the street. There’s a church. Go inside. Buy a candle and light it.’

‘You being a nice Catholic boy.’

‘Oh, I was lying about that. The candle’s just to give me time to walk around the building a couple of times — see if anyone’s following you.’

‘I’m not trying to set you up. If I were, I’d do it with a wire, not with a tail.’

‘Assuming you had a wire lying around the house, sure. Actually, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt on that one, Detective. The people I’m worried about right now aren’t the people on your team.’

Kennedy walked to the church — a nondescript modern building in yellow brick — and did as she’d been told to do. Lighting the votive candle and putting it into the wire rack in the side aisle felt like a meaningless act — she’d never believed in any god, or any other kind of free-floating power — but she found herself, to her own surprise, slightly queasy about going through the motions. Harper’s death was too recent, too fresh in her mind. This pantomime of devotion felt in bad taste, somehow — like a joke at his expense, or her own.

With the candle in place, she turned around, half-expecting to find that the big man had appeared soundlessly behind her, but she stood alone in the church.

Kennedy waited, feeling a little ridiculous. Her phone didn’t ring again and nobody showed. After five minutes, she went outside by the same door she’d entered. The big man was leaning against the wall just beside the door, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a black donkey jacket. Right then he looked less like an avenging angel than a brickie or a navvy, innocuous for all his bulk. His weathered face revealed nothing. ‘All right,’ he said to her. ‘We seem to be alone.’

‘Great,’ Kennedy said. ‘What now?’

‘A drink,’ the big man said. ‘In a very noisy pub.’

The Crown and Anchor on Surrey Street was heaving, so it fitted the bill just fine. The drink turned out to be whisky and water, which the big man — who’d introduced himself as Tillman — bought for her without asking. She didn’t touch it, but then he didn’t touch his, either. It seemed to be just a bit of protective camouflage. So was the noise, Tillman explained.

‘You can’t do much about phase grid microphones,’ he said. ‘Or lip readers, for that matter. But neither of them is going to have an easy time of it in a place like this. You need clear air to aim through or a clear line of sight.’

‘So you still think I’m being followed?’ Kennedy asked him, half impressed and half bemused. Whatever else he might be, it was clear that this man serious about watching his back.

Tillman shook his head. ‘No. I’m pretty certain you’re not. They weren’t after you in Luton, were they? They wanted the computer woman — the last one on the list. I was the only one following you — because I thought you were following someone else. Someone I’ve been after for a long time.’

Kennedy gave Tillman a narrow look. ‘You said Sarah Opie was the last one on the list. Whose list? And how would you know?’

‘Just an inference,’ Tillman said. ‘You haven’t gone chasing after anyone else, so you don’t think anyone else is in danger. I’m not saying you’re right. I’m just saying you seem to think it’s over for now. That there won’t be any more killing.’

Tillman watched her expectantly, waiting for her to confirm or deny. She did neither, just met the stare and left the ball in his court.

‘So what’s it about?’ he asked her at last. ‘Barlow was the first — or the first you found. They were working together on something. And it got them killed. That’s the working hypothesis.’

‘That sound you hear,’ Kennedy told him, coldly, ‘is me not talking. You’ve got the advantage, Tillman. You’re telling me things you shouldn’t know about my own case — things we haven’t told the public or anyone outside the division. I’m not saying a word until you tell me how you know those things. I’m certainly not going to assume that since you’re already halfway down the slipway I should tow you the rest of the distance.’

Tillman nodded tersely, conceding the point. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘That’s fair. Michael Brand.’

‘What about him?’

‘You’re looking for him. So am I. The difference is that you’ve been looking for him for about ten days. I’ve been looking for him for thirteen years. Did you ever do that thing people do in movies, of stretching a hair across your door or wedging a matchstick in the jamb so you can tell if anyone’s been in your room while you were out?’

‘Not so far,’ Kennedy said. ‘I might try and get into the habit.’

‘I’ve been doing it for years, Detective. All sorts of hairs, and matchsticks, wedges of cardboard, tin cans and bits of string. My own little network, stretching backwards and forwards and all over the place, just to let me know when Michael Brand pops up. I’ve got friends, and friends of friends, in odd little oases around the world, watching the information as it flashes by on the superhighway. Bits of viral code in online databases. Old-fashioned cuttings services in a couple of dozen countries where computers are still a bit of an oddity or where I just want that extra bit of assurance. Michael Brand is an obsession with me, you see. He doesn’t get out much, but when he does I want to know about it. So when he turned up in your investigation, I turned up too. That’s the short answer.’

Kennedy was nonplussed. Not very much about the speech had sounded sane, even though Tillman delivered it in a calm and reasonable tone of voice. She didn’t reply. After a moment or two, by way of a distraction, she picked up her whisky and took a sip. It wasn’t nice at all, but it beat staring at Tillman in the way you stare at the nutter on the bus.

He laughed, a little ruefully, as if he’d read her expression in any case. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Maybe that needs a little context. You see, I lost my wife and kids, a few years back.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Kennedy said — the automatic, meaningless response. ‘How did they …’

‘How did they die? They didn’t. I just lost them. I came home one night and they weren’t there. The house had been cleaned out, from top to bottom. Thirteen years ago. I’m still looking.’

He sketched it out for her. The official stonewalling; the police’s refusal to mount an investigation; his grief and fear and confusion; his fruitless searching and skirmishing; and his realisation at last that he needed a different approach entirely if he was ever going to get beyond square one.

As she listened, Kennedy assumed, at first, that Tillman was like any man still in love with a partner who’s outgrown him. But his absolute conviction began to get to her. Thirteen years is a long time to spend in denial, and for that matter a long time to play hide and seek with three kids. A woman alone could hide easily enough. A woman with three children would have to register them with doctors, dentists, school boards, care services of all shapes and descriptions. They’d be a cluster, distinctive and easy to find. Unless they were dead, of course. She didn’t mention this possibility, but again Tillman seemed to anticipate her thoughts.

‘She left a note,’ he said. ‘Asking me not to follow. And there was a sort of logic … no, I mean a sort of signature, in the things that were taken. I said the house was cleaned out, but it wasn’t quite like that. A few things were left behind: a few little things, that didn’t matter. Books. Toys. Clothes. But that was the point. All the things that were left were things that didn’t matter. Things that the kids wouldn’t miss. The favourite books, the favourite toys, the clothes they liked to wear, and that still fitted them okay, all those things were taken. It was Rebecca’s choice, and she got it exactly right, except for …’ His voice tailed off.

‘Except for what?’

‘Nothing. Nothing important.’

Kennedy shrugged. ‘Okay. But then, where does that leave you, Tillman? It means she went of her own free will, right?’

‘No,’ he said, bluntly. ‘It means she knew they were going to be alive and they were going to be together. She took all the things they’d need, for a life somewhere else. But I don’t believe — I can’t make myself believe — that a life without me was what she wanted. And even if it was possible to be wrong about that, Detective, I’d still want to find her and ask her why. And I’d still want to find my kids again. But I’m not wrong. Rebecca went because she didn’t have a choice. And she left me a note telling me not to look for her because she didn’t think I’d ever be able to find her or bring her back from where she was going. She was trying to spare me at least some of the pain.’

He stopped, watching her closely. It seemed to be important to him that she should accept all this on his bare word. Kennedy ducked the issue.

‘Michael Brand,’ she reminded him.

Tillman nodded reluctant approval. It was the right question, as far as it went, sticking to the business of why they were here. Why they were talking at all. ‘Rebecca saw him,’ he said. ‘She arranged to meet him — or the other way around, more likely. He called and asked her to come and see him. At a Holiday Inn about five minutes’ walk from the house, where he was registered as a guest. It was the same day they left.

‘And she went. She met him. The desk clerk knew Brand by sight — a guy in his thirties, he said, with a shaved head and a really hard look about him, like he might be police or ex-army. I showed the clerk a photo of Rebecca, and he remembered seeing her with Brand. I don’t know what happened between them; what he told her. But whatever it was, they left together. Went back home, I guess, where Rebecca started packing. That was the last time I saw her. Saw any of them.’

Tillman’s tone stayed level through this recitation. Kennedy couldn’t guess what effort that cost him. If he was still searching thirteen years later, these events he was describing were, collectively, an open wound that had subsumed his whole life. She knew, too, as Tillman had to know, that even if he was right on every count, it didn’t mean that his family were still alive right now, or were still alive an hour after they left the house. It only meant that Rebecca had believed they would be. He could be chasing a ghost: four ghosts, or five if you counted Brand.

And obviously, once you started thinking about it, Brand was the weakest point in the whole house of cards.

‘It can’t be the same man,’ she said. ‘Your Michael Brand, our Michael Brand …’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, why should they be? Your Michael Brand has hole-in-corner meetings with married women in cheap hotels. My Michael Brand lies his way on to academic message boards, pops up at history seminars like …’ she groped for a simile ‘… the comet before a plague. He presides over mass murder, then disappears. They don’t have a whole lot in common, Tillman. And it can’t be that unusual a name. Seriously, what are the odds that your man is our man?’

Tillman was swirling the whisky in his glass, but still hadn’t tasted it. ‘Give or take?’ he asked her, calmly. ‘I’d say a hundred per cent. Even on the basis of what you just said, there’s the same MO working: he turns up, he signs into a hotel, he does what he’s come to do and then he disappears. Two very different mission statements, obviously, but that’s how he operates, in both cases.’

‘I still don’t …’

‘Let me finish, Detective. Because I promise, you’ll like my detective work. I started putting out my tin cans and strings for Michael Brand a long time ago. That means I’ve had a chance to do some things you haven’t done. I’ve built up a scrapbook. A database, sort of, except that databases are on a computer and I don’t get on with computers. These are just notes I’ve taken, as I went along. Backs of old envelopes, kind of thing. A fact here, a fact there.’

He leaned towards her across the table, fixed her with an Ancient Mariner stare. ‘It’s not just the name. There are other things he doesn’t change. If he gives a false address, it’s always the same false address. Garden Street. Or Garden Road, Garden Crescent, Avenue, Mews, Terrace, whatever, but Garden something. Where did your Michael Brand say he lived?’

‘Campo del Jardin,’ Kennedy murmured. ‘You could have got that straight out of the file.’

‘I haven’t read your file. But I would have bet good money on it. Anyway, there’s more. I met one of Brand’s contacts in Russia — sorry, the former Soviet Union — who told me the man I was chasing was coming to London. That was how I caught on to your investigation in the first place. But you’re right, it could still have been a different Michael Brand. A total coincidence. So I turned over a few rocks and got the address of the hotel he’d been staying at.’

‘The Pride Court. Bloomsbury.’

‘Exactly. Did you go take a look at the room?’

‘No,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘Not personally. One of my colleagues carried out a search.’

‘Did one of your colleagues find anything?’

‘Not to my certain knowledge.’

‘No. Well, I did. I found this.’ Tillman reached into his pocket, took out something small and bright, held between finger and thumb, and put it down on the table between them. It was a silver coin.

Kennedy just looked at it for a moment. It was like a sliver of her dream, made solid, and it unsettled her very deeply. She pulled herself together with an effort she hoped he couldn’t see, reached out to pick it up — but then stopped and shot Tillman a look: may I? ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Go ahead. There are never any fingerprints on them. Never any spoor at all, anywhere, after Brand has cleaned out. Except for these.’

The coin looked old and worn: the only way you knew it was a coin at all was because it was a small, flat piece of metal bearing the outline of a human head. It was far from circular, far from regular in shape. The head had blurred to the point where you couldn’t even tell if it was male or female, but there was a series of tiny bumps across the forehead that could have been some kind of head-dress, maybe a laurel wreath. She turned the coin over. The obverse was even harder to make out: a figure that could have been a bird with its wings folded, or maybe just a sheaf of wheat, and a few symbols that seemed to include a K and a P.

The anomaly struck her after she’d turned the coin over and over several times. Silver oxidised quickly and developed a black patina that was hard to remove. If this coin was so old, why was it so bright? It had to be a reproduction of some kind. But it was heavy enough to be solid metal.

‘He left it inside the U-bend of the wash basin,’ Tillman told her. ‘Your colleague should have looked a little harder. Brand — my version, Brand one-point-zero — always leaves one of these things behind, in any place where he stays for longer than a day. He used to put them some place fairly obvious, like on top of the lintel of a door or behind the headboard of a bed. He still does, sometimes, but these days he usually shows a little more imagination.’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘I don’t get it,’ she muttered. ‘If he’s going to the trouble of giving false addresses, why leave a calling card?’

‘Why stick with the same name?’ Tillman countered. ‘That’s the real question, and I don’t know the answer. But he does. I used to think he was playing a game with me. Taunting me, maybe. Like, “I can make it as obvious as I like and you still won’t ever catch up with me.” But I don’t think he knew until a couple of years back that I was even looking for him, and he was doing this all through that time. So it’s something else. Something that will maybe make sense when we know what it is he’s doing.’

What it is he’s doing? Kennedy’s common sense asserted itself in one last effort of rebellion. ‘There’s no kind of mission statement that could include kidnapping your family thirteen years ago and murdering four history teachers today.’

‘Three history teachers. One IT lecturer.’

‘Still and all. And I don’t want to burst your bubble, Tillman, but there were two killers at Park Square. Not one. It’s possible that neither of them was Michael Brand.’

‘It’s certain that neither of them was Michael Brand,’ he said. ‘I don’t think he does his own killing.’

‘Then what does he do?’

‘I’ll tell you. But not for free. I’ve given you a lot already. You share with me everything that comes up in your investigation — everything you’ve got so far and everything you get from now on — and I’ll give you what I’ve got.’

Kennedy didn’t even have to think about it. She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m a police detective, Tillman, and you’re not anything. I’m really grateful that you stepped in when that guy was about to cut slices out of me, but I can’t discuss active investigations with people who aren’t on the case team. And more especially, people who aren’t even on the force.’

Tillman stayed silent, studying her face. ‘You’re serious?’ he asked her, finally.

‘I’m serious.’

‘Then I guess we’re done.’ He held out his hand for the coin. Kennedy held on to it.

‘This is evidence,’ she said. ‘It’s relevant to a murder investigation, and you don’t have any right to keep it.’

‘Give me the coin, Detective. This isn’t a one-way street. I came here with an offer, you turned me down. We go back to where we were.’

She opened her handbag and dropped the coin inside.

‘Kennedy—’

She cut him off. ‘No. By rights, I should bring you in as a witness, if not a suspect. I’m not going to do that because I owe you, and because you’ve been through enough already that I’d feel bad about adding any more. But you don’t get to keep this. Tillman, there’s a line. I’m on one side of it and you’re on the other. I have the right to hunt for criminals. It’s my job. You don’t. So what you did to that man — the one who was about to stab me — that makes you a criminal too.’

Tillman made an impatient gesture. ‘You’re talking technicalities,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be someone who could see past garbage like that.’

‘No, I’m really, really not.’ She thought it was important to explain to him, although it was so obvious and basic to her that it didn’t even need saying. ‘There are bad things I can do and not lose a second’s sleep over them, but this isn’t one of them. I can’t share information with you, Tillman. Not and stay a cop myself. That puts me over a line. A line that still matters to me.’

It mattered a lot, she realised now. Her voice was shaking. Talking about these things had brought up in her mind the complex of emotions and anxieties that wound themselves around what she’d done to Marcus Dell. What Tillman had done to Harper’s killer was different — and what her father had done, all those years ago, different again. But somehow the differences felt a little tenuous right then.

She stood up, and Tillman withdrew his hand. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Keep the coin. I’ve got others. You’ll have a hard time explaining where you got it, though, and an even harder time logging it as evidence. I’m sorry we couldn’t do business, Sergeant Kennedy. If you change your mind, well, you’ve got my number on your mobile, now, haven’t you? But don’t call me up unless you decide to share. That was your last freebie.’

The look in his eyes as he said it was what stayed with her. It stayed because it was so much at odds with his words. He talked like a tough guy out of a movie. He looked like a man hanging on the ledge of a tall building as his fingers lose their grip, one by one, counting him down to disaster.

He walked away, leaving his whisky untouched.

Kennedy drained hers.

At home, after thanking Izzy and putting her dad to bed, Kennedy went back to the file. She panned its murky depths for an hour or so, without coming up with a single nugget of gold.

But there were things she could chase, all the same: three of them, all told.

There were Dr Opie’s last words, as she lay dying. Kennedy had mentioned them in her report, but they didn’t seem to lead anywhere and the reference had been ignored. It was difficult to see what anyone could do with it anyway.

There was the photo she’d found in Barlow’s office. A photo of a ruined building in a nondescript, anonymous place, with some meaningless strings of characters on the back. Barlow had hidden it; his killer, or maybe someone else, had searched both his home and his office but not found it. Or else — not so good, but it had to be considered — had found it and put it back because it was irrelevant.

And there was the knife.

It took her a long while to get to sleep. She kept thinking about Tillman’s haunted eyes just before he walked away, and about his journey: a thirteen-year trek through the wilderness that couldn’t possibly lead him to a land of milk and honey. In abduction cases, most detectives counted in three-day blocks. The first three days were fifty-fifty: the supposed victim was about as likely to turn up alive as dead. Every three days after that doubled the odds against alive.

Did Tillman really believe in his crazy quest or was he using it to distract himself from the near-certainty that his wife and kids were dead?

Either way, she suspected, it was only the hunt that kept him going. Like a shark, he’d die if he ever came to a standstill.

26

The morning shout was one of the things that try men’s souls. Women’s souls, too, for that matter. Summerhill began it by closing one line of inquiry completely.

‘As you know,’ he said, ‘we brought in all of Professor Barlow’s computers — the two at the college and the one at his home — on warrant. We gave them to the IT forensic support team to see what they could squeeze out, but they came up empty. There’s nothing on the machines at all. No files, no emails, no pictures, not even an internet cache. Someone’s done a clean system install over whatever was there, on all three of them.

‘Barlow had a couple of external hard drives and they’re empty, too. Half a dozen recordable discs, which turned out to be blank, not even formatted. That’s all there was. We’re going over the paper records at the moment, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there that’s new, or relevant.’

Kennedy thought about the break-ins at Barlow’s office and at the bungalow. Maybe that was all they’d been for: not a fishing expedition but a wipe-clean. If the ITF data hounds, who could not just get blood out of a stone but give you a choice of blood types, had come up empty-handed, then this was professional work. Most people thought that clicking DELETE got rid of a file, whereas in fact it just added a flag to it, allowing it to be overwritten later. Whoever had killed Barlow had been a lot more thorough.

‘What about the other victims?’ she asked. ‘Did we requisition their files and papers as well? I mean, if we’re assuming that the motive relates to Barlow’s Rotgut project in some way …’

Combes was sighing and shaking his head, but it was Summerhill who cut her off. ‘We’re emphatically not assuming that, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘At least, if the project provides a motive, our best guess is that it was in an indirect way. The project was what brought the victims together — although, even then, there seems to have been an existing relationship through the Ravellers message board. Once assembled, Barlow’s team got itself into something that drew the attention of a very professional and well organised crew of killers. Possibly they bought some document or artefact on the black market and accidentally trod on the toes of the criminal cartel they bought from. There are any number of scenarios that might explain this pattern of deaths, and very few of them bear directly on the contents of Barlow’s research. People don’t generally become murder victims because of an academic disagreement.’

‘But if we at least knew—’

‘We’re not ruling any of this out.’ Summerhill’s tone was sharper this time: stop rocking the boat, he was saying, when you should be grateful you’re even in it. ‘Of course we searched the other victims’ computers. Opie’s particularly, since all her files had been backed up to the college server and we were able to go back a long way. We didn’t find any correspondence with Barlow or any references to his name. We also failed to locate any files or folders that referenced the Rotgut Codex, or the project, or anyone else connected to it. Obviously there are other search parameters that could be applied, but we didn’t want to get too deep in among the trees at this stage. You’d be talking, at a conservative estimate, about thousands of pages of material, tens of thousands of emails, possibly millions of words. Until we’ve got a compass to steer by, trying to read every single word didn’t seem to offer much of a way forward.’

Summerhill looked away from Kennedy, caught Combes’s eye. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve all been up to,’ he said. ‘Josh, start us off.’

Combes brought them up to date on the search for the elusive Michael Brand. He’d put out a query to major hotel chains in the UK and Spain to see whether the man had ever checked in anywhere else under that name. He’d also mailed out a verbal description and photofit, both provided by the desk clerk at the Pride Court: a middle-aged man, bald, above average height, with brown eyes and pale skin, his accent foreign but hard to pin down.

It wasn’t a lot to go on and there hadn’t been any ping-backs yet. In the meantime, Combes had also requisitioned searches of airline, train and ferry operational databases, to see if he could map Brand’s movements prior to his arrival at the Pride Court, and after. A parallel search of prison and police records had already come in negative. There was no Michael Brand anywhere in the known universe who had a criminal record and made a possible match to their own man by age or description.

Combes was now working through the other members of the Ravellers forum to see whether any of them had met Brand or had any private correspondence with him.

Stanwick and McAliskey had been taking corroborative statements from the students who had witnessed Sarah Opie’s death. They’d also gone over camera footage from the college’s security system, hoping to find some film of the two murderers either in the computer lab or on their way to it. Their luck was out. The cameras saved on to disc, and the relevant disc had developed a formatting error, which meant that it could not be accessed. They’d found a technician who might be able to extract some usable data from the disc, but it was turning out to be a slow process. In the meantime, they’d put out identikit images both to the other regional forces and on Crimewatch programmes, and were asking anyone who’d seen the two men to call a dedicated helpline. Half a dozen PCs from the uniformed branch were sorting through the hundreds of calls that had come in already.

Cummings had picked up the slack on Samir Devani’s death, the only one that could still conceivably have been an accident. By dismantling and examining the components of the fatal computer, he had been able to rule that prospect out, more or less. The power cable had come loose inside the machine and then somehow bent back on itself to touch the casing. The angle was an acute one, and the wire had had to be threaded through the heat sink of the motherboard to keep it in place, so that when the computer was turned on at the wall socket the handsome retro-styled metal casing went live. Now Cummings was trying to determine who had had unsupervised access to the machine in the sixteen hours between its last use and the fateful throwing of that switch.

Summerhill heard all of them out, interpolating questions and suggestions. He kept it fast, kept up a sense of urgency and purpose. Then he paused when he got to Kennedy.

‘Anything from your end, Detective Sergeant?’ he asked, with suspicious mildness. Nothing had been assigned to her, and she’d only been out of hospital a day. Maybe that glint in the DCI’s eye was kindled by the expectation of a ‘no’.

