The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  She wasn’t even sure he was there: she had no idea what he looked like. But as she walked away, she saw out of the corner of her eye one of the seated men stand and detach himself from the group.

  ‘Bitch,’ Combes snarled at her back.

  Her blood was boiling, but she chuckled, let them all hear it.

  2

  Harper drove, through light summer rain that had come from nowhere. Kennedy reviewed the file. That took most of the first minute.

  ‘Did you get a chance to look at this?’ she asked him, as they turned into Victoria Street and hit the traffic.

  The detective constable did a little rapid blinking, but said nothing for a moment or two. Chris Harper, twenty-eight, of Camden Ops, St John’s Wood and the SCD’s much-touted Crime Academy: Kennedy had taken a few moments in-between Summerhill’s office and the bear pit to look him up on the divisional database. There was nothing to see, apart from a citation for bravery (in relation to a warehouse fire) and a red docket, redacted, for an altercation with a senior officer over a personal matter that wasn’t specified. Whatever it was, it seemed to have been settled without any grievance procedure being invoked.

  Harper was fair-haired and as lean as a wire, with a slight asymmetry in his face that made him look like he was either flinching or favouring you with an insinuating wink. Kennedy thought she might have run across him once in passing somewhere, a long way back, but if so, it had been a very fleeting contact, and it hadn’t left behind any strong impression for good or bad.

  ‘Haven’t read it all,’ Harper admitted at last. ‘I only found out I was assigned to this case about an hour ago. I was going over the file, but then … well, you turned up and did the dead rat cabaret, and then we hit the road.’ Kennedy shot him a narrow look, which he affected not to notice. ‘I read the summary sheet,’ he said. ‘Flicked through the initial incident report. That was all.’

  ‘All you missed was the autopsy stuff, then,’ Kennedy told him. ‘There was sod all actual policing done at the scene. Anything stay with you?’

  Harper shook his head. ‘Not a lot,’ he admitted. He slowed the car. They’d run into the back end of a queue that seemed to fill the top half of Parliament Street: roadworks, closing the street down to one lane. No point using the siren, because there was nowhere people could move out of their way. They rolled along, stop-start, slower than walking pace.

  ‘Dead man was a teacher,’ Kennedy said. ‘A university professor, actually, at Prince Regent’s College. Stuart Barlow. Age fifty-seven. Place of work, the college’s history annexe on Fitzroy Street, which is where he died. By falling down a flight of stairs and breaking his neck.’

  ‘Right.’ Harper nodded as though it was all coming back to him.

  ‘Except the autopsy now says he didn’t,’ Kennedy went on. ‘He was lying at the bottom of the staircase, so it seemed like the logical explanation. It looked like he’d tripped and fallen badly: neck broken, skull impacted by a solid whack to the left-hand side. He had a briefcase with him. It was lying right next to him, spilled open, so there again, there was a default assumption. He packed his stuff, headed home for the night, got to the top of the stairs and then tripped. The body was found just after 9 p.m., maybe an hour after Barlow usually clocked off for the night.’

  ‘Seems to add up,’ Harper allowed. He was silent for a few moments as the car trickled forward a score or so of yards and then stopped again. ‘But what? The broken neck wasn’t the cause of death?’

  ‘No, it was,’ Kennedy said. ‘The problem is, it wasn’t broken in the right way. Damage to the throat muscles was consistent with torsional stress, not planar.’

  ‘Torsional. Like it had been twisted?’

  ‘Exactly. Like it had been twisted. And that takes a little focused effort. It doesn’t tend to happen when you fall downstairs. Okay, a sharp knock coming at an angle might turn the neck suddenly, but you’d still expect most of the soft tissue trauma to be linear, the damaged muscle and the external injury lining up to give you the angle of impact.’

  She flicked through the sparse, unsatisfying pages until she came to the one that – after the autopsy – was the most troubling.

  ‘Plus there’s the stalker,’ Harper said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘I saw there was another incident report in there. Dead man was being followed.’

  Kennedy nodded. ‘Very good, Detective Constable. Stalker is maybe overstating the case a little, but you’re right. Barlow had reported someone trailing him. First of all at an academic conference, then later outside his house. Whoever signed off on this the first time around either didn’t know that or didn’t think it mattered. The two incident sheets hadn’t been cross-referenced, so I’d go for the former. But in light of the autopsy results, it makes us look all kinds of stupid.’

  ‘Which God forbid,’ Harper murmured, blandly.

  ‘Amen,’ Kennedy intoned.

  Silence fell, as it often does after prayers.

  Harper broke it. ‘So that stuff with the rat. Is that part of your daily routine?’

  ‘These days, yeah. It pretty much is. Why? Do you have an allergy?’

  Harper thought about that. ‘Not yet,’ he said at last.

  Despite its name, the history annexe of Prince Regent’s College was aggressively modern in design: an austere concrete and glass bunker, tucked into a side street a quarter of a mile from the college’s main site on Gower Street. It was also deserted, since term had finished a week before. One wall of the foyer was a floorto-ceiling notice board, advertising gigs by bands Kennedy didn’t know, with dates that had already passed.

