The Demon Code

1

Heather Kennedy, formerly Detective Sergeant Kennedy 4031, of the London Metropolitan Police, Serious and Organised Crime Division, now without rank, stepped out of the foyer of Number 32 London Bridge, also known as the Shard, into brilliant summer sunlight. She walked down the steps briskly enough, but then, once she reached the bottom, she stood in the centre of the pavement, jostled by random passers-by, uncertain of what to do next.

Her right hand hurt.

Her right hand hurt because the knuckle was bleeding.

Her knuckle was bleeding because she had split it open on the jaw of the man who until five minutes ago had been her employer.

It was an equation whose final terms she was still working out.

Kennedy was chagrined at her intemperate outburst, and more than slightly surprised. Normally, if the client had made some sexist remark, tried for a casual grope, or even impugned her professional integrity, she would have dealt with the situation calmly and skilfully, and emerged unruffled. In no way, and under no circumstances, would she have punched him out.

But she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt normal.

Massaging the injured hand gingerly, she eased herself into the steady stream of commuters and tourists. She wanted to go home and get the hand into cold water. Then she wanted to have a good, stiff drink, followed by a badder, stiffer one.

The only problem with that formulation was Izzy. She wasn’t sure how much further downhill the day could go without hitting bottom. Or what the consequences might be of walking in on Izzy in the middle of her working day, unannounced. The last time that had happened …

Kennedy wrenched her thoughts forcibly off that track, but not before she saw all over again the mental image she’d been trying to avoid and was hit by the same feelings that it always inspired: bitter rage superimposed on terrifying emptiness like cheap whisky laid over ice.

So she didn’t go home. She went to a bar — a characterless chain place with a faux-whimsical name that had firkins in it — and took that whisky straight instead of metaphorical. She nursed it gloomily, wondering what came next. The job at Sandhurst Ballantyne was meant to be the start of something good, but laying violent hands on your boss greatly reduces the chances of him recommending you to friends. So here she was, with a zero-calorie client list, an empty appointment book and an unfaithful (maybe serially unfaithful) girlfriend. The future looked bright.

Kennedy’s statuesque good looks and long blonde hair attracted a fair amount of attention from the other daytime drinkers. Either that or it was the usual tedious business of a woman in a uniform. Hers was severe in the extreme — crisp police-blue security coveralls, black military boots — but for some men the fact of a uniform is enough.

She was just polishing off the whisky when her phone rang. She fished it out with a momentary flare of hope: sometimes one door opened right when another one closed.

But it was Emil Gassan. He was an academic, a historian at a Scottish university who she’d got to know in the course of an old case — and that was the only thing he ever wanted to talk to her about. Kennedy refused the call and tossed the phone back into her bag.

She considered spending the day drifting around London: doing a gallery, taking in a film. But that would be ridiculous. She wasn’t bunking school, she was out of work, and there was no point in putting things off. She squared her shoulders and headed for home.

Home was Pimlico — a short, elbowed hop by Tube, but then a fairly long walk up Vauxhall Bridge Road; long enough, anyway, that by the time Kennedy got to the front door of her flat, she’d revised that earlier rhetorical question. Where exactly was the bottom, these days? And did she really want to find out?

She made a lot of noise with the key in the lock, shuffled her feet on the floor and closed the door too loudly. When she was halfway up the hall, Izzy came out to greet her — from the lounge, not the bedroom, to Kennedy’s relief.

Shorter and darker than Kennedy, Izzy was at the same time considerably more concentrated: a louche and limber ball of sex appeal, from which her fairly broad hips didn’t detract in the slightest. Radiating both surprise and suspicion as she faced Kennedy down the length of the hall, she flicked a strand of hair from her chocolate-brown eyes.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘So you say,’ Kennedy riposted.

‘Do I get a kiss?’

It was a good question, but Kennedy didn’t have a good answer — or a good evasion. Hangdog, she advanced down the hall, kissed Izzy on the cheek, then carried on past her.

Izzy turned to watch her go. ‘You’re home early,’ she pointed out. ‘What, are you checking up on me now?’

‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘Why, should I be?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, then.’

They seemed to have reached the end of that conversational avenue. Kennedy went into the lounge, with a detour into the kitchen to put some ice in a glass. But when she opened the drinks cabinet and found herself meeting her own gaze in its mirrored back, she lost some of her enthusiasm. She already had one drink inside her. Getting smashed at eleven in the morning would feel a lot like a cry for help.

Izzy had followed her into the room. ‘Is something the matter?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you meant to be at Shithouse Brigadoon this morning?’

‘It’s Sandhurst Ballantyne.’

‘Yeah. Them.’

‘I was.’ Kennedy turned to face her, bottle in hand.

‘And you gave in your report?’

‘I tried to.’

Izzy cocked her head on one side and looked comically puzzled, which in another mood Kennedy would have found appealing. Right now it just irritated her.

‘The client refused to be briefed. He told me not to submit the report. He offered to pay me a performance bonus if I binned it and gave his ratty little department a clean bill of health.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Izzy said.

Kennedy shoved the whisky bottle back into the cabinet, then got it out again and poured herself a shot after all. ‘Plausible deniability,’ she muttered, as she did these things. ‘The report says there’s at least one and probably two people in the firm doing insider trading in client shares. If Kenwood knows about it, he’s got to do something about it. And since one of the two crooks — the definite one, not the probable one — is his boss, he decided he’d rather not know.’

‘Then why hire you in the first place?’ Izzy demanded. ‘That’s stupid.’

Kennedy nodded, and took a swig of the harsh, blended whisky. She grimaced. Izzy’s taste in booze was reliably horrendous. But she went ahead and drained the glass anyway. ‘Compliance is part of his job. He had to look like he was doing something — but he was hoping I’d come back empty. Then when I didn’t …’

She lapsed into silence.

‘So did you take it?’ Izzy asked.

‘Did I take what?’

‘The performance bonus?’

Kennedy sighed and put down the empty glass. ‘No, Izzy, I didn’t take it. He was getting himself off the hook by sticking me onto it. If I take the bribe, and then a year or so from now there’s an internal inquiry or an FSA investigation, he can say I withheld information. Then he’s in the clear and the fraud department comes after me.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ Izzy’s expression changed. ‘So?’

Kennedy showed her knuckles, covered in her own congealed blood. Izzy took the hand and kissed it. ‘Good for you, babe,’ she said. ‘Unless he sues. Is he going to sue?’

‘I don’t think so. Whenever I’m in a one-to-one, I make voice-tapes. So I’ve got him making that indecent proposal on the record. And I’m sending the report in anyway, to him and his boss and the CEO. Unfortunately, he still owed me half my fee. And when I left, he wasn’t reaching for his cheque book.’

‘Any other clients in the pipeline?’

‘The pipeline is dry all the way to the Caucasus, Izzy. This was meant to get me a lot of referrals to other city companies with security needs they couldn’t meet in-house. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen now.’

Izzy seemed perversely cheered by the bad news. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘so you can be a kept woman for a while. Live off my immoral earnings.’

She was joking, but Kennedy couldn’t laugh, didn’t feel able to cut Izzy the smallest amount of slack. ‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘that sounds like one of the lower circles of hell.’

She realised at this point that what she’d come home for was an argument — a stand-up row about fidelity and responsibility that would probably feel really cathartic for the first five minutes and then after that would feel like she was force-feeding both herself and the woman she was supposed to love handfuls of broken glass. She had to get out of there. Nowhere to go, really, but she had to get out.

‘I’m going downstairs,’ she muttered. ‘To box up some more of my dad’s stuff. If I hang around here, I’ll just put you off your stride.’

‘Or inspire me,’ Izzy said, but Kennedy was already heading for the door. ‘Heather …’

‘I’m good.’

‘I don’t have to clock on just yet. We could …’

‘I said I’m good.’

She was aware of another sound that Izzy made. A sigh maybe, or just a catch in her breath. She didn’t look back.

Downstairs, in her own flat, she threw random objects into boxes, opened wardrobe doors and slammed them shut again, walked from room to room in a futile pantomime of bustle and purpose.

Moving in with Izzy had seemed like the logical thing to do, after Kennedy’s father died. In the last year or so of his life, Izzy had been Peter Kennedy’s de facto nurse, or maybe babysitter, or maybe both. That was what had brought them together. Kennedy was a rising star in the detective division of the Met: her hours were long and unpredictable, and she needed someone close at hand who could come in and pinch-hit at a moment’s notice. Izzy was perfect, because although she already had a job, it was on a phone-sex line. Acting as a cheerleader for other people’s masturbation was light work you could do from pretty much anywhere. All the equipment she needed was a mobile phone and a dirty mind, and she had both.

The process by which they became lovers was anything but inevitable. It had started around the time Kennedy was kicked out of the Met on her ear, which meant she was around the flat a lot more when Izzy was there. The relationship had developed through the months that followed and it had seemed natural when Peter finally died for Kennedy to move in with Izzy. The flat she’d shared with her father felt like an exhibit in a museum, its associations permanently fixed. Moving out — even though she was only moving upstairs — felt like escaping from at least some of those associations.

But escape depended on a lot of things, and it had its own rules. One of them was that you can’t escape from stuff you’re still carrying with you. Exploitative and degrading though Izzy’s work was, she had never thought about quitting. She liked sex a lot, and when she wasn’t having it she liked to talk about it.

And, as it turned out, she liked having it even when Kennedy wasn’t around.

Their life together was now stalled: a perpetual tableau of the adulterers discovered, with Izzy scrambling to cover herself up, a sheepish young man trying to figure out what was going on, and Kennedy standing in the doorway, wide-eyed and reeling.

Izzy had never promised to be faithful, and in any case, she drew an absolute distinction between women and men. Women were lovers, partners, soul-mates. Men were an itch that she occasionally scratched. Kennedy had never thought that extorting promises was either necessary or desirable. In the patchy history of her sex life, one was the highest number of lovers she’d ever had on the boil at the same time, and it had generally felt like enough.

She ought to forgive Izzy. Or she ought to walk out with some cutting remark along the lines of ‘check out what you’re missing, babe’. She couldn’t do either. The passive aggression of guilt, reproach and sullen withdrawal was the horrendous unexcluded middle.

Kennedy’s phone rang. She glanced at the display, saw it was Emil Gassan again. She gave in and took the call, but only to tell him that this was a bad time.

Gassan got in first. ‘Heather, I’ve been playing phone tag with you all day. I’m so glad I finally caught up with you.’

She tried to head him off. ‘Professor—’

‘Emil,’ he countered. She ignored him. She didn’t want to be on first-name terms with Gassan: on some level, it felt wrong that the dry, spiky academic should even have a first name. ‘Professor, I really can’t talk right now. I’m in the middle of something.’

‘Oh.’

Gassan sounded more than usually cast down and Kennedy experienced a momentary compunction. She knew why he was calling and what it meant to him. It was all about that old case. The biggest find of his scholarly career was something that he could never discuss, on pain of death, except with her. Every so often, he had to vent. He had to tell her things that they both already knew and she had to listen — as a personal service. It gave her some sense of what Izzy must go through in the course of a working day.

‘It’s just … you know … pressure of work,’ she temporised. ‘I’ll call you later in the week.’

‘So your slate is full?’ Gassan said. ‘You wouldn’t be free to accept a commission?’

‘To accept …?’ Kennedy was baffled, and — in spite of her sour mood — amused. ‘What, you need a detective, Emil? You want me to track down a missing library book or something?’

‘Yes. More or less. If you’d been free, I was going to ask you to take on some work — very sensitive and very well paid — for my current employer.’

Kennedy hesitated. It felt hypocritical and ridiculous to make such a rapid and shameless turn-around: but she really needed the money. Even more, she needed to have something that would keep her out of the flat until she could figure out what she wanted to do about Izzy.

‘So who’s your current employer, Professor?’

He told her and her eyebrows rose. It was definitely a step up from city sleaze.

‘I’ll come right over,’ Kennedy said.

2

The Great Court of the British Museum was like a whispering gallery, magnifying sound from all around Kennedy so that she felt surrounded by and cocooned in other people’s conversations. At the same time, sounds from close by seemed to come to her muffled and distorted: perfectly dysfunctional acoustics.

Or maybe she just hated the Great Court because when she’d come here with her father, as a young girl, it had been an actual courtyard, open to the air. She remembered clutching tightly onto his hand as he took her across the sunlit piazza into the cathedral of the past — a place where he’d been animated, happy and at home, and where just for once there was something he actually wanted to share with her.

Now the Great Court had a roof of diamond panes, radiating outwards from what had once been the reading room. The light inside this huge but sealed-off space was grey, like a winter afternoon with a threat of drizzle. It was an impressive feat of engineering, but she couldn’t help thinking there was something perverse about it. Why hide the sky and then fake it?

Kennedy took a seat at one of the court’s three coffee bars and started counting diamonds while she waited for Gassan. Knowing her man, she’d dressed formally in a light-blue trouser suit and grey boots, and pinned her unruly blonde hair back as severely as she could manage. Formality and order were big on Emil Gassan’s list of cardinal virtues.

She saw him from a long way away, bustling across the huge space with the purposeful dignity of a head waiter. He was dressed a lot better than a waiter, though: his blue three-piece suit, with the unmistakable zigzag stitching of Enzo Tovare on the breast pocket, looked new and unashamedly expensive. Gassan thrust his hand out before he reached her, then kept it out so that it preceded him into the conversation.

‘Heather, so good of you to come. I’m delighted to see you again.’

He really looked like he meant it, and she was disarmed by his beaming smile. She offered her own hand, had it grasped and engulfed and effusively wrung. ‘Professor,’ she said, and then, surrendering the point, ‘Emil. It’s been a long time. I had no idea you were working in London.’

He threw out his arms in a search me gesture. ‘Neither did I. Until last week, I wasn’t. I was still up in St Andrews — lecturing in early medieval history. But I was head-hunted.’

‘In the space of a week?’ Kennedy was as incredulous as he seemed to want her to be.

‘In the space of a day. The museum board called and asked if I’d like to be in charge of the stored collection. Well, they didn’t call me directly. It was Marilyn Milton from the Validus Trust, an independent body which has been sponsoring my research for the last two years. Validus is also a major sponsor for the British Museum and British Library. You know they used to be the same institution, until the library was moved in 1997?’

Kennedy shrugged non-committally. She wasn’t sure if she’d known that or not, but in any case she didn’t want to slow Gassan down by inviting further explanation.

‘Anyway,’ he told her, ‘a position opened up — under somewhat tragic circumstances, I’m sorry to say. The previous incumbent, Karyl Leopold, had a serious stroke. And Marilyn contacted me to suggest that I apply — with a promise that she would let the appointments committee know I was Validus’s approved candidate.

‘I was going to say no. Leaving in the middle of a term, you understand — causes all kinds of disruptions. But in the end, the museum board were so keen to get me that they cut a separate deal with the university. Hired a lecturer to replace me until … no, no, don’t get up.’ Kennedy had stood, indicating a willingness to go and get them both coffees and thereby stop the logorrhoeic flow. But Gassan would have none of it. He scooted off to the counter and when he returned, the tray he held had two slices of carrot cake on it, as well as coffees. Obviously he was seeing this as something of a celebration, and she was going to have to let him talk himself out before she got to be told why she was here.

‘So,’ she said. ‘You’re in charge of … what was it again?’

‘The stored collection.’

‘And what is that, Emil?’

‘Everything,’ Gassan said happily. ‘Well, almost everything. Everything that’s not on the shelves. As you can imagine, the museum collection is absolutely vast. The part of it that’s available for the public to see represents approximately one per cent of the total.’

Kennedy boggled politely. ‘One per cent!’

‘Count it,’ he suggested playfully, holding up a bony finger. ‘One. The rest of the collection spreads across more than twenty thousand square metres of storerooms, and it costs the Museum twelve million pounds a year to maintain and manage it.’

Kennedy took a sip of her coffee, but ignored the treacherous blandishments of the cake. Back when she was on the force, the stresses and physical rigours of the job had kept her slim no matter what she ate or drank. In the last few years, she’d had to learn abstinence. ‘You must be very proud,’ she said to Gassan. ‘That they went to such lengths to get you.’

The professor went through a miniature pantomime of faux-modest shrugs and eye-rolls. ‘It feels like a culmination, in a lot of ways,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve always felt that lecturing was a dilution of my contribution to the field. Now … I’ll be allowed, even encouraged, to publish, but I’ll have no public duties at all.’

Kennedy considered that, and was reminded of what she’d said to Izzy about the circles of hell: the idea of spending her life in a subterranean vault, with no reason for stepping outside it, made Izzy’s endless smut treadmill seem like the earthly paradise.

‘So,’ Kennedy said, cutting to the chase at last. ‘Where do I fit in?’

Gassan had just taken a mouthful of cake, producing the short silence into which she had projected her question. Now he struggled to get it down so he could answer. ‘There was a break-in,’ he said at last, fastidiously wiping his lower lip with the corner of his serviette. ‘A month ago. The night of Monday the twenty-fourth of July.’

‘In the stacks?’ Kennedy asked. ‘The storerooms, rather than the museum proper?’

He nodded emphatically. ‘In the stored collection, yes — which is now my responsibility. Whoever it was, they were very skilled. They were able to get in and out again without triggering a single alarm.’

‘Then how did you know they’d been there? Wait, let me guess. From the gaps on the shelves.’

‘Not at all,’ Gassan assured her. ‘In fact, as far as we can tell, nothing is missing. No, we found out about this several hours after the fact — and in a rather alarming way. The intruder left behind a knife. One of the security guards found it, the next morning, just lying on the floor. And it appeared to have been used. At least, there was blood on the blade. After that, they did a more thorough search for evidence and it transpired that a CCTV camera had caught the intruder climbing up through one of the panels of a false ceiling as he left.’

‘Wait,’ Kennedy said. ‘So let me get this straight. You’ve got a break-in with nothing actually stolen and a bloody knife with nobody actually hurt?’

‘Well, we assume that somebody must have been hurt. But it’s true that there was no dead body at the scene — God forbid — and we have no way of knowing who was injured, or how. It’s deeply troubling. And we’ve had a terrible time trying to keep the story out of the news. Something like this would generate the most sensationalistic coverage.’

‘Yeah, I’d imagine,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But you say you’ve got some closed-circuit footage of your burglar?’

‘Yes, but he’s masked, and it’s hard to tell anything about him beyond the fact that he’s male — and empty-handed. If you look at the image closely, he seems to be carrying a small satchel, but it couldn’t have held more than a few items. And a quick stocktaking exercise showed nothing out of place. Although there are three and a quarter million artefacts in the collection, so it’s entirely possible that we’ve missed something.’

Kennedy thought about this for a moment or two. A skilled burglar getting past a serious array of locks and alarms, to break into a collection presumably full of items both highly valuable and highly portable. But he didn’t bother to bring a decent-sized shopping bag with him, and he didn’t swipe anything prominent enough to be noticed. That meant iron self-control or a very specific mission statement. And then there was the knife. Was it a message of some kind? A threat? A bad practical joke? Whatever internal organ governs the detective instinct was making its presence felt. She had only come here as a favour to the professor, and for the money. Already, she had to admit, she was genuinely interested.

‘What’s my brief?’ she asked Gassan.

The professor held up one hand, with the little finger folded down — then used the forefinger of the other hand to count off. ‘It’s three-fold,’ he said. ‘It will be three-fold, if you accept. First, we want to know how the break-in was accomplished, so we can close the security loophole.’

Kennedy nodded. She’d assumed as much.

‘Second, we want to know what, if anything, was actually taken. And if the answer is nothing, we want to know what the intruder was doing during his — or her — time on our premises. If something was vandalised or interfered with, that could be every bit as serious as a theft. Oh, and we’d like to know who was injured, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘And third?’

‘We want you to find our intruder. And if appropriate, to secure an arrest.’

‘I’m not a police officer any more, Emil.’

‘I know that. Also, of course, I know why. We’d only ask you to put the full facts — the file, the evidence, everything you’ve found — into our hands. And then leave the rest to us. If we think it necessary, and desirable, we’ll put the matter in the hands of the police.’

‘Can I ask a stupid question?’

‘Always.’

‘Why aren’t the police on the case now?’

Gassan toyed with what was left of his cake. ‘This was a situation I inherited, obviously,’ he said carefully. ‘There was a police investigation, but it wasn’t considered to be very productive. Trespassing isn’t a crime unless actual damage is involved — and that was the only crime we could prove. The inquiry petered out, and the museum allowed it to do so. They’d already decided that it would be better to put the matter on a more discreet basis. Marilyn Milton was insistent that the museum’s trustees wanted me to deal with this matter personally — and that they wanted it done without any further recourse to official bodies or agencies.’

Kennedy had to smile. ‘So you thought of me?’

He returned the smile. ‘The most unofficial person I know.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m going to need to bring up the subject of money, because—’

‘Of course,’ Gassan exclaimed. ‘I apologise for not mentioning it sooner.’ He reached into his pocket, took out a piece of paper and handed it across the table to her. It was a cheque, already made out in her name, from the bank account of the Validus Trust. The figure, which was printed rather than handwritten, was twenty thousand pounds. Kennedy stared at the four identical zeros. The fact that they had another number in front of them immediately distinguished this job from her previous one.

‘Is that acceptable?’ Gassan asked.

‘Yes,’ she said bluntly. ‘Very. But I’d like a letter setting out the terms of my contract. No offence, but item three — finding your intruder — might turn out to be a tall order, if I can’t get any other leads on him. I don’t want to be working this case for ever. Or to have to give the money back.’

‘That’s perfectly reasonable. Marilyn indicated that this was a payment for four weeks of your time, on an exclusive basis insofar as that’s feasible. But if you have other cases—’

‘I don’t have any other cases. That was just bullshit.’

‘Oh. Well, you bullshit very well.’

‘Thank you. Who would I report to?’