‘I want to follow up on the murder weapon,’ Kennedy said. ‘I mean, the other murder weapon. We’ve got all this intel on the gun, but nothing on the knife that killed Harper. I think it’s worth—’

‘Wide, three-inch blade,’ Combes said. ‘Very sharp. Probably angled at the tip. Is there anything else you want?’ He talked over his shoulder, without looking at her.

‘I think it’s worth following up,’ Kennedy went on, still talking to Summerhill. ‘This Michael Brand had a foreign accent, according to witness statements, and in Luton the assailant with the gun spoke to me in what I’m fairly certain was a foreign language. Maybe all three men are from the same region — the same country. The knife was of a very odd design. It’s just possible that it’s geographically specific. If it is, we might end up with enough data for a shout-out to another force.’

Summerhill looked unimpressed, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. ‘Did you see the knife clearly enough?’ he asked. ‘Really? Clearly enough to recognise it again if you saw it?’

Kennedy nodded at the flip-chart in the corner of the room, with some marker pens left over from somebody else’s meeting. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Go ahead.’

She crossed to the board, took a pen and began to draw what she’d seen. Behind her, someone muttered, ‘Can you tell what it is yet?’ and someone else laughed. She ignored them, trying to remember the exact shape of that weird, ugly blade. It had only been as long as the knife’s handle, and thicker, and it was asymmetrical, flaring out at the top on one side like one half of the head of a mushroom. It looked clumsy and unfit for purpose, but it had been as sharp as a razor and it had done for Chris Harper on a single pass.

She put the pen back and turned to face the rest of the team. ‘Like that,’ she said, going back to her seat.

They stared at it. ‘Okay,’ McAliskey said, laconically. ‘It’s distinctive.’

‘Could be a smoothing knife for plaster,’ Cummings observed. ‘Or a cake slice. Doesn’t look much like a murder weapon, though.’

‘I’d like to talk to someone at the Royal Armouries,’ Kennedy said to Summerhill. ‘Unless you need me for anything else. I’d also like to go back over the Ravellers message board archives and see if there’s any information there about what Barlow was trying to do with his Rotgut project.’

‘There isn’t,’ said Combes. ‘We already went through that stuff. Barlow didn’t put anything up on the boards except that first call for volunteers. Nobody got to hear what he wanted them to volunteer for except the people he chose to be his team, and, oops, we just ran out of them, didn’t we?’

‘That’s enough, Sergeant Combes,’ Summerhill growled. ‘Yes. Fine. You do that, Kennedy. The URLs and access codes are in the case file.’

‘I’d also like to talk to Ros Barlow again.’

‘The professor’s sister? Why?’

‘Because the professor talked to her about Michael Brand, and Michael Brand now seems to be central to the case — whether you think of him as a witness or as a suspect.’ She was uncomfortably aware as she made this proviso that it was a smokescreen. After talking to Tillman, she was definitely thinking of Brand as the villain of the piece. She’d need to watch that. ‘Also, if Barlow was keeping the project close to his chest as far as the forum was concerned, it’s at least worth asking if he talked about it at home.’

Summerhill nodded, but looked to Combes. ‘Follow that up, Josh,’ he said, and Combes nodded, scribbling a note to himself.

‘She already knows me,’ Kennedy pointed out, trying not to lose her temper.

‘Let’s not get territorial, Sergeant Kennedy.’ Summerhill clasped his hands together as though about to lead the group in a prayer, then opened them again, palms up. ‘Call me if you get anything. Otherwise, case notes on my desk for six. What are you waiting for, gentlemen? Peerages?’

They folded up their tents and scattered. So Summerhill was keeping her on the farm, Kennedy reflected as she walked back to the bear pit. Or trying to anyway. But he couldn’t tell her not to leave the building. He could only assign all the promising leads to other people.

Which just meant she had to turn up some other leads.

Her call to the Royal Armouries was answered by an intern, who left her on hold for a long time and then put her through to a Ms Carol Savundra — the acquisitions manager for the collections. Savundra was perfunctory: her tone said that she had a full in-tray, a short fuse and zero time or patience for unusual requests that came in via unorthodox channels. Kennedy didn’t have high hopes, but she described the knife anyway.

‘Nothing springs to mind,’ Savundra said.

‘Well, can I fax you a sketch of the blade? It might spark an association — or you could circulate it around your colleagues.’

‘By all means,’ said Savundra, but she didn’t volunteer the number until Kennedy asked for it, and was vague as to when she might be able to get back in touch. ‘To be honest, antiquities are a smaller and smaller part of what we do.’

‘This knife was used in a recent murder.’

‘Really? Well, go ahead and send it in. Perhaps once I see it I’ll have a flash of inspiration.’

Kennedy drew the knife again, on an A4 sheet, and faxed it over.

Next she tried Sheffield Knives, where she spoke to a Mr Lapoterre, their principal design engineer. He was a lot friendlier, but had never heard of anything remotely resembling what Kennedy described. He called her back as soon as he got the fax, but only to confirm that he was clueless. ‘We do a lot of knives with asymmetrical blades,’ he said, ‘but that’s a new one on me.’

‘It doesn’t remind you of knives produced in a particular part of the world?’ Kennedy coaxed, a little desperate.

‘It doesn’t remind me of anything at all. It’s like — if you found the skeleton of a bird, you’d know it was a bird because the bones would be in the right places for a bird’s bones. This isn’t anything. It doesn’t fit any category I’ve got a name for. Sorry.’

Kennedy hoped for better from the British Knife Collectors’ Guild and the US Office of Strategic Services, which included knife procurement for the American army in its online boast-list, but neither was of any help.

Discouraged, she turned to her other job for the day: the old message board threads of the Ravellers, which other people had trawled before her without result. Kennedy logged on to the forum and used the access code to get into the archived directories. Immediately she saw the scale of the task and realised that — however categorical Combes had sounded — he hadn’t been through this stuff. There were seven thousand pages of it, or rather seven thousand threads, each of which just ran on until it stopped. There had to be tens of thousands of posts. Probably a couple of months’ work just to read through it all once.

Maybe you could sort it in some way. The site had no search engine, but she knew how to make the department’s bespoke engine, which had been written by MoD wonks, search a specific domain. Barlow’s nom de forum was written on the file under the access codes: BARLOW PRCL, his surname and his college ident. Evidently the Ravellers didn’t have so many members that they needed to get tricky and postmodern with their IDs.

A first pass showed her that Barlow had posted comments on two hundred and eighteen threads, seventy one of them threads he’d started. She directed her attention to those, first of all.

Immediately she ran into the same problem that Harper had complained about. The subject headers, which in theory stated the theme of each thread, were so arcane that in most cases they provided no clue at all to their possible contents.

She clicked on a few threads at random. In the older ones, as she might have expected, the Dead Sea Scrolls got a lot of mentions. Barlow picked fights with existing readings, proposed counter-readings of his own, was shouted down or applauded or condescended to.

Then the Scrolls faded out of the picture by degrees, and other things trickled in, the focus still on translation and textual interpretation, but the texts now mostly New Testament — odd fragments of gospels identified by strings of letters and numbers. Barlow’s views often seemed to be controversial, but Kennedy couldn’t tell why because the arguments were too abstruse and the in-jokes too thick on the ground.

Eventually, she found the thread she was looking for. The header, as Opie had already told her, was: Does anyone have any appetite for a new look at the Rotgut? Under that heading, a couple of terse sentences: I’m thinking of coming at the Rotgut Codex from a new angle — for fun, and for a book I’m writing, not for funding. Hard slog, endless data crunching, possible fame and fortune. Anyone interested?

It sparked a short chain of comments, most of them pugnacious or derisive. Why go back to the Rotgut? And without funding? Barlow couldn’t be serious. There was nothing new to find there, and the codex probably wasn’t even a translation, just a mash-up. The positive responses came from HURT LDM and DEVANI [field left blank]. Nothing from Sarah Opie. Barlow promised to get in touch with his collaborators by phone, and the thread petered out after a few more unsympathetic heckles from other forum members. Then, much later — almost two years later, according to the header, and only three months before Barlow’s death — another reply appeared, from BRAND UAS. Very excited by what you’ve achieved so far. Would love to talk, and maybe get you over a hump.

After that, nothing.

After that, fatal falls down darkened stairwells, electrified computers, hit-and-run drivers and daggers drawn in daylight.

So how did Barlow reply to Brand? Kennedy wondered. He didn’t respond on the thread itself, even to ask for a contact number. Maybe he accessed Brand’s profile and picked up his contact information from there. She tried and found there was none. Brand’s profile was just a name, nothing else.

UAS, she discovered in an on-site registry, meant University of Asturias, Spain. But if Barlow had gone by that route, he’d have found out at once that Brand was a fraud. Presumably, trusting that nobody would be on a historical forum except historians, he hadn’t bothered to do that.

A private message, then. Private messages had a different access code, but the moderator of the Ravellers board had provided that, too. Kennedy opened the archive in a different window, found that the data was stored by member ID. Under Barlow’s name, a couple of dozen messages, but not to any member of the project team.

There was a message to Sarah Opie, a little later than the correspondence with the other three team members: Sarah, you remember the conversation we had at the Founders’ dinner? Do you think it would be possible to do what I was asking for, using your own system, or your work machines? Call me, and let’s discuss.

And one message to Michael Brand, dated on the same day as his forum post: Mr Brand, you intrigue me. I know Devani talked to you at FBF, but I also know he didn’t tell you anything. How did you hear about us? Please don’t reply through the forum. I’d rather dampen speculation on this than inflame it. My college extension is 3274.

Nothing after that. Nothing that seemed to relate to the ongoing project anyway. On an impulse, she searched through the other Ravellers’ private messages to see if anyone mentioned the Rotgut Codex there. Probably she was in technical breach of the search warrant, but it would only matter if she turned anything up, and she didn’t. The Rotgut wasn’t a hot topic. Nobody was gossiping about Barlow’s big project or speculating about what it was for. Nobody seemed to give a damn. Of the message headers she could actually understand, most seemed to relate to money — research grants, departmental budgets, per diems, bursaries, bids to the Lottery fund, capital allocations, loose change found behind sofa cushions. Nobody had enough and nobody knew where the next pay cheque was coming from.

It was tough all over, except for Stuart Barlow and his little band of irregulars: they’d been doing it for fun. And they were dead.

The day passed in this almost directionless searching, grindingly slow and inert. One of the breaks in routine occurred when Kennedy went over to Harper’s desk to clear it of any case-related paperwork that might still be there. Underneath a stack of unrelated intra-departmental rubbish, she found the Interpol data requests he’d filled in on Michael Brand. These were the originals, kept because what had been sent out were faxes. Looking them over, Kennedy found that Harper had made an elementary mistake. He’d only asked to be copied on cases in which Michael Brand had been linked as a suspect or listed as a potential witness. There was a huge middle ground in which Brand’s name might have come up in other people’s testimony, and she wanted to see those listings too. She sent an amended request — the same form, with a few boxes ticked. Because it was the same form, she didn’t need to bounce it back up to Summerhill for authorisation, but she added her own signature and ID at the bottom and — with a brief ache of unhappiness — crossed out Harper’s.

She made a few more knife-related calls, with nothing more to show for it, and walked out of Division on the dot of five — the first time in seven years that she’d done so.

Izzy was amazed to see her turn up at the flat before six: almost indignant. ‘You’re never back this early,’ she said, gathering up her things. ‘What, weren’t there any crimes today?’

‘I’m Serious Crimes,’ Kennedy said. ‘There were crimes today, but they were funny ones.’

As always, they walked to the door together. ‘Well, he’s in a rotten mood,’ Izzy reported. ‘He was crying earlier and listening to that bloody awful twang-twang-twang music. He was talking about your mum.’

Kennedy was surprised and disconcerted. ‘What did he say about her?’

‘He said he was sorry. “Sorry, Caroline. Sorry I ever hurt you.” Stuff like that.’

Kennedy would have said she was beyond feeling anything for her father now beyond the mixture of pained affection and half-healed-over resentment that she was so used to. This hurt: it came right on the heels of too much other stuff that made the wound feel raw. She drew in her breath and Izzy realised that she’d somehow put her foot in it.

‘What?’ she said, distressed. ‘I’m sorry, Heather. What did I say?’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just …’ But there was too much to explain from a standing start. ‘My mother’s name was Janet,’ she muttered.

‘Yeah? So who was Caroline? His bit on the side?’

‘No. Just a woman he killed. Goodnight, Izzy.’

She closed the door.

27

They had no shout the next morning. Summerhill was in the building but kept to himself, and the other detectives scattered early and without consultation. Kennedy was left to cool her heels in the bear pit, and service her knife experts once again — without any joy.

Nothing had come in from Interpol, but she could access their online archives and see if there was anything among the older, written-off cases where no interdepartmental clearances would be necessary.

Interpol’s digital records service had an overly complicated user interface that required you to fill out a whole raft of often irrelevant data parameters before you could start to interrogate the system. But Kennedy had plenty of time on her hands and was feeling bloody-minded enough to hack her way through the digital deadwood to get to the sap within.

And there was some sap, once she got there. Michael Brands had been involved in petty larceny and date rape, but their ages and descriptions were worlds away from the Michael Brand she was looking for. But ten years ago, in Upstate New York, and then seven years ago, in New Zealand, South Island, there were missing persons cases that tripped the Michael Brand search field.

Kennedy drew down what was available on both cases, and was amazed and appalled by what she found.

The New York case: a woman, Tamara Kelly, and her three children, all reported missing by the woman’s husband, Arthur Shawcross, a sales rep for a stationery company. He came home from a week on the road to find the house stripped, his wife and kids vanished into thin air. The day before, a call had been made to the house from a number Shawcross didn’t recognise. It turned out to be registered to a Michael Brand, but subsequent investigation failed to turn up the man himself.

New Zealand: Erwin Gaskell, a carpenter and cabinet-maker, had been away from home for two days, visiting his mother, who was recovering from a heart op. He came home to find the house a burned-out shell. His wife, Salome, and their three children, were gone. Because of the fire, and the suspicion of arson, residents at a nearby motel had been questioned. One of them, Michael Brand, had not been questioned because he had never returned to his room to retrieve the few belongings he had left there. He’d been seen talking to Salome Gaskell on the day she disappeared — or at least, someone answering to his description had been seen. It was a pretty circumstantial description, too: the bald head and the dark eyes stayed in people’s minds.

Woman and three kids, every time. What the hell did that mean? For one thing, that Tillman might be less crazy than he looked. For another, that Michael Brand was in the women and kids business on a hitherto unsuspected scale.

Sex slavery? But why go for whole families, in every case? And why always for families with that exact configuration? Also, why would the women agree to see and talk to Brand, as Rebecca Tillman had and as it seemed each of the other women had, too? What line was he selling them?

Serial murder? Was Brand a psychopath, recreating some primal moment in his own past? That sounded ridiculous, if he was the same Brand who was able to call up a phalanx of assassins to take out Stuart Barlow and his luckless team.

At that point, momentarily out of ideas and suffering badly from cabin fever, Kennedy just started to improvise wildly. She did a repeat of her knife trawl, calling up museums and archives and reading down the phone to them the strings of letters and numbers from Barlow’s carefully hidden photograph.

Nobody admitted to any knowledge as to what they might mean.

Kennedy switched tack, using online search engines. But it was useless because random alphanumeric strings turned up everywhere — in the serial numbers of products and components, the identifying plates of cars and trains, the makes and model numbers of everything under the sun. There was just no viable way to narrow down the search.

She decided, while she was at it, to check everybody else’s case notes on the departmental database, to see what if anything had been added to the sum total of their knowledge. Her log-in didn’t work.

She looked around. None of the other case officers had returned yet, but McAliskey had left his machine switched on and logged in — a disciplinary offence, if anyone had cared to report it. Kennedy crossed to his desk and opened the file from there.

What she saw made her swear at the screen, eyes wide with amazement.

She wasn’t given to storming but her progress from the bear pit to the DCI’s office could fairly be called a serious squall. Rawl seemed amazed to see her.

‘He’s … he’s not taking any—’ she began.

‘I’ll just be a moment,’ Kennedy said, already striding past her.

Summerhill was on the phone. He looked up as she entered, but made no other response. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir. I’m aware of that. We’ll do our best. Thank you. You too.’

He put down the phone and looked across the desk at her, shrugging with his eyebrows to invite her to speak.

‘You cut me out of the case file,’ she said.

‘Not exactly.’

‘My password doesn’t work. What counts as exactly?’

‘It’s an administrative hiccup, Heather. Nothing more. When you’re the subject of a committee of inquiry, all your operational files have to be scrutinised by HR and the IPCC. That inevitably means your security is compromised. All passwords are deactivated and all access codes are revised. You’ll get a new password in a day or so.’

‘And in the meantime, you turn me into the lady who comes round with the goddamned tea.’

‘I don’t know what you—’

Kennedy slapped the print-out down on his desk and he looked at it for a moment before realising what it was: a page from Combes’s notes from the day before, added into the file with a date stamp of 7.30 p.m.

‘Combes saw Ros Barlow yesterday afternoon and she told him to go piss over a five-bar gate,’ Kennedy summarised.

Summerhill nodded. ‘Yes. Well. Your suggestion of asking her if her brother had ever talked about his work was worth following up. But she proved less than cooperative.’

‘Jimmy, she asked for me.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘She refused to talk to Combes and she specifically asked for me. When were you thinking of telling me?’

He met her stare, unapologetic. ‘If you read the rest of Sergeant Combes’s notes, you’ll see that he didn’t feel Rosalind Barlow had anything further to add to the testimony she’d already given. He recommended against a follow-up visit.’

‘Screw that!’ Kennedy exploded. ‘She asked for me. Do you think that meant she had nothing to say or do you think it meant she thought Combes was a jumped-up little cartoon prick-and-balls with a squeaky voice and she preferred to talk to a human being?’

‘Kennedy, I’d advise you to moderate your language. I’m not prepared to overlook outbursts against fellow officers.’

Kennedy shrugged helplessly. ‘For the love of Christ,’ she said, her voice strained, ‘am I on this case or am I in the toilet? If you refuse to give me anything substantial to do, Jimmy, what’s the point of my being here?’

Summerhill seemed to perk up at this, as though he’d seen it coming a long way out and felt glad it was finally here. ‘Are you requesting a transfer?’ he asked. He pushed his chair away from the desk back towards the filing cabinet behind it — which Kennedy knew contained run-off copies of all divisional paperwork, including the PD-012 form that she’d advised Harper to fill in with respect to herself. Officer requesting transfer because of personal factors affecting work effectiveness.

She laughed.

‘No,’ she said, and Summerhill’s hand, half-lifted, fell into his lap. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Jimmy. I’m not asking for a transfer. I thought we already had this discussion, and I thought we understood each other, but that was just me being naive, wasn’t it? No, you carry on. And in the meantime, get Rawl to cut me a temporary password. You can keep me on a leash if you like, but do not try to hood me as well.’

She stood, and he shot her a look full of suspicion and dislike. ‘You’re not to speak to Ros Barlow, Heather,’ he told her. ‘That’s not a productive use of your time, and her hostility to this office and this investigation makes her an unreliable witness.’

‘I think it makes her a soulmate, but you’re the boss.’

‘Try to remember that.’

‘If I forget, I’m sure you’ll remind me.’

She left quickly, so that if the urge to punch something overwhelmed her self-control, Summerhill’s face wouldn’t be so temptingly close to hand.

At her desk again, she thought it through.

Summerhill was determined to keep her at the margins of things. Probably, in his own way, he felt absolutely at ease about doing so: she’d had her chance with the case and proved at Park Square that she couldn’t handle it, leaving an officer dead on the ground. Her last-ditch play after the incident committee met had got her back on to the team, but the DCI was telling her in his own charmless way that this was as far as she was going to get.

That left her with three options.

She could shut up and watch the world go by from the comfort of her desk. In which case, she might as well be dead.

She could dust off her earlier ultimatum and try to twist Summerhill’s arm a little further. But she hadn’t been bluffing the first time around, and this time she would be. She had just that little bit more to lose now that she had her job back.

Or …

She took out her mobile, slid it open and thumbed through the call log. She found Tillman’s number easily enough: it was the only one she didn’t recognise at once. She keyed CALL BACK.

‘Hello?’

‘Tillman.’

‘Sergeant Kennedy.’ He didn’t sound surprised, but there was an edge of anticipation in his voice; an implied question.

‘This isn’t an all-or-nothing deal, is it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean. We pool information, that’s all. I’m not asking you to work with me — just to tell me what you know. Let’s agree on one rule, though: no lies, even by omission. No holding things back to get an edge.’

‘And you’ll do the same for me?’

‘You’ve got my word.’

‘Okay.’ She shifted to McAliskey’s desk, where the case file was still open. ‘I’ve got something for you, first off. A freebie because I feel like I owe you one.’ She told him about the other two women — names, places, dates and times. She could hear him scribbling the details down, probably so he could check them with his own contacts. He didn’t react to the news, though, or not in any way that she could read over the phone.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Got all that?’

‘Yes,’ Tillman said. ‘What now?’

‘Twenty questions. You go first.’

For an hour, he grilled her about the case. She started with Stuart Barlow, went on to the other known victims: cause of death, the Ravellers connection, Barlow’s secret project (which as a pretext for multiple homicides sounded just as ridiculous as it always had), the unknown stalker and the shape of the investigation so far. Tillman asked focused and circumstantial questions at every stage. The sort of questions a cop would ask. What had made them decide that Barlow’s death was murder? Had the killers left any fingerprints or DNA traces at any of the crime scenes? Failing that, had they found any physical evidence at all that proved the link, or were they just working from the fact of a suspicious cluster of deaths? Kennedy gave him what answers she could, and admitted her ignorance wherever she had nothing to offer. When Tillman had run out of questions — or at least, had fallen silent — she interjected some additional points of her own.

‘We’re still working in the dark when it comes to motive, but I’m thinking it’s significant that Barlow and his team felt the need to be so secretive about what they’d found — what they were looking for, even.’

‘Significant how?’

‘I have no idea. But there’s an overlap between legitimate historical research and treasure-hunting. You remember those big Anglo-Saxon finds last year — Viking gold, worth millions? It becomes treasure trove if you declare it. Finders and landowners get a reward, state gets the property. Suppose Barlow had stumbled on something like that? And then someone else found out what he had?’

‘It works as a motive for murder,’ Tillman allowed.

‘You don’t sound all that convinced.’

‘Neither do you, Sergeant.’

‘Heather. It’s Heather, Tillman. Heather Kennedy. This isn’t a cop talking to you right now. I took it as far as I could as a cop. You’re talking to a concerned citizen.’

