by Adam Blake
‘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.