‘You’ll report to me and I’ll report directly both to the museum board and to Validus. Their relationship to me is almost one of agency, in this respect — and the museum is very comfortable with that.

‘As to powers, I believe what I’m proposing to do is to deputise you. So you’ll be able to do anything that I could do. Talk to all of the staff. Have full run of the building. Full access to files and information.’

‘Consult other people outside the museum?’

The professor’s lips pursed slightly. ‘Where appropriate. And so long as absolute discretion is maintained. I think that’s a reasonable stipulation.’

‘Entirely. I’ll take the job.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it.’ Gassan threw his arms in the air and seemed almost to be about to lean over and hug her.

‘Okay,’ Kennedy said, forestalling that alarming possibility, ‘do you want to show me the scene of the crime?’

‘But of course.’

The professor stood and indicated with a sweep of his arm that Kennedy should follow him.

3

The picture of the museum’s storerooms that Kennedy had had in her mind was a very romantic one, she now realised. She’d imagined vast underground halls with Gothic arched ceilings but ultra-modern steel doors like the doors of bank vaults. Either that or the colossal warehouse of the first Indiana Jones movie, with endless wonders sealed and stacked in endless identical packing crates: an Aladdin’s Cave in camouflage colours.

The reality was much more mundane. The main storage facility wasn’t even on the museum site: it was an entirely separate building, Ryegate House, on St Peter’s Street in Islington, ten minutes away by cab. Kennedy wondered briefly why, in that case, Gassan had brought her to the British Museum at all, but the answer was obvious. He wanted to show off his good fortune, the prestige of his brand-new job, and he clearly felt that the Great Court made a better stage than the place they were now heading for.

He was right. The building in front of which the cab rolled to a stop was an anonymous brutalist block with a concrete façade only marginally enlivened by pebbledash. The effect might have been pleasant when the building was new: now, many of the rounded stones had fallen away, leaving recesses greened with moss. The effect was of a face pockmarked by disease.

Kennedy made some remark about the twelve-million-pound budget that Gassan had mentioned. It ought to run to a facelift, surely?

‘Oh, it does,’ the professor assured her earnestly. ‘But we don’t want to advertise what’s here. We’re very keen to be overlooked.’

He pointed to the sign beside the entrance. It simply read RYEGATE HOUSE, and it made no mention whatsoever of the British Museum. Yes, that had to count as effective camouflage.

Inside was a different story. The carpet in the foyer was deep and soft, and the doors were automatic, opening in front of them with a soft sigh of acquiescence. Kennedy could feel now how thick the concrete was under that erratic pebbledashing. It was there in the flatness of the acoustics, the instant deadening of all sounds both from within and from without.

The reception counter was the size of a small yacht. The woman on duty there was a stacked redhead whose white blouse was buttoned all the way up to the neck. She recognised Gassan and greeted him very civilly — even warmly — but she gave Kennedy a hesitant, searching look that bordered on open suspicion. Kennedy wondered whether the professor knew how big a hit he’d made in just one week. If the rest of the building was as keen on him as the reception desk was, he was sitting pretty.

Gassan introduced his guest with proprietorial pride. ‘This is Sergeant Kennedy, Lorraine. She’s here at the board’s request, to investigate the break-in. Could you please buzz Glyn Thornedyke and tell him we’ll need access to Room 37?’

They waited on the near side of a turnstile barrier. ‘Security falls to my brief,’ Gassan explained to Kennedy, ‘but Thornedyke coordinates the actual rota and superintends on a day-to-day basis, reporting directly to me.’ The speech seemed to Kennedy to be very much of a piece with Gassan introducing her as sergeant, despite the fact that she no longer had any rank at all: he liked to use the people around him as ramparts to build up his ego.

A door opened off to one side of them and a uniformed security guard appeared. He seemed to be barely out of his teens, with the overstretched rangy look that in girls is called coltish and in boys (if they’re lucky) is politely overlooked. His fair hair was worn in a severe military crew cut, but his blue eyes had a baby-doll clarity of colour that undercut the effect. He all but saluted as he presented himself to Gassan.

‘Rush, sir,’ he said. ‘Mr Thornedyke said you need me to open some doors.’

‘Actually,’ Kennedy said, ‘I think what I really need before anything else is a tour of the building. Would that be okay, Professor?’

‘By all means,’ Gassan said.

The young man looked doubtful. ‘I should be on the staff door,’ he said. ‘I should probably check in with Mr Thornedyke before I—’

‘This is on my authority,’ Gassan huffed, dismissing the objection. ‘Sergeant Kennedy is a professional security consultant — an expert, with many years of police experience. We’re very lucky to have her and we need to facilitate her investigation in any way we can.’

The tour took a lot longer than Kennedy had expected. It seemed to cover all or most of the building, but it was hard to tell because the interior structure of Ryegate House was homogenous to the point of nightmare. It consisted of dozens of more or less identical rooms, high-ceilinged, cool, with energy-efficient lighting that came on as gradual as a sunrise; hundreds of yards of corridor with ID-swipe checkpoints at every turn and angle, and occasional fire doors that closed down the corridors into short stretches like narrower rooms. There was a subtle but pervasive smell that was hard to identify. It was a little like the passenger cabin of an aeroplane, Kennedy decided at last: like the air had been recycled many times, and was going to be recycled a few times more before being allowed to go about its business.

As they trekked through the storage facility, Rush extolled its wonders. Kennedy felt that he was trying for the casual assurance of an old hand, but it sounded as though he were parroting stuff from an orientation lecture. The security systems were really good, he said. In most respects, state-of-the-art. There were pressure and breach alarms on all external doors and windows, movement sensors in most rooms and at nodal points throughout the building, full electronic records of every key usage and every entry and exit.

‘CCTV?’ Kennedy asked — she hadn’t seen any cameras yet.

‘Oh yeah, everywhere,’ Rush assured her. ‘But if you’re looking for the cameras, you won’t see them. They’re built into corners, angles, mouldings and stuff. We use a system called CPTED, Sergeant Kennedy — Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. It’s like, you show people where your cameras are if you want to regulate behaviour in a big public space, right? In a shopping centre, say, or a multistorey car park. Big Brother is watching you, sort of thing. But we camouflage our cameras, because this is a sealed facility. Nobody unauthorised is going to come through here unless they’ve broken in. So the CCTV is meant to catch criminals in the act.’

Including your own employees, Kennedy thought. Because conspicuous cameras would do both things — deter criminals and catch transgressions. What they wouldn’t do was regulate the behaviour of people who worked with the collection on a day-to-day basis. This was a system that forestalled unpleasant surprises by treating everyone as the enemy.

What Rush never bothered to mention in the midst of all of these technological wonders was the collection itself; but as they moved from room to room, Kennedy couldn’t keep her gaze from wandering, drawn by massive sculptures, Native American totem poles, bark canoes, suits of armour. The smaller items, as she’d expected, were safely stored in packing cases that lined the walls of the rooms or were neatly stacked in miles of grey-steel shelving. The big, uncompromising things were sitting right out in the open.

Room 37 was one of the least remarkable in this respect. It was full of shelf units and boxes and nothing else. They glanced inside but didn’t go in, because Kennedy wasn’t ready to focus in on it yet. She wanted to get a decent overview of the place first.

‘Our environmental control is also state-of-the-art,’ Gassan said, as they walked on. ‘Temperature, humidity, light — they’re all regulated and monitored in real time.’

‘What are these?’ Kennedy asked. She pointed to a grey box on the wall, right next to the more familiar red box that was the fire alarm. It was identical in size and shape, but was labelled SECURITY where the other was labelled FIRE. Like the fire alarm, it had a rectangular glass insert, bearing the words PRESS HERE.

‘That’s another security feature,’ Gassan said. ‘Installed by my predecessor, Dr Leopold. Breaking the glass or pressing the button triggers a lockdown. All internal doors are deactivated. External doors and windows lock, and security shutters are lowered. It turns the building into a jailhouse, essentially.’

Rush was standing several yards further on, holding a door open for them. He fell in next to Kennedy, after Gassan had gone through. ‘Not all that much use,’ he told her, in a confidential murmur.

She looked at him. ‘How come?’

‘Well, it’s manually operated, for starters. It’s not tied to the movement sensors or the cameras. There’s no automatic triggering.’

Sotto voce or not, Professor Gassan had overheard them. ‘Because of the risk of injury to an intruder,’ he said, giving Rush a look of schoolmasterly disapproval before he turned his attention back to Kennedy. ‘We have legal and ethical responsibilities.’

‘The alarm is linked to a local police station, sir,’ Rush pointed out. ‘And the average response time is twelve minutes.’

‘The liability would still be ours,’ said Gassan.

Rush walked on ahead again. He knew when he was beaten.

He rounded off the tour by taking them up onto the roof. He pointed out the pressure and movement alarms, CCTV rigs and the grid of outward-tilted razor wire around the whole roofspace to a height of five feet.

‘This is all new,’ Rush told Kennedy. ‘We used to be pretty vulnerable up here. Now we’re …’ He hesitated.

‘State-of-the-art?’ she hazarded.

‘Yeah, really. It’s pretty amazing.’

Kennedy took a little wander, looking for any points of entry. There were air-conditioning ducts big enough to take a human body, but their mouths were covered by heavy metal grilles, riveted into place, and there was no sign that any of them had been touched. The door by which they’d accessed the roof was plate steel, with a combination lock, a key lock and three padlock-secured bolts. There wasn’t even a handle on this side.

The two men were waiting patiently for her to complete her inspection. Kennedy walked to the edge of the roof, scanned the ground below and the approaches. The building had no near neighbours. It stood on its own ground, with at least six feet of clearance on all sides. No trees or telegraph poles or lamp stanchions for an intruder to shinny up. Drainpipes, obviously, but at intervals along their length Kennedy could see the spiky crowns of anti-climb brackets. She could also see the cameras swivelling back and forth on their mounts, quartering the landscape below them.

She went back to Rush and Gassan. ‘You didn’t catch anything on these, I assume?’ she said, pointing at the cameras.

‘From the night of the break-in, you mean?’ Rush shook his head. ‘No. We went through all the outside footage, right from when we locked the doors the night before. Nothing. Not a dicky bird.’

‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m done up here. Thanks for waiting.’

‘So did you figure anything out yet?’ Rush asked her, almost shyly.

His faith in the detective’s art was touching. ‘Not yet,’ Kennedy said. ‘But I’d like to see the CCTV footage from Room 37 — the segment where your intruder shows up on camera. And then I’d like to go back in and take a proper look at the room itself.’

They went to the surveillance room, which was about the size of a broom closet. Rush opened up a locked steel cupboard and selected a disc from a hundred or so that were racked there.

There was only one seat, which Gassan insisted Kennedy take, even though this meant Rush having to squat to operate the DVD playback. He slid the disc into a reader that was a blank steel slab without controls, opened up an interface window on the computer right next to it and typed in a time signature. A second window popped open on the screen: the camera playback, delivered in an area about the size of a credit card.

As the image resolved, Kennedy found herself looking at a space that could have been any one of the dozens of rooms she’d just walked through.

‘Room 37,’ Rush said, with just a hint of melodrama. ‘Night of Monday the twenty-fourth.’

The point of view was from up near the ceiling. A shelving unit bisected the field of vision, so that they were looking down two parallel aisles. Everything was so still, the image might have been a freeze-frame except for the numbers of the time stamp cycling at top left.

‘Can you make this any bigger?’ Kennedy asked.

Rush fiddled with drop-down menus, but nothing happened. ‘Sorry. I don’t know the system that well.’

A figure came abruptly into view. Dressed from head to foot in black, with a black balaclava, it was the stereotype special ops agent of popular fiction. The eerie incongruity raised a slight prickle on Kennedy’s scalp. Despite what Gassan had said earlier, it was impossible to tell whether she was looking at a man or a woman — although whoever it was must be young and strong. The figure scaled the shelf unit as though it were a ladder, pushed at something that was off-screen and then hauled itself through, out of sight.

The whole sequence covered no more than twenty seconds.

Rush rewound to the moment when the figure disappeared off the top of the screen, and froze the image.

‘Ceiling panel,’ he said, tapping the monitor. ‘He went up into the drop ceiling.’

‘And then?’

‘No idea. We looked up there, but there was nothing, no trace of him.’

‘And has anyone been allowed into the room since the break-in?’ Kennedy asked.

‘Well, we went in. The security team, I mean. Right after we saw the camera footage. Then the police came and made a search of the room. And while the police were still here, some clericals did a count to see if anything was missing — but that was under police supervision. Since then the room has been permanently off-limits.’

‘Okay,’ said Kennedy. ‘Then I guess that’s where we go next.’

4

It was at this point that Gassan peeled off, with apologies, to deal with some other work he had to finish before he left for the evening. He asked Kennedy to drop in on him when she was done with her inspection — an injunction that Kennedy pretended not to hear.

On the way down to Room 37, she tried to get Rush talking about himself. Most of the security guards she’d met had been ex-cops, ex-army or occasionally ex-criminals working on the poacher-turned-gamekeeper ticket. She was curious as to why someone would go into the job straight from school. But Rush was shy and wouldn’t be drawn on that subject.

The room was just as unremarkable the second time around. Just row after row of wooden packing crates and cardboard boxes, with a stepladder leaning against one wall. There were none of the larger and more visually appealing items that had loomed above the shelf units in some of the other rooms.

Kennedy walked up and down the aisles. As she’d already been told, nothing appeared to have been touched. There were no tell-tale gaps on the shelves, no boxes out of place. Dust might have held fingerprints or indicated where something had been moved, but there was no dust. After three weeks of lockdown, the place was still spotless.

She returned to Rush, who was setting up the stepladder. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘That’s where he climbed up. Cobbett and me went up to check, while we were waiting for the police to get here. Then the police sent their own people up, so I can’t say nothing has been disturbed.’

He gave Kennedy an electric torch, which he’d brought with him from the CCTV room, and held the ladder steady while she ascended.

‘Mind how you go,’ he said.

Although Kennedy was wearing trousers, she noticed that the boy was keeping his face modestly averted from her ass — except for a sidelong glance as it bobbed past his eye level. Impeccable manners. Or more likely she was just too old for him.

The dropped ceiling was made of expanded polystyrene tiles in a rigid metal grid. She pressed her hands against the tile that Rush had indicated, pushing it up and then aside. From the top of the ladder, she was able to thrust her head and shoulders through into the narrow space above her. There was, she could see now, a gap of about three feet separating the drop ceiling from the real ceiling above.

She flashed the torch. It revealed an airless and featureless expanse only a couple of feet high but identical in its lateral dimensions, as far as she could tell by eye, with the room below. There were no vents, ducts, holes or grilles through which the intruder could have escaped.

‘Am I missing something?’ Kennedy called down to Rush. ‘It doesn’t look to me like there’s any exit from up here.’

‘We didn’t find one either,’ he shouted back. ‘Walls are solid. Ceiling is solid. If he found a hole up there, he pulled it in after him.’

Kennedy did one more circuit with the torch, looking not for the intruder’s escape route now but for anything even slightly out of place. There was nothing. She leaned forward to take a closer look at the nearest wall, which was just within her reach. She rapped her knuckles against it. Solid.

‘Is it brick all the way round?’ she called to Rush. ‘No plasterboard?’

‘No plasterboard. No voids. No hidden panels. Nothing but what you see, Sergeant.’

She looked down through the hole, meeting Rush’s curious, slightly nervous gaze. ‘It’s not “Sergeant”,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘Heather will do fine.’

‘Okay.’

There didn’t seem to be any more sights worth seeing up in the ceiling space, so she came back down. When she was back on terra firma, she asked Rush to talk her through the whole sequence of events from the moment when the break-in was discovered.

He thought about it. ‘There isn’t that much to tell, to be honest,’ he said. ‘We found the knife — you heard about the knife, right? — first thing on Tuesday morning. But the break-in was the night before. The time signature on that footage you saw is 11.58 p.m.’

‘How was the knife found?’ she asked him. ‘Do you check every room every day?’

‘Yeah, we do. The duty officer clocks on at 6 a.m., signs the rest of us off on the rota and briefs us about anything special. Then we do vee-twos — visual verifications — of every room. I don’t mean on the cameras, I mean we actually walk around the building. Steve Furness found the knife just lying on the floor there. Five- or six-inch blade. Really, really sharp. And it had been used. There was blood on it.’

‘Did they find out whose?’

Rush shook his head. ‘I suppose they tested it. But they didn’t tell us what they found. Obviously we looked for a body, but there wasn’t anything. Not even any more blood — only what was on the knife. Nobody was missing from our staff, or from the area — and you can see from the footage that the guy’s not carting a body along with him when he leaves.’

‘He doesn’t seem to be carrying anything much.’

‘No,’ Rush agreed. ‘And you know we didn’t find anything missing. But the thing is, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of items, maybe even millions, and some of them are really tiny. Something could go missing and not be spotted for a long time. The clericals checked that all the boxes were still there and that the access seals on the important stuff hadn’t been broken.’

‘Is everything sealed?’

‘No. Just the most valuable bits and pieces. Maybe ten, fifteen per cent of the collection. They did vee-twos on all of that stuff. But it’s still possible they could have missed something. It’s more than possible.’

Kennedy paced the room, looking from the shelf units to the ceiling and back again. ‘How many cameras are in here?’ she asked.

‘Two.’

‘Fixed?’

‘All our cameras are fixed, Sergeant … Heather. If they were on swivel mounts, they’d have to be out in the open.’

She knew that she was missing something, some anomaly that was nuzzling at the edge of her attention. She decided to leave it there for now and let it announce itself in its own sweet time, rather than risk scaring it away by lunging for it.

‘Did anything else happen on Monday or Tuesday?’ she asked.

‘Nothing that’s relevant.’

‘Forget relevance. What else was on your mind that day?’

Rush thought about that question for a moment or two. ‘Mark Silver,’ he said at last.

‘Who?’

‘One of the other security guys. He died on Sunday night, as it turned out. We found out about it on the Monday.’

‘Died how?’

‘Drunk driver hit him on a pelican crossing. Monday afternoon, some of the reception staff were going round taking up a collection. There was a pretty sombre mood. It was only a few weeks after Dr Leopold — he was the director before Professor Gassan — had his stroke. Everyone was talking about how bad news comes in threes. The break-in that night was number three.’

‘This guy Silver was a friend of yours?’

‘No. Not really. I knew him, but I never really talked to him much. I just felt bad that he died in such a stupid way.’

Kennedy asked a few more anodyne questions, steering the conversation back into emotionally neutral territory. None of this was coming together yet, but she could see that the boy found the topic distressing, and she didn’t see any reason to make him dwell on it. ‘Thanks for all your help,’ she said at last. ‘Tomorrow I’d like to look at the staff logs and staff profiles. I’m also going to do interviews with everyone who was on duty on that Monday. Could you drop into Professor Gassan’s office and tell him that?’

‘Okay,’ Rush said. ‘Sure. Or I could take you over there and you could tell him yourself.’

‘No need,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m happy for you to pass the word along.’

As Kennedy left Ryegate House, three people watched her.

The first two were sitting in a silver Ford Mondeo — the most popular colour of a hugely popular car — fifty yards down from the building’s front entrance. They were inconspicuously, even drably dressed, but there was a quiet intensity about them that compelled a second glance.

They waited while Kennedy flagged down a cab, and while the cab accelerated past them back towards the city centre. Then the man in the driver’s seat started up the engine and eased in behind the taxi, with elaborate casualness. The man beside him checked the street, with a practised eye, to see if they were watched.

They were, but he didn’t perceive that they were. Much further away, Diema stared down from the roof of a lock-up garage, through foliage that hid her from stray glances but gave her a more or less unimpeded view of the part of the street that concerned her.

She didn’t follow. She was there to monitor for now, and to assess risk. Her current assessment was that there was very little. Neither Kennedy herself nor the people watching her were aware of Diema’s presence, or that their own surveillance had been enfolded into something much larger.

When the time came to act, Diema would act. Those upon whom she acted would not see her coming.

5

When Kennedy got back to Izzy’s apartment, let herself in and walked through to the living room, it was to the sound of these words: ‘Oh God, I want you. I want you inside me, right now. Would you like that, baby? Would you like to fill me up? I bet I could take you, all the way …’

This would have been alarming if Izzy hadn’t been sitting right there in front of her, alone, watching Coronation Street with the sound turned down. She held her mobile in one hand, a mug of strong Yorkshire tea in the other, and though her face was screwed up into a grimace of arousal and urgency, she was draped over the chair in a very relaxed pose.

She was at work, in other words. Coaxing a stranger over the edge of the orgasmic precipice at the bargain rate of 80p a minute plus VAT. Since both of her hands were occupied, she waved to Kennedy with her left leg. Tea in the pot, she mouthed, raising the cup and nodding at it.

Kennedy didn’t feel like tea. She fixed herself a whisky and water — in full stealth mode, making no sound that the phone might pick up. She took it through into the bedroom, shrugged her bag from her shoulder and let it fall onto the bed. She slumped down beside it, kicked off her shoes and stretched out full-length, resting her head against the annoying wrought-iron scrollwork of Izzy’s headboard.

There was a TV in the bedroom, too. Automatically, she turned it on, just for the comfort of the sound. But it was set to ITV, like the one in the lounge, and the seventeenth retelling of how Frank Foster raped Carla Connor on the night before their wedding grated slightly on her soul. She surfed channels, bounced off a nature documentary and a stultifying studio quiz show before settling on the news.

As she lay there, she realised it was the knife that intrigued her most. Without that, the break-in was just a locked room puzzle — and most locked room puzzles had fairly mundane explanations once you cut away the dross. But the knife meant something else. There could be another, more serious crime dangling off the end of this investigation. She just didn’t know what it could possibly be yet.