‘Okay. Heather. I’m Leo.’

‘I know. I looked you up. And you’re right, I don’t buy that this is just about money. That’s a big, all-purpose motive, and people will do more or less anything to get it, but those people in Luton — they behaved more like soldiers than anything else. And they killed three people over the space of two days, in three different ways. They’ve got reach, and trained muscle.’

‘Organised crime cartels can operate like armies.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure. But correct me if I’m wrong, don’t they also operate like businesses? Import-export, distribution, sales divisions, reliably sourced product and massive turnover. If it weren’t for the fact that the things they’re selling are illegal, they’d be in the Fortune Top 100. Would they be chasing stolen antiquities? I don’t think so. It would be another kind of criminal. The kind who doesn’t have worldwide infrastructure.’

‘So where does that leave you?’

‘It leaves me wondering about Michael Brand, Leo. That’s one reason why I called you. I think maybe this case doesn’t crack open by inductive logic, like something out of Sherlock Holmes. Maybe we need what you’ve got.’

‘One reason? What’s the other?’

‘I’ll get to that. Tell me about Michael Brand.’

‘If you’ll tell me one thing first.’

‘Shoot.’

‘I notice you don’t have Brand pegged as Barlow’s stalker. You refer to them as two different people. Why is that?’

‘Oh, right.’ She had to think before she answered. She’d made the assumption very early on, and it had been a while since she’d thought about it. ‘It’s mainly because Barlow already knew Brand online. At some point — not long before Barlow was murdered — they met. Obviously that gives us a connection, but why would Brand take the trouble to set up this fake persona of an interested academic, if he’s going to follow Barlow around like a cheap gumshoe?’

‘So it’s two different approaches to the same problem,’ Tillman said.

‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think it’s exactly that. We know someone’s been turning over the victims’ stuff — houses, offices, computer data. So they’re looking for something and they keep coming up blank. Brand cosies up to Barlow. That’s the softly-softly-catchee-monkey side of the equation. But he’s got one of his people sitting on Barlow’s ass in case they can find what they want by following him or frisking him.’

‘And when both approaches fail, they kill everyone.’

‘And go over their possessions with a fine-toothed comb.’

‘Okay.’ Tillman was silent for a while. Kennedy waited. Brand was the centre of everything for Tillman, had to be, because of what he’d told her the last time they met. She guessed he was about to touch again on the agonising knot that had become the centre of his life. So she was completely unprepared for what he finally said.

‘Brand is a buyer.’

‘He’s a what?’

‘Or a procurer, maybe. Someone who sources and obtains things on behalf of someone else.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Anything. Everything. There’s no pattern to it. Weapons and medicines are the two constants, but all kinds of other stuff mixed in with that. Computers and motherboards. Software. Machine tools. Electronic surveillance equipment. Timber. Vitamin supplements. And … in among all that …’

Kennedy filled the static-laced silence. ‘Women with exactly three children.’

‘Yes.’

‘All right. So let’s assume that what’s happening now is part of the same pattern. Brand is trying to get his hands on something else — something that Barlow and his people found, or made, or just knew about. He moved in. He moved his people in. He sweet-talked Barlow, then killed him and ransacked his house. But he didn’t find what he wanted because the team didn’t leave yet. They’re still looking.’

She heard nothing but Tillman’s breathing for a few seconds. ‘They’re still looking,’ he agreed. ‘But your scenario doesn’t work.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they didn’t try to talk to Sarah Opie, they just shot her down. I don’t think this is procurement. I don’t think it’s business as usual. I think it’s something else, and that makes me think maybe we’ve got a chance here. Brand is an expert at coming into a place out of nowhere, getting what he wants and then disappearing again. He never sticks around and he never leaves a trail. But it’s, what, getting on for a couple of months now since Barlow was murdered? And Brand’s people are still here. So the situation isn’t entirely under his control. It’s—’

Kennedy filled in the missing words again. ‘Damage limitation.’

‘I’m thinking. Yeah. Look, you said there was something else you wanted from me.’

She told him about the knife and her failed efforts to identify it. He sounded happy to engage with a discrete and concrete problem. He made her hang up so she could take a photograph of her own sketch and send it to him via the phone. Then he called her back.

‘I met a knife like that just recently,’ he said.

‘Met it? Met it how?’

‘Someone threw it at me.’

‘Are you sure it was the same kind?’

‘I had to cauterise the wound by setting fire to myself to stop it from bleeding.’

‘Okay,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘It was the same.’

‘It never occurred to me to chase the knife itself,’ Tillman said, sounding maybe a little unhealthily animated. ‘You see? This is why it’s better to have two minds on the problem.’

Kennedy laughed in spite of herself. ‘But we’re both clueless,’ she pointed out.

‘Agreed. But I know someone. An engineer.’

‘An engineer? Tillman, my point is that the weapon’s origin might—’

‘He knows a lot about weapons. He’s a real oddball. His name is Partridge. Let me talk to him and get back to you.’

Tillman hung up, and Kennedy gathered her things. Right then, she felt a sort of weird kinship with the mysterious Michael Brand. If he was involved in damage limitation, trying to corral a difficult, messy, intractable situation back under control, then so was she: compensating and correcting for other people’s mistakes, and her own; trying to find the one safe course through a minefield she had helped to lay. Then again, there might not even be a safe course.

But she knew where she had to start.

28

‘I don’t mean to be difficult,’ Ros Barlow said. ‘I just have a low tolerance for bullshit. Your colleague kept lying to me. And he wouldn’t stop, even when I asked him to point blank. So I told him to leave.’

She cut a Danish pastry into slices, spaced them out on the plate with what Kennedy considered an obsessive-compulsive level of care. The plate bore the logo of the restaurant where they’d agreed to meet, in the City, a hundred yards or so from the Gherkin building where Ros worked: Caravaggio. It was an unfortunate choice, in several ways: the price was one, the unwelcome reminder of knife fights another.

‘I don’t think Sergeant Combes would have told you any outright lies,’ Kennedy answered, scrupulously. ‘But perhaps he didn’t give you the full picture.’

Ros snorted. ‘He didn’t even give me the preliminary sketches. He came in with a lot of self-important blather about how the investigation was a lot wider now than it had been, and it was really important that he went over my earlier statements to make sure I hadn’t missed out anything … what was the word he used? … anything material. But when I asked what had happened to change things, he wouldn’t give a straight answer. I said I thought you were leading the case, and he laughed and said no. Just no — but as though he could say a lot more if he wanted to. I asked what no meant, and he tried to slap me down like a schoolgirl: that wasn’t really my concern, and he was there to go over my statements, and he only had a limited amount of time, and — this was the one that did it — if I cared about catching my brother’s murderer, I’d do as I was told and let him do his job. So then I dug my heels in.’

Kennedy nodded. It wasn’t unpleasant at all to imagine that scene. ‘It’s true about the investigation getting wider,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. She told Ros about the other deaths — most of them anyway. She found herself skirting around what had happened to Harper. Ros had read about it in the papers, though, and knew the rough shape of what Kennedy was leaving out.

‘Were you there?’ she asked. ‘When the other man died? This Constable Harper?’

‘I was there,’ Kennedy said. ‘Yes. Sarah Opie was the last member of your brother’s project team left alive. We didn’t know that when we got there, but it became clear as we talked. We decided to take her into protective custody, but we’d left it too late. They got her, too.’

‘Right in front of you,’ said Ros, looking at her searchingly.

‘Right in front of me,’ Kennedy agreed. She knew this was sympathy, not accusation, but it was still hard to keep her voice level, her emotions locked down. Ros seemed to see the strain she was under. She didn’t say any more about Harper.

‘Why go after Dr Opie just then?’ she asked instead. ‘After so long a wait, I mean? I thought the other deaths were all …’ She hesitated, leaving a gap for Kennedy to insert the technical term.

‘Clustered? Yes, they were. And I think the answer is that she died because we went to see her. It can’t have been a coincidence that the killers were there at the same time as us. They were watching us — either to figure out how much we knew or to fill the spaces in what they knew.’

‘Or both.’

‘Yes. Or both.’

With admirable composure, Ros polished off half the Danish — three slices, each consumed in a mouthful, in the way people eat oysters, straight down. She touched the sticky tips of her fingers together.

‘So there’s more than one of them,’ she said. ‘Killers, plural, not one killer.’

‘I saw two,’ Kennedy told her. ‘And there’s a third man floating around in the background — the man your brother met as Michael Brand. We still don’t know what his role is, but it’s hard to believe it’s entirely innocent.’

‘And you don’t know why they did it? Why they killed Stu, and all these other people?’

‘Not yet, no.’

‘Do you think they’ll come after me now?’

‘I don’t know that either,’ Kennedy admitted, frankly. ‘But I don’t think so. They didn’t come after you the last time we talked. If we’re right, and your brother’s research project is the key factor, the real link between the victims, then the only way you’d be at risk is if they thought you knew something. And for the moment, they seem to have decided that you don’t. Of course, we still don’t really have any idea what they’re trying to achieve — what their motive is. Until we know that, we can’t quantify the risk in any meaningful way.’

Ros considered this for a number of seconds, in silence.

‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll take my chances. I want these bastards hanging by their heels. What do you want to know?’

‘Anything you can tell me. Anything about your brother’s work.’

‘Stu didn’t talk about his work. But you know your bully-boy colleague took his computer.’

Yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘There’s nothing there.’

‘Nothing relevant, you mean?’ Ros asked.

‘The hard drive has been wiped clean.’

Ros’s eyebrows rose. ‘Then why are you still wondering about the motive?’ she demanded. ‘They’re trying to kill off the book. They have to be.’

‘That’s still not an explanation, Ros. Not unless we know why. You said yourself there was nothing in this book that mattered — no reputations at stake. The Rotgut has been around since the fifteenth century, right? And it’s just another translation of a gospel that already existed in a lot of different versions.’

‘Stu said that was the whole point,’ Ros shot back.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That the Rotgut was so well worn, and so worthless. Why did Captain De Veroese give a full barrel of rum for something that wasn’t ancient, wasn’t unusual and wasn’t rare?’

Kennedy shrugged. ‘So what’s the punchline?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ros admitted, glumly. ‘I just remember Stu saying that to someone he was having an argument with.’

‘Who? Who was the someone?’

‘He was talking on the phone. I have no idea who to. It was months ago. Most likely one of the others on the team.’

Kennedy chewed the conundrum over. ‘It might be something about the document itself,’ she speculated. ‘Something besides what was written on it. The material it was made of, or the binding, or a hidden message that had been missed …’ She fell silent, suddenly realising how little she knew about this document that had got five people killed that she knew of, and possibly a sixth. It was a thought that made her feel faintly ashamed.

‘Ros, where is the Rotgut? The original, I mean?’

‘The scriptorium at Avranches,’ said Ros, promptly. ‘Brittany. Or Normandy. Northern France anyway. But the British Library has a beautiful photographic copy: every page, in really high resolution. That was the one Stu used, most of the time. He only went to see the original twice.’

Kennedy decided to raise the other thing that was on her mind. ‘I told you that your brother’s computer had been wiped,’ she said. ‘Sarah Opie had all her files backed up on to her college’s network, and they have been retrieved intact. But we found nothing relating to the project.’

‘Could those files have been tampered with as well?’ Ros asked.

‘We don’t think so. To remove every trace of a whole set of files from a large server, without leaving some sign that you’d been there … it’s possible, but it calls for a very high level of knowledge and skill. And if they could do that, the brute-force wipe they did on your brother’s computer doesn’t make any sense. They’d have tiptoed in and out both times.’

‘What are you asking me, Sergeant Kennedy?’

‘Well, I was thinking that your brother knew he was being followed and might have known that it was in connection with his research. Is it possible he had another hiding place, either at the cottage or in London, at Prince Regent’s, where he could have kept hard copies or discs that relate to the project? If he had a secure stash like that, he might have told the others to erase everything they had in case their machines were compromised.’

‘That’s a lot of maybes,’ Ros observed.

‘I know. But is there somewhere?’

‘If there is, he never shared it with me.’

Kennedy felt her spirits sink a little. She was down to her last shot — or rather, her last two shots. ‘Okay,’ she said, trying to sound neutral and detached. ‘I’d like to bounce a couple of things off you. If they trigger any associations for you, I’d like to know what they are.’

‘All right,’ Ros said.

Kennedy took from her purse the photograph she’d found under the floor tile in Stuart Barlow’s office. She’d transferred it to a clear evidence bag, with date, time and place written on a standard ID label at lower left: a half-hearted attempt to dress up its complete illegitimacy. She put it down on the table and pushed it across to Ros.

Ros stared at the image for a long time, but finally shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I’ve never seen this before. And I don’t know where it was taken.’

‘It looks like an abandoned factory of some kind,’ Kennedy said. ‘Or a warehouse. Do you know of your brother having any kind of a connection to a place like that, or having visited one?’ When Ros shook her head again, Kennedy turned the photo over to show her the strings of characters on the other side. ‘What about these? Ring any bells?’

‘No,’ said Ros. ‘Sorry. What’s the other thing?’

‘The other thing is even more tenuous,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘As Dr Opie was dying, she said something that I didn’t understand. She mentioned a dove.’

Ros looked up from the photo, which she still held and was continuing to study. ‘A dove?’

‘I only heard a few words. She said, “a dove, a dove got”, and whatever followed that, I didn’t manage to—’

She broke off. Ros was staring at her intently: a stare that seemed either nonplussed or suspicious.

‘I’m going to assume this is for real,’ said Ros, ‘and not some weird joke. Because you don’t strike me as the sort of person who plays weird jokes.’

‘It was real,’ Kennedy assured her. ‘Why? Do you know what it was that she was trying to tell me?’

Ros nodded slowly. ‘Not “a dove got”. It was “Dovecote”. Or maybe it was “at Dovecote”.’

There was more. There had to be more. Kennedy didn’t ask. She just waited and watched while Ros Barlow took a gulp of coffee.

She put the cup down again and it rattled against the saucer, as though her hand had been unsteady. ‘Sorry,’ Ros said. ‘It just brought it all home to me again. We used to go there a lot when we were kids.’ She fell silent for a moment, shook her head and looked squarely at Kennedy. ‘My parents owned two properties,’ she said. ‘The cottage, and the farmhouse. It’s called Dovecote Farm. It’s down in Surrey, near Godalming. Just off the A3100, in fact, and you can’t miss it because Dad had this horrendous sign put up. He was a great fan of the Goodyear blimp — so the D of Dovecote has a bird’s wing coming out of it, like Hermes’s helmet. Bloody ridiculous, but he thought it was wonderful.’

Kennedy said nothing for a moment. She didn’t want the excitement to be audible in her voice. ‘You said that Stu had gotten to be a little paranoid in the weeks before he died,’ she said at last.

‘Only, as it turns out, not paranoid enough,’ Ros pointed out, bitterly.

Kennedy accepted the qualification with a grim nod. ‘So it’s at least possible that he held meetings at the farm, for the members of his team. If he thought he was being watched at the college, and if your house had been broken into …’

‘It would make sense,’ Ros agreed.

‘Do you have a key to the farm?’

‘I’ve got all the keys. Four of them. They’re all on the same ring, in the kitchen drawer at home. I would have said nobody had been near them in years. Do you want to come out and collect one?’

Kennedy thought about this for what felt like a long time. ‘Actually,’ she said at last, with some reluctance, ‘no, I don’t. I really believe that Harper and I were followed to Luton, and we didn’t see the people who were doing it. Let’s take the worst-case scenario. If they’re still watching what I’m up to, they know we’re meeting up now. It seems insane to talk like this but you said yourself that your brother’s paranoia wasn’t enough to save him. Let’s make sure you don’t go the same way.’

Ros didn’t exactly take this in her stride, but she seemed to accept the logic. ‘All right,’ she said, her tone almost matter-of-fact. ‘What did you have in mind, then?’ She handed the photo back across the table to Kennedy, and Kennedy returned it to her purse.

‘Do you send stuff out by courier, when you’re at work?’ she asked, still rummaging in the purse and therefore not meeting Ros’s gaze.

‘All the time.’

‘Take one of the copies of the key into work with you tomorrow. Put it in an envelope and send it to Isabella Haynes. She’s my neighbour.’

‘What’s the address?’

‘22, East Terrace, Pimlico. Flat 4,’ Kennedy said. ‘Two and two make four — do you think you can remember it without writing it down?’

‘I work in investment banking, Sergeant Kennedy,’ Ros told her, dryly. ‘I have to remember currency rates to four decimal places, and they change every day. 22, East Terrace, flat 4.’

‘In Pimlico.’

‘In Pimlico. You can give me the postcode, if you like. I’m not going to forget it. Or get it confused with the flat number.’

Kennedy gave it to her, then put her credit card down on the table. Ros Barlow pushed it back to her. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘You’ll hear from me tomorrow. And I’ll settle up here. All of this on one condition.’

‘Go on,’ said Kennedy. She was on her feet, putting her jacket on.

Ros stared up at her. ‘Anything you find, tell me. When you can.’

She saw the unreconciled grief and guilt behind the other woman’s eyes, wondered if that was what Ros saw when she looked at her.

‘I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

Back in the bear pit, Kennedy wrote up the meeting with Ros Barlow in full paranoid mode, but omitted any details that could imply either one of them had access to relevant information about the case.

You’re learning, she told herself, with a sort of fatalistic satisfaction. Which meant, really, that she was going down the rabbit hole: accepting that she now moved in a world where unidentified cabals might be stalking her informants with a view to murdering them before they could tell her anything useful.

Anything useful about what? The answer — a bad medieval translation of a readily available Christian gospel — still made no sense whatsoever. But at the bottom of the rabbit hole, where bottles labelled DRINK ME could change your life for ever, you just rolled with things.

Her mobile, which she’d turned to mute during the conversation with Ros, vibrated in her pocket. She took it out and flipped it open.

‘Kennedy.’

‘Busy day?’ Tillman asked.

‘Busy. Not necessarily productive.’

‘Maybe the best part comes last. I talked to Partridge — and he’s found our knife.’

29

Kennedy spotted John Partridge at once because he was exactly as Tillman had described — and the polar opposite of what his cultured, diffident voice had led her to expect. He was a barrel-chested, florid-faced man who looked as though he could have stepped straight out of an advertisement for premium pork sausages. He wore a grey turtleneck sweater and cargo trousers rather than an apron, and carried a cellphone instead of a cleaver, but the image of a smiling butcher stayed with Kennedy as she threaded her way through the milling schoolchildren and Japanese tourists to join Partridge on the front steps of the British Museum, where he stood out like a monk in a massage parlour.

Kennedy crossed to him and stuck out a hand. ‘Mr Partridge?’

‘Sergeant Kennedy?’ he enquired, giving her the briefest and most gingerly of handshakes. ‘It’s good to meet you. Good to meet any friend of Leo’s.

‘You’re doing me the favour,’ she reminded him. ‘Where’s the knife?’

Partridge smiled. ‘It’s close at hand,’ he said. ‘In Middle Eastern antiquities. Come.’

He led the way, and as Kennedy fell into step beside him began what turned out to be a long list of reasons why he wasn’t the right person to ask about this. ‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘that your little problem lies far outside my specialism, and doesn’t touch on any field in which I’m even marginally competent. I’m actually a physicist.’

‘Leo Tillman said you were an engineer.’

‘A physicist by training. An engineer de facto, by profession. I studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in their materials science programme. So my comfort zone is, broadly speaking, the physical properties of objects and substances. Within that field, which is a great deal bigger than it sounds, I have a narrower specialism: ballistics. The past year of my life — more than a year, in fact — has been dedicated to the supposedly obsolete Lagrange ballistics equations, which relate to the pressure of expanding gases in the chamber of a gun after ignition of the primer. Really, I’m as innocent as a child when it comes to edged weapons.’

‘And yet you solved my problem inside of a day,’ Kennedy said, hoping not to be diverted on to the subject of obsolete equations. ‘That’s impressive.’

‘Even more impressive than you know,’ Partridge said, gleefully. ‘This falls outside my discipline in so many ways, Sergeant Kennedy.’ He turned to smile at her and to watch her reaction. ‘It’s not even a weapon.’

Kennedy frowned. Harper’s messy, drawn-out death rose in her mind, against her will. ‘I’ve seen what it can do,’ she said, as neutrally as she could.

‘Oh yes, it’s dangerous,’ Partridge agreed, still smiling. ‘Deadly, even. But its significance lies in the fact that it was never meant to wound or to kill.’

‘Explain,’ Kennedy requested.

The smile widened by an inch or so. ‘All in good time.’

Partridge paused in front of an open door. The sign beside it read, ROOM 57: ANCIENT LEVANT. Through the door, Kennedy glimpsed a cabinet full of unpainted clay pots. It was what she had always associated the British Museum with as a child: and why she’d preferred both the Natural History and the Science Museums, and even the Victoria and Albert.

‘The Levant,’ Partridge said, with the slow precision of a lecture, ‘is the area that today comprises Syria, the Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Territories adjacent to Israel.’

‘So how long ago was it the Levant?’ Kennedy asked. She was wondering whether this was a wild goose chase after all, and if so, how long it would take to disentangle herself from this well-meaning but somewhat irritating man.

‘I’m not a historian,’ Partridge reminded her. ‘I think most of the exhibits here date from a period between eight thousand and five hundred years before the birth of Christ. Ideally, I’d have liked to show you a later example of your asymmetric blade, but to do that I’d have to take you to the Museumsinsel in Berlin. There are none here in the UK from the appropriate period.’

He stepped into the room, and again Kennedy followed. They walked past the pots, past stone slabs with bas-relief sculptures carved into them, before stopping in front of a cabinet full of metal tools.

‘The second shelf,’ Partridge said, but Kennedy had already seen it. In spite of herself, and in spite of knowing that Partridge didn’t need any confirmation, she raised a hand and touched the glass, pointing. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That one.’

In terms of physical condition, it was completely unlike the weapon that had sliced through her shoulder, had ended Harper’s life. Age had eaten it. The discoloured surface had become pitted with verdigris to the point where you couldn’t even tell what the original metal had been, the handle worn away to a slender spike. But the blade had the exact shape that stood out so clearly in her memory: very short, almost as wide as it was long, and with an asymmetric extension at the tip, rounded on top and hooked underneath.

Now that she saw it in cold blood, it looked a bit ridiculous. What was the point of such a piddling little knife? And what was the point of the rounded extrusion at its tip, where you’d expect it to narrow to a point? But something constricted in her chest as she stared at it, squeezed out her breath in a short huff. It wasn’t fear: she had been afraid when the Park Square assassin had pointed the gun at her. This knife, though it had killed Harper and taken a tithe out of her, she only hated.

