by Adam Blake
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 c
ab 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. Beca
use 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?’