The TV news seemed to be all bad. A fire at a country house in the north of England had left a dozen people dead, even though the place was meant to be derelict. The police suspected arson. A terrorist group had planted a bomb in a German church and set it off during a Sunday mass. And a ground-to-air missile, accidentally launched from an IDF battery outside of Jerusalem, had sailed straight over the Dome of the Rock before it exploded in mid-air — and had therefore come within about a hangnail’s width of starting the bloodiest religious war since the Third Crusade.

Too much. Too much craziness. She turned the box off again and focused her mind on Ryegate House. She would do the obvious things first, just so she could cross them off. Most obvious of all was Ralph Prentice.

Prentice picked up on the third ring, but he was brusque. ‘I’m elbow deep in work, Heather. Short and sweet, or I’m hanging up.’

Since he worked in the police morgue attached to New Scotland Yard’s forensics annexe on Dean Farrar Street, Kennedy tried not to think about what exactly it was that his elbows were deep in.

‘Last month, Ralph. Night of Monday the twenty-fourth, into the Tuesday morning. Did you see any corpses presenting with knife wounds?’

A chair scraped and there was a barrage of rhythmical clicks at the other end of the line.

‘No,’ he said. ‘According to the big book of everything, that was a pretty quiet night. Last quiet night I can remember. It’s been apocalyptic since.’

‘It has? Why?’ Kennedy was interested in spite of herself. It was an unusual word for Prentice, normally a master of understatement, to use.

‘Car bomb in Surrey Street. Aggravated shooting in Richmond. And then that fire in Yorkshire. You heard about that, right? Incendiary bombs — very professional kit, by all accounts. Anything with possible terrorist links, we’ve got a reciprocal arrangement. So a lot of our people are stuck up there, helping the local plod to count footprints.’

‘But no knives.’

‘Not for a while, to be honest. Plenty of random unpleasantness, but a bit of a lull in incised wounds.’

‘Can you do me a favour, Ralph?’

‘You mean, besides talking to you? Given how high they bounced you, Heather, this right here is already a favour.’

‘I know. And I’m grateful. Really. But I’m trying to pin something down here and there’s nobody else I can ask.’

Prentice sniffed. ‘No, I should imagine not.’ He didn’t bother to say ‘because you don’t have any friends left in your own department’: it was too obvious to need saying. Kennedy had given evidence against two Met colleagues involved in an unlawful shooting, then lost two partners in quick succession in appalling bloodbaths. The bloodbaths were none of her fault, but in most people’s eyes she was a snitch and a jinx. By the time they’d forced her out, it was a formality. Nobody would have agreed to work with her in any case.

She waited Prentice out. They’d had a really good relationship back when she was in the Met, and Kennedy had been careful not to presume on it too much since. By her own estimation, she still had plenty of emotional capital to draw on.

‘Go on, then,’ the forensics officer muttered at last. ‘What do you need, Heather?’

‘See if anything’s come in from any of the hospitals,’ she said. ‘Malicious wounding, with a bladed weapon.’

‘Same time frame?’

‘Same time frame. Last Monday, or a day or so later.’

‘Just London?’

‘If you can pull the regionals, too, that would be great.’

‘What did your last slave die of, Heather?’

‘Sexual ecstasy, Ralph. That’s what does for them all, in the end.’

Prentice sighed. ‘I think it’ll be cholesterol with me,’ he said glumly. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

The other easy call was to a man Kennedy knew by the name of Jonathan Partridge. He was an engineer who’d studied materials science at MIT. He was also a polymath who liked puzzles and he’d helped Kennedy out on a number of occasions with odd insights and esoteric connections. But Partridge wasn’t home. All she could do was leave a message, after the Thatcher-esque matronly voice of the voicemail loop invited her to do so.

As she hung up, Izzy came into the room, grinning evilly and tapping her watch. ‘Two and a half minutes,’ she gloated. ‘Counting from “What do they call you, lover?” to “Ohgodohgodohgod!” I wish talking dirty was an Olympic event. I could make my country proud.’

Kennedy lowered her phone. ‘Don’t you get paid by the minute?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. Of course I do.’

‘Then the quicker you get the guy where he wants to go, the less you get paid.’

Izzy threw herself on the bed next to Kennedy and snuggled in close. ‘It’s not about the money, babe,’ she said. ‘I’m a professional.’

‘Of course.’

‘And my standards are very high.’

‘I know that.’

‘It’s like you wouldn’t respect a bullfighter who left a bull hanging on in agony instead of finishing it off.’

‘Right. Because that would be inhumane.’

‘Exactly. Or in a cockfight, if you got the cock all psyched up for the fight, and then—’

‘Could we,’ Kennedy asked, ‘move away from the animal comparisons?’

Izzy rolled over on top of her and then sat up, smiling down at her, straddling her waist. ‘But I didn’t get to the bucking bronco.’

Kennedy raised the phone, like a barrister presenting evidence in court. ‘I’m working,’ she said.

‘Uh-uh.’ Izzy shook her head, still playful. ‘When I’m on the phone, I’m working. When you’re on the phone, you’re getting other people to work for you.’

‘Like you get other people to come for you,’ Kennedy said. Once it was said, it sounded a lot colder than when it was inside her head.

‘Well, that’s the name of the game, babe.’ Izzy took one last shot at salvaging the mood: ‘You want to help me beat my record?’

Kennedy felt claustrophobic, trapped not by Izzy’s weight on top of her (which she could bear very easily; had often rejoiced in bearing) but by the invitation to pretend an easy intimacy that she couldn’t feel right then. She hesitated. Words assembled themselves on her tongue that her mind refused to parse. She was about to say something horribly hurtful and destructive.

The phone saved her. It vibrated in her hand, giving off a sound like a hornet trapped under a glass. Kennedy shrugged a half-hearted apology to Izzy, who climbed off her and sat back.

‘That was fast,’ Kennedy said, after seeing the caller display.

‘What can I do for you, ex-sergeant?’ John Partridge asked.

She made a show of hesitation. ‘Well, it’s a big favour, John.’ She let the words hang in the air for a moment, to see whether he’d stop her or encourage her.

‘Go on, Heather. Coyness doesn’t become you.’

That was all the encouragement she needed. She gave him a thumbnail sketch of the case, then came right to the point. ‘You used to work at Swansea, didn’t you, John?’

‘I was in charge of their post-grad physics programme for three halcyon years. Before the Tories, when they still had funding. Why do you ask?’

‘Do you think they’d let you borrow the Kelvin probe?’

Partridge laughed — a short, incredulous bark. ‘It’s not a case of borrowing the Kelvin, ex-sergeant. It’s just a big barcode scanner with a computer attached. But there’s no point having the Kelvin without an operator. And those ladies and gentlemen are like the saints of a new religion. Generally whatever time they take off from research is booked six months in advance.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘No harm in asking.’

‘I didn’t say no,’ he pointed out. ‘I’ll see what I can do. But they’ll laugh their legs off when I tell them they’re investigating a break-in. Mass murders are more their style.’

‘Thanks so much, John. You’re an angel.’

‘Fallen. Say hello to your lady love for me.’

‘I will.’ Kennedy hesitated. ‘How’s Leo these days?’

‘Quiet.’

‘That’s good, right?’

‘No, that’s just Leo. He’s quiet when he’s bad, too. But in this instance, I think he’s quiet because he’s working. So perhaps “non-existent” would have been a better word. I haven’t heard from him in months. If you need to get a message to him, though, there’s a café in Clerkenwell that he uses as a poste restante. You’re one of the three people I’m officially allowed to give the address to.’

‘No need, thanks. But send him my love, next time you see him.’

‘I will. And I’ll let you know about the probe.’ The line went dead: Partridge considered the formalities of leave-taking a waste of time.

‘So what’s the job?’ Izzy asked. Kennedy looked up to see her leaning against the door frame, arms folded. The earlier flirtatiousness was gone. Izzy had had time to disengage and she clearly wasn’t going to risk rejection a second time.

‘It’s hard to say,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘Investigating a crime that may not have happened.’

‘I love it already. Tell me over a drink?’

They went to the Cask, on Charlwood Street. It was a fairly pricey pub, but it was close, and this early in the evening, it would still be possible to find a seat.

The conversation was desultory. After telling Izzy the basics, Kennedy stonewalled on all her questions. If she’d had the energy or the imagination to come up with another topic, she would have, but nothing occurred to her: Izzy tried to keep the conversation going on her own, but eventually they just wound down.

A few minutes into the silence, Izzy put out a hand and touched Kennedy’s forearm.

‘We’re breaking up, aren’t we?’ she said. Her voice was calm, even resigned.

Kennedy stared at her. ‘I don’t know what we’re doing,’ she answered.

Izzy shook her head. ‘Oh babe, you’ve got ninja lying skills, but not with me. You can’t even look me in the eye any more. I’m talking to you and you’re planning your getaway, right here.’

‘I’m not planning anything, Izzy.’

‘Okay, then do something for me.’

‘What?’

‘Kiss me.’

Kennedy looked around at the other tables, about half of which were occupied. ‘We kind of stand out,’ she said.

‘Since when did you care? Kiss me or piss off, Heather. Don’t hang around my place making me pay, day in and day out, because you’re too lazy to pack a bag.’

To pack a bag? Kennedy’s clothes, CDs and personal accoutrements had migrated slowly up the stairs to Izzy’s place over a period of months. The point at which she’d moved in hadn’t been formally marked. She’d assumed that her exit would be similarly protracted: storming out and slamming the door so gradually that you’d need a stop-motion camera to catch it.

As soon as she realised that, she was ashamed, because everything that Izzy was saying was true. On the other hand, she reflected, it was also true that Izzy had been playing away — and with a man. So it was hard to sit there and take the lecture as though she had it coming.

‘I don’t know what we’re doing,’ she said again. ‘Seriously, Izzy, I’ve been too busy trying to scrape together some work. But if I’d found the time, I guess I’d have thought that you might be prepared to give me the space, since it was you that was sleeping around.’

Izzy grimaced. ‘Sleeping around? It was one guy. I was drunk, and I was horny, and I let one guy pick me up. I was alone for the best part of two years before you came along. I got pretty casual about stuff like that.’

Kennedy said nothing, but she let her feelings about this statement show on her face.

‘I’m not a slut,’ Izzy said.

‘No.’

‘When I don’t have a partner, I still have a need to get laid every once in a while. I don’t think that’s a crime.’

‘When you don’t have a partner,’ Kennedy said, ‘then no, it isn’t. But you’ve got me.’

‘And it was a shitty thing to do, and I cried, and I said I was sorry — and I kicked the poor guy out without his shoes, if I remember right.’

‘But on the upside, he got to keep his balls.’

Izzy grinned faintly at that, although Kennedy wasn’t joking. If she’d still had her ARU licence, still had her gun, she might have done something stupid. She could picture it very easily. More easily than she could get her head around what actually happened, which was that she stood there like a deer on the freeway and watched the knock-kneed little jerk haul his pants on, looking from her to Izzy and back again like he was trying to work out some equation in his head and he kept getting the square root of huh?

‘I don’t know what else I can do,’ Izzy resumed. ‘If you would’ve just unfrozen and let me back in, I think maybe I could have convinced you that I really do love you — and that a roll under the duvet with Shoeless Joe Jackson wasn’t ever going to change that. But you didn’t, so I couldn’t, and here we are.’ Her eyes were bright with tears by the time she finished this speech. One of them was starting to roll down her cheek.

‘Wherever here is,’ Kennedy said.

‘Babe, we both know exactly where here is.’

Kennedy stood. They both had unfinished drinks, but the thought of having to carry on with the conversation just in order to finish them was suddenly unbearable. ‘I’ll sleep downstairs tonight,’ she said, like someone saying the time of death was 11.43 p.m. ‘I’ll come and get my stuff tomorrow.’

‘Or else we go back right now,’ Izzy said, ‘and I screw you so hard your brain melts and you don’t remember what you were even mad at me for.’

‘I …’ Kennedy couldn’t find any words. ‘Izzy …’

‘No,’ Izzy said, holding up her hands in surrender. ‘No need. No worries. I just thought it needed to be said. Do what you feel, Heather. And you hold that moral high ground against all comers, okay? You’ll be fine so long as the oxygen holds out.’

The last words were hard to make out because she was crying so hard. Izzy turned and headed quickly for the door, ricocheting off an empty chair, then barging a guy whose expansive gestures put his almost-full pint directly in her path. The man’s arm shook and beer slopped onto the floor.

‘Clumsy bitch!’ he shouted after her. ‘Don’t bloody drink it if you can’t handle it.’

It was the sort of blunt-edged insult that Kennedy normally found easy to ignore. Normally, but not tonight. She took hold of the top of his glass and tipped it so that the rest of the pint was dumped over his END OF THE ROAD T-shirt. Then she brought her face up close to his. ‘Words to live by,’ she said.

The guy was still yelling as she left the pub and she half-expected him to follow her, but the look in her eyes as she stared him down had probably been a pretty scary one. There were no footsteps behind her.

And no Izzy up ahead.

Kennedy looked around, bewildered. She’d only been twenty seconds behind, and the street was clear in both directions. To the left, where Izzy should have gone, scaffold sheeting flapped around the fascia of the Windsor Court Hotel, whose SOON TO OPEN UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT sign was itself now in need of renovation. To the right, silent Georgian terraces extended into the middle distance, their doors raised above street level by steep arcades of steps, like a chorus line of dancing girls lifting their dresses to do a can-can.

The scrape of a heel on stone made her turn back towards the hotel, and this time she saw what she had missed. There was a body lying on the ground there, half-under the scaffolding that covered the whole front of the building.

Kennedy cried out and ran. In seconds she was kneeling beside the still form. It was Izzy, lying on her back, arms and legs asymmetrically sprawled. Her head was in deep shadow, but Kennedy knew her by a hundred other signs.

Don’t move the body, she told herself. And the implications of that thought broke over her like a wave. The body. Oh shit. Oh shit. She felt for a pulse, found one, though it seemed weak. She looked for wounds and saw nothing.

‘Izzy,’ she babbled. ‘Sweetheart, what happened?’ She was rubbing Izzy’s hand between hers, trying to wake her. ‘What happened to you?’

Izzy didn’t move or speak. She was deeply unconscious.

Kennedy got out her phone. She was dialling 999 when the scaffolding behind her head rattled, giving out a tinny music in the way that the vibrating rails next to a Tube platform announce the imminent arrival of a train.

She looked up. Over their heads, something black and angular was growing to eclipse the baleful street-lamp glow against which it was defined.

There was an instant in which to act, not time enough, really, except that Kennedy suddenly knew what this was and saw the punchline coming from a thousand Warner Bros cartoons. She threw herself on top of Izzy, gripped the lapels of her shabby-chic Marc-Jacob-alike leather jacket and rolled them both sideways with a furious, simultaneous shrug of every muscle she could enlist.

They did one complete roll, Izzy on top of her, beside her, then under her again. Right next to them, something struck the pavement like a colossal fist, the slap of impacted air hitting Kennedy full in the face. She gasped and her mouth filled with something thick and soft like talcum powder. An instant blizzard enveloped them both.

Through it, eventually, she heard voices. ‘Holy shit.’

‘My God, did you see?’

Kennedy tried to wave away the drifts and roils of white that were blinding and choking her. It had a bitter taste and it stung her eyes. As she levered herself upright, she felt a fine cakey dust crunch under her fingers. Hands came from both sides, helping her to her feet. People she vaguely recognised from the pub supported her arms, dusted off her clothes. ‘Your friend,’ someone exclaimed. ‘Is she …’

‘I don’t …’ Kennedy coughed, spat, tried again. ‘I don’t know how badly she’s hurt. Call an ambulance. Please!’

There was a flurry of cellphones, everyone rummaging in bags and pockets and then drawing at once like the climax of a bad western.

Freed from the grip of the good Samaritans, Kennedy knelt again to examine Izzy, careful not to move her spine. The white powder, whatever it was, was settling on her face. Gently brushing it away, Kennedy found the contusion on Izzy’s temple, already swelling, where she’d been hit. Horror filled her, and then white-hot anger.

She looked at what had fallen on them — or almost on them. It was lying a scant few inches from Izzy’s head: a builder’s pallet, with twelve sacks of cement piled on it, loosely tied with a single loop of rope. Some of the bags had ruptured. That was what was floating in the air and insinuating itself into their lungs.

It was the sort of thing that could look like a terrible accident, but clearly it was nothing of the kind. It was an ambush, hastily but efficiently improvised. Presumably the original plan had been to catch the both of them as they left the Cask and walked home together. But Izzy had left first, and the fact that she’d been enlisted as bait made it absolutely clear that Kennedy herself was the real target.

She looked up at the scaffolding above their heads. Nothing moved there, and it seemed unlikely that whoever had dropped the pallet had stayed to watch the after-effects. There was a ladder running up the side of the scaffolding to the first floor. That was probably how their unseen attacker had got up there. But he certainly hadn’t come down again that way.

Kennedy picked a man almost at random, one of a group who all had the meticulously groomed scruffiness of students. She gripped his arm and pointed at Izzy. ‘Don’t let anyone touch her,’ she said. ‘Stay close to her until I get back. You and your friends. Stay with her. Surround her. Do you understand me?’

‘All right,’ the man said, ‘but we don’t—’

Kennedy didn’t hear what else he said. She ran up the steps to the hotel entrance. A panel of thick particle board had been put there in place of the original door, but someone had prised it loose along the left-hand edge and pulled it away from the wall. She was able to squeeze in.

Nothing inside but darkness and silence. Kennedy stood still, listening, but heard only her own breathing. When her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she moved forward. The main stairs were right ahead of her. She rummaged in her bag until she found the pistol-grip pepper spray she always kept there. It was a military-issue Wildfire — illegal in the UK, but not nearly so illegal as an unlicensed gun.

She went for speed rather than stealth, taking the stairs three at a time. On the first floor, then the second, she paused and looked around. After the second, there was nowhere else to go — except the roof, presumably, and the stairs didn’t go up that far.

She stepped aside into a patch of shadow. Light from the street lamp outside, which was level with the windows of these upstairs rooms, turned the scene in front of her into a black and white mosaic.

She’d just about decided that she was wasting her time when something moved. It moved to the left of her, where there was nothing except the wall of the stairwell. It was a shadow: whatever had cast it was outside, on the top-most level of scaffolding. A window frame rattled and then creaked as it was opened from outside.

Kennedy waited until the man was halfway over the sill before she rushed him. She gave him a shot of the pepper spray right in the eyes, but a black mask covered his entire face and he didn’t even react. He just dropped and twisted, turning the movement into a surprisingly graceful roll, and then he was inside the room with her.

She aimed a blow at his stomach as he scrambled to his feet, but the punch didn’t connect. He leaned away from it with incredible speed, catching Kennedy’s arm above and below the elbow, pulling her forward right off her balance and throwing her. She came down hard on the floorboards, stunned.

Through blurred, tearing eyes, she saw the man standing over her. He took something from his belt and she knew from the way it flashed in the yellow-white glow from the street lamp — dull-bright-dull, inside of a second — that it was a knife. She raised a clumsy block, but she couldn’t protect her whole body, and stretched out on the floor as she was, she made an unmissable target. She was dead.

But the knife didn’t come down. The man was staggering, clawing at his mask. The pepper spray had soaked through at last. It was burning his eyes and cutting off his breath, and because it was in the fabric of the mask there was no way for him to get away from it.

Kennedy got her feet under her and stood, but even blinded and hurting, he heard her step back. He advanced in a step-shuffle gait into the space she vacated, pressing her hard until the wall was right up against her shoulder blades.

Then he kicked her through it.

His foot connected with Kennedy’s chest, with so much force behind it that it would probably have staved in her ribs if she’d been leaning against brick. But she was leaning against thin, stale, crumbly plaster pasted over wafer-thin laths. She went staggering and sprawling through into the next room, fell on her back and rolled aside, expecting him to follow through.

Nothing came through the wall. She got to her feet and staggered to the ragged-edged hole, cradling her chest and trying to suck in some air.

The man was gone. Kennedy pushed and stumbled her way back through to the room where they’d fought. Something lay on the floor, a dark and shapeless mass. Kennedy went to it and picked it up, then winced and held it far away from her face. Sodden, limp, sour with the stench of oleorosin, it was the man’s face-mask, and he’d torn it half to ribbons in his haste to get it off.

On the street, the innocent bystanders had mostly dispersed like ghosts at cock-crow, their civic duty done and their curiosity satisfied, but the small group of students who Kennedy had summarily deputised stood in a slightly sheepish defensive ring around Izzy, who was still unconscious. Kennedy thanked them and released them back into civilian life. Then there was nothing else to do but wait until the ambulance arrived.

Izzy revived before the ambulance got to them. After a few seconds of not knowing where she was or what the hell was going on, she sat up — ignoring Kennedy’s attempts to stop her — rubbed her eyes and looked around. She coughed, licked her lips and grimaced as she tasted the cement dust that had accreted on them.

‘If you’re trying to kill me for the insurance money, babe,’ she said hoarsely, ‘there isn’t any. Hard to believe, but I’m worth more alive.’

Kennedy hugged her close. ‘Shut up,’ she muttered.

They were like that for a long time, sitting on the edge of the pavement, Izzy leaning awkwardly into Kennedy’s embrace, as the dust settled all around them. A distant siren whooped and then was silent again, maybe their own ambulance, on its way.

‘I like this,’ Izzy murmured, her head pressed tight against Kennedy’s bruised and aching chest. ‘I like this a lot. I should have got the crap beaten out of me ages ago.’

6

Glyn Thornedyke, the security coordinator at Ryegate House, was a sort of corpulent wraith, badly overweight but pale and insubstantial and clearly very unwell. He seemed surprised that his approval was needed for a mass interrogation of the facility’s staff — and in retrospect, Kennedy was sorry that she’d taken the time to ask him. It was already almost ten and her eyes had that itchy feeling that comes with the more serious kinds of tiredness. Giving statements to the police had kept both her and Izzy up until long after midnight. Then other things had kept them up. As a result, Kennedy felt both exhausted and full of urgency — a feeling like she needed to catch a bus that had already left.