‘What is it?’ she asked Partridge. She was relieved to find that her voice was level, the emotion locked down inside her for later disposal ‘It’s a razor,’ Partridge said. ‘A man would use it to shave and sculpt his beard. That one is bronze, and as you can see from the accompanying notes it was found in a tomb at Semna. But the design is most commonly associated with a later era and a different part of the Middle East.’

He turned to face her, clasping his hands behind his back. ‘During the Roman occupation of Israel-Palestine,’ he said, ‘the conquered Jews were forbidden to carry weapons. But you couldn’t be arrested for carrying your shaving gear. Not at first, anyway. So freedom fighters took to walking abroad with razors like this in the sleeves of their robes. When they passed a Roman soldier or civil official, the razor could be put to immediate use and hidden again in the space of a few seconds. An assassin’s tool, and a very effective one. The Roman term for a short-bladed knife was a sica, and so the insurrectionists who used these weapons came to be called Sicarii: knife-men.’

‘But that was two thousand years ago,’ Kennedy said.

‘More or less,’ Partridge agreed. ‘And if you want to know anything further about your blade’s historical context, I’m afraid I won’t be able to help. We’ve already exhausted my knowledge of that subject. But not — not quite — my knowledge of the object itself. Shall I tell you how I was able to recognise your blade, in the end? I mean, why it has something of a profile in contemporary weapons theory, despite its great antiquity?’

‘Please,’ Kennedy said.

‘Because of its aerodynamic properties. It belongs to a class of bladed objects that can be thrown at a target and hit it without spinning end over end. The modern flying knife is the most famous example. That was designed by a Spanish engineer, Paco Tovar, who wanted to avoid the annoying habit most knives have of occasionally hitting the target handle-first. His knife uses longitudinal spin to impart stability and is thrown in very much the same way as a cricket ball. The sica doesn’t spin longitudinally, and was never designed to be thrown, so it’s a little mysterious why it should be so steady in flight. It turns out to depend on the blade’s unorthodox shape. I attended a symposium on the subject when the flying knife was first displayed, in Müncheberg in 2002. I was standing in for a colleague, and had a dreadful time, since my knowledge of knives is minuscule, and my interest in them substantially less.’

‘Well, I’m grateful that it stayed in your mind, despite that,’ Kennedy said, sincerely. ‘Mr Partridge, are you saying that this property — the flying straight — is fairly rare?’

‘In bladed and edged weapons, yes,’ said Partridge. ‘There’s usually a requirement in such things for the grip to be thick enough to fit the hand comfortably and to allow easy carrying and use, while the blade typically needs to be thinner and lighter. The imbalance normally imparts spin.’

‘So would that be reason enough for people still to use knives like this?’

Partridge pursed his lips as he considered the suggestion. ‘Possibly,’ he allowed. ‘But I’d assume that the flying knife does the same job a lot better — as do the half-dozen or so variants that have appeared since.’

‘But they’re all fairly recent?’

The old man nodded. ‘Within the last ten years.’

‘Thank you, Mr Partridge. That’s really useful.’

‘It’s been my inestimable pleasure,’ he told her, inclining his head in a slight bow.

Kennedy left him still looking at the knives, his brow furrowed in concentration.

She met up with Tillman at the City of London cemetery, where she found him sitting with his back to a tomb and with a gun — the same weird-looking thing he’d used at Park Square — in his lap. He was watching a funeral in progress way over at the cemetery’s further end, closest to the gates. From where he was sitting, on a slight rise, he had a panoramic view.

‘Do you mind putting that thing away?’ Kennedy asked.

Tillman favoured her with a brief, slightly unnerving grin. ‘As the actress said to the bishop.’

He made no move to holster the gun, which she now realised he was cleaning. She leaned against the tomb and watched him work. ‘You’re in a good mood,’ she commented, dourly.

‘I am.’ He was jabbing a bore brush into the barrel of the gun with fastidious care. A small tub of Hoppe’s No. 9 solvent was open beside him on the grass, and the pungent smell of amyl acetate hung heavy in the air. ‘I feel pretty good about all this, Sergeant.’

‘About the deaths, specifically, or just the general mayhem?’

Tillman laughed — a rich, throaty chuckle that had a slightly ragged edge to it, as if he were forcing it beyond its natural limits. ‘About where we’ve got to. You have to understand: I’ve been looking for Michael Brand for a long time now. Longer than you’ve been a detective, maybe. And in all that time I’ve never felt as close to finding him as I do now. We met at the perfect time. What you know and what I know — it dovetails, pretty near perfectly. We’re in a good place.’

He slid a wadded rag into each of the gun’s six chambers in turn, with minute attention. ‘A good place,’ he murmured again, more to himself than to her.

‘I’m glad you think so,’ Kennedy said. In spite of herself, the peculiar revolver — like a lopsided six-gun — had caught her interest. She’d finally figured out what it was about it that looked so strange, and she was trying hard not to ask. She didn’t want to show any interest in the damn thing. But he caught the glance and offered the gun to her to look at.

‘I’m good, thanks,’ she said. And then, in spite of herself, ‘The barrel’s lined up with the bottom of the cylinder. What the hell is that about?’

‘Mateba Unica Number 6,’ Tillman said. He opened up the cylinder to show her, sliding it up and to the left. ‘Yeah, the cylinder is mounted above the barrel. Means there’s very little recoil and most of what there is pushes straight back at you, rather than up and back. There’s no muzzle flip to speak of.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘It’s the only automatic revolver in production. Webley-Fosbery hung in there for a time, but its hour passed. Mateba still makes the Unica because enough people out there want that combination: fantastic accuracy with a real heavy round.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘You should. I know whereof I speak. I’m only a medium good shot, but with this thing in my hand, I tend to hit what I aim at.’

She remembered the knife at Park Square that he had shot out of the killer’s hand. Hard to argue with that.

She sat down beside him. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you got the lecture about the knife?’

‘Partridge filled me in. It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? Your murder victims were looking at a really old gospel and these killers use a really old knife. Same point of origin: Judea-Samaria, first century AD.’

‘It’s interesting, yes. I don’t know where it gets us, exactly.’

‘Neither do I. I’m relying on your keen detective skills to piece it all together so it makes sense.’

‘This isn’t funny, Tillman.’

‘I’m not laughing. This would be the wrong place to make a joke. But I mean it when I say we’re close to something.’ He sat silent for a moment, working the action of the gun to make sure the cleaning fluid got into every small crevice. ‘The truth is …’ he said, thoughtfully. Another pause made her look around, stare at his face. It was blank, meditative. ‘This — all of it, your case — came at the right time for me,’ he went on. ‘I was about ready to give up. I hadn’t told myself that but I was losing momentum. Then I got a lead on this, from a guy way over on the far side of Europe, and I came here, I met you …’

‘There’s no such thing as destiny, Tillman,’ Kennedy told him, alarmed by his tone.

He looked up at her, shook his head. ‘No. I know that. No plan. No providence. “No fate but what we make.” Still. I’m glad we’re on this. I’m glad we’re on it together.’

Kennedy looked away. She didn’t like to be reminded of how thin a line her de facto partner was walking. It made her own situation look that bit more desperate.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a possible lead on Barlow’s project.’ She told Tillman about the suggestive absence of any Rotgut files on Sarah Opie’s computer, and about Dovecote Farm. But she stopped short of actually naming the place.

‘Sounds worth a look anyway,’ he said. ‘You want to do it tonight?’

‘No. Barlow’s sister is sending a key tomorrow morning. And I want you to stay clear until we’ve worked it as a possible crime scene. If you go in first, any evidence will be contaminated — and you might leave behind some evidence of your own. I don’t want the rest of the case team to get you in their sights by accident.’

Tillman didn’t seem convinced. ‘What evidence?’ he asked her. ‘What crime scene? You’re going in on the assumption that the thin white dukes don’t even know about this place, right?’

‘I’m hoping they don’t.’

‘So there’s nothing to contaminate.’

‘If I’m right, that’s true. But we don’t really have any idea what we might be walking into. And since that’s the case, I want to walk into it first. Alone.’

He stood and faced her, his expression serious. ‘The deal is that we share all the information we get,’ he reminded her. ‘It only works if we keep to that.’

‘I swear to God,’ Kennedy said, ‘whatever we find, I’ll pass it right along to you. I just want to do a book pass.’

‘A what?’

‘A pass. By the book. Means go in really carefully and disturb nothing. It may be that nothing’s all I’ll find. In which case, I come out again and I was never there. Because the other factor in all this is Ros Barlow. If these … whoever they are get the impression that she knows anything, they might close her down the same way they did Sarah Opie.’

‘Put her in protective custody, then. The way you did with that other guy — Emil what’s-his-name.’

‘Gassan. Emil Gassan. I’d do that if I could. But I’m not the captain of this ship. I’m more like Roger the cabin boy. I’ve been told to stay in Division and count case-relevant paper clips.’

Tillman looked at her shrewdly. ‘So you need me as much as I need you,’ he said.

‘If that makes you feel good, Tillman, then yes. I need you. And I’m going to need you a lot more if we get a solid lead out of this. Which is why I want you to stay out of it and keep your powder dry until I’ve given the place a once-over.’

He nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I trust you.’

‘You do?’ Kennedy was puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘I’m a good judge of character. I’m an especially good judge of the characters of sergeants. I was one myself for a dog’s age — and I knew dozens more. The bastards were easy to tell from the saints.’

‘What about the ones in-between?’

‘There weren’t that many. Other ranks have their grey areas. Sergeants are polarised.’ He’d been watching her closely throughout this conversation, but now he looked off towards the cemetery gates, where the last of the mourners had finally trickled away and the sextons had finished their work.

‘If you want to pay your respects,’ he said, ‘now would be the time.’

‘My respects?’ She followed his gaze. ‘Why? Whose funeral was that?’

‘Sarah Opie. Would have been sooner, I guess, but your people couldn’t release the body until they’d done the autopsy.’

She had a momentary feeling of disorientation — of being pulled out of normal time, like Scrooge; visiting the way-stations of her life so far, with Tillman as the spirit of screw-ups past. ‘What were you doing at Sarah Opie’s funeral?’ she demanded.

‘I wasn’t at the funeral. I was watching it from way over here. Just in case.’

‘In case what?’

‘In case our untanned friends decided to do a stake-out here. For me, or for you, or for anyone else they might have missed. I did a pretty extensive recon before, and another one during. Nobody showed.’

Kennedy had no answer to that. And she could think of nothing she wanted to say to Sarah Opie’s grave. In this thing, at least, she belonged to the school that views actions as speaking louder than words.

30

The next morning seemed long. Kennedy spent most of it in the bear pit, reviewing the case notes and finding little that was new or significant in them.

The one area where she did make a little progress was in cross-checking the witness statements from Park Square, as taken down and collated by Stanwick and McAliskey. The first time around, she’d missed the account they’d obtained from Phyllis Church, a desk clerk at the car rental agency who had rented the white Bedford van to Sarah Opie’s killers. (That had been yet another promising lead that went nowhere: the men had used extremely good fake ID, identifying them as Portuguese wine merchants in London for a trade show.)

Church’s description of the two men was broadly in keeping with everybody else’s. She remembered their tightly curled black hair and pale complexions, had wondered if they were related, since they shared these striking features. But she also said that one of them must have been injured because he’d been bleeding.

Kennedy read the account three times, absently highlighting different words as she chewed it over.

The words stirred an echo, made Kennedy’s memory dredge up an image of the man who had killed Harper. It was true: there had been red tears running down his cheeks. In the chaos and horror of that moment, she’d forgotten it until now. It could so easily have been a trick of the light. But no. When the other man turned to face her, to aim at her, his eyes had been bloodshot too. The pale face and reddened orbs had given him the look of a dissipated saint, drunk on communion wine.

She did some research on congenital conditions and drug side effects. Bloodshot eyes; bleeding eyes; bleeding tear ducts; weeping blood; ocular lesions. These and many variations on them told her nothing beyond the obvious. Almost anything could rupture the tiny capillaries in the eye, from a strong cough or sneeze to high blood pressure, diabetes or blunt force trauma. Changes in external air pressure could do it, too, but any physical exertion would be enough in itself, even in people who had good overall fitness.

Weeping blood was something else again. It had a name, haemolacria, but that just described the symptom. The actual phenomenon seemed to be much rarer — and more often associated with statues of Christ or the Virgin Mary than with medical conditions. A cancerous tumour in the tear duct could bring it on. So could certain rare forms of conjunctivitis. Kennedy decided to rule out for the moment the possibility that the Park Square killers could both simultaneously have been suffering from one of those conditions.

A long article on a fringe medical website discussed the spontaneous occurrence of blood-enriched tears in the adherents of ecstatic religions during rituals where gods were called down into them. It turned out, though, that there were no authenticated instances. The article leaned heavily on anecdotal sources from the Caribbean in the nineteenth century: voodoo bokors claiming to have Baron Samedi or Maître Carrefour riding them, and producing bloody tears and bloody sweat by way of a clinching argument. Stage magic, most likely. Another dead end.

She called Ralph Prentice in the police morgue, an old not-quite-friend with whom she hadn’t spoken since the shooting of Marcus Dell and the subsequent loss of her ARU licence. He made no reference to either of those things, though he must certainly have heard.

‘I was looking for your help on something,’ Kennedy said.

‘Go for it,’ Prentice invited her. ‘You know I’m a goldmine of useless information. And the three stiffs on my table this morning are all a good deal less attractive than you.’

‘I got lucky, huh?’ Kennedy said.

‘Oh yeah. I had a real looker in yesterday.’

‘Leaving your sex life out of this, Prentice, do you know anything that could make people weep tears with blood in them?’

‘Oestrus,’ Prentice said, promptly.

It was completely irrelevant, but momentarily stopped Kennedy in her tracks. ‘What?’

‘Oestrus. Ovulation. Some women do it every month. If you’re aiming to get pregnant, it’s sometimes a pretty reliable marker.’

‘“Some women”?’

‘It’s pretty damn rare. Maybe two or three in a million.’

‘Okay, what about men?’

‘Not so much. I’d imagine you could get an infection of the tear duct itself that would lacerate the inner surface and cause a little blood leakage. In fact, I’m sure conjunctivitis can bring it on — although just plain old bloodshot eyes are the more usual symptom there.’

‘Two men at the same time. The two men who killed Chris Harper last week.’

‘Ah.’ A long silence on the other end of the line. ‘Well,’ Prentice said at last, ‘leaving aside the scenario where one of them gets an eye infection and passes it on to the other by reckless, close-up winking, two possibilities spring to mind.’

‘Which are?’

‘Drugs. Stress. Possibly some combination of the two.’

‘What drugs, exactly?’

‘No drugs I’ve ever heard of,’ the pathologist admitted. ‘But that doesn’t mean it ain’t so, Kennedy. I’ve got a formulary sitting behind me on the shelf that lists twenty-three thousand pharmaceutical delights — with a good thousand of them coming online in the last twelve months.’

‘Is there a list of possible side effects?’

‘Always. That’s one of the things the book is for. It lets doctors see if there are any contra-indications for a particular patient. Like you wouldn’t prescribe venlafaxine to someone who already had high blood pressure because it would make their heart explode.’

‘Got you. Well, could you do a search for me, Prentice? See which drugs list haemolacria as a—’

‘Twenty-three thousand different compounds, Heather. I already told you that, remember? Sorry, but there aren’t enough hours in the day, or days in the week. And I have my own job to do here.’

She adopted a tone of contrition. ‘Understood. I’m sorry, Ralph, I wasn’t thinking. But there’d be online formularies, right? Places where you could just run this stuff through a search engine?’

‘Bound to be,’ Prentice admitted. ‘But you have to understand, those lists of side effects run to three or four pages sometimes. Any condition that manifested in the trials, even if it only showed up in one patient, has to be put in there. So you’re probably going to find that you get a hundred or so drugs where the literature cites blood in bodily secretions as a possible concomitant. I honestly wouldn’t bother, unless you’ve got some other way of narrowing it down.’

Kennedy thanked him and hung up. She went online anyway, found an internet drugs database run by a hospital trust in New York State as a service to local hypochondriacs, and did the search. But Prentice had overestimated: only seventeen drugs listed haemolacria as a rare but known side effect. All were derivatives of methamphetamine, apparently designed to treat either attention-deficit disorder or exogenous obesity.

Around about this time, Stanwick walked into the bear pit, followed a few seconds later by Combes. Kennedy had no real enthusiasm for their company, and they clearly felt the same about her, but as she was waiting for Izzy to come by with the key to Dovecote Farm, she didn’t want to leave her desk. She saved the drug list and closed the file, devoted some time to updating the case file with what she’d found out from John Partridge about the knife.

Her phone rang, and she picked up.

‘Hey.’ Tillman’s voice.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Can we talk later?’

‘I’d rather we talked now. Before you leave.’

‘What about?’

‘That perennial David Bowie favourite, The Thin White Duke.’

She hesitated, torn. ‘Where are you?’

‘St James’s Park. Your side.’

‘I’ll see you there.’

She grabbed her coat and walked.

She strode the length of Birdcage Walk without seeing Tillman; and the only birds she saw were pigeons working the tourists there. The mayor’s office considered the birds enemies of the state and hired Harris hawks from private aviaries to chase them from Trafalgar Square, where their excrement caused an estimated eight million pounds of damage every year. The pigeons just moved a mile or so south and waited for the heat to die down.

But the heat was on full force right then. The sunlight hit the ground, the trees in the park, the back of Kennedy’s neck, like a rain of tiny hammers. Bright sunlight always seemed somehow out of place in London: something the mayor’s office would no doubt control if it could.

When she got to the corner of Great George Street, and the massive grey fascia of the Churchill Museum, Kennedy stopped. There were a lot more people here, and it occurred to her that any one of them could be someone assigned to her as a watcher: a friend or associate of the men who had killed Chris Harper. She realised then that she had been unconsciously scanning every face that passed her, looking for that tell-tale combination of features — the pale skin and black hair — that the Park Square killers had shared. A young couple walked by, their heads leaning inward, the man murmuring something into the woman’s ear, too low for anyone outside their charmed circle to overhear. Target acquired, perhaps. A hawk-faced man in shirtsleeves who moved purposefully towards her turned out to be clearing a way for a crocodile of children heading towards the museum.

Kennedy stood at the junction of the two roads, hemmed in by towering neo-classical arcades like the barred sides of a sheep pen. The sunlight on her back felt like a hand pushing her, herding her. She thought of Opie, dancing jerkily as her body absorbed the kinetic energy of three bullets; Harper bleeding out in her lap; the moment of her fatal hesitation as the gun was pointed at her.

This was no way to live. No way to think. She saw her future foreshadowed in the poisoned filaments of fear and uncertainty that turned inside her mind, in the subtle shadow that had come between her and the world: a possible future anyway. She could see herself declining into a more profound uselessness even than her father’s, a paralysis like death.

She turned around. Tillman stood leaning against a lamp post a few feet away, watching her with bleak patience. She crossed to him.

‘Okay,’ he said, without preamble. ‘Two nights ago, I check into a fleabag B&B in Queen’s Park. It looked clean enough, but last night I go back there and it’s already picked up an infestation.’

‘Wait. You mean there were—’

‘Two charming young men, scarily close to identical, waiting for me to come home. Pale skin, black hair. The same two I met on the ferry, I think. They almost killed me back then, and they’d definitely have killed me last night if I’d walked into their line of sight. And when I tried to double around behind them instead, they melted like snow in the Sahara.’

Kennedy absorbed this news in silence, while Tillman stared at her, waiting for a response.

‘The identical features,’ she said at last. ‘I think it’s kind of an optical illusion. They’ve got a way of moving, and a cast of expression, that’s sort of a signature. It makes you ignore obvious differences of age and build.’

‘Screw the family resemblance,’ Tillman said, without heat but with a grim emphasis. ‘Sergeant, they’re up on my comms. That means they’re up on yours, too. If you’ve told anyone about this farmhouse, or put it into your case file, or taken a call from Ros Barlow where she told you the key was coming, I’d lay a pound to a punch in the throat they know where the place is by now and they’re there before you.’

‘I haven’t told anybody,’ Kennedy said.

‘Or written it, anywhere? Don’t you have to do that when there’s a break in the case?’

‘Yeah, but I haven’t. Nobody knows except us, Leo. And I’m keeping it that way.’

‘I want to come with you.’

‘No. We’ve been over this. First pass is just me. Then I’ll leak you the address.’

‘Okay.’ He said it with huge reluctance. ‘You’ll need my new number. I switched, just in case.’

He gave it to her and she wrote it on the inside of her wrist. ‘You could be getting in over your head, Kennedy,’ he told her.

She walked away without answering. She’d been in over her head ever since Harper died, and she knew that Tillman had been in far deeper, for a whole lot longer. The question now was whether either of them would make it back to the surface before their lungs gave out.

In the bear pit, a FedEx package was sitting dead centre on Kennedy’s desk. Izzy had arrived in her absence and handed it in at the street desk with a note for her. It read, GOT A PACKAGE FOR YOU, BABE. GOT A BIG, BIG PACKAGE. YOU WANT TO FEEL IT? DO YOU? DO YOU? — LOTS OF LOVE, I. Kennedy blushed furiously — partly at the thought of Combes or one of the other assholes around her reading the note, but mostly at the thought of calling up the sex line that Izzy worked on and talking dirty to her.

She pulled her mind out of the gutter with an effort. Combes and Stanwick, still working on something together off in the far corner, didn’t look towards Kennedy or seem to notice her. But even if they’d sneaked a look at the package, they wouldn’t have found any mention of Ros Barlow on the address label. It identified the sender as Berryman Sumpter, Investment Consultants.

Kennedy opened the package, reached inside. The tips of her fingers touched cool metal. She took out the key — an old, solid-looking Chubb whose brash golden sheen had faded to a dull mid-brown. Then she ripped off the address label, just to be sure, and put it in her jacket pocket before dropping the envelope into the waste bin.

There was one more thing she needed. She left the bear pit and went downstairs to the basement, where the evidence lockers were. The constable on duty was someone she didn’t know: a uniform whose name tag was obscured by the headphones draped around his neck. She’d seen the guy hastily pull the headphones into that neutral position as she came down the stairs. He was so fresh out of training he sat up straight as she approached, like a kid in school. A copy of Empire sat before him on the desk, open.

‘Sarah Opie,’ Kennedy said, writing it in the day book as she spoke. ‘Case number fourteen-triple-eight-seventy.’ She showed ID and the constable opened up the door in the counter to let her through, then took out the metal bootlocker box with the requisite number and put it on the big central table for her. For a while he watched her sifting through the contents of a dead woman’s pockets.

