by Adam Blake
‘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 th
em 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 guesse
s 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.