  The harassed bursar, Ellis, came out to meet them. His face was shiny with sweat, as though he’d come straight from the bureaucratic equivalent of an aerobic workout, and he seemed to see the visit as a personal attack on the good name of the institution. ‘We were told the investigation was closed,’ he said.

  ‘I doubt you were ever told that by anyone with the authority to say it, Mr Ellis,’ Harper said, deadpan. The official line at this point was that the case had never been closed: that had only ever been a misunderstanding.

  Kennedy hated to hide behind weasel words, and at this point felt like she owed little loyalty to the department. ‘The autopsy came back with some unusual findings,’ she added, without looking at Harper. ‘And that’s changed the way we’re looking at the case. It’s probably best to say nothing about this to anyone else on the faculty, but we’ll need to make some further investigations.’

  ‘Can I at least assume that all this will be over before the start of our summer school programme?’ the bursar asked, his tone stuck halfway between belligerence and quavering dread.

  Kennedy wished it with all her heart, but she believed that giving people good news that hadn’t been adequately crash-tested was setting them up for more misery later. ‘No,’ she said, bluntly. ‘Please don’t assume that.’

  Ellis’s face fell.

  ‘But … the students,’ he said, despite the self-evident lack of any. ‘Things like this do no good at all for recruitment or for our academic profile.’ It was such a strikingly fatuous thing to say that Kennedy wasn’t sure how to respond. She decided on silence, unfortunately leaving a void that the bursar seemed to feel obligated to fill. ‘There’s a sort of contamination by association,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you know what I mean. It happened at Alabama after the shootings in the biology department. That was a disgruntled teaching assistant, I understand – a freak occurrence, a chance in a million, and no students were involved at all. But the faculty still reported a drop in applications the next year. It’s as though people think murder is something you can catch.’

  Okay, that was less fatuous, Kennedy thought, but a lot more obnoxious. This man had lost a colleague, in circumstances that were turning out to be suspicious, and his first thought was how it might affect the college’s bottom line. Ellis was clearly a selfserving toerag, so he got civility package one: just the basics.

 
‘We need to see the place where the body was found,’ she told him. ‘Now, please.’

  He led them along empty, echoing corridors. The smell in the place reminded Kennedy of old newsprint. As a child she had built a playhouse in her parents’ garden shed from boxes of newspapers. Her father had collected them for arcane reasons (maybe, even that far back, his mind was beginning to go). It was that smell, exactly: sad old paper, dead-ended, defeated in its effort to inform.

  They turned a corner and Ellis stopped suddenly. For a moment Kennedy thought he meant to remonstrate with her, but he half-raised his hands in an oddly constrained gesture to indicate their immediate surroundings.

  ‘This is where it happened,’ he said, with an emphasis on the ‘it’ that was half-gingerly, half-prurient. Kennedy looked around, recognising the short, narrow hallway and the steep stairs from the photographs.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Ellis,’ she said. ‘We’ll handle this part on our own. But we’ll need you again in a little while, to let us into Mr Barlow’s study.’

  ‘I’ll be at reception,’ Ellis said, and trudged away, the cartoon raincloud over his head all but visible.

  Kennedy turned to Harper. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s walk this through.’ She handed him the file, open and with the photos on top. Harper nodded, a little warily. He staggered the photos like a poker hand, glancing from them to the stairs and then back again. Kennedy didn’t push him: he needed to get his eye in and it would take as long as it took. Whether he knew it or not, she was doing him a favour, letting him put it together in his own mind rather than hitting him with her thoughts right out of the gate. He was fresh out of the box after all: in theory, she was meant to be training him up, not using him as a footrest.

  ‘He was lying here,’ Harper said at last, sketching the scene with his free hand. ‘His head … there, around about the fourth stair.’

  ‘Head on the runner of the fourth stair,’ Kennedy cut in. She wasn’t disagreeing, just wrapping it in her own words. She wanted to see it, to transfer the image in her head to the space in front of her, and she knew from experience that saying it would help. ‘Where’s the briefcase? By the base of the wall, right? Here?’

  ‘Here,’ Harper said, indicating a point maybe two yards out from the foot of the stairs. ‘It’s open and on its side. There are a whole lot of papers, too, just strewn around here. Quite a wide spill, all the way to the far wall. They could have slipped out of the briefcase or out of Barlow’s hands as he fell.’

  ‘What else? Anything?’

  ‘His coat.’ Harper pointed again.

  Kennedy was momentarily thrown. ‘Not in the photos.’

  ‘No,’ Harper agreed. ‘But it’s here in the evidence list. They moved it because it was partially occluding the body and they needed a clear line of sight for the trauma photos. Barlow probably had it over his arm or something. Warm evening. Or maybe he was putting it on when he tripped. Or, you know, when he was attacked.’

  Kennedy thought about this. ‘Does the coat match the rest of his outfit?’ she demanded.

  ‘What?’ Harper almost laughed, but he saw that Kennedy was serious.