Kennedy got out her notebook, made some annotations. The desk constable’s attention moved gradually but inexorably back to a review of a Korean martial arts movie.

Fourteen-eight-seven-eight-sixty was Marcus Dell. Kennedy could see the bootlocker on a lower shelf, at the same height as her knees. She eased it out a little way, peered in. This was where her life had begun to go off the rails. Like Pandora’s box, this one contained all the evils in Kennedy’s world. Or at least it was their source.

She opened it anyway. Doing so without signing the day book was a serious offence, carrying a mandatory written warning, but the desk constable was absorbed in his magazine and seemed to have forgotten her existence. She knelt down and stared in at Marcus Dell’s effects. She put her hand in and picked up the ruined phone that had brought about his death. Tagged and bagged, inviolate behind cold polythene, its relationship to the world was ended.

Kennedy reached a decision, an accommodation with herself.

‘Okay,’ she said, a few moments later. The clerk looked up and found that she had already put all the various envelopes and packages back into the bootlocker. He came over and counted them cursorily, then checked a little more carefully to make sure that all the numbers matched those on the docket. All present and correct. He nodded, locked the box and put it back in its place on the shelf.

‘Did you find what you wanted?’ he asked her. Kennedy nodded. ‘Yes. I did. Thanks.’

The clerk let Kennedy out again and she walked back to the stairs. Combes was leaning against the wall halfway up, waiting for her — at the turn so that she didn’t know he was there until she almost walked right into him. He gave her a hard, unfriendly look, and he didn’t bother with small talk.

‘Tell me what you’re up to, Sergeant,’ he said, with heavy and sarcastic emphasis. ‘Or I’ll make you wish you’d never been bloody born.’

31

Kennedy kept her face perfectly inexpressive as she came to a dead stop in front of Combes. In the narrow stairwell, he made a pretty effective roadblock. She decided to let him speak first. Maybe he’d run loose enough at the mouth to tell her what he already knew, and she could decide from that how much more — if anything — she needed to tell him.

Combes seemed more than happy to make the running. ‘You came down here to look through some logged evidence,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘So if it’s related to the Rotgut killings, I’m entitled to ask you what it is you’re looking at and why.’

‘The Rotgut killings?’ she repeated. ‘Is that what we’re calling them now?’

‘I’m serious. You’re meant to be working on the knife, and the message board stuff. If you’ve got new information, or a new angle on what we’ve already got, you should have logged it in the case file and copied it to the team.’

‘Nothing new,’ Kennedy said. ‘Nothing substantial anyway. I wanted to check through the Park Square stuff.’

‘Yeah?’ Combes didn’t even bother to hide his aggressive scepticism. ‘On a whim? Nothing to do with that package you just got?’

‘I don’t do anything on a whim, Combes. I’m not sure what package you’re talking about — or why you think it’s your business.’

Combes had been holding the FedEx envelope behind his back the whole time, she realised now. He brought it out and brandished it in front of her face. ‘I’m talking about this package,’ he said. ‘You remember it now?’

Kennedy’s gaze flicked from the crumpled FedEx envelope to Combes’s eager-beaver face. ‘Very curious behaviour,’ she said. ‘Going through my rubbish.’

Combes was unabashed. ‘Berryman Sumpter,’ he said. ‘The brokerage firm where Ros Barlow works. I had to go see her at the office, Kennedy. You didn’t think I’d remember two days later?’

‘I didn’t think it was your business,’ Kennedy told him. ‘I still don’t.’

‘You didn’t log this in the case file.’

‘Which might be taken to imply that it’s not relevant to the case.’

‘But you did tear the label off, so nobody could search through your waste bin and make the connection.’

He had her there. ‘I’m entitled to do whatever I want with private correspondence,’ she temporised.

‘And what you did was to come charging straight down here to collect something from stored evidence. That’s a hell of a coincidence.’

‘No, Combes. That’s one thing following another thing. And since the second thing was me working, and this is where I work, it’s not that big a coincidence at all, is it?’

He didn’t rise to the bait, and his expression was still a gloating half-smile. ‘You’re on to something, and whatever Ros Barlow sent you plays right into it.’

‘You mean, what Berryman Sumpter sent me.’

‘Oh yeah,’ he sneered. ‘Sorry. That was just a message from your brokers, then? New investment portfolio, something like that?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Except it wasn’t a portfolio at all. It wasn’t papers. It was something small and solid, like a flash drive.’

‘Right,’ Kennedy said. ‘But we’re not playing twenty questions, are we? You want to let me past?’

Combes didn’t move. ‘Nah, not yet. What did you look at in the evidence? And if you tell me it’s none of my business, I’m walking straight to the DCI’s office.’

Kennedy really didn’t want that to happen. The truth — or selected extracts — seemed the best bet, seeing as Combes could just go on down and check the day book. ‘I was looking at the things we got out of Opie’s pockets,’ she told him.

‘Yeah? Why, exactly?’

‘In case there was anything we missed. Anything that might give us a clue to what she was doing on Barlow’s team.’

‘Just going through her pockets. At random. That’s bravura police work.’

‘Well, I aspire to be as good as you some day.’

‘I read what you put into the file after you met with Barlow’s sister,’ Combes growled, more or less ignoring what she’d said. ‘It didn’t say anything about her sending you a package.’

‘No,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘It didn’t.’ She could see no point in trying to conceal any longer the fact that Ros was the sender. It would be ridiculously easy to check. ‘Barlow remembered something she hadn’t said, sent me a note.’

‘By courier? Through a third party?’ Combes’s voice dripped with scorn. ‘Piss off, Kennedy. I’m not an idiot. And I already told you, I was watching you open that thing: there was no note in there. So come clean or I’ll go to the DCI and tell him you’re playing fast and loose with the reporting rules. Maybe the evidence rules, too, since you’re down here. You want to tell me what you got out of the lockers?’

Kennedy showed him instead. She opened her notebook to the page and held it out to him. He took it from her and read: three lines of butchered poetry.

‘I don’t get it,’ Combes said, giving it back. ‘What the hell is it?’

‘When we told Opie we were taking her into protective custody, she took a sheet of paper from her desk. It was the last thing she did as we were leaving. She said it contained a mnemonic for her password — a password that protected her files. And that was what she had written on it.’

Combes shook his head. ‘The stuff on the college network wasn’t locked,’ he said. ‘We didn’t need a password to get to it.’

‘Then she must have been referring to some other files, mustn’t she?’

‘We checked all her—’ Combes stopped abruptly as Kennedy held up the key.

‘Barlow inherited a farmhouse from his parents,’ she said. ‘It’s called Dovecote. Dovecote Farm. Opie’s dying words weren’t “a dove got”. They were “at Dovecote”.’

Combes stared hard at the key. Kennedy could see him making mental connections. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So you’re thinking what, that Barlow was using the farm as a spare office? That the files on his Rotgut project might be down there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Leaving aside Opie’s famous last words? Because they weren’t anywhere else, Combes. And because the killers did system wipes on Barlow’s computer, but they were still ready and waiting — and watching — when we went to Opie. There’s something they don’t want us to see and they can’t be sure we won’t find it. So maybe it’s still out there, and maybe Barlow stashed it at Dovecote Farm. Or Opie did.’

Combes shot her a look of open contempt. ‘And you thought you’d sneak off and find it by yourself, yeah?’ he said. ‘Blindside the team and grab the glory?’

Kennedy lost her patience. ‘Sarah Opie died for talking to us, you idiot,’ she yelled. ‘I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to Ros Barlow. And as far as the rest of the team goes, you drove me into a damned lay-by and parked me. I didn’t have any other choice — except to sit upstairs at that desk and watch the sodding world go by.’

She’d leaned forward as she spoke, without particularly meaning to: her face was an inch from Combes’s, and he blinked rapidly a few times in the face of her point-blank fury. Then there was a pause for what must have been thought. Finally he nodded.

‘Something in that,’ he admitted. ‘A lay-by is exactly where you are. But it’s what you asked for. Even before you got Harper killed, it’s what you were asking for.’

Kennedy didn’t bother to argue the point.

‘Look, it’s just a drive down to Surrey,’ she said. ‘And I’m not asking you to go with me. If I’m wrong, what do we lose?’

‘I don’t lose anything,’ Combes said, holding his hand out, palm up. ‘Give me the key.’

‘What?’ Kennedy really hadn’t seen this coming, although knowing Combes as she did, she probably ought to have done.

‘How we’re going to work it,’ Combes said, ‘is like this. I’m going to go down there and check this out. You’re going to go back upstairs and write up that package from Ros Barlow. Your log entry from yesterday is already in the system, yeah? Okay, so you’ll have to say that Barlow thought about the farm after she got home last night, and sent the key over unsolicited — to Division, I mean. Don’t mention it was to you.

‘The fact is, Kennedy, this does look like a solid lead — only it’s me that’s going to run with it. I’m screwing you over the same way you screwed over John Gates and Hal Leakey. If you don’t like it, complain to Summerhill. Only bear in mind that if you do, he’ll probably want to know what you were doing going out to see Barlow in the first place after he’d told you to keep clear.’

Since she didn’t offer him the key, he tried to take it from between her fingers. She slapped his hand away, hard.

‘It’s not negotiable, Kennedy.’

She folded her arms, putting the key well out of reach. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t. I promised Ros I’d keep this low profile. I’m happy to cut you in, if that’s what it takes. But we go under the radar. If we find something, fine. Then we come back, we open it to the team, and we decide how we’re going to play it. Until then, nobody hears word one about this. Nobody else dies on my watch, Combes.’

He let out a loud, pissed-off sigh, rubbing the back of his neck as he stared at her hard: a stare that said, ‘What the hell am I going to do with you?’ Kennedy felt a strong urge to bring her knee up into his crotch, but realised with regret that this might not be the best time. Particularly as they were now deep into a mutually incriminating discussion as to the best way to falsify the case file. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Then we do this. We go down there together — but we tell Stanwick before we go. He doesn’t write it up, but he knows where we are in case this goes tits-up on us.’

Kennedy pondered this — particularly the ‘we’ and the ‘together’. It stuck in her throat like a fishbone, but there seemed no way of cutting Combes out now that he knew about the farmhouse and the key. And it seemed as though, in his own patronising way, he was trying to do the right thing. The plural pronoun couldn’t have been any easier for him than it was for her.

‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘I agree. But Stanwick has to keep it quiet. If he goes to Summerhill as soon as we’re out the door, he gets a brownie point, we get to stand in the corner and Ros Barlow maybe gets her throat cut or a bullet in the head. Are you sure you can get him to keep his mouth shut?’

‘Stanwick wouldn’t fart without my blessing,’ Combes assured her. ‘He’s a total arse-licker. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.’

Combes led the way back up the stairs. Kennedy was tempted to ask why he employed the same tactics with Summerhill that he despised in Stanwick, but she didn’t want to endanger the precarious understanding they seemed to have reached.

Stanwick was still in the bear pit, as it turned out working his way through another list of European hotels that might once have welcomed Michael Brand as a guest. He had his phone to his ear and was in the middle of a loud and probably bilingual conversation.

‘Well, is there anybody there who can speak … No, is there anybody there who speaks English a little better than … What? No, I know you can speak English, sir, but your accent … If I could speak with …’

Combes made a hang-up-the-phone gesture. Stanwick only hesitated for a moment. Then he dropped the handset back into its cradle and made an obscene gesture. ‘Screw it,’ he said. ‘There’s no way this guy uses the same name twice.’

‘You might get lucky,’ Combes said, consolingly. ‘Listen, Stanwick, Kennedy got a lead from Barlow’s sister. She needs someone to go check it out with her.’

Kennedy wouldn’t have gone so far as to say she needed Combes, but she looked out of the window and kept her own counsel as he explained to Stanwick about Dovecote Farm. Stanwick really seemed not to get it. He obviously felt that if Combes was going to drive down to Surrey in pursuit of a lead, the privilege of riding shotgun belonged to him. He didn’t say that: it was just implicit in the way he kept asking — with only slight variations in wording — what he should say if anyone asked him about this, given that he didn’t really know anything about it.

‘Nothing,’ Kennedy said, breaking in at last. ‘You say nothing. It’s not in the file yet, Stanwick, okay? It doesn’t exist yet. That’s the point.’

‘And if it turns out to be nothing,’ Combes agreed, in a more emollient tone, ‘then it never did exist. No harm, no foul. But if there’s something to it, then we all share the glory. Equal split, twenty-five per cent each.’

‘Three times twenty-five is only seventy-five,’ Stanwick objected.

Combes shrugged. ‘DCI gets his cut, obviously. Look, Stanwick, we just need an anchor here, that’s all. If everything goes okay, we’re back before the end of the afternoon and nobody’s the wiser. Then we write it up so it happens in real time, take the treasure to Jimmy. Everybody’s happy. But if we hit trouble, if we go off the grid for any reason, you know where we are.’

‘Yeah, but how do I know?’ Stanwick said. ‘How does this not come back on me?’

‘Note on the desk,’ said Kennedy, writing it as she spoke on the top sheet of his scribble pad. ‘Keep it in your pocket. Find it if someone tries to call us and we don’t answer.’ She gave Stanwick the note, which read, Dovecote Farm. Following up information from civilian informant. ‘Okay? So you’re off the hook whatever happens.’

‘But nothing is going to happen,’ Combes added. ‘And most likely there’s nothing down there in the first place. We’ve just got to tick it off.’

Stanwick gave in finally, managing to get his puppy dog stares of reproach under some degree of control, and they hit the road. They took Combes’s car, a smoke-grey Vectra V6, and he held open the passenger door for her with cold courtesy. Kennedy ignored it and climbed into the back seat.

‘Fine,’ Combes said.

‘For the first few miles,’ Kennedy told him. ‘I don’t care how stupid it looks. I’m trying to be invisible on this.’ She lay down across the back seat, and drew her mac — brought along for the purpose — over herself. If anyone was watching the street ramp, she’d look like nothing much: a payload of old laundry or a rolled tarp in the back of the car.

Combes started the V6 and eased it into motion. Kennedy closed her eyes and willed herself into immobility. She found that she didn’t mind the cramped conditions, but lying down across the back seat stirred potent memories. It gave her the feeling of being a child again, surrendering to a journey defined by omnipotent others. She sat up after ten minutes or so, and when Combes stopped for a longer-than-usual red light she took the opportunity to switch into the front passenger seat.

Kennedy would have bet money that Combes would turn out to be the boy-racer type she so despised, but in fact he was a reasonably safe driver, staying just above the speed limit most of the time and not using the siren at all, even on a couple of occasions when she might have been tempted herself. Maybe he was on his best behaviour on her account.

They didn’t talk much until they got out of the city. Combes gave most of his attention to manoeuvring through the traffic, and when it thinned out seemed to be taken up with his own thoughts. Kennedy was more than happy to leave him there. She checked the rear-view once or twice a minute, making sure there were no vehicles hanging in their wake, following them south.

Once they hit the A3, Combes took a glance at the petrol gauge, flicked it with his thumbnail. ‘That moron Stanwick left the tank three-quarters empty,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to fill up.’

‘Fine,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’ll see if I can pick us up an ordnance survey map. Ros wrote some directions, but they’re a bit vague.’

They drove on in silence for a while and then Combes pulled in at a service station that called itself Travellers’ Haven: big words for a breezeblock shack and three petrol pumps. While Combes filled up, she went to the small pay kiosk and asked if they sold maps. The adolescent on the other side of the counter shook his head rapidly, wide-eyed, as if she’d asked whether he had any kiddie porn or hard drugs.

She bought some chewing gum and headed back to the car. When she was almost there, Combes hung up the pump and stared at his two hands, raised in front of his face. ‘Can you get this?’ he asked. ‘I’m drenched here. Damn thing leaked.’

Kennedy went back to the kiosk and handed her credit card across the counter. ‘Number three,’ she said. She was tapping in her PIN when the sound of the car engine coughing to life made her stop and turn round again. Combes was pulling out of the forecourt, back into the traffic, already moving fast.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Kennedy yelled.

She started to run, but then slowed and stopped again immediately. There was no way she could catch up to him: the car was almost out of sight already.

Combes had had time to think it out and he’d decided that he didn’t need the key to the door at Dovecote — just the address, which she’d already given him. And he didn’t need her. He knew she couldn’t complain at being cut out of the action: the only way to drop any heat on him was to draw it down on herself, too. She couldn’t even call anyone in Division and ask for a rescue.

With that realisation came another.

Tillman.

She dialled the new number — the one she’d jotted down on her wrist. Tillman didn’t pick up and there was no voicemail option, but as Kennedy was pacing backwards and forwards on the narrow forecourt, trying to come up with a plan B, he rang her back. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was working on something. What’s up? Are you at the farm yet?’

‘Nowhere near.’ She told him about Combes’s double-cross, steeling herself for some bitingly sarcastic put-down. She knew how stupid she’d been — first of all letting Combes drive and then falling in with his half-arsed stitch-up like a trained puppy. But Tillman took it in his stride.

‘You want to leave him to it?’ he asked.

‘Do I what?’

‘Well, he’s in your team, right? Anything he gets, he’ll pass on to you. Maybe the best bet is to let him get on with it. We can always go back and have a skirmish around later, if we think he’s missed anything.’

‘No.’ Kennedy had the decency to feel ashamed, considering how ready she’d been to cut Tillman out of this find, but she knew she was better at reading a scene than Combes was on the best day of his life, and the thought of him getting to open up the Dovecote treasure chest by himself was more than she could bear. ‘We can’t stop Combes from getting there first, but I really want to get the measure of this place now, while it’s fresh. And the way things are in the department, I wouldn’t get the clearance to come out here once it’s reported in. This might be my only chance.’

Again, Tillman didn’t waste any time arguing the point. ‘Okay. I’ll grab a car and come out and get you. Where are you?’

She told him where to find the Travellers’ Haven, and he hung up with a curt ‘See you soon.’

She had ample time to wonder, as she waited, what he meant by grabbing a car. Forty minutes later, when he turned up in a fourteen-wheeler, caparisoned in bright green and yellow livery, she had her answer.

They were driving down to Dovecote Farm in a stolen truck.

32

About forty minutes after Kennedy and Combes left, the phone on Kennedy’s desk in the bear pit started to ring.

Stanwick was still in the room, along with McAliskey and a few DCs, who were busy with their own stuff. They all ignored the phone, and it cut off after a while as the call diverted to Kennedy’s voicemail. Then it rang again. This procedure was repeated five or six times.

Nobody else seemed to be keen to take a message, but it occurred to Stanwick that it might be Kennedy herself calling in. Maybe they needed a third man after all or they wanted him to call in forensic or IT support. Maybe they just wanted to check the address or needed him to get some kind of clearance from the DCI.

Finally, he picked up.

‘Hello?’

A cultured, slightly foreign-sounding voice said, ‘I need to speak with Sergeant Kennedy, please.’

‘And you are?’

‘Whitehall exchange. Sergeant Kennedy can verify the number, and my ID: alpha zebra seventeen.’

Stanwick was impressed. Whitehall exchange meant MI5, most likely, although it could also be one of the parliamentary intelligence liaisons making an enquiry on behalf of a government committee or quango. It could even be Downing Street. However you cut it, it was serious.

‘Sergeant Kennedy is away from her desk,’ Stanwick said. ‘I’m DC Peter Stanwick. Can I help?’

‘I don’t think so. Is Sergeant Kennedy working a case right now?’

‘Yes, she is.’

‘The Barlow murder.’

‘Umm … I’m not really at liberty to answer that, sir.’

‘If it’s the Barlow murder, there’s nothing in the case file to indicate where she’s gone or what she’s doing.’

Stanwick was even more impressed now. Whoever he was talking to, the guy had stratospheric clearance: real-time access to case files was a privilege given to very few people outside of Division. You more or less had to be God or a close personal friend of his. Suddenly Stanwick’s own position — right in the Whitehall line of fire — was starting to look a little invidious.

‘It’s … something that just came up,’ he said. ‘Suddenly. She and DS Combes decided to check it out right away, and I’m … I’m updating the case file now.’

‘Please do so,’ the other man said, curtly. ‘It’s possible that Sergeant Kennedy and Sergeant … Combes, did you say? … are walking into an operation we already have set up. That would be far from desirable and we’d want to do our best to head them off if there’s still time.’

‘I’ll make the entry right now,’ Stanwick promised. ‘The refresh might take five minutes or so, but—’

‘I’m not concerned about the refresh. Thank you for your assistance, DC Stanwick. We’ll refer to the file — and I hope it won’t be necessary to call again.’

Stanwick hoped that too, very fervently. He cursed Combes for putting him in this stupid position, and himself for agreeing to be the fig leaf on their balls-out privateering. He updated the file to indicate that they were at Dovecote Farm, near Godalming, Surrey, pursuant to a suggestion made by Rosalind Barlow in a couriered package delivered at 11.20 a.m. After a moment’s hesitation, he timelined the entry at 1.43 p.m. Bastards already had him, if they wanted him. But he was far from the epicentre of whatever shitstorm was coming, and if he kept his head down he might not even get wet.

Kuutma put the phone down and thought.

It was very fortunate that he’d had his people set up a visual feed from the Detective Division at New Scotland Yard, which included in its field of vision the desk at which the rhaka, Kennedy, spent most of her time. When she disappeared from the feed, but failed to emerge from the building (the followers assigned to her would have reported contact), his suspicions were aroused. He had waited for almost three quarters of an hour — she could be elsewhere in the building, even though the rest of the inquiry team had all been accounted for — but finally he’d reached a decision and made the call. He was devoutly grateful that he had.

He called Mariam and gave her the glad tidings. Her failure to make a kill on her previous deployment, against Tillman on the ferry, had left her distressed and ashamed, and her team demoralised. It was part of Kuutma’s duty to consider the heft and the sharpness of the tools he used, and to whet them, wherever he could, against the rough edges of the world.

This would be good for them. They would take it for a blessing, which it was.

33

‘It’s here,’ Kennedy said. ‘The next left. Look, there’s the sign.’

Even in the gathering dusk, it was impossible to miss the sign. About three miles out from the last village they’d come through, it looked exactly as Ros Barlow had described it: the golden wing rising from the ‘D’ of Dovecote in a ridiculous, melodramatic flourish, reducing the whole effect to bathos. The squat, thatched building and scatter of tumbledown barns beyond couldn’t live up to that bombastic declaration. You needed the god Hermes descending out of a clear sky, maybe on wires.