‘I’m going to want all the staff files,’ she told Thornedyke. ‘Hard copy or digital, whatever’s quicker.’

‘Yes. Very well.’ Thornedyke cast his eye across the files and papers on his desk as though he suspected that what Kennedy was asking for might turn out to be right there in front of him. She wondered what kind of turf wars he’d already fought with Gassan — the professor had been very keen to claim the overview of site security as part of his own brief. ‘I can certainly provide physical copies. Will you need anything else?’

The tone was balanced between hope and trepidation. Clearly, Thornedyke wanted her to say no and go away.

Kennedy had to disappoint him. ‘Yes, Mr Thornedyke. I’ll also want an office to conduct the interviews in. And someone to feed people through to me. I don’t know anyone’s face or where they work.’

‘I can’t allocate you a room,’ Thornedyke said plaintively. ‘Rooms are booked through the front desk. And if you take someone from my staff, I’ll have a hole in the rota.’

‘Well, how about if I take Ben Rush?’ Kennedy said.

‘The probationer?’

‘Yeah. Him. Would that be a hole you can live with?’

Thornedyke thought about it. ‘I suppose so. Yes. So long as it’s just for one day.’

‘Great. He’ll come and collect the files from you as soon as I’m ready.’

The security coordinator still didn’t look all that happy, but Kennedy left before he could raise any more objections.

Professor Gassan, only too eager to be of assistance — and maybe to demonstrate the size of his new empire — gave her the main boardroom to work out of. The space was about as big as a football field, with a conference table so long and wide it had obviously had to be brought up from the street in sections and assembled like a jigsaw. It was a vanity table, designed to make museum executives feel like they were wheeling and dealing in a serious, corporate world. The deep-pile carpet and thick, pleated curtains were identical shades of oatmeal.

Gassan also approved Kennedy’s loan of Rush for the day, and the gangly boy turned up about fifteen minutes later with an armload of manila folders. He dumped them down on the table and mopped his brow, miming exhaustion.

‘Thanks, Rush. Okay, you’re seconded to me for the day. I hope that’s okay. It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting.’

Rush nodded equably. ‘A change is as good as a rest.’

‘Okay, then. I’m going to take an hour or so to go through these files and make notes. After that, I’ll ask you to bring people in, one at a time, and act as chaperone while I interview them. In the meantime, did you get breakfast yet?’

Rush shrugged. ‘Cup of tea. Round of toast.’

‘Most important meal of the day, Rush. Is there anywhere around here that does coffee and bagels?’

Rush nodded. ‘Sam Widge’s, on Gerrard Road.’

‘Lox and cream cheese and double espresso for me. Dealer’s choice for you.’

She gave him a twenty pound note, and he was off.

The personnel files were as bare and banal as she expected them to be, and Kennedy was able to get through them easily inside the hour she’d allowed. The coffee helped. The flaccid bridge roll — ‘no bagels left, sorry’ — not so much.

All of Ryegate House’s staff, both full-time and part-time, had impeccable employment records. None of them had any spent convictions or debt problems, or at least, any that had showed up at the fairly superficial level of investigation that the museum deployed. Most had been here since before the flood, and almost everyone above the entry level had been promoted internally.

On the face of it, a closet with no skeletons.

So Kennedy narrowed her search, looking for repeating patterns. It was standard police procedure with any possibility of conspiracy — or where you wanted to eliminate that possibility — to look for the common ground in which it could have grown: if two or more of the Ryegate House staffers had attended the same school or college, had worked together in another context, or were members of the same club or society, it would have been worth following up. But they didn’t, hadn’t, weren’t. The only thing they had in common was Ryegate House itself.

Kennedy took a different tack, looking for hobbies or work experience that might translate into burglary skills. Not much there: two of the security team were ex-army, but their background — Royal Corps of Transport and Household Guard — didn’t suggest that either had seen much in the way of special ops training.

Finally, without much more sense of direction than she’d had when she started out, she pushed the stack of files across the table at Rush. ‘Shuffle and deal,’ she said. ‘Put them into some sort of order that makes sense to you and then feed them through to me one at a time.’

He seemed nervous with that much responsibility. ‘Is alphabetical okay?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Kennedy, on an impulse. ‘Surprise me.’

The next few hours were gruelling. With no steer from her, Rush sent in the top brass first. The topmost brass — excluding Emil Gassan — was a Valerie Parminter, who bore the title of Assistant Director. She was in her fifties and austerely attractive, with a well-maintained figure and pink-tinted hair that made a virtue of its unnaturalness. To judge from her face, she saw this interview as a huge affront to her dignity.

Parminter’s responses to Kennedy’s questions began as sparse sentences, but quickly degenerated into monosyllables. Her face said: I have to endure this, but I don’t have to hide my contempt for it.

Kennedy went for the jugular without a qualm.

‘So,’ she said, ‘this happened on your watch, so to speak. In the period between the departure of the old director and the arrival of Professor Gassan.’

Parminter stared at her, a cold, indignant stare. ‘I don’t think the timing is relevant to anything,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ Kennedy said.

Those who live by the monosyllable shall die by the monosyllable. Parminter waited for more, and when it wasn’t forthcoming she voided her hurt feelings into the accusing silence. ‘For the record,’ she said acidly, ‘I suggested a full security review nine months ago. Dr Leopold said he’d take that under advisement. Which of course meant he’d sweep it under the carpet and forget it.’

‘You had concerns about the adequacy of the security arrangements,’ Kennedy summarised, scribbling notes as she spoke.

Parminter shifted in her seat. ‘Yes.’

‘But you only raised them on that one occasion. A pity, given the way things turned out.’

‘I was ignored! You can only beat your head against a brick wall so many times.’

Kennedy pursed her lips. ‘And these concerns. You voiced them in an email? A memo?’

‘No.’

‘At a minuted meeting, then.’

‘No.’ Parminter looked exasperated. ‘It was a private conversation.’

‘Which Dr Leopold will corroborate?’

The older woman laughed, astonished, indignant, faux-amused, but with a nervous edge underneath these things. ‘Dr Leopold suffered a massive stroke. He can’t even talk. But I’m not on trial here. Security is the Director’s remit.’

‘Of course,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘Nobody is on trial here. It’s just that I was asked to submit a report on staff awareness and efficiency, in addition to the case-specific inquiry. I want to make sure I do you full justice.’

So start talking.

‘This is absurd,’ Parminter protested.

Kennedy shrugged sympathetically. ‘I know.’

‘We had a spate of attempted break-ins,’ Parminter said. ‘A cluster, all together, around seven months ago.’

‘Attempted?’

‘Yes.’

‘No actual loss or damage?’

‘No. But it made us all aware that in some ways we were falling short of best practice. I’d been on a course the year before where there were talks on how you should go about protecting very small and very valuable items.

‘I pointed out to Dr Leopold that some museums and archives use a double-blind system for storage. When an item has to be brought out of the stacks into any other part of the building, a requisition form has to be filled in first. Assistants use the item code to generate a physical address from the computer and the box is brought up from the stacks, sealed. The curator who requested the box knows what’s in it, but not where it is. The assistant knows where it is, but not what’s in it.’

‘Which has the effect of …’

‘It makes targeted theft impossible. Our system, by contrast, depends on physical barriers and deterrents. Which are fine until somebody figures out a way to bypass them. And when they do, they know exactly where to look. Well, except for the books, of course.’

‘The books?’

‘The legacy collection from the old British Library. That’s what Room 37 is full of, isn’t it?’

Kennedy’s interest quickened, despite the woman’s lecturing delivery. Gassan had said that the British Library and the British Museum used to share the same premises. At the time, she’d wondered where that random factoid had come from. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What makes the books different?’

‘Well, we don’t have an extant catalogue for them,’ Parminter said, as though stating the blindingly obvious. ‘The catalogue and all the access codes went to the new library building on Euston Road. If they wanted to find a specific book, they’d have to give us a physical location — room, rack, position, box number. The only alternative would be to search every box until you found it.’ The older woman smiled. ‘It’s ironic, really.’

‘Is it?’ Kennedy asked. ‘How?’

‘Well, the lack of a physical address means we’ve achieved a level of security for those books that goes beyond anything we’ve got for the other artefacts. And yet the books — at least the ones that were left with us after the move — are the least valuable part of the collection.’

‘I’m not sure that counts as irony, exactly,’ Kennedy said. ‘But I take your point. Ms Parminter, what do you think the intruder was after?’

‘Whatever he could get his hands on.’ The answer sounded flip, but it was spoken with a definite emphasis.

‘What, you don’t think he had a plan? A specific target?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Why is that?’

Parminter almost sneered. ‘Well, let’s just say that if he did, and if he ended up in that wing, in that room, he must have taken a wrong turning.’ She stood up, without asking Kennedy if the interview was over, and headed for the door.

‘He’d have had better luck going through our rubbish,’ she said over her shoulder.

Before Kennedy could get to interviewee number two, Izzy called. She was still on the train.

‘Hey, you,’ Izzy said, trying to sound jaunty through the misery and the hurt. ‘What you up to right now? Smiting evildoers?’

‘Interviewing witnesses,’ Kennedy said. ‘Smiting comes later. I thought you’d be there by now.’

‘Train got held up outside Leicester. We’ll be pulling in soon.’

There was a pregnant silence. ‘Give them my love,’ Kennedy said, for want of anything else to say that actually had any kind of a meaning attached.

‘Obviously,’ Izzy said. They were Izzy’s brother Simon, his homophobic wife Caroline, who crossed her legs whenever Kennedy entered the room as though she feared her vagina was under direct threat, and their weirdly quiet but otherwise okay kids Hayley and Richard. They lived in a well-to-do suburb of Leicester, kept rabbits, and — considered as a family unit — had a Stepford kind of serenity that Kennedy observed with perplexity and mild suspicion. Caroline was something in the City, but at long-distance, making crazy money in a locked room at the top of the house that contained only a desk, a computer and three phones. Simon looked after the kids, the rabbits, the house and pretty much everything else.

It had been Kennedy’s idea that Izzy should spend some time with her only sibling and his family — or at least, that she should get some distance from Kennedy until Kennedy was able to establish which chicken from her former life was coming home to roost. It had to be that. There was no conceivable way that the attack could have anything to do with her work at Ryegate House, which had barely begun. It was only the timing — and the unsettling visual echo of the black stealth-suit, so like the one she’d seen in the CCTV footage. But even if the Ryegate House intruder was crazy enough, and desperate enough, to commit a murder in order to hide a theft, there was no way that Kennedy presented a credible enough threat to motivate an attack like that. She knew nothing, had no leads and no ideas.

Izzy had been full of indignation and derision at the suggestion that she needed to be protected; but she thought it was hot as hell that Kennedy wanted to protect her, be her knight in shining armour. Once they were back in the comfort and privacy of Izzy’s flat, the sex they’d had on the back of that particular conversation had reached heights and depths that surprised both of them.

But when it was over, and they were lying across each other in a snarl of knotted sheets like the victims of some very localised tornado, both of the elephants — the relationship one and the near-death-experience one — were still in the room. One hour of sweaty apotheosis didn’t mean they were safely over the dead ground. And the fresh bandage on Izzy’s forehead was a potent reminder that someone had just tried to cement their fate with actual cement.

Kennedy came up with the idea of a trial separation — partly so they could figure out how they felt about each other, partly so that Izzy could get out of harm’s way while Kennedy tried to find out where the harm was coming from and shut it down.

It was a hard sell for Izzy. The great sex, and Kennedy’s protectiveness, had completely changed her prognosis for the relationship. Now she wanted to capitalise on these gamechanging events and get Kennedy to tell her that she was forgiven. ‘Don’t ask me to go to bloody Leicester!’ she pleaded. ‘I can stay out of trouble right here. I’ll go and stay with Pauline and Kes, down in Brixton.’

‘Too close, too current,’ Kennedy told her bluntly. ‘And you’d still be seeing all the people you normally see. Anyone who was halfway trying could find you inside of a day.’

‘But what about my work?’

Kennedy picked up Izzy’s phone from the arm of the sofa and waved it briefly in her face before dropping it into her handbag. ‘That’s your work. You can do it just as well from two hundred miles away. Better, you won’t be tempted to invite a regular up for a face to face.’

It was deliberately cruel — a pre-emptive bid to end the discussion. And it worked really well, as far as that went. Izzy absorbed the low blow without a word and took over the packing for herself. When she left, an hour later, they embraced, but it was clumsy and tentative.

Just like their conversation now.

‘I had a thought,’ Izzy said.

‘What about?’

‘Sleeping around.’

‘Izzy—’

‘Hear me out, babe. I was thinking I could set you up with someone. Someone really cute. And you could, you know, be unfaithful right back. Get it out of your system. You wouldn’t even have to enjoy it. It would just relieve the tension, you know? So we could get back to being us again.’

‘Izzy, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.’

‘Okay.’ Izzy abandoned the notion quickly, got some distance from it. ‘I thought it was stupid. I just wanted to put it out there.’

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll call you tonight.’

‘I love you.’

Kennedy hung up and grabbed the next file.

Second Assistant Director Allan Scholl — a Boris Johnson lookalike with a mop of blond hair he obviously thought was a selling point — was a whole lot smoother than Parminter and a whole lot more courteous. But he had even less to say. He was keen to stress his pivotal role on the day the break-in was discovered. It had been him who called the police, told security to seal off the room and organised the preliminary trawl through the collection to find out what had been stolen. He’d overseen the process himself, because his PA had been away sick and although he returned that day, he got in late.

‘And you found that nothing was missing?’ Kennedy said.

‘Nothing that we could definitely verify,’ Scholl corrected her. ‘We’ve done a more detailed search since and everything appears to be where it belongs. But it’s hard to be categorical on that point.’

‘Why is that, Mr Scholl?’ Kennedy knew the answer, but it never hurt to seem more clueless than you actually were: the Columbo principle.

‘Because there are literally millions of items in the collection. To tick every one off the list would be hugely time-consuming. And visual verification might not be enough, in some cases. If you wanted to steal a very valuable artefact, and then to sell it on, one of the things you might do would be to replace the original with a copy so that its loss went undetected. Then there are the books …’

‘Which aren’t catalogued.’

‘Which were catalogued, but the catalogue is both massively out of date and not here. It’s at Euston Road, on completely separate premises. So yes, we think we dodged the bullet, and that’s our public position, as it were. But privately, I’m agnostic.’

Kennedy thought back to the CCTV image of the man in black, with the tiny shoulder bag. Whatever he’d come for, it wasn’t a bulky item. And he hadn’t been on a random shopping trip, either.

So her position went beyond agnosticism. She was pretty near certain that something had been taken. The intruder had been picked up on camera and had dropped a knife (after he’d used it, which was a piece that didn’t seem to fit anywhere in the puzzle), but he’d still got away clean, and she had no reason to assume that his mission was aborted.

What was the mission? And who was he? And how had he gotten in and out?

And in back of those questions: did he try to kill me last night?

As she went on through the morning, she got back into the rhythm of it. In her former life as a cop, she’d been good at this stuff. She’d understood, intuitively, that it wasn’t about the questions. Not at first. You kept them bland and general, and people told you what was on their mind. The questions were like Rorschach inkblots.

‘I got to work late that day,’ said a man with bleach-blond hair, a dancer’s narrow build and intense, over-large brown eyes.

Kennedy glanced at the corresponding file. Alex Wales. She made a connection in her mind. ‘So you’re Mr Scholl’s PA?’

The man nodded at some length, as though Kennedy had made a point he profoundly agreed with, but he said nothing. Maybe his eyes weren’t too big: they were just very much darker than his face, so that they drew your gaze.

‘You were away from work all day on the Monday,’ Kennedy said. ‘Then you got in around eleven on the Tuesday. Why was that?’

There was a silence that was long enough for her to register it as awkward. ‘I have pernicious anaemia,’ Wales said. ‘Every so often, I get fainting fits. I take pills to keep it under control — but even with the pills, the iron level in my blood fluctuates a lot. When it’s really low, I can’t even get out of bed.’

‘So you took the Monday off because you were ill.’

Another pause. ‘I just lay there all through Monday. And Tuesday morning, too. Then I got up.’

He seemed to be picking his words with care, as though afraid of being accused of something; faking a sickie, maybe.

‘What was happening when you arrived on Tuesday?’ Kennedy asked him.

‘You mean, what was the first thing I saw on Tuesday?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

‘The police were all over the place. Going through the rooms.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I went to my desk. Logged onto my computer.’

‘Just like normal?’

Wales nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘You weren’t surprised to see that massive police presence? You didn’t stop to ask them what was happening?’

‘I thought they were probably investigating a break-in.’

‘You thought that? Right away?’

Kennedy got another long, hard look from those big, dark eyes. ‘Yes. Right away.’

‘What made you think that?’

‘Well, it seemed like the obvious explanation. But I suppose it could have been a lot of worse things.’

‘Such as?’

Silence. Stare. Wait for it.

‘Well,’ Alex Wales said, ‘it’s not like the police ever come with good news, is it?’

She was finished before she knew it.

She was expecting one more clerk or curator to step timidly across the threshold, but when the door opened it was Rush instead.

‘All done,’ he said.

Kennedy looked down at the remaining file, sitting by itself next to the stack of those pertaining to people she’d already seen. ‘What about Mark Silver?’ she asked, and memory stirred as soon as she spoke the name aloud. She answered her own question. ‘Mark Silver is dead.’

Rush nodded solemnly. ‘Yeah. The weekend before the break-in.’

‘Traffic accident.’

‘Is correct.’

‘So why did you give me his file?’

‘Sorry,’ Rush said. ‘You said to put the files in some kind of order, and you said it couldn’t be just alphabetical, so I went by start date. You know, when they came on-staff here. The people you saw first were the people who’d worked here the longest. So I was looking at the dates instead of the names. Otherwise I would have taken Mark out.’

There was a silence. Kennedy couldn’t think of anything to fill it with.

‘Do you want me to get you some more coffee?’ Rush asked her.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. The truth was that she was too tired to move. As though she needed some excuse to go on sitting there, she opened up the cover of Silver’s file and scanned the details. Born in Birmingham, educated in Walsall and Smethwick, and then buggered off to join the British Army on the Rhine. Obviously Mark had felt the need to shake off the dust of his home town and get out into the big world. Couldn’t blame him for that.

As her gaze wandered across the page, Kennedy was struck by a mild sense of déjà vu. It was something recent, too. Dredging up the memory, she checked Silver’s file against one of the others she’d just been looking at. Not a perfect match, but close enough. In order of start date, Rush had said.

Kennedy looked up at him. He was giving her a slightly puzzled stare, watching the expressions chasing each other across her face. ‘Those break-ins,’ she said.

‘Break-in, you mean. Singular.’

‘No. The other ones. The abortive attempts.’

Rush frowned. ‘Oh, right. Those. That was a while ago now. We added some external cameras, up on the roof — you saw them yesterday. Whoever it was, they didn’t come back.’

‘Right.’

She almost had it now. Had some of it, anyway. Change the perspective, and the impossible becomes banal. Was that Columbo again, or Sherlock Holmes?

‘Get your keys out,’ she told Rush. ‘I want to take another look at the room.’

7

Eight parallel aisles of boxes. No empty spaces on the shelves, although Gassan had told her the room was only at one third of its capacity. That was the first thing.

‘So some of these boxes don’t have anything in them, right?’ Kennedy asked Rush.

‘All the ones from about the end of aisle C onwards,’ he confirmed. ‘The clericals normally fill the space up from the front. But there’s probably a few more empty boxes mixed in with the full ones — spaces that didn’t get filled or things that were moved to new locations and left a gap.’

‘So why bother to have boxes with nothing in them?’ Rush gave this question some thought. ‘I suppose it’s got some value as a smokescreen,’ he said at last.

‘You mean because it forces a burglar to open every box?’ ‘Yeah. But I think it was more about space, to be honest. The boxes are rigid, reinforced sides, high quality. They don’t come flat-packed. So where else would we stack them? It’d be stupid to have rooms set aside for empty boxes when we can just fill the shelves here and then have everything set up ready for new stuff as it comes in.’

Kennedy nodded. ‘Yeah. That would be stupid.’

She got Rush to show her the two fixed cameras, and with his help she paced out the areas of the room that would be visible to each of them. The negative space, where the cameras couldn’t see, was where she began.

He watched her for a while, opening boxes and peering into them. He was perplexed. ‘Those ones are empty,’ he told her.

‘Yeah,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘And I bet nobody bothered to search them, right?’

‘I don’t know. There wouldn’t be much point, would there?’

‘Depends what you’re looking for.’

Rush waited for more, but Kennedy didn’t have any more to say. If she was wrong, she might as well be wrong off the record. There were hundreds of empty boxes on the endless shelves. The full ones were all the same size, since they all had the same contents: books from the British Library overspill. The empty boxes had just been put wherever there was space to put them, so they came in a variety of sizes to reflect the infinite variety of items in the museum’s collection.

Kennedy was only bothering to open the largest ones, and she struck gold before she’d gotten halfway along aisle D.

She beckoned Rush over and pointed into the open box. He stared down and his eyes widened. The box contained a black sweater and a pair of black leggings. Black boots. A black balaclava designed to cover the entire face. And a large quantity of what looked like ash.

‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed. ‘I don’t get it. Is that what the intruder was wearing?’

‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘It is.’

‘Then why is it still here? We saw him leave the room.’

‘No. We didn’t. We saw him climb up into the ceiling space. But we both know there’s no way out from up there. So whatever we saw, it wasn’t the great escape. It was something else.’ Kennedy was still piecing it all together in her mind, but the fact that she’d gotten this part right gave her confidence to pursue the other, more elusive aspects of the crime. If it even was a crime.

‘The room’s been locked and off-limits ever since the day after the break-in,’ she said — a statement rather than a question.

‘Yeah,’ Rush confirmed. ‘I already told you that.’

‘Clerical assistants did a tally of the contents, but they were watched the whole time. Nobody’s been allowed to come in here alone.’

‘Except the police.’

‘Except the police. Take a note of the box number, would you, Rush? And then close up here. Leave everything exactly as it is.’

‘Right.’

‘And don’t say a word to anyone.’

‘Right.’ He blinked rapidly, gave her a guarded look.

‘I’ll talk to the professor,’ Kennedy said. ‘And to Thornedyke. I’m not asking you to lie to your boss. Just don’t talk to anyone else on the staff here, okay? Word will spread around, our suspect will get to hear about it, and then we’ll be screwed. I think this is our chance to break this case.’

Rush seemed to like the word our, but he had to ask. ‘We’ve got a suspect? As of when?’

‘As of about five minutes ago. I won’t give you a name — not just yet. If you see this person, you’re going to need to behave absolutely normally, so as not to put them on their guard. But I promise you’ll be the first to know after the professor.’

Back in the boardroom, Kennedy picked out the two relevant files and took them down to Gassan’s office. She dropped them onto his desk and stood with arms folded while he read the names.

Gassan looked up at her, with blank amazement on his face. ‘You’re not saying these two had anything to do with the break-in?’

‘Actually, Professor, I’m saying they did it. And I believe I know how they did it. One inside, one outside — probably the only way it could be done. But I need your help for the next part.’

‘Which is?’

‘Figuring out what it was they did.’

Gassan rubbed his forehead, as though he had a slight headache. Clearly the news that the break-in might have been an inside job didn’t thrill him. He looked from one file to the other, then back to the first. ‘I hate to point out the flaw in your reasoning, Heather,’ he said at last, ‘but Mark Silver was already dead when the break-in occurred. You must be mistaken.’

‘Maybe,’ she allowed. ‘Get me the swipe records for that day and we’ll know. Because if I’m right, they’ll both have swiped out at the same time on the night of—’

Kennedy’s phone played a few bars of ersatz jazz — an incoming text, not a call — and she paused while she checked the message. It was from John Partridge and it was good news.

Swansea said yes. Kelvin probe plus operator. One day only. Tomorrow.

She took the files back from Gassan. ‘You don’t have to believe me,’ she said. ‘Just let me run with it. We’ll know a lot more tomorrow. Because tomorrow, we’ll be able to go where they went. See what they looked at, what they touched. Find out what they took, if they took anything.’

Gassan looked at her with a very patrician scepticism, as though she’d just tried to sell him a timeshare. ‘And how will we do that? By magic?’

‘Pretty much,’ Kennedy said.

8

‘Isobel and Heather aren’t here right now, but if you’ve got a message, go ahead and leave it after the beep. We’ll be right back at you.’

Nobody had a message. There was no red light on the phone’s base unit. Kennedy had only pressed the playback key so that she could hear Izzy’s voice. The flat was haunted by her absence — an anti-poltergeist of inimical stillness.

She wandered from the living room into the bedroom, back out into the hall. None of these places felt as though they wanted her.

Ever since she first found out what gypsies were, back when she was about seven, Kennedy had nursed a secret fantasy that involved ditching everything except the clothes she stood up in and going on the road. When she was down, she tended to see rooms as prisons. That feeling came back to her now, stronger than it had ever been.

She took out her phone, looked at it as though expecting it to ring, or else defying it to. It didn’t, but she noticed another text that she hadn’t registered when she read Partridge’s. It was from Ralph Prentice.

Might have something for you on the knife wounds. Just checking it out now. Probably be in touch tomorrow.

She keyed in Izzy’s number, let her thumb hover over the call button for a good long while.

But in the end, she just put it back in her pocket.

The evening was a mausoleum. Kennedy tried — in quick, futile succession — to watch TV, read a book and tidy the flat. Her mind refused to focus down on anything. She ate supper — a defrosted lasagne and two stiff whiskies — then lay on the bed fully clothed, staring up at the plaster ceiling rose. The insane events of the night before sat undigested in her mind. Now that she’d seen it up close, the resemblance between the outfit modelled by the Ryegate House burglar and the one her own attacker had worn was even closer than she’d thought at first. Black is black, but the design of the balaclava was identical to the one she’d held in her hands after the attack on her and Izzy.

She had to face the possibility that someone wanted to halt her investigation — at a time when she barely had one. And wanted it badly enough to kill her. That thought shook loose a very disturbing memory. She’d met some people once who thought nothing of killing for a book. She really, really didn’t want to meet them again.

The heat was oppressive. Kennedy went through into the living room and fixed herself another drink, then sat in front of the open window to feel the breeze. A thick bank of cloud hid the moon, but there were a few stars visible high up near the zenith of the sky. She imagined she was looking down from there — a psychological technique taught her by a crisis counsellor after the incident that had cost her the licence to carry. The exercise was meant to encourage a healthy decentring, putting your own problems in perspective. Kennedy found it useless in that respect, but it did give her a pleasant, mild sense of vertigo.

While she was still sitting there, trying to get lost in inconsequential thoughts as a defence against the scary ones, the end of the cloud bank unrolled with slow theatricality from the face of the moon. In its sudden spotlight, Kennedy saw something move on the roof of the building opposite. It was only for a second. Probably a cat, or nothing at all, a piece of garbage light enough to be lifted on the wind. Except that it was moving against the wind.

As casually as she could manage, Kennedy took another sip of her drink, set the glass aside and ambled away from the window, out of the door of the room into the hallway that ran the length of Izzy’s flat. As soon as she was through the door and out of any possible line of sight from the roof, she sprinted down the hallway, took the stairs three at a time and got to the street door inside of twenty seconds.

Then she slowed and walked out onto the street at a casual pace, her head down, trusting to the darkness to cover her. She strolled away down the street, turned the corner, quickly crossed the road and took an alley that led behind the buildings on the opposite side.

The building directly facing Izzy’s was another residential block. Kennedy was in luck: a teenaged boy and girl walked out of the back door as she approached it, and the girl obligingly held it open for her.

She found the stairs and climbed them, quickly but quietly. At the very top, there was an emergency door that led out onto the roof. Conveniently close to hand, a fire extinguisher sat in a niche on the wall. It was of the black CO type, small enough and solid enough to make a reasonably good weapon. Kennedy snatched it up and slammed the door open.

And found she was facing the wrong way. The door opened towards the rear of the building, not its front. In the echo of the door’s slamming, there were some other sounds — a scrape of stone or gravel, and then a rustling insinuation that died away quickly.

She ran out onto the roof and around the low housing in which the fire door was set. There was nothing else obstructing her view and no sign of anyone or anything that shouldn’t be there.

Still wired, still suspicious, she patrolled the length of the roof, looking across directly at the windows of Izzy’s flat. She could see where she’d been sitting, her empty glass still on the sill, and she tried to work out from that where the movement would have been.

She found it, in the end. The surface of the roof was gravel laid on green mineral felt and a small area of it bore both the scuff of footprints and the indentations of someone sitting or kneeling there for a long time.

Not paranoia. She was being watched.

And it seemed like the watcher must have wings, because there was no other way off the roof that she could see.

9

Partridge was waiting outside Ryegate House’s main entrance when Kennedy arrived the next morning, with the smallest dog-end she had ever seen wedged between his index and forefinger. He had two companions, both standing nervously upwind of Partridge’s cigarette: a shy, slightly fey-looking young man and a serious, bespectacled woman, both in their early twenties and dressed in what looked like their Sunday best. Partridge himself wore a shabby donkey jacket over a plain white T-shirt and dark-blue trousers with more pockets than anyone could actually need. He took Kennedy’s hand and greeted her with old-world civility.

Then he introduced the other two: ‘Kathleen Sturdy and William Price, of the University of Swansea’s School of Engineering.’ They were standing to either side of a solid-looking steel box with rows of handles bolted to its sides and foam-rubber chocks affixed to each corner.

‘This is the Kelvin probe?’ Kennedy asked.

‘This is just the scanning head,’ Partridge said. ‘There are a lot more components. They’re parked in a van three streets away — closest we could get. My God, I hate this city.’

‘That just makes you a bigger hero, John.’ Kennedy turned to the young man and woman. ‘And I assume you two are the operators. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this.’

‘Actually, we’re graduate students,’ the woman — Kathleen — answered. Her voice had a Welsh accent so delicate and musical that it sounded as though she were reciting a poem. ‘But we’re qualified to use the probe. We’re both doing research in force microscopy.’

‘And the university couldn’t spare anyone from the faculty,’ Partridge summed up. ‘So William and Kathy kindly agreed to come down to the Smoke for the day and help you out. In exchange for their travelling expenses and a small per diem.’

‘Of course,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m grateful to you both. Really. This is just wonderful.’ She didn’t think Emil Gassan would object to the extra expense, but if he did, she would meet it herself out of the money she’d already been paid.

‘Let’s go in,’ she suggested. ‘I’ll see about getting you some coffee, and then I’ll explain what it is I need.’

‘We might just as well skip the coffee,’ Partridge suggested, as the two students hefted the steel case by its evenly spaced handles and raised it between them like pallbearers raising a coffin, ‘and get straight down to business.’

But they couldn’t do that without explaining to Gassan, and he was rattled all over again when he realised what he was signing up to. ‘Are we sure that this is legal, Heather?’ he asked, drawing Kennedy aside. ‘It sounds as though it might raise issues of privacy and freedom of information.’

‘These are your premises,’ she explained. ‘All we’re doing is examining them for evidence of unauthorised access. We’re not assuming criminality, only trespass. We’re going to look around Room 37 and find out what was done there. Then when we brace our suspect, we’ll have some ammunition. This was a professional job, Emil. He won’t cave, he’ll stonewall you to the last inch. If you want to have any chance of finding out what happened that night, you’ll need to have a good part of the answer before you ask the question.’

She waited while Gassan thought it through, but she knew she was right and she didn’t have any doubt as to what he’d eventually decide. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Let’s do this.’

At Kennedy’s suggestion, they brought Rush in to help the two students ferry the rest of the components from Partridge’s van. While they were unpacking and setting up, Kennedy tried to explain to Gassan what the probe actually did, but very soon ran into the limits of her own understanding, and Partridge had to come to her rescue.

‘In the 1980s,’ he told Gassan, ‘two Swiss scientists developed a new kind of microscope, one that could scan at an atomic level. They called it AFM, atomic force microscopy. And they did great things with it. It could resolve images down to nanometer scales, with enormous accuracy. The only problem was that the image size, even for a single-pass scan, was colossal. So unless you were looking at incredibly tiny areas, it wasn’t feasible to use an AFM device.’

Away in the background, Kennedy could see Rush standing a little aside from the students. He was helping them whenever they needed him, passing them components from the boxes, holding the main body of the probe steady while Sturdy or Price connected a cable or a bracket to it. It was obvious that he was attracted to Sturdy — and that he had no chance at all because Sturdy and Price were already an item. The follies of youth, Kennedy thought.

She wrenched her attention back to Partridge, who was still talking about the Kelvin probe and its short but illustrious history. ‘But then,’ he said, ‘the University of Swansea got stuck into the original design and started to come up with some really sweet variations. They more or less invented a science called nanopotentiometry. It measures minute changes in electrical potential. The probe looks at the conductivity of an object’s surface. It creates a map of that electrical potential.’

Gassan was nodding, but his eyes were a little glazed.

‘You can use it for fingerprints,’ Kennedy told him, cutting to the chase. ‘It does a million other things, too, but for police it’s a fingerprint machine.’

Partridge looked pained at this oversimplification, but he nodded. ‘Traditional fingerprinting produces an image using oily residues from the skin surface. But those same residues alter the electro-magnetic profile of any object that you touch with your hands. So the Kelvin probe cuts out the middle man and looks at the conductivity of the object’s surface. It creates a map of electrical potential — on which fingerprints stand out like mile-high beacon fires. No need for developing or resolving agents. No need to touch the surface at all, so no danger of destroying or contaminating other kinds of evidence like DNA while you’re looking for a latent print. And you can programme it to recognise and respond to a specific print — your prime suspect, say. It’s like a magic lamp. Except it’s bloody hard to use, because you’ve got to adjust the sensitivity of the reader to a minute degree of accuracy to screen out other kinds of random or systemic variation in the electric field forces. Hence these two enthusiastic young people working their arses off in uncomplaining silence behind me.’

Kathy Sturdy and Will Price looked up, awkward and embarrassed, as Partridge gave them this accolade. They’d unpacked the components of the probe and assembled it beside its steel housing. Now Price was adjusting brackets and screws on its outer case, while Sturdy was taking readings from a small tablet computer that she’d attached to the device via an HDMI cable. Rush watched them, or at least he watched Sturdy, his expression rapt.

The scanning Kelvin probe didn’t look like a magic lamp. It didn’t look like a microscope, either. It looked like an artist’s impression of a vacuum cleaner from a sci-fi pulp published before vacuum cleaners had actually been invented. Every single component looked ramshackle and jury-rigged. The only high-tech thing about it was the image on the tablet PC, which formed and reformed itself out of bright-green grid lines from moment to moment.

Sturdy tweaked the image using virtual slide controls overlaid on it. She did this for a long time, before finally nodding to Price. He took the business end of the device — a scanning head about as long and thick as a foot ruler, attached to a three-metre length of cable — and ran it across a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall beside him.

The screen blanked, the gridlines reassembled themselves and a new image appeared. It was hard to make out what it was. Its planes of coagulated colour defied interpretation, until Sturdy, with a sweep of her hand across one of the sliders, caused the image to zoom out wide, revealing the curved surface of the fire extinguisher.

She zoomed in again and the surface dissolved into level upon level of fractal complexity.

‘Twenty?’ Price muttered to her. ‘Twenty-five?’

‘Twenty-five,’ she confirmed. ‘I’m going to heighten the contrast by half a per cent.’

‘Okay. Shall I hold steady?’

‘No, slow sweep. There. Up. Up by a couple of … stop.’

Price was pointing the scanner at the base of the fire extinguisher. Sturdy tapped and stroked with the tip of her index finger on the virtual controls. The screen blanked and remade itself in squares of a couple of centimetres on a side, settling to a preset level of magnification. Kennedy and Gassan found themselves staring at the raised whorls and ridges of a fingerprint.

‘And Bob’s your uncle,’ said Partridge, with some satisfaction.

‘My word,’ said Gassan, after a pause for genuine awe.

‘But that’s only the first battle,’ Kennedy reminded him — and the students. ‘There are going to be lots of prints in here. We’re looking for a particular set, and we’re going to give you a match in advance. Rush?’

‘Oh. Right.’ Rush reluctantly tore his gaze away from Sturdy. He reached into his pocket and removed a stainless steel fountain pen in a plastic evidence baggie. Kennedy had told him to go for something metallic if he could. The greater the electrical conductivity of a surface, the better the Kelvin scanner worked on it.

She took the bag and handed it to Sturdy. ‘How does this part work?’ Rush asked the student.

‘We find a print on the pen,’ she said, holding the bag gingerly by its corner, ‘and we enter it on the recognition software. Then we set the scanner to ignore anything that isn’t a match. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a full print off the pen, because then we’ve got the widest range for identifying partials.’

Kennedy turned to Professor Gassan. ‘And from that,’ she said to him, ‘we make an action-map of the room. We find out exactly where your intruder went and what he touched.’

‘Although that still won’t tell us if anything was taken,’ Gassan said doubtfully. ‘As we already discussed, Heather, this room is overspill from the British Library collection. We don’t have a catalogue.’

‘You busy, Rush?’ Kennedy asked.

Rush’s head snapped up. ‘Me?’ he said.

‘You.’

‘I … no. I’m good. What do you want?’

‘Go get me a catalogue,’ Kennedy told him.

10

It took three hours. Nobody at the British Library seemed to have the slightest idea what Rush was talking about when he mentioned the relic collection at Ryegate House. Or else they did, but they didn’t see any reason to let his problem become their crisis.

Finally, a bored clerical assistant found a third-generation photocopy of some pages marked on the first sheet in scrawled handwriting with the single word BOXED. ‘It might be this,’ he said.

It looked right, because it was broken down by room and the rooms were thirty-four to forty-one. It also looked piss-poor, because it was only broken down by room — not by aisle or box. But it was the best Rush was going to get, so he took it and went back to Ryegate House.

He found Partridge and the two students still scanning Room 37 while Kennedy was walking along the aisles laying Post-it notes down on the floor or affixing them to the shelf units, marking up the places where the Kelvin probe had already found matching fingerprints. Professor Gassan seemed to be present in a supervisory capacity — standing in a corner and watching with a mixture of fascination and concern.

Rush gave Kennedy the list and waited for her to fulminate in her turn, but she seemed unsurprised. She just nodded and handed it back to him.

‘Not a lot of use,’ he observed.

‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘But I’d have been really surprised at this stage to get anything better.’ She glanced across at Sturdy and Price, who’d reached the end of the last shelf unit and were now scanning the further wall. ‘We’re almost done,’ she said. ‘We’ll go over this stuff right here, then we’ll bring our suspect up to the boardroom and brace him. I want you there, Rush — and Professor Gassan, and maybe your boss, Thornedyke. Apart from that, we’re still saying nothing to everyone else until we’ve got the full story.’

‘Okay,’ Rush said.

At the other end of the room, Sturdy looked around at them and waited politely to be taken notice of. ‘I think we’re finished,’ she said.

Kennedy went over and conferred with her, while Rush scanned the room. For the first time, he thought about what it was he was seeing here: a three-dimensional map of the intruder’s movements around this space. Or maybe four-dimensional, since the clustering of the Post-it notes presumably indicated how long he’d spent in each part of the room.

He looked at Kennedy, who had caught his glance and read it correctly. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Everything comes back to this one area.’ She indicated the very end of aisle B, where Post-its grew in bristling thickets. ‘Whatever our intruder was interested in, it was definitely somewhere in this stretch. But he didn’t know exactly where.’

‘Seven boxes were handled extensively,’ Sturdy chimed in. ‘These seven here, all sequential, all grouped together. The rest weren’t touched at all, except for this one, right next to the others — a broad palm-print, which I think might mean that it was pushed to one side, out of the way.’

She looked at Kennedy as she said this, a little nervously, as though hypothesising might be Kennedy’s prerogative. Kennedy nodded encouragement. ‘That’s what I’d have said. So?’

‘So he knew what he was looking for, but not exactly where it was.’

Because he was working from this list, Rush realised, suddenly. And it breaks the books down by room, but not by box. Maybe he started at a random point, or maybe he took a guess based on the length of the overall list and the position on the list of the thing he wanted.

Which meant …

It came to Rush, then, that he’d had the whole thing arse-backwards all this time. He’d been assuming that the intruder had passed through Room 37 on his way out of the building and that his real business had been conducted somewhere else. But the clustering was a smoking gun.

The intruder was after a book, or maybe several books.

‘And the fact that he stopped after seven boxes,’ Kennedy pointed out, their thoughts running on parallel tracks, ‘means that he got what he came for.’

‘In box seven.’

‘This one.’ Kennedy laid her hand on the lid of it. ‘Emil, do you mind?’

‘Of course, of course.’ Gassan had been absorbing all this in fascinated, perturbed silence. He waved her on hurriedly. Kennedy opened up the box and slid out the first volume. It wasn’t really a book: it was a slender pamphlet, the paper foxed with age and ragged along every edge, in a stiff Mylar sleeve.

She held it up and showed it to them all. It was hard to tell what the title was. Everything was in the same font, but in a wide variety of point sizes, with italics thrown in seemingly at random.

‘A New Year’s gift for the Parliament,’ Kennedy read aloud.

‘By Gerrard Winstanley,’ Gassan finished.

Kennedy scanned down the cover. ‘Yeah,’ she confirmed. ‘That’s the one. Do you know him?’

‘Winstanley was a Digger. They were proto-communists, at the time of the English Civil War. They believed in shared ownership of the land.’

Rush consulted the list. He found the pamphlet reasonably quickly. ‘Middle of the seventeenth century,’ he confirmed. ‘Sixteen fifty-two, according to this.’

Kennedy went back to the box and fished out the next book. Another pamphlet, very similar to the first both in appearance and in general condition: The Law of Freedom in a Platform, Rush read over her shoulder. She slid it back and took out another book, square-bound and obviously a lot more modern, entitled Political and Religious Extremism in the Interregnum. She turned it sideways on to read the catalogue number on its spine.

‘We might be in luck,’ she said. ‘It looks as though the books were put in the box in catalogue order. Now that we’ve got the list to cross-reference against, we’ve got a good chance of figuring out if anything is missing.’

‘Then let’s continue,’ Gassan said. He took the list from Rush’s hands, laying claim to it.

Kennedy took the box, Gassan read aloud from the list, Rush, Price and Sturdy watched in solemn silence and John Partridge retired into a corner of the room to light up a strictly illegal cigarette. It only took them ten minutes to get to the first missing item.

It was the only missing item. From there to the end of the box, everything was in apple-pie order.

Rush was amazed. Mostly at the power and versatility of the Kelvin probe, but underneath that, he was amazed that anyone would go to so much trouble for a book.

‘I suppose it’s valuable,’ Kennedy mused. ‘It’s getting on for four hundred years old.’

‘Which is nothing,’ Partridge said drily. ‘I don’t know very much about the antiques business, obviously — not my field at all — but at a generous estimate I’d say that a book from that time would be worth … well, no more than a hundred thousand pounds or so. Professor Gassan, would you agree?’

‘I’m hardly an expert on the market value of these things,’ Gassan protested. ‘But I’d be surprised if that book was insured for more than fifty or sixty thousand.’

Rush thought about that. There were any number of other books in the box whose worth was likely to be at least as great, and they didn’t weigh all that much, so it would have been easy for the intruder to grab a handful of them and hit the road.

But they all knew, from the evidence of the fingerprints, that that wasn’t what had happened. You search through seven boxes, take one item, then stop: obviously, that one item was what you came for.