The gravel drive in front of the farmhouse was far too short for the truck. Combes’s grey Vauxhall Vectra was immediately visible, parked right out in front of the building in defiance of good search protocols and common sense. With the driveway blocked, Tillman swung to the right and drove over waist-high weeds to a broad open space to the right of the main building, where he rolled to a halt. Kennedy looked around for Combes, but it seemed that he was still inside. That meant he’d found something: he’d had at least a half-hour’s start on them and had probably made better time on the roads. So whatever else it was, it seemed unlikely that Dovecote Farm was a dead end.

Fighting down her excitement, Kennedy got out of the cab. She scanned the ground. Apart from the gravel bed, the whole space around and between the farmhouse and its satellite buildings had become overgrown with weeds and scrub: no way to tell if tyre prints or footprints lay under there, although if the weather had been wetter she might have knelt down, parted the weeds and taken a look.

The farmhouse and the overgrown fields around it were absolutely silent. And there were no other houses or farm buildings in sight. Dovecote itself had half a dozen derelict-looking barns and outhouses, which crowded close around the main building like conspirators. If Barlow had set up this site as a secret base camp for his Rotgut project, he’d chosen his ground well. He’d also left no trace behind him: to judge by appearances, they — and Combes, of course — might be the first people to come here in ten years or more.

The farmhouse looked both dilapidated and deserted. All the windows but one had crude particle board shutters nailed over them. The one that was visible was broken. The wood of the window frames was scabrous with peeling paint, and a decorative porch roof over the front door had fallen in on itself like a dropsied stomach.

Tillman stepped down out of the truck on the driver’s side, and, like Kennedy, stayed still for a moment or two. Where she checked the ground for sign, he scanned the outhouse buildings, presumably looking for any signs of life. He gave her a look, shrugged, shook his head very slightly and headed for the door. Kennedy fell in behind him.

The door looked undisturbed, but only at first glance. After a silent moment, Tillman pointed to what Kennedy had already seen for herself: the splintering of the jamb over an area of about three or four inches, just underneath the level of the lock plate. Someone had levered the door open with a crowbar or perhaps a car jack, and then pulled it to again.

Kennedy pushed the door with her foot. It opened a few inches with an audible creak.

Tillman grunted non-committally. ‘Are you going to introduce us or should I wait in the truck?’

‘Come on in. We’re so far from the operations manual at this point, I don’t think it matters all that much. We’ll be sharing whatever we find, whether Combes likes it or not — and he’s got as much reason as me to keep quiet about the details.’

She nudged the door with her foot a second time, pushed it open as far as it would go. The interior of the house was completely dark even on this bright day, the doorway in front a solid black rectangle.

‘Combes!’ she called.

No answer, and no echo: the darkness swallowed the sound absolutely.

Stepping over the threshold, Kennedy breathed in a sharp, musty smell as thick as incense. The smell of damp, working on paper and fabric at leisure in the dark. Unsettlingly, her shoulders brushed against unyielding substance to left and right — as though the space she was stepping into were somewhat narrower than the doorway itself. A tunnel rather than a hallway.

She called Combes’s name again, louder this time. Again, the sound felt oddly flat and muffled.

Kennedy groped beside the door, hoping to find a light switch. Her fingers touched something soft and cool and ragged-edged. When it rustled, she recognised it as paper, and now that her eyes began to adjust a little to the dark she could see it, too: paper stacked in a rough and ready way to shoulder height, just inside the door.

She found the light switch immediately above the stack and pressed it, and light from a bare bulb flooded the scene before them. Poised there, Kennedy and Tillman stared.

‘What the hell?’ Tillman murmured.

It wasn’t a single stack of paper, it was just the only one that didn’t reach all the way from floor to ceiling. They were looking into a hallway that extended about ten feet, with two doors each to left and right and another at the end. Paper lined the walls, piled up in profusion, leaving a space between barely wide enough for one person to walk through. In places, clearly, it would be necessary to turn or lean inwards so as not to disturb the stacks. They looked precarious, but none had fallen over. Probably the fact that they were braced against the ceiling as well as the floor, and packed in very tightly, helped there.

In the one room that they could see, at the end of the hallway, more paper had been piled up, in haphazard blocks like the layers of a badly made stepped pyramid. It looked like someone had been filling the room with paper, to begin with in a methodical way, but had finally taken to putting it down wherever was closest and easiest.

Kennedy took the top sheet from the nearest stack — the one that only came up to her shoulder. It was printed with alphanumeric gibberish: letters and numbers, the letters all capitals, in a sans serif font. They filled the page completely, set out in an unbroken block from right to left, with three-quarter-inch borders. No breaks and no indentations: nothing to indicate whether this was a free-standing document or a single page of a much longer one.

Kennedy showed the sheet to Tillman. He scanned it briefly, then looked across at her.

‘I was hoping we might find a floppy disk,’ she said.

Tillman laughed: a bark of incredulous amusement.

Kennedy went in first, angling her body sideways so as not to touch the encroaching towers of paper. The air felt stiflingly warm, heavy with that sour tang, and she had the uneasy feeling of entering an organic space — of being swallowed or of being born in reverse. The thought of seeming nervous or flustered in the face of Tillman’s stolid calm was an unpleasant one. She shoved her presentiments firmly down into her hind-brain and locked them in.

‘You made a good call,’ he said behind her. ‘I’m guessing this is Stuart Barlow’s research project right here.’

‘I don’t know,’ Kennedy murmured. ‘I don’t see anything that looks like a gospel yet.’ Or anything that looks like that bastard, Combes.

They moved on, slowly and warily. Bare floorboards creaked beneath their feet, and the smell got ever stronger as they left the daylight behind. The first doorway to the left showed them another room full of paper. The first to the right was the same, the second empty apart from a half-full bag of cement and a few lengths of two-by-four on the floor. The last door on the left led through to a sort of hallway, where a flight of narrow, steep wooden stairs led upward. Two more closed doors opening directly off this narrow space, behind the stairwell, turned out to be locked.

Tillman motioned Kennedy aside and kicked the doors open, without much difficulty: a single kick to each, at waist height. One was yet another paper store, the other a kitchen. Kennedy was interested in the kitchen. She went inside and looked around. A kettle next to the sink, when she flicked up the lid, still had a little water in it. A teapot next to it was brimful of feathery grey mould.

By this time, Tillman had found the fridge. He threw the door open, winced and covered his face with a hand. ‘Take a look at this,’ he called to Kennedy. She came and peered around his shoulder. The fridge was full of corruption: green milk, white-spotted cheese, apples whose fresh red faces had fallen in on brown plague sores.

‘How long to get this bad?’ he asked her. ‘Couple of months?’

‘Maybe less,’ Kennedy muttered. ‘Feel how warm it is in here, Tillman. We’re six weeks out from Barlow’s death now. He could have been coming here regularly right up until he was killed.’

And if he did, she thought, that means he was better than me at shaking his tail. I took death with me to Park Square. This amateur managed to keep his big secret in spite of everything — and his killers still hadn’t found it.

That thought brought another in its train. If Combes had been here, why had these doors still been locked? It didn’t read right. Unless he was still here somewhere — had found something so engrossing that he hadn’t finished his search or heard their arrival.

‘Nothing else down here,’ Tillman said. ‘Let’s take a look upstairs.’

‘Give me a second,’ Kennedy told him.

She went back to the door, stepped outside and took a good look around — a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. Nothing and nobody in sight, and the silence was still unbroken apart from the cawing of a crow, softened by distance.

She went back inside, closing the door. Tillman stood watching her expectantly from the other end of the passage. She nodded to him and he headed up the stairs.

Bringing up the rear, Kennedy made sure to look behind every door and in the corners of the paper storerooms where someone or something might have hidden behind the uneven stacks. She found nothing. But at the top of the stairs, they struck gold.

They struck paper, too, of course: more murdered forests reduced to cubic yards of print-out, the same meaningless strings of letters and numbers on every sheet that Kennedy picked up and examined. But when they turned on the light in the largest bedroom, which did not contain a bed, among the stacks of A4 was another stack, of grey plastic slabs bearing the Hewlett-Packard logo.

‘Looks like a hi-fi tower,’ Tillman grunted.

‘Servers,’ Kennedy said. ‘They use rigs like this to render 3D effects for movies. Somebody needed a lot of processing power.’

She pointed to a trestle table over by the room’s only window. A monitor and keyboard sat there, connected by a thicket of wire cables to the server stack. From the servers, the wires arced away across the floor to a bank of adaptors, where they lost themselves in intricate cross-connections some of which terminated at wall sockets while others ran on out of the room. At least one rose vertically to disappear through a trapdoor in the ceiling. There hadn’t been enough power points in this one room, obviously, to handle the traffic. Even with three- and four-way adaptors, it had been necessary to call on the sockets in other rooms. A tarpaulin to one side of the trestle table had been thrown hastily over another rampart of irregular but squared-off shapes: more computer components, maybe, that hadn’t yet been called into service or had been replaced as inadequate.

This was the room that had the single unboarded window, but thick sack cloth had been draped over it, hanging asymmetrically from a row of nails. Whoever had been working here seemed to have been caught in a contradiction — wanting the possibility of light but wanting to avoid being distracted by the scenic view on the other side of the glass: or, perhaps, to avoid being seen from outside.

There was more paper on the desk. Only a dozen sheets or so: quite modest in comparison to the rest of the house. Also a stack-pack of CD-R discs, still in its shrinkwrapping.

Kennedy crossed to the table and turned the computer on. She was rewarded by the faint humming and clicking noises of start-up, sounding fainter still as the barricades and escarpments of paper swallowed the sound.

She turned her attention to the paper on the desk. She was expecting the same endless streams of alphanumerics, but what she saw drew an exclamation from her — a monosyllable that made Tillman pick up the second sheet to see what she was seeing.

The text on the paper was still completely unformatted: a logorrhoeic stream that ran uninterrupted from top to bottom of the paper. The only difference — the realisation that had made Kennedy swear aloud — was that these were actual words.

The squared-off, bolded capitals and the absence of spaces and line breaks made the stream of words read like a drunkard’s bellowed rant. The bottom of the page cut it off mid-word: the sudden, bathetic silence when the ranter realises that his meaning has escaped him, and shuffles off into the night.

The computer had booted up by this time, into a mode that didn’t look like any interface Kennedy had ever seen. Folder icons were displayed in white on a black background, each with a header label: SYSTEM, BIOS, SECURITY, DEVICES, PROGRAMS, PROJECTS.

Kennedy sat down at the table. The tubular steel chair had a wobble, so she had to lean forward to keep it steady. She clicked PROJECTS and the display disappeared, to be replaced by another list. It contained only two items: PARENT DIRECTORY and ROTGUT.

She clicked ROTGUT.

A box popped up, red-bordered. PASSWORD, it demanded.

Kennedy opened her handbag and took out her notebook. She turned to the last page, where she’d copied down the words from Sarah Opie’s paper.

She typed in the number 2, then in quick succession 4334624. She hit return, and nothing happened except that the PASSWORD box flashed once and emptied itself again.

‘What was that?’ Tillman asked.

‘I took these words down from a sheet of paper Sarah Opie had on her when she died,’ Kennedy said. ‘She told me it was a mnemonic for her computer password. It’s from a Keats poem. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” And it actually goes: “Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms / Alone and palely loitering? / The sedge has withered from the lake / And no birds sing.”

‘She played about with the line breaks, so that she’d be left with exactly eight words on a line. Messed with the wording a bit, too.’

‘So you’re thinking an eight-digit password,’ Tillman said.

‘Yeah. And I just tried the first line — assuming that Opie was just taking the number of letters in each word.’

She tried the second and third lines, too. Nothing: the box filled up each time and refreshed when she hit return, appearing empty and with the same silent demand.

‘Initial letters,’ Tillman suggested.

Kennedy tried that without success. Then she tried both sequences — numbers of letters and initials — in reverse. The box blinked at her, inscrutably, and refused to yield. She swore softly.

‘It’s got to be something obvious,’ Tillman pointed out. ‘It’s no use as a mnemonic if she had to think about it too much.’

Kennedy chewed her lower lip, thinking furiously. Something obvious, but not initial letters or length of words.

Why three sequences of eight words, rather than just one? The blocks of eight indicated an eight-digit key, but maybe the three lines were significant, too. She took every third word and entered the letter totals.

The computer chuntered industriously to itself for a few moments, then the screen went completely blank, before filling up again with a list of what were presumably file names:

Kennedy clicked on the first file: ROTGUT RAW 1, 1–7. The screen blinked, there was another rattle of dry, chitinous sounds from the hard drive, and then she was looking at a different list.

She used the scroll bar on the right of the screen to see how much of this stuff there was. It went on through what looked like several hundred items.

She closed the file, opened one of the PARTIALs. This file was a whole lot busier.

‘Any idea?’ Kennedy asked Tillman, nodding at the monitor.

Tillman had been reading over her shoulder. ‘Translation,’ he suggested.

‘The file label said partial,’ Kennedy offered back. ‘And all these lists of words are places where they’re not sure — where they’re listing possible alternatives. They were working their way through a document, translating as they went.’

‘The Rotgut.’

‘Must be. No, wait. The Rotgut is already a translation, isn’t it? I mean, the actual Rotgut manuscript is already in English. Nobody knows what the source document was, or what language it was in, so that wouldn’t work.’

Kennedy picked up the top sheet of paper again and ran her gaze across the surface of the hectic verbal torrent.

Downstairs, tens of thousands of pages of random characters: upstairs, a few scant sheets of real words. No formatting, no punctuation, no spaces, but still, an actual narrative of some kind with a distinctly biblical flavour.

‘It was a code,’ Kennedy said, wonderingly. ‘And they broke it.’

She turned to stare at Tillman. He was looking at her in silence, waiting for more. And the pieces of it were all in her mind, now, but it was still hard for her to make out the final shape — like trying to figure out what a jigsaw might show by looking at the reverse face, the face that bore no image.

‘Barlow gave evidence in a court case,’ she said. ‘Years back. A ring of counterfeiters, selling fake documents that were meant to be from one of the big biblical finds — Nag Hammadi.’

‘So?’

‘He was the expert witness. They called him in to look — look hard — at the real documents and the fake ones, so he could testify which was which and prove that someone was putting dodgy gospels on the market. It was a really big thing for him. He had newspaper cuttings framed and put up on the wall of his office.’

She looked at the screen again. At the list of maybe-Aramaic characters. Actuals. Spaces. Exacts. ‘Hundreds of scholars and historians must have looked at those things. Maybe thousands. But Barlow was coming at them from a different angle. He was trying to catch them out — looking for things that didn’t fit. And …’

That was as far as she could go. She had no idea what Barlow had found, but she felt sure that it had been the turning point. ‘There was something wrong with the Nag Hammadi texts. Something you’d only see if you went in looking to catch a fraud in the first place.’

‘But you said this was years ago,’ Tillman pointed out. He’d picked up the pack of recordable discs and was turning it over in his hands, staring at it with unnecessary intensity.

Kennedy dredged her memory. ‘Fifteen years,’ she said.

‘So if he found something then, why wait so long? What happened in-between?’

She didn’t know, but she could see the shape of the thing she didn’t know. It had a definite outline. ‘He found something. Or he suspected something. He kept bouncing off it and coming at it again from a new angle. He goes away and looks at Old Testament texts — the Dead Sea Scrolls. For five years. Then he looks at the Gnostic sects. And finally he goes to see the Rotgut in Avranches. That was when it all came together. It’s like … he had the key but he didn’t know where the lock was.’

‘I don’t think I get it,’ Tillman said.

‘Leo, think about it. The Rotgut is a medieval translation of a document that already existed elsewhere. Nobody can figure out why this Portuguese sea captain bought it in the first place — why he’d ever think it was worth having. But Barlow goes to take a look at it and he sees …’

Tillman scowled. ‘What?’

‘Something. Something nobody else saw. I’m sure I’m right. There was a code in the Rotgut. And Barlow knew enough by that time to see it for what it was.’ She saw the hole in her own reasoning as she said it. ‘But the Rotgut is just John’s Gospel. Where do you hide a code in a copy of an existing document?’

Tillman didn’t answer. He threw the pack of discs back down on the desk, but it hit the edge of the desktop and clattered to the floor, where it rolled away. Kennedy could see that he was angry, but she was slow to realise why. She plunged on, putting it all together while she had it clear in her mind.

‘Maybe it wasn’t in the words. Or maybe it’s in the changes in the words. If you started from the King James version, or whatever version they had back then, but you messed with it and changed it around, you might end up with a code that someone could crack. Holy Christ, Leo. I’m right. I know I’m right. Barlow picked up on a coded message from centuries ago and built a team to crack the code.’

‘Amazing,’ Tillman said, flatly.

‘Yeah, it is. It is amazing. But they needed a computer expert to do it. Three historians and a tech-head. It makes sense now. They were looking for some really subtle patterns in the text of the Rotgut, or somewhere else on the document. Patterns that you’d need some kind of statistical algorithm to nail down. Totally insane! But here’s the question we’ve got to answer now.’ She brandished the small sheaf of papers that had been lying on the desk. ‘This information was hidden back in the Middle Ages. Why would anyone be prepared to kill for it now?’

It was at this point that she ground to a halt, seeing in Tillman’s face that he didn’t give a damn about the question or the answer. His expression looked as hard and set as if she’d driven her whole chain of reasoning into it with carpet tacks.

‘What?’ she asked him.

‘None of this matters,’ he said, tightly. ‘None of it, Kennedy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not …’ He seemed to struggle to find a word that was strong enough. ‘… relevant. This isn’t even close to what I was looking for. I lost my family. I thought if Brand was killing these people, or arranging to have them killed, it was because they’d seen through him. That they’d dug up all his dirty little secrets.’

‘I think they did, Leo. They found something that he wanted to keep—’

‘This is ancient history.’ Tillman all but spat the words out. His fists were clenched now and his face flushed red.

Kennedy absorbed the violence of that pronouncement, kept her own voice carefully neutral. ‘The victims were all historians. I’d have to say that was on the cards.’

‘It’s not funny, Kennedy. Not to me.’

‘Not to me, either. But you’re wrong about one thing: it is relevant. It’s the key to everything, somehow, and if we stick with it, I think we’ll get all the answers we’ve been looking for.’

Tillman opened his mouth to reply but said nothing. Instead, he sniffed.

Kennedy was suddenly aware of a smell that had been riding under her conscious notice for a minute or more, masked by the stench of damp and dust.

Something was burning.

34

Although she was the only woman, and although it had been taught to her throughout her life that women should defer to men, Mariam was the team’s leader. This hadn’t even been something that anyone had to decide on, it was the outcome of a simple equation whose three inputs were the personalities of herself and the other two Messengers with whom she’d been partnered, Ezei and Cephas. Nobody who knew the three of them would have doubted for a second which way that calculation would come out.

So when Kuutma called, and Ezei answered, he passed the phone wordlessly to Mariam and she handled the rest of the conversation herself.

‘Your hunt for Tillman,’ Kuutma said. ‘I believe you were successful. You found him again?’

Mariam kept her expression blank and calm because Ezei and Cephas were watching her, but she felt a sour-sweet wash of emotion rise in her. She was proud of what she’d managed to achieve but desperately miserable at how the operation had turned out. ‘We backtracked from the call log on Tillman’s phone,’ she said. ‘The one we took from him on the ferry. There was a number in the log that was registered to a name we knew — a man who fought alongside Tillman when he was in a mercenary cadre. Benard Vermeulens. I spoke with Dovid’s team, in Omdurman, and asked him to place a temporary tap on all numbers registered to Vermeulens. From that trace, we established that Vermeulens had called only one number in England in the last ten days. It was very easy to set up a GPS trace on that number.’

‘You did well,’ Kuutma said. ‘But you haven’t closed with him yet?’

Mariam’s lips quirked. That was the only visible sign of what she was feeling but it was enough to make Ezei and Cephas glance at each other in unhappy solicitude. Ezei made the sign of the noose, a little raggedly. ‘We tried,’ she confessed. ‘Two times, both last night. The first time, he saw our ambush and didn’t walk into it.’

‘And the second time?’

‘The phone signal moved around very quickly for two hours, then was still. When we were able to zero its location, we went in. It was a sewer, in west London, but Tillman wasn’t there. He’d dropped the phone into a storm drain. He must have realised that it was the means we were using to track him.’

Her confession was done. She waited for chastisement: for the Tannanu’s stern, concerned voice to tell her that he was disappointed in her performance and was recalling her and her team to Ginat’Dania.

‘Tillman is a hard target,’ Kuutma said instead. ‘Your team is far from the only one to have been set back by him. Leave him to one side, for now. I need you for another task, which at the present time is more urgent.’

Mariam almost gasped aloud as relief made her let go of a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. ‘You know,’ Kuutma told her, ‘that we’ve been searching for written or digital records from the Rotgut affair. I believe, on the basis of new information, that the relevant files were kept in discrete and isolated form at a physical location, rather than at an internet node. I will give you an address. You will go to that address and destroy everything you find there that could conceivably contain information.’

Having escaped Kuutma’s censure, Mariam was eager now to win his approval. ‘Tannanu,’ she said, ‘that would mean destroying everything.’

‘Exactly, daughter. I’m pleased that you move so quickly to the point.’

‘But to be sure of destroying everything, we’d need to examine the location carefully first — there could be writing engraved on walls that would not certainly be effaced by fire or even by an explosion. There could be a vault beneath the building that was sealed, and so on.’

‘That you’re raising these questions, Mariam, shows me that you see at once how complicated and exacting this task is. Yes, you must rule out all these things and make absolutely certain that no word or sign survives. Only so will we be safe.’

Mariam felt a fervent desire to thank Kuutma for giving her and her team this chance to prove themselves. They had failed so badly on the boat, even though it had seemed that they had the enemy Tillman at their mercy in an enclosed space with no obvious exits. And then they had failed again in London. To be given the opportunity — and so soon! — to redeem herself and her team from that taint was a wonderful thing. But she knew, too, that the Tannanu would not expect or welcome thanks. It was understood between them what was happening: the significance of the gift. She said nothing.

Kuutma gave her the address and she wrote it down. Ezei and Cephas read it wordlessly, over her shoulder, and exchanged a glance. There was no mistaking what this meant.

‘I have it,’ Mariam said, tersely. ‘Are there any further orders?’

‘Yes.’ There was a short pause, as if Kuutma expected her to ask. Again, Mariam chose silence over unnecessary speech. ‘The woman detective, Kennedy, will be there, along with a male colleague. Kill both of them, ideally in a way that prompts a minimum of further investigation. If their deaths could be taken to be an accident, that would be ideal. If there is evidence of violence, it must look like casual violence, with no trail that points forward or back from the event itself. We are too exposed in this already, Mariam. With Tillman still alive …’

He let the sentence tail off. Mariam closed her eyes and mouthed an oath in which the number thirty figured prominently. Ezei, who could read lips, stifled a gasp, shocked at the blasphemy.