And then what? You burn it? Because what Rush had seen in that other box, a couple of aisles over, was definitely ash.

Gassan was looking at Kennedy expectantly. Now that she’d brought off this miracle, his expectations of her were clearly running very high.

‘Very well, Heather,’ he said. ‘You’ve gathered your evidence. I presume you have a plan for how to use it?’

‘I think we’re ready to meet our suspect,’ Kennedy said. ‘We’ll need to use the boardroom again.’

‘The boardroom?’ Gassan frowned. ‘Perhaps my office would be more discreet?’

‘I bet it would,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But I don’t see any harm in having a little shock and awe on our side.’

11

‘You started here six months ago,’ Kennedy said.

She’d positioned Alex Wales so he’d get the full court-of-the-star-chamber effect, his chair facing theirs across the intimidating rampart of the boardroom table. Kennedy herself, Emil Gassan and the security guy, Thornedyke, sat in a row more or less at the centre of the long table. On Kennedy’s orders, Rush stood off to one side, right at Wales’s shoulder, to ram home how serious and official this all was. But Wales didn’t seem troubled. There was nothing in his bearing that suggested he had anything to hide. He stood erect, ignoring the chair, arms at his sides and head slightly lowered, like an actor at an audition.

‘Yes,’ he confirmed.

‘And prior to that, you were working at the British Library.’ Rush thought the ‘prior’ was a nice touch. Kennedy was going for a forensic style.

‘Yes,’ Wales said again.

‘But you didn’t say so on your application. You hid that connection, even though it might have been considered relevant experience. Why was that?’

‘I wasn’t there for very long,’ Wales said, with a shrug. ‘And I left for private reasons. Reasons that were nothing to do with my conditions of employment. I didn’t really want to answer questions about that.’

‘Right,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘And what about your friend, Mark Silver? What was his reason for not saying that he’d worked there?’

Wales looked to Professor Gassan, and then to Thornedyke, as though the question were unfair and he expected that one or other of them might step in to defend him. ‘Mark Silver wasn’t my friend,’ he said. The heavy emphasis on the last word left them to infer that there was a relationship there, but it wasn’t one he was going to elaborate on without being asked.

‘No?’ Kennedy’s tone was politely sceptical. ‘You arrived at the British Library together. You worked together. You left together. Then you both got jobs here within a few weeks of each other.’

‘Did we?’ Wales asked. ‘Mark must have worked in a different department from me.’

‘He was a security guard,’ Kennedy said. ‘It would have been hard to miss him.’

Wales didn’t answer — but then, she hadn’t phrased it as a question.

‘There was actually a gap in time between the two of you resigning from your jobs at the library and the start of your employment here,’ Kennedy took up again.

‘I was out of work for seven weeks,’ Wales said.

‘And in that gap — back in February — there were a number of attempts to break into Ryegate House. Attempts that failed.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘There’s nothing to link me to those attempts,’ Wales said.

‘Maybe not,’ Kennedy allowed.

She glanced at the file in front of her, flicked through its pages and checked them against another sheet on the desk: a yellow carbon copy from a multi-part document.

‘But I was curious about the timing,’ she said, ‘and I wondered whether either you or Mark Silver had any prior convictions for breaking and entering. I didn’t want to rely on something that might turn out to be complete coincidence. So I went back to the police background check that the Library ran on you when you started there. Do you know what I found?’

‘I’ve never been in any trouble with the police.’

‘Alex Wales has never been in any trouble with the police,’ Kennedy corrected him. ‘But you’re not him, are you? The real Alex Wales lived in Preston, until he left home three years ago, aged sixteen. His family reported him missing, but that was as far as it went. A routine security search would only be looking for convictions, so it wouldn’t pick up that missing persons report. You were safe unless the real Alex Wales popped up and asked for his identity back, and what were the odds of that?’

Kennedy stood. ‘I want to show you something,’ she said, crossing to a far corner of the room, where an object stood swathed in a green tarpaulin. She hauled the tarpaulin away and threw it aside, revealing a large cardboard box.

Wales stared at the box. A frown suffused his face in slow motion. Encouraged, Kennedy let the silence stretch out until it was really uncomfortable, but Wales said nothing.

‘So there were those attempted break-ins, back in February,’ Kennedy resumed at last. ‘And then there was an actual break-in, a few weeks ago. Quite a professional one. The police couldn’t offer any explanation as to how someone had managed to get past all the security to waltz into a locked room. The answer, of course, is that he didn’t. The burglar was already in the building when the annexe closed for the night. Already in the room, in fact. Curled up inside that box.’

Wales smiled coldly. ‘That doesn’t seem very likely,’ he said.

‘No,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘It doesn’t, does it? You’d expect the swipe records to show that someone didn’t go home that night. A Friday night, for the record.’

‘The break-in took place on Monday night or Tuesday morning.’ It was the first time Professor Gassan had spoken. He looked a little out of his depth, clearly not fully briefed, but trying to seem as though he were on top of everything anyway.

Kennedy gave the professor a brief glance, shook her head. ‘No, Professor, it didn’t. That’s how it looked. But it only looked that way because it went wrong. Mr Wales here got into position on Friday, just before the evening lockdown. He swiped into Room 37 at 4.53 p.m. Seven minutes later, right on time, he swiped out for the day and — to all appearances — went home. But you didn’t, did you, Mr Wales? You handed your swipe card to your friend Mark Silver at the door of Room 37. He swiped you out at the end of the day, while you went to the box, carefully chosen to be outside the field of vision of the two CCTV cameras, climbed inside and waited for everything to go quiet. Easy enough to arrange, and so long as Silver chooses his moment, nobody’s likely to notice one man swiping out with two cards, one after the other. All he had to do was swipe out as himself, then curse as though the machine didn’t recognise the card and swipe out again as you.’

Kennedy opened the lid of the box and tilted it to show the interior to Wales, and then to each of the others in turn.

She turned it in her hands so that they could see the discarded clothes and the thin layer of ash around and under them.

Wales murmured something under his breath. Rush couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like a foreign language.

Kennedy stared at the man curiously. ‘What did you say?’

Wales didn’t answer.

‘Not much to show for a three-day occupancy,’ she went on, tapping the box. ‘Did you fit yourself with a catheter or were you just wearing a nappy? Either way, it still meant three days without eating or drinking too much, because there’s a limit to what you can carry away with you.’

Wales met Kennedy’s gaze full on. ‘There are limits to most things,’ he said. His bland tone undercut the implied threat.

‘Mr Wales wanted to be alone with the books, for however long it took,’ Kennedy said, ignoring the remark. ‘His intention — his sole purpose for being there — was to search, box by box, for a particular item. Once he’d found it, all he had to do was to wait out the weekend. Because at start of day on Monday, Mark Silver was going to come back, swipe Wales in at the main entrance, then come to Room 37 to let him out.’

‘Heather,’ Gassan protested, ‘what are we assuming here? That these two men went looking for the Toller book at the British Library and followed its trail back to here?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m assuming.’ Kennedy was watching Wales’s face, which had changed at the mention of Johann Toller — his expression becoming first more intense and then more closed and guarded. ‘But all they could find at the library was the same list that Rush got for us. That got them as far as Room 37. From there on in, they were on their own.

‘And that was where things started to go wrong. Because Mark Silver didn’t come back on the Monday. He’d been killed, over the course of the weekend, by a hit-and-run driver. The kind of million-to-one accident you can’t plan for. Mr Wales had the book in his possession by then — the one that he’d been looking for all along—’

‘A Trumpet Speaking Judgment, or God’s Plan Revealed in Sundry Signes,’ Glyn Thornedyke read aloud from the piece of notepaper in front of him, in a tone that sounded slightly pained.

‘—but zero hour rolled round and Silver didn’t show.’ Kennedy turned back to Wales. ‘You didn’t know he was dead, of course, but you knew he’d miscarried. So now you had to come up with another way of getting clear.’

‘I really don’t understand,’ Thornedyke protested. ‘This book dates from the seventeenth century. I’m sure it’s quite rare, but it’s not as though this were a … a Gutenberg Bible or a Caxton hymnal. What was the point?’

‘Yes,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘What was the point, Mr Wales? Care to tell us? I’m wondering about the ashes in the box, particularly. Did you steal the book or did you burn it?’

Wales had had his arms at his sides all this time. Now he folded them and bowed his head again with a sigh of what sounded like resignation.

‘It would be impossible to make you understand,’ he said.

‘Well, we’ll get to that,’ Kennedy said. ‘Anyway, there you were. Mission accomplished, but stuck in your box with no way of getting out again. Plan A had obviously gone up in smoke. Plan B was the knife, wasn’t it? The knife with blood on it. Interesting that you were carrying a knife in the first place — and I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that armed robbery is a whole different animal from breaking and entering. But anyway, the knife was what got you out of that room.

‘I couldn’t figure out, at first, how someone who obviously knew where the CCTV cameras were, and stayed out of their way the whole time he was in the room, would screw up so spectacularly right at the end. Screw up twice, in fact — letting the camera see him just that one time and leaving the knife behind.

‘But by now, making sure you were seen was the whole point. You waited until night. Then you cut yourself — on the arm or the leg, maybe. Somewhere that wouldn’t be too visible. You left the knife right out in the open where it would be certain to be found. And you walked into the eye-line of the camera, as you climbed up into the ceiling space. It was all improvised, but it was really good stuff. It looked like you were making your getaway.

‘In reality, you came down in a different part of the room, where you knew the cameras couldn’t see you. And all you had to do after that was to climb back into your box and wait until morning. In the morning the security team found the knife and raised the alarm, which was what you needed them to do. Because the only way you could walk out of Room 37 without Mark Silver’s help was if the normal swipe-in-swipe-out restrictions had been lifted. And they had to be lifted to let the police come in and search the room.’

Kennedy had been holding the box all this time. She let it fall now and it made a hollow, funereal thud as it hit the floor.

‘So that was why you weren’t there on Monday, or first-thing on Tuesday morning, but then suddenly you popped up again in the middle of the day. I don’t know how you picked your moment to climb out of the box. I’m guessing you just waited for silence and took a punt. Then you either walked on out before you could be challenged, or you stayed right there in the room as though you were part of the search. You had to leave your outfit in the box, but of course you’d brought a change of clothes in any case. It was just a shame that the room was sealed after that and you couldn’t get back inside, unsupervised, to grab your blacks and dispose of them. Am I close?’

Wales smiled — a smile that saw what was coming and welcomed it. ‘Very close,’ he admitted. ‘Very close indeed.’

Something was wrong.

Kennedy had questioned scores of suspects during her years in the Met, and had sat in on the questioning of many more. She’d honed her skills both at piling on the pressure and at reading the body language of the man or woman she was interrogating — because pretty much everything, in a good interrogation, comes down to the accuracy of that reading and how you let it shape the questions.

Alex Wales’s body language was flat-out wrong. Fear or arrogance would both have been fine, and there was a whole range in-between that Kennedy would have recognised and known what to do with. But what Wales was radiating, despite his best efforts to disguise it, was something else entirely. It was anticipation.

Every now and then, he would lift himself up very slightly onto the balls of his feet, just for a moment or two, and there was a residual tension in his posture even when he was pantomiming dismay or resignation. He was tense and excited about something that was coming, something that he knew would happen soon. But Kennedy had no idea what that something was, right up to the point where she mentioned Mark Silver’s death.

Then something happened to Alex Wales’s eyes and Kennedy felt a jolt of pure shock rush through her from the centre on out to the extremities, as though someone had just plugged her heart into a live socket.

Wales’s eyes reddened.

They became bloodshot with a suddenness that was almost surreal. It was as though blood were welling up in them like tears, waiting to be shed.

She had seen this before. Haemolacria. It was the side effect of kelalit, a very potent drug in the methamphetamine family. Three years earlier, back when she was still a cop, Kennedy had run across a group of people who all took the drug, and all displayed the same unsettling trait. They called themselves Elohim, or Messengers, and they were the holy assassins of a secret tribe of humanity — the Judas People. It occurred to Kennedy now that when Wales had seen the ashes in the box, when he’d murmured under his breath, his expression had changed — become for a moment much more serious, even solemn. He’d looked like a man in church, kneeling at the altar for holy communion. And she was sure that whatever it was he’d said, he’d been speaking to the ashes, rather than to anyone else in the room.

If Alex Wales was on kelalit, the reddening of his eyes indicated that his system was preparing for sudden, violent action. The drug would give him the speed and the strength to kill like a demon unleashed from hell.

She knew this because she had seen it happen. She had watched her own partner cut down by one of these monsters — had faced them herself, in a case where their conscienceless atrocities had been triggered by something as banal and trivial as the translation of a lost gospel. So if she and Gassan and Thornedyke and poor puppy-like Rush were going to survive past the next few seconds, Kennedy would have to pull something out of her ass real fast.

And in the meantime, she just kept talking. Because if Wales had wanted to kill them straight out, they’d be dead already. There had to be something else he wanted, too.

‘You had me guessing, at first,’ Kennedy said, improvising recklessly, ‘about the target. The book. What was so special about it. Why you’d gone to all that trouble to find it and acquire it. False identities. Breaking and entering. Camping out in a box. Then I realised that it might not be about the book at all.’

Wales scowled in slow motion. Obviously that guess had gone way wide. It was all about the book. But Wales was still listening.

You want to know what we know, Kennedy thought. You want to be absolutely sure we’re still blind before you pull the plug on this. Or else you want to know who else, besides us, has to be taken down.

And maybe it would slow you down a little if you thought that might be a long list.

‘So at this point,’ she said, pushing back her chair and standing up, ‘I started to call in some favours. People I still knew in the Met. Academics. Acquaintances in the intelligence community. I shared data with friends and gave them the whole story. Your name. Silver’s name. The title of the book, and my guesses as to who you really are under that nom de guerre.’

Gassan made an audible gasp. He was staring at Kennedy in horror. ‘Heather,’ he protested weakly. ‘We stipulated discretion.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You did.’ She was moving now, around the edge of the table, and Wales was turning his head to keep her in sight.

‘You have no idea who we are,’ he said. And his voice had changed. The humility had fallen away, the naked edge of something completely other showing through.

‘I know this much,’ Kennedy said, still ambling towards the head of the table — not even looking at the door, although it lay full in her path. ‘I know that you and Mark Silver don’t regard anything you did as a crime, and you don’t feel any sense of guilt for it. Even if you’d had to kill, as you more than half-expected you might, you’d have been ready for—’

That was as far as she got. Wales saw where Kennedy was heading or else just guessed — as Kennedy had guessed — that something wasn’t playing out as it should. He stepped into her path and suddenly, as his hands unfolded from his chest, he had a knife balanced in each of them.

The second shock was as painful as the first. Kennedy knew the knives, too: handleless sica blades. Their unsettling, asymmetrical shape cropped up in her nightmares.

‘Thornedyke,’ she shouted. ‘Do it!’ It meant nothing, it was just a distraction. Thornedyke scrambled up and staggered back from the table, utterly terrified. Professor Gassan, with more presence of mind, lunged for the phone.

Rush went for Wales and the speed of his reflexes was what saved Kennedy from dying in that first moment. He charged the man from behind, trying to pin his arms to his sides. For a moment he succeeded, but Wales bent from the knees, dropping cleanly out of Rush’s grip, then jabbed up and back with his left arm. His elbow slammed into Rush’s crotch and the boy folded with a whuff of agonised breath. Wales rose as he fell, the elbow still extended so that it hit Rush in the face with solid, sickening force.

By that time, Gassan had the phone receiver to his ear and his hand on the key pad. As he pressed 1 — for an external line — Wales’s right arm straightened like a whip and the knife that had been in his hand was in Gassan’s chest. The professor sat back down again, eyes wide, hands fluttering in uncoordinated protest.

Kennedy threw herself forward before Wales could recover his balance, and grappled with him. It wasn’t an attack, it was more of an embrace. She was hoping to trap Wales’s arms against his body, as Rush had, and stop him from using the remaining knife.

He twisted against her and Kennedy could feel his intimidating strength. She couldn’t maintain the hold. Wales’s left arm came free and he slammed her hard against the wall. But they were so close together now that it was hard for him to bring the blade to bear against her. He stepped back.

Rush — amazingly, still in the fight — kicked at Wales’s legs. It was a glancing blow, with almost no leverage behind it, but Wales stumbled, and it took him a fraction of a second to right himself — long enough for Kennedy to throw her left arm out, smashing the glass on the security alarm. The sound of the thin plate breaking was almost inaudible.

The sound of all the room’s door locks cycling was much louder.

Wales drove her into the wall with the full weight of his body and kicked her legs out from under her as she fell. At the same time, the shutters came down across the windows with a grinding shriek of metal on metal, taking out most of the light.

‘Lockdown,’ Kennedy gasped. She was on her stomach, pressed painfully into the angle of wall and floor, Wales’s knee in the small of her back, his body overlaid on hers so that every movement she might have made seemed to be forestalled in a different way. Wales held the knife right up against her throat: she felt the sting as it broke her skin and something like the heat of a blush as a little of her spilled blood trickled down into the hollow of her breastbone. ‘No way in or out, Alex. So whatever you do or don’t do to us, you’re not walking away from this.’

The man was bending low over her, his face almost on the same level as Kennedy’s and an inch or so away. His wide eyes, alien and inscrutable, stared sidelong into her own. The red tide brimmed behind them, threatening to spill down his cheeks.

‘The average response time is twelve minutes,’ Kennedy wheezed, fighting the urge to pull away from the blade — as though the man were a cat and any movement from his prey would trigger instincts so strong that conscious thought wouldn’t come into it.

Rush was still down, or down again, folded around his injured crotch. Emil Gassan had slumped back in his chair, hands clasped to his chest in an incongruous attitude of devotion. Thornedyke had backed away until he hit the wall and stood frozen, watching, his lower jaw hanging down in mute horror and dismay. ‘And there’s what,’ Kennedy said, forcing the words out from lungs that felt hollowed out like gourds, ‘six or seven doors between you and the street? How good are you with locks?’

It was impossible to tell what was going on behind the red-rimmed, open wounds that were Wales’s eyes. He said nothing, and the razor edge at Kennedy’s throat didn’t move. But the expression on his face, now, was one of serious thought.

Rush spoke for the first time, from behind them. Kennedy didn’t dare turn to see what the boy was doing or if he’d managed to get upright again. His voice was strained and tremulous. ‘Alex,’ he said, ‘listen to me. What you’ve done … it’s just breaking and entering. Maybe theft. You might not even go to jail. But if Professor Gassan dies, that’s murder. You’ve got to stop this. Give yourself up. Don’t be stupid. Nobody cares that you nicked a bloody book.’

Footsteps sounded from outside and someone knocked on the door — tentative at first, then more loudly. A second later there was an answering knock from one of the other doors. The room was surrounded, and the police were coming.

Wales seemed to weigh these things in the balance. He let out a long, slow, steady breath, but his left arm tensed. The blade bit a fraction of an inch deeper into Kennedy’s flesh, making her flinch and stiffen.

‘I swear to God,’ Rush said again, desperately, ‘you won’t go to jail.’

Wales straightened, removing his weight from Kennedy’s back. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I won’t.’

He drew the knife across his own throat.

12

Some hours — maybe four, maybe five — went by in fuzzy staccato. Disconnected freeze-frames, the intervals between them filled with endless replays of that one indelible instant. Kennedy tried to shut it out with other thoughts, but it ran over and under and through them, the way Alex Wales’s blood had run over the knife blade and his shirt and the table and the oatmeal carpet and Kennedy’s hands and Rush’s hands as they tried to stanch the endless flow.

And through it all, Wales had smiled at them, contemptuously amused by their futile attempts to keep him alive against his will.

Kennedy had given two statements to the police, one to the regular Met, the second to one of the many anti-terrorist agencies, all of whom were on high alert because of the recent spate of fires, explosions and car-bombings. There was no question of her being blamed for the death. Rush’s testimony agreed with hers on every count, and the investigating officers were seeing these events in the light of the attack on her, two nights ago, where it now seemed more likely than not that Wales had been the aggressor. Thornedyke and Gassan would corroborate Kennedy’s story, too, no doubt, but neither could be approached for an opinion right then. Thornedyke had gone into screaming hysterics immediately after Wales’s suicide, had continued to show signs of distress and panic through the removal of the body, and on arrival at the hospital had been put under sedation. Emil Gassan was in intensive care and might not survive.

The forensics, too, supported an assumption of suicide. The angle of the gash in Alex Wales’s throat was consistent with a self-inflicted wound and although nobody had said so to Kennedy, they would obviously have checked the knife-hilt for prints by this time and found only those of Wales himself.

But the emergency room staff were if anything even more reluctant to let go of Kennedy than the police were, convinced first that some of the blood that had dried and caked on her must be her own and then that she must be suffering from shock.

And maybe she was, at that, but hot, sweet tea wasn’t going to help her out of it. She had to get away from solicitous bystanders and professionally neutral cops, and work out for herself what all this meant.

The Judas People. The Judas People running headlong into her and Emil Gassan. How could such a thing happen? What mechanism could even begin to explain it?

She had to call Izzy. Make sure Izzy was okay. Okay, maybe it didn’t make too much sense, when you looked at it closely — why wouldn’t she be? — but the instinct was too strong. Impatient of getting herself discharged from the hospital, or of persuading the friendly, inquiring detectives to tell her she was free to go, she went to the bathroom and called from inside a locked toilet.

Izzy didn’t answer and Kennedy started to panic. But as she was in the process of dialling again to leave a message, the phone registered an incoming call.

‘Sorry, babe,’ Izzy said. ‘Missed you by a second, there. Everything okay?’

Everything wasn’t, but Kennedy was suddenly tongue-tied. Izzy was still safest where she was. And telling her what had happened would mean an argument, because she’d want to come back and look after Kennedy, be there for her, and that was the last thing that Kennedy wanted right then. The assassins of the Judas People didn’t work alone, they worked in twos or threes. The man who’d called himself Alex Wales was down and he wasn’t getting up again, but there could be — would be — others.

Kennedy stammered through a few minutes’ worth of banal lies about how everything was okay and how nothing at all, either good or bad, had happened to her.

‘Well, God knows, I can sympathise,’ Izzy said, sounding glum. ‘A game of Trivial Pursuit with Hayley and Richard has been the highlight of my trip so far. And it was the family edition, babe, so they took me to the cleaners. Have you ever heard of Frankie Cocozza?’

‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘Izzy, I’ve got to go. Someone just came in.’

‘Okay. What’s that echo? It sounds like you’re in the loo. If you’re in the loo, and someone just came in, you’ve got a harassment suit right there.’

‘I’m … in a hallway.’ Kennedy’s mind was still firing randomly and she realised suddenly that the next day’s papers would be full of the violent suicide at Ryegate House. There was no way Izzy wasn’t going to get to hear about it. So she switched horses in mid-banality, came clean and gave Izzy a heavily redacted version of recent events that amounted to: someone died.

‘Right in front of you?’ Izzy demanded. ‘Someone just died, with you standing there? I don’t get it.’

‘It was … it’s hard to explain, Izzy. But I’m fine. I’m totally fine. He killed himself.’

‘He what?’

‘He killed himself. It was the guy who broke into the museum storeroom. We caught him. But he killed himself.’

‘Oh my God.’ The long silence at the other end of the line indicated how nonplussed Izzy was: silence wasn’t normally her thing. ‘So it’s over?’

‘That part of it’s over.’

‘Then it’s safe for me to pack up and—’

‘No. No, it’s not. Give me a couple more days.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

‘A couple of days is how long I’m gonna last, Heather, with the wicked witch giving me the evil eye every time I use a bad word.’

‘All right.’

‘You know how many bad words I use.’

‘All right, Izzy.’

‘No, babe. It’s not. It’s not all right. You’re telling me you’re fine, but you don’t sound fine, and I know how you lock things down inside. God knows, I paid a lot to find out. Say the word and I’m there. I’m there right now.’

‘No, Izzy. Stay where you are. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Okay. Okay. Heather?’

‘Yes?’

‘Call me tomorrow.’

‘I will.’

‘Promise.’

‘I promise I will.’

‘You know, some people find dirty phone calls cathartic. If you need my professional services …’

‘Oh, for the love of God! Tomorrow, Izzy.’ Kennedy hung up, even more restless and distracted than she’d been before the call. She missed Izzy, still resented her, was afraid for her, wanted never to see her again and wanted to see her right then.

And then there were the Judas People, who still made no sense. No sense at all.

When the doctors and nurses were done with their scattershot solicitude, they reluctantly agreed to release Kennedy on her own recognisance.

Before she left, she asked about the others. Both Gassan and Thornedyke were unconscious, one was stable, and there wouldn’t be any more news before morning. Rush had been released a couple of hours before.

But he hadn’t gotten far. When Kennedy walked out onto the street, he was waiting for her right by the entrance — leaning on a sign which told her that this was University College Hospital, on Euston Road. She hadn’t even thought to ask, and if anyone had told her, the news hadn’t sunk in.

Rush looked haggard and punch-drunk with tiredness. The right side of his face was swollen, the eye mostly closed.

‘I want to talk this over,’ he told her.

‘Tonight?’ Kennedy asked.

‘Tonight.’

‘It can’t wait?’

Rush shrugged — a gesture that took in his injury, hers, the hospital, the whole crazy situation. ‘Well, you tell me.’

Kennedy hesitated. Of all the questions he might ask her, there were only a few she’d be happy to answer. But she had to admit that there were a whole lot more that he was entitled to ask. She looked at her watch: it was 9.30 p.m. The night was — grotesquely and impossibly — still young.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk.’

They took a cab back into town. Kennedy had it drop them off at a pub on Upper St Martin’s Lane, the Salisbury. They could have walked, but the presence of the cabbie constrained conversation and gave Kennedy time to think about what she was going to say to Rush.

The boy tried to buy the round. Kennedy sent him to find some seats instead, got the drinks — a pint of lager for him, Jack Daniels over ice for her — and went and joined him. He’d chosen a corner table, was sitting with his eyes on the door. His hands, as he drank off half the pint in one long swallow, were shaking. His battered face was drawing more than a few curious or uneasy glances from people at the tables around them.

‘So how are you holding up?’ she asked.

Rush just shook his head. She took that to mean that the jury was still out.

‘You saw it coming,’ he said. ‘Some of it. You knew what Wales was going to do.’

‘I had no idea what he was going to do.’

Rush took another sip, put the mostly empty glass down. ‘But you knew he was dangerous. That he had a weapon. You were moving towards the alarm before he pulled those knives. So I’m thinking you could tell me what the hell it was I saw today. Because right now, I feel like I’m drowning. I don’t know what just happened to me. I almost died, and it’s like a meteor fell out of the sky and hit me in the head, or something. It makes about that much sense to me, you know?’

Kennedy swirled the glass, let the ice clink against its sides, but felt no inclination to drink. Her stomach was as tight as a fist.

‘You’re in mild shock,’ she said. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t go back into work. If I were you, I’d take a few days off. What you’ve just been through wasn’t business as usual.’

He stared at her, bemused and unhappy. ‘Is that what you’re going to do? Take a few days off?’

‘No,’ Kennedy admitted.

‘No. Because there’s something bigger behind this, isn’t there?’

‘Yes.’

His good eye widened. ‘I knew it. I knew it from your face. I want you to tell me about it.’

‘I can’t do that, Rush.’

‘Can’t?’

‘Won’t, then. Trust me, it’s a lot better for you if you don’t know. If you don’t get any closer to this than you already are.’

‘What does that mean?’ Rush asked.

Kennedy tried to pick her words with care, but she felt stupid and tongue-tied. ‘It’s the sort of thing … once you know it, you can’t just walk away. There are consequences.’ It was the wrong thing to say, she could see from his face.

‘I’ll take my chances,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Look, I do feel like I owe you something, Rush. But it’s not an explanation, it’s a warning. You asked me if I knew who Alex Wales was.’

‘Do you?’

‘I know his … family. I’ve met them before and I know what they’re like. They’re going to be looking for payback for what happened to him. From everyone who was in that room, just as soon as they find out who was there. So your best bet is to get far away from Ryegate House for a while and let this die down.’

‘And you think if they really want to find me, they won’t keep looking?’

Damn. Good question. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘They’ll keep looking.’

‘Exactly. And you’re going straight back in there tomorrow morning and picking up the investigation, right? I’m not stupid, Heather. Not as stupid as I look, anyway. I know there’s stuff you didn’t work out. Questions you still need to get answered.’

Kennedy’s heart sank. ‘Rush, questions are pretty much all I’ve got,’ she said, allowing her exasperation to show through in her voice. ‘These people broke into Aladdin’s cave and stole a single book. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe they broke in and burned a book. Can you come up with a plausible explanation for that? Because I can’t. And that’s before we even get to the part where I let Emil Gassan, who I kind of count as a friend, get stabbed — maybe fatally — right in front of me. So yes, I’m still hired. I’m still on the job. But your job description is a little different from mine.’

‘I didn’t even mean any of that,’ Rush said.

‘No? Then what did you mean?’

‘I mean why was Wales still there? He stole — okay, stole or else destroyed — that book three weeks ago. If the job was finished, he should have cut and run.’

‘So?’

‘So the job wasn’t done. He came back because he had unfinished business, and whatever it was, it was something that made it worth the risk of sticking around through a police investigation.’

Kennedy had reached the same conclusion, but she didn’t want to have this conversation with Rush. She just wanted him to understand how close he was to the edge of a precipice and to have the sense to walk in the opposite direction.

‘Have you got any holiday coming?’ she asked.

‘Holiday?’ Rush was derisory. ‘I haven’t even finished my probation yet. I’m casual labour.’

‘Then be casual about it,’ Kennedy said. ‘Don’t turn up for work tomorrow. If they bounce you, shake it off and walk away. You’re young. You’ll bounce right back. Stay away from Ryegate House. And if anyone asks you about what went down today, don’t answer.’

‘What if it’s the police?’ Rush demanded sardonically.

‘If it’s the police, stonewall them. You don’t remember, you didn’t see, nobody told you a thing. You’re just poor bloody infantry.’

‘You’re making a lot of assumptions.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like that death means the same thing to me that it does to you.’

‘Death means the same thing to everyone,’ Kennedy said sharply. ‘It means your hearts stops, your brain cools and people start referring to you as “the body”. There’s no such thing as a good death, Rush. There are just some that are worse than others.’

Rush tapped his beer glass with his thumbnail, watching it rather than looking at her. ‘My best mate died in a knife fight at school,’ he said, in a tone that was almost conversational. ‘He got stabbed. And my first girlfriend killed herself with sleeping pills because her step-dad raped her. She sent me a text to say goodbye and I couldn’t get there in time. She must have known I wouldn’t, but she wrote that message anyway. I still have it. I went after him and almost killed him, except that when I had him on the ground I couldn’t do it. Didn’t have the right mindset, I suppose.’

‘Did any of this come up in your job interview?’ Kennedy asked laconically.

He shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago.’

She sighed. ‘Okay, I get it. You’re telling me you know about this dark, grown-up stuff. Well, maybe you do, at that. If you’re sure you want the truth, I’ll give it to you.’

‘I want it,’ he said at once.

So she told him the whole story — or at least, as much of it as was hers to tell.

She started with the death of Chris Harper, her partner, who bled out in her arms after taking a wound from one of the Messengers’ poisoned knives. It was hard for her to keep her voice steady. Even after three years, it still hurt to remember.

She talked about the Judas People for what must have been an hour or more. She told Rush how they lived as a separate tribe within the mass of humanity. How they hid in the cities of the Earth, choosing places where there was sufficient density of population to hide them, and how they’d perfected the arts of camouflage to the point where they left no footprint on history, no record of their comings or their goings.

Rush kept quiet for most of it and let her talk.

‘And they really believe they’re descended from the serpent of Eden?’ he asked, when she’d finished.

‘By way of Cain and Judas,’ Kennedy said.

‘But the serpent was the Devil.’

Kennedy shrugged. ‘That’s our version. Their version is that he was an emissary of the true God who stands above and outside creation. So Cain was special, and all Cain’s offspring are special, whereas Eve begat a lineage of sinners and wastrels. But they name themselves after Judas because he’s the one who made the covenant with God on their behalf.’

‘And the deal was?’

‘Three thousand years in the wilderness. For all that time, the children of Adam are the stewards of God’s Creation. But after that time is up, the faithful — the true heirs of Cain and Judas — will be given their reward. Which is everything. Dominion over the whole world.’

Rush absorbed this for a few moments in silence. ‘Three thousand years counting from when?’ he asked at last.

‘Well, let’s just say that God should have called by now. Judas made the covenant about two thousand years ago, but the date that was used as a reference point was around a thousand years BC. The unification of the tribes of Israel, under King David. That was the cornerstone of history, as far as Judas was concerned. The one moment in time that everybody knew and nobody was going to argue about. So that was what he and Christ used as a reference point. At least, that’s what the Judas Gospel says.’

‘And they waited all that time …’ Rush mused.

‘They’re still waiting. They’re not happy about it, but at this point they don’t have a lot of choice. The thing is, there aren’t that many of them. And three thousand years is a long time as far as genetic inbreeding goes. So they come out into the world every so often. I mean, some of them do.’

Rush was looking at her with a baffled kind of expression, so Kennedy went on, picking her words carefully. This part of the story belonged to others. It wasn’t for her to tell how Leo Tillman’s family had been stolen from him, and how he’d later killed his own sons, at Dovecote Farm in Surrey, without knowing who they were. That secret, at least, she intended to take to her grave. ‘They send women out, to get pregnant. To bring in new genes. The women meet Adamite men, get married and raise families with them.’

‘Adamite?’ Rush said, with a grimace. ‘What? What’s that? The rest of us?’

‘That’s the rest of us, yeah. And these women, these “vessels” — the Kelim — get pregnant three times. As soon as the third child is old enough to travel, they just disappear. They go back to the tribe, taking the children with them. Mission accomplished.’

‘You’re putting me on,’ Rush protested. ‘Nobody would do that. It’s sick.’

‘Getting into this stuff,’ Kennedy said, deadpan, ‘it’s like stepping into another world, Rush. They’ve got their own rules. Their own way of seeing things. And it does the job. Stops them all dying from double recessives. But anything could happen to a woman out in the world by herself. A woman raised in seclusion, totally lacking in street smarts. So there are others. Agents. Operatives. People who act like guardian angels for the Kelim, and to some extent for the whole tribe. They’re called the Elohim, which is Aramaic for “Messengers”, and if they think someone knows too much … well, their speciality is accidental death, but they’re comfortable with straight murder, too. That’s what Alex Wales was.’

When she finally ran out of words, Rush stared at her for a few moments in complete silence.

‘I don’t know why I sat through all that lunacy,’ he said at last.

‘Yeah, you do,’ Kennedy said. ‘It was because you saw a man kill himself right in front of you today and you can’t get the picture out of your head. You’re willing to listen to any amount of lunacy if it will help you to understand that.’

‘That’d be great if it actually worked. But I’m not understanding any of this. It’s a stupid story.’

‘Yeah, isn’t it?’

‘But you say it happened to you.’

‘And to you, Rush, as of today. You were in the room. With any luck, they won’t know that, but maybe it’s just as well you made me tell you all this. At least now, you might be that little bit more paranoid at a time when you’ve actually got something to be paranoid about.’

‘Thanks,’ Rush said glumly. ‘Anything particular I ought to watch out for?’

‘What happened to Wales’s eyes, that’s something they seem to do a lot. When they kill. When they’re thinking about killing. Or sometimes just as a response to stress or emotion. It’s called haemolacria. They weep blood.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It’s because of the drug they take. It’s toxic and in the end it kills them, but it makes them faster and stronger and more resistant to pain. Believe me, it takes a lot to put one of them down.’

‘Like you said,’ he reminded her, ‘I was in the room.’ He pondered, staring into his empty glass. ‘But why didn’t he just kill us all, then? Wales, I mean. It wouldn’t have been all that hard.’

Kennedy felt the weight of that guilt and unease settle on her. ‘He could have done, if he’d wanted to. But I think he didn’t want to be questioned. They hide from the light. I threw that into the mix and hoped he’d run away. It didn’t occur to me that he’d kill himself to avoid answering awkward questions.’

She picked up her bag, straightened her jacket and generally did the premonitory things that mean you’re about to leave. Rush ignored the signals.

‘What do we do now?’ he asked her.

Kennedy frowned. ‘We don’t do anything now,’ she said. ‘We go to bed and sleep. Neither of us is in any shape for life-or-death decisions.’

Rush laughed hollowly. ‘You think it’s going to be up to us to decide? Really?’

Kennedy got to her feet. ‘I think we wait and see,’ she said. ‘If we’re lucky, this is where it ends.’

But it wouldn’t be. Of course it wouldn’t. That was why she’d told Izzy not to come home yet, and why she’d told Rush enough to put him on his guard. It wasn’t over. It couldn’t be.

Herself, and Emil Gassan. No coincidence. She’d been rolled up into something, by a force that she couldn’t see or define. She was in this mess for a reason and it sure as hell wasn’t her own reason.

‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ she told Rush. ‘I have to sleep.’

‘Okay.’

‘You’re staying?’

‘I need another drink.’

‘Just make sure you can still walk home,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

But as she turned, he called her name again. She looked back over her shoulder.

‘It’s Ben,’ he said.

His voice was slurred enough that she didn’t understand at first. ‘It’s what?’ she demanded.

‘Benjamin. Ben. My given name. I was christened—’

‘Okay.’ She waved him to silence. ‘Sorry. It’s way too late for that. You’re Rush now.’

He sighed deeply.

‘What’s the secret of a good joke?’ he asked Kennedy.

‘Timing.’

‘Right. So I guess I’m a bad one.’

She just about had time to jump on the Piccadilly Line at Leicester Square, then drop down to Pimlico on the last southbound train.

Kennedy’s feet were heavy and she was irresolute all the way back about where she was going to sleep. The night before, Izzy’s bed without Izzy in it had felt like an alien planet. But she suspected that her own would feel like a crypt.

In the end she went for Izzy’s because at least the bed was made and she could just fall into it. Whether she’d sleep was a question that would answer itself in due course.

She opened the door and stepped inside, wondering for a moment why the action of the lock seemed a little looser than usual, the cylinder rattling slightly in its housing.

As she stepped across the threshold, she saw the living room door ahead of her standing open. She knew she’d left it closed that morning, so now she knew why the lock was loose.

Stand or run? A professional wouldn’t give her a chance to run in any case, and if it was a casual burglar — please, God — she could probably take him. She reached into her bag for the pepper spray.

Arms locked around her from behind, pinning her hands to her sides. Something was pressed to her face and though she struggled not to inhale, consciousness slipped away before she could even register the smell of the drug.

13

The world came back piecemeal, a lot more slowly than it had gone away.

Kennedy was aware of sounds first: slow, discrete, shifted toward the bass register. Not words, as such — and they carried on not being words no matter how hard she focused on them.

Then a sourness that was half-smell, half-taste welled up from everywhere and nowhere, around and inside her. She balked.

‘Mistakh he. He met e’ver.’

‘Ne riveh te zi’et. Hu vihel veh le tzadeh.’

Hands clasped her head and shoulder. She tried to pull away from them, but they just turned her onto her side. Her stomach tightened, sending a peristaltic wave through her upper body. She retched weakly, felt warm liquid run over her lips and tongue.

Cloth beneath her cheek, beneath her body. Soft, and cool. It had rocked slightly when she moved. She was on a bed.

A blurred dot of light appeared, more or less centred in her field of vision. It expanded and there was movement in front of it, across and across.

‘Can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying?’ A man’s voice, deep and mellifluous.

Kennedy played dead as she laboriously assembled her recent memories into some kind of sequence. The stairs. The door. The bed. No, she was missing a step. Someone moving behind her, arms pinning her arms, the handkerchief pressed to her face. And then the bed. Fine.

Not fine at all.

‘I think she’s awake.’ A different voice, not harsher but deader, affectless: a voice that actually scared her, given the implications of why she was lying on a bed, why she’d been attacked at all.

‘Then let’s get started.’

Hands were laid on her once more. She was too weak and sick to resist as she was rolled onto her back again and her arms were pulled up over her head. Something closed on her left wrist with a snap. There was a metallic clanking and scraping, then clack, something bit into her right wrist, hard and sudden enough to make her flinch. When she tried to flex her legs, she discovered that they were already immobilised in some way. She was spread-eagled on the bed, and absolutely defenceless.

‘Ni met venim, ye sichedur.’

‘Nhamim.’

If that language, whatever it was, was what her assailants spoke to one another, Kennedy wondered for a moment why they’d shifted into English. The answer came to her at once: ‘Let’s get started’ was something she was meant to hear and be frightened by. Seeing through the ruse gave her some crumb of comfort.

She opened her eyes now. There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by faking unconsciousness any longer.

The biggest surprise — although it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all — was that she was in Izzy’s bedroom. She probably hadn’t been out that long and there was very little point in ambushing her at the flat if her assailants then had to take her to someplace else entirely. But still, the familiar surroundings accentuated the weirdness and her terror at what was happening.

There were just the two of them — the ones she’d already differentiated by their voices. Both were young, but one was very young, perhaps still in his teens or early twenties. He was slightly built, handsome, with shoulder-length black hair and a short, neat moustache and beard.

The other was bigger and stockier, with a sullen baby face. Black hair, again, but this man wore it short and in a curiously retro style, with an off-centre parting.

Both were dressed in rough-weave linen suits in a colour that might be called a light tan, and both had the unnatural pallor of the Judas tribe, whose life was lived mostly underground. Both were staring at her with solemn intensity — accompanied in the case of the bigger man by something like disgust.

‘We’re going to ask you some questions, Miss Kennedy,’ the bearded man said gently. Unsurprisingly, he was the one with the attractive, cultured voice. The designated nice cop, Kennedy thought. But she wasn’t about to give him the benefit of any doubts on that account. ‘About the job you were called in to do at the British Museum and about the events of this afternoon.’

Kennedy didn’t answer. She twisted her head to look up and then down, taking in what they’d done to her. Her wrists were cuffed — with a single pair of handcuffs threaded through the bed’s wrought-iron headboard. Pink, furry handcuffs: bondage gear. Her legs were locked in their wide-open position by some sort of hobble bar. But she was fully clothed. They hadn’t even taken off her jacket. The mixed signals were confusing. Why prep her for rape and then stop halfway?

‘Don’t know … what you’re talking … about,’ Kennedy mumbled. Her mouth and lower face were still numb from the drug and it was hard to form the words. But in any case, it seemed like a good idea to let them come to her.

The bigger man uttered an oath she didn’t catch. He reached into his jacket and drew out a knife. Kennedy’s heart hammered as she saw the asymmetrical shape of it, the curved spur where the blade ought to narrow to a point and the blunt, rough tang, the exact same metal as the blade, that served it as a hilt. It was the sica again.

These men were Messengers — the professional assassins of the Judas tribe.

The big man pressed the knife to Kennedy’s cheek. ‘Listen to me, filth,’ he said, between clenched teeth. ‘Every time you lie to us, I will cut you. Every time you don’t answer quickly enough, I will cut you. Every time I don’t like the answer you give, I will cut you. And when I have no more questions, I will cut your throat.’

‘Samal.’ The younger man spoke the word softly, but his partner tensed at once and looked to him, settling for Kennedy the question — which had been open up until then — of the pecking order. He made a gesture and the heavy-set man took the knife away from Kennedy’s face, lowered it to his side. Nice cop outranked nasty cop.