‘I see the problem, Tannanu. Perhaps we can make it appear that the man violated and murdered the woman, and then killed himself out of shame.’

‘A possibility, Mariam. Overly elaborate, perhaps, but a possibility. Remember, though, the sins that are forgiven you are very specifically defined. Do what seems best to you to do, and come to me afterwards. I’ll hear your report in person.’

‘I will, Tannanu. Where we have been, nothing will stand.’

‘I believe this to be true. Goodbye.’

The line went dead and Mariam gave the phone back to Ezei. The two men were staring at her, excitement and anticipation making them stand very straight, like soldiers coming to attention. Mariam felt a surge of love for them and such a profound joy she almost laughed.

‘We’re on,’ she said, simply. ‘Cousins, we’re on again. This very night.’

‘This is wonderful,’ Cephas said.

‘Yes! Yes, it is.’ Mariam went to the mini-bar in the hotel room they’d booked under a name that wasn’t Brand (Kuutma only bound himself to that convention, not his teams) and took out three hypodermic syringes along with three snap-in ampoules. She handed them out, trying to maintain a solemn face when all the while she felt as if she were giving out presents.

The ritual itself called for silence, so they opened the syringes, inserted the capsules and injected themselves without exchanging a word. Only the fervent glances the two men cast her showed that they shared Mariam’s excitement.

The drug hit her system with its usual expanding slow-burn: a bubble waking in the centre of her being, then rushing outward until it filled her entirely and popped startlingly against the inside of her skin.

‘Beracha u kelala,’ Cephas murmured, shuddering as the pharmacon lit up his nervous system. It meant: both the blessing and the curse. The drug’s more usual name, kelalit, recognised only the second part of this equation.

But when Mariam and her team descended on Dovecote Farm and delivered the final mercy upon Detective Sergeant Heather Kennedy, it was the blessing that would sit behind their eyes and hands.

The journey was quick and uneventful. They had no GPS, but Ezei had a great facility in map-reading and he led them unerringly.

They identified the farm at once from the prominent sign that faced out on to the road. Mariam drove on past the building, then took a narrow lane that led into woodland half a mile or so further on. Fortuitously, the lane bent back on itself, taking them around in an oxbow bend towards the rear of the property, so that by the time she found a secluded place in which to park, invisible from the road itself, they’d almost come back to where they started.

‘What should we bring?’ Ezei asked Mariam.

‘Sicae and guns only,’ she decided. ‘We go in light and fast. Anything else we need, one of you will come back for.’

The grounds of Dovecote Farm were easy to find, and almost completely open at the back. Wooden posts held up a single strand of barbed wire: a purely symbolic fence, low enough for them to step right over.

They approached cautiously, but from a hundred yards out, and even in the gathering dusk, it was clear to their over-sensitised eyes that boards had been nailed over the windows of the farm. If their quarry was already in the building, there was no way they could be aware that the Messengers were approaching. And if they had yet to arrive, then so much the better.

All the same, Mariam was cautious. She didn’t come in on a straight line but on a shallow diagonal, the two men following her lead without question, so that the closer they got to the farmhouse the more of its exterior and its outhouse buildings they could see.

They spotted the car when they were still some distance away. So Kennedy and her partner had already arrived and were inside. Using the language of gestures that all Messengers were taught, Mariam told Ezei and Cephas to split up so that they could approach the farm separately, from different angles. Silently and efficiently, they checked each of the outbuildings in turn. It was most likely that the police officers would be inside the farmhouse itself, but it was good to take nothing for granted. Mariam herself checked the car and found it locked and empty. Only when they had been over every inch of the ground did she call her team back to her, again with a gesture rather than a word.

The farmhouse had two doors, but a quick reconnaissance showed that the side door was screwed into its frame and would be hard to open quickly. Mariam stationed Cephas where he could see both doors and instructed him to shoot anyone who emerged. Then she and Ezei went to the front door.

They found it standing ajar. Damage to the jamb showed that the detectives had prized it open with a screwdriver or a crowbar. Mariam gestured to Ezei to walk behind her and to split off from her if the interior made it necessary. Then she pushed the door very lightly, widening the gap by a bare inch so that she could slide through. The warped, dried wood creaked, but the sound was low and wouldn’t carry far.

The paper-walled maze that met their eyes came as something of a shock. They had grown up in an environment where books and pictures were few, so they had no referent for these head-high stacks of white sheets filled with inscrutable figures. They seemed faintly indecent. Mariam almost wanted to raise her hands and cover Ezei’s eyes, even though he was older than her. He had always seemed to her to be someone who needed to be protected from the things of the profane world.

The paper aside, though, the interior layout of the farmhouse appeared to be very straightforward. They quickly ascertained that there was nobody on the ground floor — and just as quickly that someone was upstairs, moving around loudly and without precaution.

Mariam once again took point as they approached the stairs. So far their movements had been completely silent, but she could see that the boards of the stairs — as warped as the door — would creak under her feet no matter how she tried to distribute her weight. She unlaced her boots silently, slid them off her feet and signed to Ezei: hand upright, hand sloping forward, then a nod to the stairs.

He understood at once. Standing with the toes of his boots against the bottom step, he leaned forward carefully. He put out his hands, bracing one against the angle of stair and wall, the other against the angle of stair and banister. When he felt himself to be properly balanced, he nodded to Mariam. She stepped up on to his back, placed first one and then the other bare foot on his shoulders, and from there stepped up lightly on to the first landing. The wood beneath her shifted, with a slight creak of protest, but she was halfway up the stairs and could take the remainder in two strides.

Motioning to Ezei to stay where he was, she looked cautiously around the bend of the stairwell. She saw nobody, but the sounds were clearly coming from inside the room directly facing her at the top of the stairs. They were the sounds of purposeful movement. Someone inside the room was walking around, perhaps moving bulky objects.

She used the sounds as cover, moving when there was movement inside the room to mask any sounds she might make. In a few measured steps she was beside the door of the room — and by this time, she had reached some conclusions about whoever was inside it. One set of footsteps, heavy, distinctive and unvarying; no conversation. One person, probably a man, alone.

Where was the woman, then? That was a problem that she would need to solve, but a choice had to be made right now: to take down this man and then search for his partner, running the risk that she might be alerted by the sound of a struggle, or to wait and tackle both together.

Aim at the target that is in front of you, was a dictum that the Tannanu and her other teachers had drummed into her on many occasions. She felt confident in her own ability to kill or disable the man without giving him time to raise an alarm.

Reaching her decision, she stepped into the room. She was still moving as quietly as she could, but she knew that at such a small distance even the movement of air might betray her. So her first priority was speed.

The man — stocky, broad-shouldered, probably outmassing her by as much as a half — was on the far side of the room, kneeling beside an electric extension into which he was inserting or trying to insert a number of plugs.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mariam coming towards him. He started to rise as she reached him, his mouth open on the first syllable of a greeting or a challenge.

Mariam kicked him in the throat. She hadn’t put her boots back on, but she turned her foot to the side and made contact with her instep, the full weight of her body aligned behind her extended leg so that the force went from hip to knee to ankle and thence without mitigation into the unprotected flesh of the man’s gullet.

The sound he made was no sound at all, but a muted vibration: his ruined voicebox pulsing momentarily against the flesh of her foot. Then she lowered that foot, raised the other, performed a half-pirouette and straddled him. It was easy: his rising motion had stopped and he had crashed back down on to his knees, hands raised to his throat, making no move to defend or to counterattack. Mariam pincered his head between her muscular legs and, reaching down, wrapped her forearms around his temples.

A half-twist from this position would have broken the man’s neck easily, unless he knew it was coming and braced himself against it. Mariam applied a smaller degree of torsion but an equal amount of force, closing the man’s airway without damaging any of his vertebrae. She was already assuming that it would be necessary to burn down the farmhouse, so any soft-tissue damage she inflicted would be disguised by the much greater damage done by the flames.

The man realised that he was dying, a few seconds too late for the knowledge to do him any good. From this position, the only way he could reach her hands was to bend his arms back behind his own head. Most of his strength was lost in the awkward contortion, while hers was almost doubled by the kelalit she’d taken. The man writhed and strained under her, but she’d positioned herself well and he was unable to shift her balance or break free of the hold. His feet slammed against the bare boards, forcefully at first but then in a rapid diminuendo as his strength failed him.

When he was weak enough that she could afford to shift her weight a little, Mariam leaned forward to whisper into the man’s ear. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s almost over.’ Her English wasn’t good, but she spoke slowly and carefully, and she was reasonably sure he understood her. It was a small gesture but important all the same. We dress our brutality in ritual to keep our own animal nature at a distance. Mariam was never more gentle or considerate than when she killed.

The man’s last conscious movement was to fasten both of his hands around one of her ankles. It was a good idea, but again too late: he wasn’t strong enough now to push against her leg and disturb her balance. The grip was ineffectual, the push feeble and short-lived.

Mariam maintained her hold for a full minute after the man stopped moving, then parted her legs to let him fall. Kneeling beside him, she felt his throat for a pulse. There was none. The man’s face had gone hectic red and he fixed her with a reproachful, exophthalmic stare. She ignored it: the spirit didn’t linger long enough to bear grudges, and the flesh was nothing.

She searched the rest of the upper floor quickly, finding no trace of the woman. By this time, she wasn’t expecting to: if anyone had been within earshot, the frantic thrashing and kicking of the man as he died would have brought them at a run.

She went back down the stairs, less concerned now about the creaking floorboards, and found Ezei still waiting for her at the bottom. ‘One man,’ she rapped out, as she slipped her boots back on and laced them. ‘Alone. Search again.’

Between them they combed every inch of the farmhouse, looking everywhere that a human body could possibly squeeze itself. Finally, Mariam satisfied herself that the woman wasn’t on the premises. If she’d never arrived, that was fine. If she’d been there previously but had left, they might have a very narrow window in which to destroy these records — the other part of their assignment, and in fact the task that the Tannanu had mentioned first.

Mariam sent Ezei and Cephas back to the car to fetch some of their equipment, including the fire-starting kit. It included untraceable chemical accelerants and a flexible tube that she would use to breathe smoke into the lungs of the dead man. Most coroners wouldn’t look further than that before pronouncing a verdict of death by fire.

Once the men had gone, she returned to the computer room. Their instructions were to destroy everything that was here, but she was aware that it was sometimes possible to retrieve information from computer discs and hard drives even when they’d been comprehensively damaged. Along with the fire-starting materials, Ezei and Cephas would bring the wipe-clean, a portable generator in a briefcase-sized box that produced a monstrously powerful AC magnetic field. A ten-second pass with the device at full charge would corrupt every file on the computer, so that even if anything was saved from the fire, it would be gibberish. Taking the computer away with them would be simpler, of course, but would expose them to the risk of being stopped and searched while they still had it in their possession. This was better.

Mariam wondered, though, what secret had been discovered in this house that she and her cousins were charged with deleting from the world’s consciousness again. She crossed to the desk and picked up the top sheet from among the papers there. Reading it, she experienced a surge of mixed emotions. The words on the sheet were unexpectedly familiar: so familiar that she could have recited them from heart. But to see them in this place was momentarily disorienting, as though she had opened a door in a stranger’s house and found her own bedroom behind it.

In that moment of strange suspension, a spotlight shone through the window and picked her out perfectly.

It was an illusion, of course. Even as her training made her freeze in place, the light swung past and was replaced by a second, moving in lockstep with the first. The sound of the engine and the crunch of tyres on gravel reached her at the same time. Headlights. The headlights of a car.

It was the woman, then. Or perhaps someone else. It didn’t matter, either way: whoever it was had to die, and the task of destruction had to be completed. As soon as the lights passed by, Mariam moved to do what was necessary. Quickly, she dragged the body across the floor, to a stack of boxes that had been covered with a tarpaulin sheet. She manhandled it into position at the base of the stack and rearranged the tarpaulin to hide it from a casual glance.

Where were Ezei and Cephas? On their way back from the car by now, surely. They would have seen the headlights and they would know that the situation had changed. Hopefully they would stay in place and wait for her to contact them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t leave or call them: not yet. She had to wait for her moment and she had to know who it was they were now dealing with.

She moved to the window and parted the folds of sacking very slightly. Below and to her left, a little way from the house, a large truck was now parked. As she watched, the doors of the cab opened. A woman and then a man got out. They were only silhouettes in the dusk, hard to make out even though, like her physical strength and speed, the keenness of her sight had been enhanced by the kelalit.

The two figures walked towards the door. Retreating from the window, Mariam considered her options and decided on the most direct and obvious. She would wait in the room and kill the two as they entered. She might have to break bones, but she would try not to. If there was visible damage to the bodies, that fire wouldn’t hide, she might resort to the rape scenario she’d described to the Tannanu. Or she might drop the bodies from the window, so that it looked as though the damage had been sustained as the two tried to escape from the fire.

She walked silently to the door of the room. She could hear the two in the hall downstairs now: their voices, coming towards the stairs and then passing them. They were in the kitchen. She heard the man call the woman Kennedy, which came as no surprise at all. But the woman’s answer caught her unprepared.

‘Feel how warm it is in here, Tillman.’

Tillman.

Mariam’s fists clenched involuntarily. The target they’d missed so many times. The man who’d first escaped from Ezei and Cephas, in the point-blank confines of the ferry’s washroom, and then shot her knife out of the air. Who’d read their ambush from who knew what near-invisible clue, and escaped it. Who’d sent them down into a dank sewer in search of his abandoned phone. He was here. He was here with the woman.

Kelalit was known to heighten certain emotions. Part of the training of a Messenger included locking those emotions down into a manageable and containable part of the mind: you worked around them, refused to acknowledge them until, ignored, they lost the power to harm. That was what Mariam did then: she did not even look at the emotions that Tillman’s name, Tillman’s presence evoked. She folded those emotions in anaesthetic veils and pushed them down beneath the threshold of perception. At the same time, she conducted a rational appraisal of the situation. Tillman was a trained fighter and had survived an attack by her two cousins. There was a real chance that if she tried to take him here, even with the advantage of surprise, she might fail.

She heard footsteps on the stairs now: Tillman and the woman coming up. Moving as slowly as she dared, Mariam crossed the upper landing and stepped into the room opposite. It was possible that her enemies would go there first but it was unlikely. The computers were visible through the open doorway and would attract their attention. The logical thing to do would be to go and examine them immediately.

They passed within a few feet of her. She let them go by. Though her hands and feet prickled with the imminence of sudden, violent motion, she remained still.

The man and the woman went into the room, talking. ‘Servers,’ the woman said. ‘They use rigs like this to render 3D effects for movies. Somebody needed a lot of processing power.’

They were ten feet away from Mariam now, then fifteen. If she moved, and they saw the movement, Tillman would have time to turn: possibly, to draw and aim. But the distance was so small, she couldn’t miss with a thrown blade. She slid a sica from her belt and balanced it in her hand. She raised it, ready to throw — but only if the perfect window presented itself.

The woman passed between her and Tillman, blocking her line of sight. Killing Kennedy would be easy, but would alert Tillman to Mariam’s presence. If he were able to find cover in the room, and hold her off, everything might be compromised.

The moment passed. They both walked out of her line of sight, further into the room, heading no doubt for the desk.

Mariam left her hiding place and walked down the stairs. The voices from behind her were loud enough to mask the sounds her movements made, but she kept to the edges of the stair runners to minimise the risk that the old wood might speak and reveal her.

Only when she was in the hall did she acknowledge the slight tremor in her legs and in her hands: the small, almost insignificant component of that emotional surge that had been fear.

She walked out of the farmhouse and round to the rear, staying close to the wall. Once out of any possible line of sight, both from the bedroom window and from the road, she walked out boldly into the long grass. Ezei and Cephas rose in her way, not challenging her — they had recognised her even in the dark — but acknowledging and reporting to her.

‘Tillman is there, as well as Kennedy,’ she said.

Ezei blinked, startled. ‘What should we do?’

‘As we decided,’ Mariam said. ‘We burn the place. If they try to leave, we shoot them. If they stay in the building, we burn them. There are three of us and three faces to that building which have doors or windows. But if we work quickly enough, we’ll trap them on the upper floor in any case, and doors and windows will be no use to them. Come on.’

Cephas nodded, and a second later Ezei did too. Mariam noticed the momentary hesitation and read it for what it was: an implied question. If you saw them, why are they still alive? She turned her back on her cousins and led the way to the building.

They had two drums of the accelerant, a clear chemical compound that had no detectable by-products and virtually no smell — only a slight whiff of floral disinfectant — yet burned as quickly and as fiercely as kerosene. They started at the back of the building and worked their way to the door: Ezei and Mariam poured, anointing the piled-up papers, the walls and the floor. Cephas remained at the foot of the stairs until the last moment, his gun raised and ready.

Ezei had the incendiary flare — also unidentifiable from its breakdown products — that would ignite the blaze. He gave it to Mariam, who acknowledged the gesture of respect with a curt nod. His earlier hesitation was still fresh in her mind.

She pointed out to Ezei and Cephas the positions she’d assigned to them and they melted into the dark. There was nothing to be gained by waiting, and too much time lost already.

She tugged on the strip that kept the two chemical components of the flare apart. They merged and it sputtered into life in her hand. She threw it underarm down the hallway, where it bounced once before it settled.

There was a soft whump. Fierce light reared up like an angel in the narrow hallway, and hot, expanding air touched Mariam’s cheek like the caress of an urgent lover. She closed the door gently and took up her station.

35

Someone had been burning flowers. The stairwell was a cauldron of seething air that stank of ruined blossoms: an inferno in a quiet summer meadow. Tillman wasn’t an imaginative man, but images of sacrifice and massacred innocents rose in his mind anyway, too sudden to avoid. It was a smell you needed absolution from.

At his side, Kennedy swore. For a moment, she seemed rooted to the spot. Then she sank down on her knees. He thought she was praying, then realised she was searching. She came up with the pack of computer discs in her hand.

‘There’s no time,’ Tillman told her.

‘I’ll bloody make time,’ Kennedy snarled, tearing at the shrinkwrap plastic.

They didn’t even have to shout: the fire wasn’t loud yet, despite its fierceness. That was more unsettling even than the smell: this was a fire that got on with the job, with minimum fuss and maximum effect.

Tillman crossed to the door and stepped out into the heat, which was like pushing against a physical presence that filled the stairwell. He got as far as the angle of the stairs, beyond which a harsh actinic light, as much white as yellow, was writhing like a living thing. He cast a quick look around that corner, enough to tell him that there was no way through. The lower hall had become an oven, hot enough to render flesh from bone.

The windows, he thought. But there were boards nailed up over the windows. Except for the one in the computer room.

He ran back up the stairs and into the room. Kennedy was busy at the machine, hammering at the keyboard, feeding a disc into the drive. ‘Kennedy!’ he bellowed. ‘Heather!’ She didn’t answer. ‘We’ve got to go.’

‘It’s only the downstairs that’s on fire,’ Kennedy shouted over her shoulder. ‘We’ve still got a couple of minutes.’

Tillman grabbed her arm, turned her around to face him. ‘The smoke will kill us first,’ he reminded her. ‘You know that. Let’s go.’

She hesitated for a second, then gave him a reluctant nod. ‘Smash the window. I’ll be right with you.’

He crossed to it quickly, looking around for something he could use to smash the glass out of its frame. Kennedy ejected the disc from the drive, snatched it up and stuffed it in her pocket.

Tillman went to the stack of computer servers and hefted the top one in his hands. Wires connected it to the others, but he shook and kicked them loose.

‘That’s evidence!’ Kennedy yelled, anguished.

‘It’s going to be molten plastic inside of three minutes,’ Tillman told her, tersely.

He struck the glass once, twice, three times. It smashed on the first impact: the other two were to clear the jagged shards from the corners of the frame so that they could climb through without slashing open an artery. He was leaning in for a fourth blow when something else hit the wood from the outside, slamming into the edge of the sash and making it explode into fragments inches from Tillman’s face.

The whining report of a semi-automatic followed a second later. Tillman was already ducking back, acting on pure reflex. The second shot went past his ear, close enough for him to feel the wake of displaced air, and punched through the plaster of the ceiling, sending a shower of dust down on their heads.

Kennedy stared at the hole in the plaster and swore again. He thought she might be freezing on him: people did that in a crisis sometimes, even capable people, and the best thing to do in that situation was usually to punch them out. They were less trouble as a dead weight than as an active encumbrance.

But he was wrong. Kennedy was thinking it through. She cast a glance around the room, zeroed in on the blanket that was covering yet another pile of junk and snatched it up. That derailed her for a moment, since it revealed a fresh corpse lying on the floor, hidden by the blanket until now.

‘You poor bastard,’ Tillman heard Kennedy mutter. ‘Should have … oh Jesus, Combes! …’

Her voice tailed off. She ran from the room, trailing the blanket behind her. Tillman followed, guessing what she was going to do. It wouldn’t save them but it would buy them time.

He found her in the bathroom. She’d already started the taps running in the sink and in the bath, and she was trying to tear the blanket into strips. He took the hunting knife from his belt and offered it to her wordlessly. With the knife she quickly made a tear and ripped a ragged triangle from one corner of the blanket. Tillman took it from her and soaked it in the water filling the sink, while Kennedy cut loose a second strip of cloth for herself.

When the torn strips were thoroughly drenched, they tied them around their faces like bandanas. It would keep the smoke out for a few minutes and stave off monoxide poisoning. It gave them leeway. But leeway to do what?

The room was filling up with thick smoke now, on which motes of fire from the burning paper below floated like lanterns in a stream. The fire had got a lot louder now, too, roaring like a demon in the stairwell, making up for lost time. On top of the masks, that made it almost impossible to talk.

The stairwell was out.

Someone outside was waiting to kill them if they stuck their heads out of the windows.

What did that leave?

Kennedy tapped him on the arm, beckoned. He followed her, back into the computer room. She pointed upwards at the trapdoor, set into the ceiling. Tillman nodded vigorously, made a thumbs-up sign. Okay, let’s do it.

They piled up unopened boxes of paper to make a step ladder. He boosted Kennedy up so she could first throw the trapdoor open — it wasn’t locked, thank God — and then haul herself into the loft space above. He followed, climbing on to the precarious stack of boxes, then jumping and catching the edge of the trapdoor. The wood creaked loud enough to be heard over the buffeting roar of the flames, but it held. He got his elbows in and Kennedy hauled him the rest of the way over the edge.