The younger man sat down beside her on the bed, arranging himself almost primly, and stared into her eyes. He smiled — and the smile was a lot more unsettling than the big man’s ferocity. It was the smile of someone so sure of his own rectitude that guilt and shame couldn’t land a punch on him.

‘My name is Abydos,’ he told her. ‘And that man there, with the knife, he is my friend, Samal. Samal is a man who — as you might imagine from his manner — doesn’t flinch from unpleasant work. But despite what he says, it will be I who will question you. And I will only allow Samal to hurt you if you force my hand. By that I mean, if you make me believe that hurting you will bring you to tell us more or keep you from lying. You understand me? If you cooperate, there will be less pain. Perhaps no pain at all. And the end, when it comes, will come more quickly and more easily.’

He paused, as though he expected her to reply. When she didn’t, he resumed. ‘I can, besides, offer you one further consolation. At the moment — with only a little more stage management — your death will seem like a sexual game that escalated out of control. But if you tell us the truth, without prompting, then before we leave here we’ll remove these …’ he gestured, with a tight, uncomfortable smile ‘… accessories from your body and leave it fully clothed. You won’t be dishonoured.’

‘Yeah, I’ll still be dead, though,’ Kennedy said. ‘I hate to sound ungrateful, but … you know.’ It hurt her throat to speak, she discovered, and her voice came out as an unlovely croak.

The young man shrugged. ‘You’re an intelligent woman,’ he said. ‘If I promised to let you live, it would be meaningless. We’d both know it for a lie and then you wouldn’t believe anything else I told you.’

Kennedy licked her dry lips, muttered something low and far back in her throat. When the young man obligingly leaned forward to try to catch her words, she spat in his eye. It was all the defiance she could muster, but she saw from the horror and disgust that flared in his face that it had done the job.

The man took out a handkerchief and wiped his cheek with it. ‘Well, then,’ he said, his mouth twisted, ‘perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps it will be impossible, after all, to conduct this conversation along rational lines.’ He looked to the other man, who still stood ready with the knife in his hand. ‘Samal, take a finger.’

The big man bent over her. Contradictory expressions — eagerness, revulsion, fear, hate — chased themselves across his face.

‘I’ll talk,’ Kennedy said quickly. ‘You don’t need to cut me. I’ll tell you what you want to know.’

Abydos gestured, and Samal paused again. He hadn’t even touched her and he seemed relieved not to have to, even though she saw how easily the knife sat in his hand. She was sure he’d killed before. She was equally sure that torture held no particular terrors for him. There was nothing like mercy in his face, and if anything, he seemed to feel a visceral loathing for her. On an impulse, she struggled against the cuffs and let her forearm, as if by accident, touch the back of Samal’s hand. The man jumped as if he’d been stung.

Women, Kennedy thought. You’re scared of women.

‘Very well,’ Abydos said. ‘Let’s begin with this afternoon. You called a meeting, at Ryegate House. What happened there?’

Kennedy licked her dry lips and tried her hardest to keep her voice steady. ‘I accused a man, Alex Wales, of theft.’

‘Theft of what?’

‘A book.’

‘Name the book.’ Abydos’s emphasis was so precise that Kennedy hesitated, forewarned. She knew how important the written word was for the Judas People. Actually, she’d been told in counter-terrorism seminars back when she was still a cop, that the same thing went for most religious fanatics. To the fundamentalist mindset, the word was literally flesh and any harm or disrespect offered to it was a direct assault on the godhead.

So, out of some half-explored instinct, she lied. ‘We weren’t able to find that out,’ she said. ‘We just knew that there was a discrepancy. That one of the boxes in that room was light. Something had been stolen.’

‘And you knew that Alex Wales had stolen it.’

‘Yes.’ Again, they had to know this much. Their agent, the other member of their cell, hadn’t reported in — had dropped off the map. His death would hit the news soon enough, if it hadn’t already. Lying wouldn’t help her.

‘How did you know?’ Abydos asked.

Kennedy stumbled through an explanation. The chiming dates in the personnel files. The inside-man hypothesis. The coincidence of Silver’s death.

‘Very good,’ Abydos acknowledged, as though he were a teacher, or else a priest coaching her in her catechism. ‘And you put these things to him. To Wales.’

‘I questioned him. Yes.’

‘How did he reply?’

‘He didn’t. He refused to answer any of my questions. And then, when I locked him in the room and called the police, he killed himself with his own knife.’

Samal made a sound, an ululating moan, deep in his throat. Abydos glared at him and admonished him in whatever their language was. ‘Ne eyar v’shteh. De beyoshin lekot.’ It certainly sounded a lot like the bastard Aramaic of the Judas People.

‘Ma es’irim shud ekol—’ Samal answered, his face as tragic and imploring as a whipped dog’s.

Abydos cut him off with a curt, commanding gesture. Then he turned back to Kennedy, as though there’d been no interruption. ‘But it won’t do,’ he told her. ‘You’re very careful to say “I did this” and “He wouldn’t answer me”. As if the two of you were alone in that room. But you weren’t. You will tell us, please, who else was there.’

Kennedy realised with a cold, sudden shock that this — all of this, everything that was happening to her now and was about to happen — was the reason why Alex Wales hadn’t killed her when he could. Once he’d decided on his own death, it became essential to allow Kennedy to live so that these men could question her.

‘I thought Wales might be more likely to talk if I spoke to him alone,’ she said. Her voice cracked, zigzagged raggedly up the scale, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

‘No,’ Abydos said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘It’s the truth.’

There was a long pause. ‘I ask you again, Miss Kennedy. Who else was there? Tell me, and spare yourself this pain.’

‘It’s the truth,’ she said again.

‘Well,’ Abydos said. He nodded to Samal.

Kennedy braced herself, but she knew enough about torture to be sure that any preparations she made in advance would be useless as soon as it started.

She thought the man might take a few moments to screw up his courage, but he just stuck the knife deep into her left side, until it touched the rib and ground against the bone. Kennedy opened her mouth to scream. Abydos, who had been expecting this, pushed a piece of cloth — a handkerchief, maybe — deeply into her throat. The scream became a soggy yodel, more vibration than sound. The man watched her closely, clinically, as she struggled and gurgled into the gag.

‘Again,’ he said.

Samal lowered the blade and Kennedy went into futile spasms, panic and terror shutting out all rational thought.

But the knife didn’t touch her, because the two men had both frozen at a sudden sound, absurd and extraneous, from outside the room. Five hollow knocks, in quick succession, in the sequence universally known as shave-and-a-haircut.

‘Izzy?’ It was a woman’s voice, young and slightly querulous, coming from the other end of the hall — from the flat’s front door. ‘Lover? Are you in there?’

14

Abydos responded a little quicker than Kennedy, and that slight difference was crucial. As she tensed her body for some movement violent enough to warn this newcomer off, he gripped her wrists tightly in his hands and whispered a single word to Samal.

‘Rishkert.’

By that time, Kennedy’s legs were lifting off the bed, but Samal caught her ankles in mid-air and forced them down again slowly and inexorably. She couldn’t produce any more noise than the writhing of her upper body against the sheets.

‘Izzy? Are you in here?’ The voice seemed a little wary and unhappy. ‘The door wasn’t locked …’ Abydos gave Samal a smouldering glare and Samal turned his face away from it as though from a slap.

Footsteps in the hall, getting closer. ‘Izzy?’ By now, whoever it was had to have seen the light streaming from under the door. But you wouldn’t just wander into someone’s bedroom, uninvited. Nobody would be insane or brazen or crass enough to do that, unless they were pretty sure they had an open invitation.

The door handle turned and the door opened an inch. ‘Okayyy …’ The voice had changed from tentative to teasing, although there was still an undertone of uncertainty. ‘If you’ve got someone in there, I’m giving you a full ten seconds to get under the covers. Nine … eight … seven … Nah, to hell with it.’

The door was pushed fully open and a young woman — a very young woman — stepped into the room. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and even in her extreme panic, a part of Kennedy’s mind found time for wonder and outrage.

Jesus, Izzy.

The woman was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt — plain, even drab — and black wrestling boots that hadn’t been in style for so long that they had to be a retro affectation. Her hair was short and dark and tightly curled, her eyes were violet, and right then they were as wide as saucers because whatever she was expecting to be looking at, what she was actually seeing was two stony-faced men and a tied-up woman, and Samal had stood and swung round to face her, a gun in his hand now (replacing the knife — when had that happened?) pointing directly at the mid-point of her body.

‘I … I …’ she faltered. ‘I was—’

‘Come into the room,’ Abydos said. ‘Come. We won’t hurt you.’ His voice was firm, but with a slow, even cadence, reassuring. He made no move towards her, but his gaze was fixed on her eyes. ‘Come in, or this woman will die.’

The girl looked from Abydos to Samal, then to the gun. Her face was the face of a trauma victim, dull with shock. Run, Kennedy thought, and tried to say, but the only sound that came through the gag was a desperate, almost voiceless growl.

‘Come inside,’ Abydos said, in the same gentling voice. ‘Close the door.’

The girl took a step. At least, her foot moved forward, but her body stayed where it was, on the threshold, frozen.

‘My mum knows I’m here,’ she said, but she said it with a rising pitch, as a question or a plea.

‘All right,’ Abydos said. ‘It’s all right. Close the door.’

But the girl seemed to have run out of motive force. ‘I just wanted …’ she said. ‘I was gonna give Izzy her books back.’

She held up something that Kennedy hadn’t seen until then: brightly coloured, even garish, and with a high gloss over which the light of the lamp played in a momentary flash of Morse.

It was a porno mag. Bush League. Two mostly naked women entwined on its cover, pelvis grinding against pelvis, the body of one twisted ridiculously to display her gigantic breasts to the best effect.

‘You want to see?’ the girl said, holding it out. Samal recoiled from the image as though it were a snake. And then a number of impossible things happened in swift sequence.

From under the magazine, which tilted suddenly in the girl’s hand, two glittering threads arced up to hit Samal in the centre of his chest.

There was a sound like a clock ticking, but too fast and too loud. Samal did a clumsy moonwalk, moving backwards across the room in three jerky half-steps, until his shoulders hit the wall. He slid down it, expelling breath in a grunt of agony.

Meanwhile, Abydos had lunged for some weapon of his own, but the young girl had dropped both the porno mag and the spent Taser, leaped across the bed like a hurdler and was up in his face, darting whip-swift punches at him that forced him to use both hands to defend himself.

Both hands were enough, at first, but the girl was in constant movement, her body swaying back and forth, her flickering hands weaving in and out like the shuttle on a loom, forcing Abydos back. Then there was a moment when he warded off two low blows, leaving his upper body undefended. The girl stepped into the gap and drove her forehead into his face.

Abydos staggered back, blinded and in pain, and the girl pirouetted, her left leg swinging round with balletic grace to smack into the side of his head with a muffled crunch. He sank to his knees, then toppled full length.

A movement closer to hand diverted Kennedy’s attention. Samal was groping for the fallen gun. Acting purely on instinct, Kennedy twisted round on the bed and dropped her legs over his head. Then she drew up her knees, so that the hobble bar hit him in the throat.

If he hadn’t been groggy from the Taser, he’d have dealt with the clumsy assault in a heartbeat. As it was, he had to wrestle with Kennedy’s dead weight for a few seconds before he succeeded in lifting her bodily and throwing her off. In that time, the girl had crossed the room again, snatching up Izzy’s bedside lamp en passant. She hadn’t even slowed to look at the lamp, it seemed to Kennedy, but with its stainless steel base, its weight and its heft, it fitted her needs exactly. She swung it back behind her like a bowler, then brought it round and up, gathering her body under it, and delivered it with appalling force to the point of Samal’s chin. The blow lifted him an inch off the ground and dropped him flat on his back on the bedroom floor, which shook under his weight.

The girl circled him cautiously. The big man was still conscious. He rolled to his side, trying to get up yet again. Unhurriedly but with clinical precision, she delivered three devastating blows to the back of his head, which drove him into Izzy’s shag-pile carpeting like a hammer driving a nail into a board. After a moment’s further appraisal, she hit him again.

Then, finally, she dropped the lamp and flexed her hands as though gripping it so tightly had hurt her a little.

Somewhere during those last, terrifying seconds Kennedy had drawn in a panic breath so deep and sudden that she’d partially inhaled Abydos’s handkerchief. Now she was suffocating on it. She writhed on the bed, trying to draw in air that wasn’t there.

The girl was checking the two sprawled bodies with quiet, detached interest, but she noticed Kennedy’s plight at last. She put down the lamp and reached into Kennedy’s mouth to fish out the handkerchief by the end that was still visible.

Kennedy took a raw, shuddering breath, converted — when she let it out again — into the ragged sobs of shock.

‘You’re fine,’ the girl said, sounding exactly as Abydos had sounded a moment or two before. ‘It’s over. But you have to go.’

‘Who …’ Kennedy wheezed, ‘… are … you?’

‘I’m Diema,’ the girl said simply. She was searching Samal’s pockets, and then Abydos’s, for a key, but Kennedy didn’t make the connection until she saw it, until the girl was unlocking the cuffs at her wrists, the bar at her ankles. ‘You need to get out of here,’ the girl repeated as she worked. ‘These men came here alone, but there will be others. Probably soon.’

Kennedy sat up and began to massage some life back into her numbed hands and forearms. She glanced down at Samal, afraid in spite of what she’d seen, in spite of what her rational mind was telling her, that he might rise up and attack her again. ‘I’m sorry but I’m not getting this,’ she said, when she felt she could trust her voice. ‘Who are you? Why did you help me? Are you — are you really a friend of Izzy’s?’

The girl gave her a slightly startled look, momentarily thrown. ‘A friend of your lover? Don’t be ridiculous. Just listen to what I’m telling you. Find a place they don’t know about. And then another place, and another. Keep moving. Change your habits. Don’t give them an easy target.’

The police, Kennedy thought. I’ve got to call the police.

The bedside table had gone over and the phone was lying on the floor. She reached for it, but the girl’s foot came down on her wrist before she could touch it. She let all her weight fall onto Kennedy’s hand, making Kennedy gasp in pain and shock.

‘No,’ the girl said.

Pinioned, Kennedy looked up at her. The girl’s face, calm and detached despite the violence she’d just meted out, was folded into an uncompromising frown.

‘You know who I am?’ she asked Kennedy. ‘Where I’ve come from?’

Kennedy pushed the answer out through clenched teeth. ‘No. I r-really don’t.’

The girl’s eyes flicked momentarily to the bodies on the floor, then back to Kennedy. ‘The same place they came from. And we’re all sworn to keep that place a secret. So you know what I’d have to do to you if you picked up that phone and dialled.’

She took her foot away. Gingerly, Kennedy flexed the fingers of her hand. They hurt like hell and she could barely make them move, but none were broken.

‘Think about this,’ the girl said. ‘These men came here to question you and then to kill you. They failed, so others will be sent. Assuming you did speak to the authorities, I doubt they could help you very much. It would be hard for them even to believe you. Get out now. Leave behind everything you don’t need. Think about where you go. Who you talk to. The trail you’ll be leaving behind you. Because there will be people following that trail, people who are very skilled at what they do.’

‘So I shouldn’t go back to Ryegate House?’ Kennedy asked. ‘You’re warning me off?’

The girl’s frown deepened. She stared at Kennedy as if she were mad.

‘Of course you should go back. Finish the job you were given. Find the book and do what has to be done. Why do you think I’ve been wasting my time watching your back? Why else would you be worth saving?’

She turned on her heel and left, treading the porno mag underfoot with contemptuous disregard.

15

In Scotland, four clergymen reported missing are found dead. Their deaths mirror the deaths of four of the twelve apostles of Jesus: Matthew (stabbed through with a spear, in this case an athletics javelin), Thaddaeus (beaten to death with a rock), James (beheaded) and Peter (crucified upside down). Scottish police classify the murders as hate crimes.

In Umbria, a road bridge collapses. Cars fall like heavy rain into a steep gorge, at the bottom of which there is another road, carpeted with rush-hour traffic. Two hundred are killed.

In California, every warm-blooded animal in the San Diego zoo dies over a three-day period, showing symptoms similar to Ebola. When the viral agents are isolated, they are found to be different for almost every species, individually tailored or adapted for maximum susceptibility. The birds are simply gone, one morning, their cages open to the sky. A state-wide search fails to find a single one.

In Beijing, the Tiananmen Gate, its structure weakened in some way that defies analysis, disaggregates into several massive blocks of stone, which crush a party of German tourists and three students cycling to college. The pulped bodies are removed in buckets, prompting protests from relatives about the insensitive handling of their loved ones’ remains.

Seven young cavers in Auckland enter a beginners’ cave with a maximum depth of seven metres. All are found dead from severe decompression sickness and arterial gas embolisms, consistent with a dive to a thousand metres and an almost instantaneous return to the surface.

Across the world, the ripples were spreading. But that is precisely the wrong metaphor, Ber Lusim thought. Ripples get weaker and weaker, the further they get from their source. This — he observed with a certain pleasure — was more like a tsunami building, or like a riptide dragging more and more unwary swimmers into its invisible, deadly channels.

It was not that he relished pain and degradation for their own sake. Once, perhaps. A little. But he was no longer that man, no longer purely and simply the Demon. The prophet’s words had changed him in his essence, without altering his trajectory by the smallest fraction. He did all the things that he had always done, mortifying flesh and spirit, but different meanings now attached to his actions. That was Shekolni’s miracle, and proof enough that he was touched with the divine.

The prophet found his old friend sitting on the cot bed in his sleeping quarters. The room was as bare as a monk’s cell, so in fact there was nowhere else to sit. Easily and unselfconsciously, Shekolni seated himself on the stone floor in front of Ber Lusim.

Ber Lusim had been reading, but now he jumped to his feet and offered the bed to Shekolni — who declined it with a wave of the hand. Ber Lusim took his seat again, closed the book and set it to one side. It was the book, of course: the book that had become the focal point of their lives and their aspirations, their rock of salvation and their stern taskmaster.

‘Why so thoughtful, Ber Lusim?’ the prophet asked. ‘You’ve pulled the trigger, now, and the bullet has gone out into the world. You can’t alter its flight.’

Ber Lusim raised an eyebrow. ‘Such things are my province rather than yours, Holy One. And I’m not sure I agree. With a bullet, as you say, all the thought and the care is taken before it’s fired. Afterwards, you can only watch and see what comes.’

‘So? Isn’t that what we’re doing?’

‘Your pardon, Holy One, but this thing that we do is more like torture. A series of careful and painstaking interventions to achieve a cumulative effect.’

Shekolni smiled. ‘And it’s this that creases your brow? Are you having second thoughts?’

‘Not at all!’ Ber Lusim was shocked at the implication. ‘Torture is something I’m very well versed in. I’m not taking issue with the plan, only trying to comprehend it.’

Ber Lusim stared at Shekolni, there in the darkness of the cell, which was unrelieved apart from the flames of three candles, burning in a niche beside the bed. The shadows covered the prophet’s face as if with a veil, so his expression could not be read.

‘Do you ever think of our childhood?’ he demanded at last. When you were only a man, he meant. When there were still mysteries you couldn’t pierce. But he didn’t say those things. Tact and humility were important, when dealing with the incarnate divine.

The prophet laughed. ‘I wasn’t even alive in those times. I don’t remember them at all. My life began on the day when I saw my first vision. Nothing before that has any meaning for me.’

Ber Lusim nodded as though he understood, although the statement showed how utterly different the two men were. Both of them by the violence of their natures and the force of their will had marked themselves out for peculiar destinies. But whereas Ber Lusim had embraced that violence and made it his garment, Shekolni had opened it like a door, passed through it into a place that was unknowable.

‘Children are cruel,’ Ber Lusim murmured. He was thinking of himself — his first experiments with the pain thresholds of others, that had permitted him to know himself.

‘All men are cruel,’ the prophet said. ‘And all women, too. If we were not, then we would not need God.’

He climbed to his feet again. His movements were uncannily like those of an old man, although there was not a month between his age and that of Ber Lusim. Perhaps the mantle of holiness was heavier than ordinary men imagined.

‘It’s important to comprehend,’ he said. ‘To have a mental model for one’s actions that takes everything into account and answers all objections. I’m about to preach to your comrades in arms. You should come and listen.’

‘I invite you to think of a miracle,’ the prophet said, his words rolling out across the vast hall almost like physical things, each cradled in a tangle of echoes. A hundred men watched him and listened to him, eager for revelation, immune to weakness and doubt. ‘The miracle of birth.’

‘None of you have wives or children. None of you ever will, now, not through any weakness or failing in you but because of the accident of history and the unalterable shape of the Plan.

‘But let me assure you that birth, seen from up close, is a very ugly thing. The mother, in her birth-agonies, fills the air with her screams — with animal bleats and bellows. Sometimes she loses control of her bowels. The newborn child, when he comes at last, is covered with the filth of his mother’s entrails, and more often than not with her blood. Scarcely human, he looks, as he’s held aloft. To be human, he has to be cleansed. To be human, he has to breathe. And to be human, he has to be separated from the womb that bore him and nourished him. Cut free with a knife.

‘Does the doctor who wields the knife see the glory or does he see the ruck and ruin of blood? Does he smell incense or excrement? Does he hear screams or angels singing?’

Avra Shekolni paused theatrically, for the answers that would not come.

‘You are that doctor. And the future, the thing that is waiting to be born, depends entirely on your readiness with the knife, your skill. It needs you to cut away what once was so very precious, so very much needed, and now is only dead weight. It needs you to see past the blood, however high it rises, to the light — the endless, endless light.’

He fell silent, and his arms, which had been thrown out as though to embrace them all, dropped to his sides. The followers of Ber Lusim fell to their knees as one. Most were weeping, and all were making the sign of the noose.

Ber Lusim knelt too, his heart singing, his blood drumming in his ears.

He had served heaven at one remove — God’s commandments trickling down through the minds and voices of fallible men.

Now he was a word that God spoke.