The loft space was so full of dull grey smoke that it seemed like a solid thing, packed in there in cords and bundles. But when they moved, they left darker holes in the smoke that hung in their wake, tunnels of past time.

A skylight would have been too much to hope for, and in any case they didn’t need one. The slates were of pre-war construction, probably nineteenth century, each hung on a single wooden pin in the traditional method, exquisitely balanced. But the spruce-wood laths were so old and worm-eaten that Tillman could dismantle them with his hands. Working together, they made a ragged hole and crawled out on to the sloping roof.

It was like climbing out of a hole in the ice of a pond. The area around the gap they’d made had been weakened so that it leaned inwards and clearly wouldn’t bear their weight. They slid downwards from it towards the gutter, which also didn’t look like a safe bet.

It became a lot less safe a second later, when one of the slates at the edge of the roof exploded into razor shards that tore at their faces. Tillman heard the thup thup thup of small arms fire: he could even identify the gun, within a reasonable margin of error. The light but sturdy Sig-226, probably in a double-action Kellerman version with two trigger reset points. The sort of gun a cop like Kennedy might have used in the days before .40 calibre became the word and the law.

Tillman backed away up the roof ridge, keeping his body as flat to the tiles as he could. Beside him, Kennedy was imitating his action: in fact, she’d started moving a second or so before him.

But there was no salvation on the roof ridge. They’d just be at the highest point when the roof collapsed, which couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes away now. Assuming they didn’t catch a bullet first, they’d plunge through the roof back into that furnace, and if they were lucky they’d break their necks in the fall.

That wasn’t at all what Kennedy had in mind. She was looking off to Tillman’s left, towards the rear of the building, and as he followed the line of her gaze he saw what she was looking at, or looking for: the nearest of the barns, maybe fifteen feet from the farmhouse and a yard or so higher. It faced the farmhouse full-on, and had a square hole in its front where a window had once been. Wooden shutters welded open by generations of lazy paint jobs stood to either side of the gap: landing guides for a short, unpowered flight.

Dangerous but not impossible.

Kennedy started to clamber upright on the ridge. Out of the corner of his eye, Tillman caught the movement from far below. He pulled her down again just as the bullets started punching through the tiles around them: heavy, slanting rain that brought a shower of shrapnel in its wake. He drew his Unica and returned fire, to buy them a little respite and to warn the shooters against pulling back too far from the walls of the farmhouse in search of a better shot.

‘Damn!’ Kennedy bellowed in rage and frustration ‘This is total bloody overkill.’

Tillman emptied the Unica into the darkness below, then rolled on to his back to reload. He had two spare speedloaders, modified HKS 255s, both ready racked. After that he had nothing, not even loose ammunition. He emptied out the spent cartridges, slotted the speedloader and loaded the chambers with a quick twist of his wrist, all within a few seconds, but the virtuosity was an empty gesture. Firing into the dark, backlit by the flames that were starting to dance and weave between the gaps in the tiles, he knew he had little chance of hitting anything — of achieving anything beyond making himself an easier target. Maybe he could draw off the unseen assassins’ fire while Kennedy made her run and jump for it.

And then they’d stroll over to the barn and pick her off at their leisure. He needed to come up with something better than that. Something that offered at least measurable odds on their surviving.

His gaze passed over the truck, then came back. Blow up the gas tank? It was a sign of how desperate he was that he considered it even for a second. Urban legend aside, it had been proved time and again that you couldn’t make a petrol tank ignite by shooting at it. The bullet didn’t generate enough heat, and fuel-grade petrol wasn’t unstable enough. Striking a spark off the metal of the tank itself might do it, but that was worse than a one-in-a-million chance, and there was no point gambling on those odds.

Which left one spectacularly stupid stunt: the sort of thing the phrase ‘million-to-one chance’ had been invented for.

Tillman groped in his pockets and found what he was looking for: the box of Swan Vestas he’d been carrying ever since Folkestone. Opening the cylinder of the Unica again, he tapped it against the heel of his hand and let a bullet slide out into his palm.

Kennedy was watching him, bewildered.

‘Move towards the barn,’ he told her. She didn’t hear him through the mask, so he hauled it off and threw it away: the air was cleaner out here, and one way or another they probably weren’t going to die from the smoke now. ‘Move towards the barn,’ he said again.

‘They’ll see me,’ Kennedy pointed out.

‘Doesn’t matter. Move over there, as close as you can get, but don’t jump until … well, jump when they’re looking elsewhere.’

‘At what? What will they be looking at?’

‘All the pretty lights,’ Tillman muttered.

He turned his attention to the bullet. A .454 Casull, a round that had built on the Colt .45 casing and turned what was already a gun-range classic into a small masterpiece. Casull and Fullmer, the designers, were looking to make a handgun cartridge primarily for the biggest of big-game hunting, so they wanted to maximise power at point of impact — ideally, though, without breaking the arm of the shooter. So they’d married a rifle primer to a pistol cartridge, generating upwards of 60,000 cup when shot from a test barrel, and capable of accelerating a 230 grain bullet to 1800 feet per second.

For the low-recoil architecture of the Unica, it was the perfect round. Tillman stuck to the storefront standard most of the time, but occasionally rolled his own using the Hornady brass casing and a primer he’d gotten from an old Irish recipe. Consequently, he knew when he prised the bullet casing open with his teeth that it wouldn’t explode and rip the lower half of his face off.

Kennedy was edging away from him along the roof, and the bullets had moved with her. She was pressed flat against the tiles, offering the smallest possible target, but a stray bullet was going to take her out sooner rather than later. Even a peripheral hit would probably send her sliding and tumbling down the slope of the roof, gathering momentum until she pitched right off at the bottom.

Right now she was probably wondering if Tillman was just using her as a decoy, aiming to make a run and jump himself off the opposite end of the roof ridge and trust to luck that he didn’t break a leg or his spine when he landed.

Opening the Swan box, Tillman bit the heads off a couple of dozen matches. He chewed them up in his mouth, turning them into a thick paste, then let the foul, bitter mixture dribble from between his lips into the base of the bullet casing: a crude stew of red phosphorus and saliva. He resealed the casing, again using his teeth to bite around the edges of the base and crimp it into place. He bit down as hard as he could, until his teeth seemed likely to shatter under the applied pressure. Even then, there was a better than fifty per cent chance that the freakish, home-made thing would just explode in the barrel. But screw it, he was committed now.

Kennedy had gone as far as she could go: was pressed up tight against a broad chimney stack two-thirds of the way along the roof. It offered a little cover, at least, but it also blocked her passage unless she stood or knelt upright to edge around it. The shooters had followed her there and were more or less free now to choose their angle. They remained completely invisible in the perfect darkness below, but the muzzle flashes showed their positions each time they fired. Tillman could target the muzzle flashes, of course, but he knew, too, that only an idiot would be standing still while they fired.

Stick with plan A — where A stood for absurd.

He counted to three in his mind, then sat bolt upright. He took careful aim, even though he knew how well he must be showing up against the brightness of the fire at his back. A shot whucked past his shoulder, close enough to feel. A second smacked into the tiles between his legs.

Holding the out-breath, holding the target, he shut out the world and squeezed the trigger.

Instantly, the night turned into day: specifically, the dies irae, when God loses his patience and says enough is damned well enough.

36

It was endgame.

Tillman and the woman were effectively trapped in the building and the building was burning to the ground.

Mariam expected them to try the windows and was ready to push them back inside when they did. In fact, she felt almost certain she’d hit Tillman when he appeared at the bedroom window, where she was already aiming, and she would not have been surprised if they’d seen no more of either him or the woman.

It was Ezei who heard the sounds from the roof first. He whistled — two short notes, to get Mariam’s attention — and pointed up. She saw the movement there, abstract at first and then suddenly resolving into the woman’s head and shoulders. She fired and the woman ducked down out of sight.

Of course, out of sight was purely a matter of geometry. Mariam didn’t need to tell Ezei and Cephas what to do. In synchrony with her, they stepped back from the walls of the house. Two figures were moving up on the roof now, but they blended in with their background for the most part: it was only when some part of one or other body broke above the line of the roof and was picked out against the glow of the licking flames that they could be seen. Mariam raised her gun on to that line and waited.

Twice something bulked briefly against the flames and she fired. The second time, shots were returned and she had to duck back in closer to the wall out of Tillman’s line of sight.

She considered, for a moment, leaving it at that, allowing the two to burn to death in their own time, without further complications. But the roof wasn’t completely isolated, and Tillman and Kennedy had seemed to be moving to the rear, from where it might be possible to jump across to the nearest of the out-house buildings.

Mariam whistled and Ezei looked in her direction again. To the back, she signalled, and he took off at once. Quickly, she jogged along the front of the building until she could see Cephas on the other side. He looked round at her as she appeared and she gave him the same silent instruction.

She herself, Mariam decided, would stay at the front. It seemed impossible now that Tillman and Kennedy would duck back into the building, whose interior must be one undifferentiated mass of flame, and try to make it to the window again — but if they did, or even more inconceivably made a run for the door, then Mariam would be in place to shoot them down.

She watched approvingly as Ezei and Cephas circled, firing as they went. For a moment, she glimpsed the woman’s shoulder and part of her back. Kennedy appeared to have gotten most of the way to the rear end of the roof ridge, where the abrupt vertical of a chimney stack stood in her way, providing a little cover so long as she didn’t try to move past it. But if she stayed where she was, she had about a minute more before the roof collapsed, and in the meantime she stood out against the white-painted chimney every time she shifted her balance. Cephas took aim — but then suddenly shifted to fire at a different target, presumably Tillman. He squeezed off two shots.

The third shot came from the roof and Mariam saw it at the same time that she heard it: a luminous red streak in the air, drawing the shortest possible line between two points. The first point was Tillman. The second was the truck in which he had arrived.

The explosion was spectacularly sudden and agonisingly bright. Burning air washed over Mariam and slapped her off her feet. A buffeting thunderclap arrived so long afterwards that it seemed to belong to a different explosion altogether.

Groggy, she raised her head and blinked into the roiling smoke. Her ears were ringing, her eyes were blind and the hot air she breathed was a soup of overcooked petroleum. She tried to shout for Cephas and broke into jagged coughs that ripped her seared throat as though she were chewing on broken glass.

Then she saw a strange thing: a vision. The world had turned to black and white, and a man drawn in soot on grainy chalk was doing a ridiculous slapstick dance, his movements discontinuous and unconvincing. He fell down, as Charlie Chaplin was accustomed to fall down, with such energy in the fall that he rolled himself almost upright again, only to fall a second time.

It was Cephas. And it wasn’t a dance or a comedic act. It was his death throes. The fire was all over him, clasping him like a lover, the burning petrol drenching his clothes and his skin, pulling the moisture from inside his body and turning it to vapour to fling it into the sky in a violent and terrible transubstantiation.

Mariam screamed, and the scream hurt so much that her mind almost shut down. She had to fight to stay conscious.

Her eyes streaming, she staggered to her feet. She saw Ezei running around the rear of the farmhouse, then stopping abruptly as he saw what she had seen: Cephas turned into an offering to God. ‘Ezei!’ she croaked, as she started towards him. She had to shape the sound with blistered lips. ‘Ezei, don’t—’

Don’t go near him, was what she meant to say. Don’t step into the light, you’ll only make yourself a target. But Tillman’s gun sounded even as she spoke, and the spectacular lighting allowed Mariam to see Ezei’s fate with far too much clarity. The smoke beside his head rolled and reddened: some of that smoke was Ezei’s blood and brains, exiting through a hole made by a heavy shell at close to medium range. He stumble-stepped to a halt, already dead, and fell heavily to the ground.

Mariam was running before she knew it, running for the barn, because that was what they’d do now. They’d jump and they’d be vulnerable when they jumped, vulnerable when they landed. She could still bring this home, she could still avenge, she could still finish the mission.

The closed barn doors hung off their hinges. She tugged and heaved until they opened, stepped back and then launched herself into the darkness inside in a tight vertical roll. She tensed as she unfolded, gun in one hand, sica blade in the other. If she saw him before he saw her, she’d use the knife. If it came to a shoot-out, she’d trust to the gun first and pray he lived long enough for her to get in close and slit his throat.

From outside came a soft thump, and then a second. They’d climbed over the barn, not into it.

Mariam screamed again — a profanity she wouldn’t even have admitted that she knew. She ran outside, but the burning truck and the burning building and the air super-saturated with smoke seeled her eyes more effectively than any blindfold. There were running footsteps in the darkness beyond the painful light. She ran after them, firing in that direction until the clip emptied and the trigger locked.

Then she tripped on something in the dark and sprawled on the rough ground, tearing the skin of her palms. The breath was knocked out of her. Her chest felt like it had been ripped open, and the skin of her burned face was too tight on her skull, stretched like a death mask. She rolled over on her back in the long grass, spent. For a moment she felt she was dying. But the pain, which intensified with each breath, told her that she was still alive.

Through the agony, she began to glimpse the faint, uncertain outlines of a consolation. God wasn’t done with her, yet. And she wasn’t done with the monsters who had snuffed out the lives of her beloved cousins.

37

A moment came, in their running, when Tillman wondered what it was, exactly, that they were running from.

The shooters, obviously. But he’d laid out two of them, one with an exploding petrol tank, the other in a more conventional way, with a bullet. He’d tried to count, while he was up on the roof, and was almost certain that there could only be one or two more of them out there, in all.

But that meant one or two who’d actually fired: they could have reinforcements ready to hand and ways of bringing them to bear real quick. Maybe the scream they’d heard, after they jumped from the roof of the barn, was exactly that: a summons. It had sounded like a woman’s voice. He wondered, inconsequentially, if it was the woman from the boat, who’d landed a knife into his thigh at thirty yards. That wasn’t a woman to face in the dark, with an empty gun.

Better to run, then, and take stock later, rather than stay and fight what might be a premature last stand. Kennedy had the disc in her pockets: they’d gotten … something out of this, and it was something the pale assassins had swarmed to keep them away from. So it was worth having. It had to be.

Kennedy was keeping up with him, at first, and then suddenly she was outpacing him. His hip, still stiff from the knife wound, slowed him down. He put on an extra burst of speed, in spite of the pain, and caught up with her as they reached a shallow ditch that seemed to be the southern edge of the property line.

Negotiating the ditch, Tillman walked into a barbed wire fence, but it was only a single length of cable and it did minimal damage. He clambered over it and found himself on a dirt path that led back down towards the distant road on a steep angle. He looked back at Kennedy, who was struggling over the wire behind him. She either didn’t see his offered hand or else chose to ignore it.

This was neutral ground: not Dovecote. They slowed at last, by silent consent deciding that they’d run far enough for now. Kennedy bent from the waist, hands gripping her knees, and gradually got her breath back under control. Tillman stayed upright, looking behind for pursuit: but they would already have heard any pursuit that wasn’t made up of ninjas.

‘Where now?’ Kennedy asked, haltingly. ‘We’re … in the middle of … bloody nowhere, and you blew up the truck!’

‘Felt like a good idea at the time,’ Tillman said.

Kennedy laughed — a harsh sound that seemed torn out of her. ‘Did the job,’ she observed, grimly, and then, ‘How? How did you do that?’

By the dumbest of dumb luck, was the answer. The mere chance that I couldn’t find a lighter to cauterise my wounds, back in Folkestone, and had to settle for matches; and a fun fact from a decades-ago chemistry lesson. ‘I turned a regular bullet into an incendiary,’ he told her. ‘The miracle ingredient was ground-up match-heads: they’re mostly crystallised red phosphorus. Two-hundred-degree ignition point, more or less, which is about the same as the petrol in the tank — but you’ve only got to hit that temperature for a fraction of a second, say with impact friction, and then it sparks like crazy because it’s a degraded form of white phosphorus, and that’s a natural pyrophore.’

He wound down because that was as much as he knew, really. As a kid, he’d done it with BB pellets, anointing the noses of the tiny leaden slugs with gritty red slime and then waiting for them to dry: shooting at cans of lighter fluid at ten metres on a home-made range, then marvelling at the angel of light and heat that spread its wings suddenly above their tiny backyard.

Kennedy looked at him, in silence, for a long time, seeming about to speak but saying nothing. Tillman waited anyway, knowing that something was coming.

‘That’s two people dead,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Two people dead. Extra-judicial killings. You killed them, Tillman.’

He shrugged, genuinely not sure what response she wanted from him. ‘So?’

‘So I’m meant to sodding arrest you. This is … messed up. I’m not your moll, or your sidekick, or your … anything else. We can’t go on meeting like this.’

He breathed out slowly, his own equilibrium escaping him. It had been a wild night even by his sloppy standards, and the deaths, in memory, left him with no sense of triumph. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We can’t. Not for much longer. But the deal stands, Kennedy. Whatever you get from those discs or the papers …’

‘Yes? Whatever I get?’

‘Well, I killed for it. So it’s mine, too.’

She stared at him in silence again, and again he waited her out. This time there was no sequel. Whatever it was she wanted to say, she didn’t manage to find the words for it. She walked on past him down the lane, heading towards the road. He respected her mood, allowed her a whole lot of distance all the way down.

38

What had happened at Dovecote Farm could not be hidden.

Kennedy called Division from the roadside, reporting the results of their search, Combes’s death and her encounter with the killers. She left out nothing — except that in her account, she’d made her own way to the farm after being separated from Combes, and she’d been alone when she escaped from the blaze. About Tillman, she was silent.

Squad cars and ambulances, fire tenders and vans with flashing lights began to arrive within the next half-hour. They cordoned off the site, put out the flames still feeding fitfully on the remains of the farmhouse and the truck, and began the long, involved task of working the scene. Kennedy wished them joy of it.

Summerhill himself was almost the last to arrive. There could be any number of reasons for that, but one was certainly his backtracking through the files before he left Division, looking for the data trail that led to this pandemonium, making damn sure he hadn’t given his blessing to it.

They exchanged words briefly. Kennedy played up her exhaustion and pain to keep Summerhill at bay and the paramedics mindful of their duties. She gave him the barest of bare-bones explanations, decisively derailed when she told him that one of the as yet unidentified bodies was that of Detective Sergeant Combes: another man down. Summerhill didn’t even ask if she’d managed to retrieve any of the physical evidence, so she didn’t have to lie.

Temporary dressings were applied to her cuts and burns, and then she was spirited away to the Royal Surrey, the nearest hospital with an A & E department. Before she left, she asked Summerhill to send a black-and-white after her. If they were going to drug her — maybe put her under — she wanted to get her statement down first: there was no telling what she might forget under anaesthetic. Begrudgingly, Summerhill agreed. Apart from that, though, he ordered her to talk to nobody before she talked to him. ‘Nobody, Kennedy. Not even a bloody priest.’

‘I don’t know any, Jimmy,’ she croaked. ‘Don’t move in those kind of circles.’

In fact, her injuries were mostly superficial and nobody suggested putting her out. It was just topical analgesics, painkillers and an anaesthetic gel. They did suggest an intravenous drip, but Kennedy refused it, signing the prissy little form which said, effectively, that it was her look-out.

Twenty-five minutes later she walked out through the sliding doors of the A & E and found the squad car waiting on the tarmac. ‘I need to go back to Division,’ she told the slightly startled constable. ‘New Scotland Yard. Now. There’s some evidence that needs to be logged.’

The PC reached for his radio. Kennedy put a hand on his arm and he stopped.

‘It’s ATSA,’ she said. ‘No discussion on open channels. Sorry.’

The PC didn’t argue or ask any questions: it was bullshit, of course, but the provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Security Act were a useful trump card, a shapeless bag of special powers invoked whenever anyone in Division wanted to jump a small hurdle without slowing down for explanations.

Or was it bullshit? Certainly she was up against a conspiracy that had better resources than she did and links to other countries.

Once they got back to Dacre Street, she let the PC go. He’d probably report in straight away, but only to his own super. She wasn’t worried about word getting back to Summerhill any time soon.

In the bear pit, she made a copy of the disc. Then she dropped the original into an envelope and put it in the internal mail to Summerhill. She added a brief note explaining how the pain of her burns and the trauma of her narrow brushes with death had made her momentarily forget that she’d managed to save one small keepsake from the inferno.

She felt the absurdity of all this hole-in-corner intrigue. But she knew, too, that the next few days were going to be rough: rougher, even, than what had come before. Another man down, and once again the record would show that Kennedy had gone in without proper back-up. This time she’d also ignored chain of command and acted without any authorisation from her case officer. There was a real chance that the book, suspended in mid-air since the events at Park Square, would now be thrown full-force. If that happened — if she was embroiled in committees and hamstrung by inquiries — she wanted at least to be able to evaluate what she’d found, to stay involved in the investigation, as far as she could. She owed that much to Harper, and to herself.

She copied the disc one more time, for Tillman. While she was waiting for her creaky, ancient drive to finish the job, she checked her emails. Among them she found a reply from Quai Charles de Gaulle, Lyon. Interpol.

She scanned the email: ‘Your request for information under the reciprocal arrangements set out in the UN Convention … positive results recent enough to be relevant to your … accompanying documents only to be circulated internally and by permission of …’

There was an attachment. She clicked on it. And then stared at the screen for a minute without even blinking.

Then she picked up her phone and called Tillman’s cell, the new number.

‘Tillman.’

‘Kennedy.’ Considering what they’d been through a scant couple of hours before, he sounded pretty composed and matter-of-fact. She wondered where he was. In a transport café off the A3? A pub in Guildford? Back in the Smoke already, holed up in some rented room reading Guns and Ammo?

‘Leo …’ she said, and got no further.

‘Are you okay? What happened when your top brass arrived? I was watching that circus from about a half-mile off: really didn’t feel like getting any closer.’

‘I … it was fine,’ she foundered. ‘It’s fine so far. They can’t convene a firing squad until they’ve checked their ammunition.’

‘Let me know when it gets serious. I’ll help any way I can.’

‘Leo, listen. There’s a message here from Interpol. They came back on my C52.’

‘On your what?’

‘Routine request. Information from other forces on pending cases. I asked them … I asked them about Michael Brand.’

‘And they came up positive?’ The tenor of his voice changed instantly. ‘Something new?’

‘They forwarded a whole wad of stuff from America. PDFs of documents from local forces in Arizona, and from the FBI.’ She swallowed, tried again. ‘Leo, there are other ways into this. With what we’ve got from Dovecote, we can—’

He cut across her, reading her tension accurately, wanting her just to say it, whatever it was. ‘Kennedy, ten words or less.’

‘Michael Brand …’

‘Yes? Come on.’

‘He went down in a plane crash just outside a town called Peason, in Arizona. He’s dead, Leo. He died six weeks ago.’