  ‘Is it the same colour as Barlow’s jacket and trousers?’

  Harper flicked through the file for a long time, not finding anything that described or showed the coat. Finally he realised that it was in one of the photos after all – one that had been taken right at the start of the examination but had somehow been shuffled to the bottom of the deck. ‘It’s a black raincoat,’ he said. ‘No wonder he wasn’t wearing it. He was probably sweating just in the jacket.’

  Kennedy climbed part of the way up the stairs, scanning them closely. ‘There was blood,’ she called over her shoulder to Harper. ‘Where was the blood, Detective Constable?’

  ‘Counting from the bottom, ninth and thirteenth stairs up.’

  ‘Right, right. Stain’s still visible on the wood here, look.’ She circled her hand above one spot, then the other, triangulated to the bottom of the stairs. ‘He hits, bang, bounces …’ She turned to face Harper again. ‘Not robbery,’ she said, to herself more than to him.

  He referred to the file again – the verbal summary this time, not the photos. ‘No indication that anything had been taken,’ he agreed. ‘Wallet and phone still in his pocket.’

  ‘He’s worked here for eleven years,’ Kennedy mused. ‘Why would he fall?’

  Harper flipped a few pages, was silent for a while. When he looked up, he pointed past Kennedy to the head of the stairs. ‘Barlow’s office is at the other end of that first-floor corridor,’ he said. ‘This was pretty much the only way he could take when he left the building, unless he was going all the way back to reception to drop off some outgoing mail or something. And it says here the bulb had gone, so the stairwell must have been dark.’

  ‘Gone? As in removed?’

  ‘No, gone as in burned out. Bulb had blown.’

  Kennedy ascended the rest of the stairs. At the top was a very narrow landing. A single door, set centrally, led to another corridor – from what Harper had said, the corridor that led to Barlow’s office. To either side of the door were two windows of frosted glass that looked through on to the corridor, extending from the ceiling down to about waist height. The remaining three feet or so from the windows to the ground were white wooden panels.

  ‘So he comes to the top of the stairs in the dark,’ she said. ‘Stops to turn on the light, but it doesn’t go on.’ It was to the left of the door, a single switch. ‘And someone who’s waiting here, on the right-hand side, moves in on him while his back is turned.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Harper said.

  ‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘It doesn’t. That’s not where you set an ambush, is it? Anyone standing around out here is visible both from the bottom of the stairs and from the upper corridor, through these windows. It’s stippled glass, but you’d still see if someone was standing there.’

  ‘With the light out?’

  ‘The light might be out on the landing, but we’ve got to assume that it’s on in the upstairs corridor. You wouldn’t miss someone standing right there in front of you, on the other side of the glass.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Harper. He paused, thinking. ‘But this is a college. You wouldn’t necessarily assume it was sinister for someone to be waiting here at the top of the stairs.’

  Kennedy raised her eyebrows, let them fall again. ‘The murderer would know it was sinister,’ she said. ‘So it would be an odd place to choose. And Barlow had reported being followed, so he might be more alert than usual. But there’s a better answer for all this anyway. Go on.’

  ‘A better answer?’

  ‘I’ll show you in a minute. Go on.’

  ‘Okay,’ Harper said. ‘So whoever it was hangs around on the landing here for however long it takes, lets Barlow walk past, then grabs him from behind. Twists his head until his neck snaps, and pitches him down the stairs.’

  Even as he was saying this, Harper was smiling. He snorted derision at his own summary. Kennedy looked a question at him, and he pointed to the top of the stairs, then to the bottom. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t make any sense at all. I mean, talk about overkill. The guy was fifty-seven years old, for Christ’s sake. The fall would probably have killed him in any case. Why not just give him a push?’

  ‘Interesting point,’ Kennedy said. ‘Maybe Mister Somebody doesn’t want to take the chance. Also, let’s not forget that Mister Somebody knows how to break someone’s neck with a single twist. Maybe he doesn’t get to show his skills off too often and this was his night to strut.’

  Harper joined in the game. ‘Or they could have struggled, and the twist was a headlock that went wrong. Both that and the fall could have been accidents, more or less. Even if we find the guy, we might not be able to prove intent.’

  Kennedy had descended again as he was talking. She passed him, went all the way back to the foot of the stairs. The banister rail ended there, curving down into a
thicker wooden upright. She was looking for a specific feature, which she knew had to be there. It was about two feet off the ground, on the outside of the upright – the side that faced the lower corridor, rather than the stairs themselves.

  ‘Okay,’ she said to Harper, pointing. ‘Now look at this.’

  He came down and squatted beside her, saw what she was seeing. ‘A nick in the wood,’ he said. ‘You think it was done on the night Barlow died?’

  ‘No,’ said Kennedy. ‘Before. Probably a long time before. But it was definitely there on the night. It shows up in some of the forensics photos. Look.’

  She took the prints back from him and flicked through them, came up with the image she’d first seen earlier that day, sitting across from Summerhill as he gave her the poisoned chalice. She passed it to Harper, who looked at it with cursory interest at first, then carried on looking.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said at last.

  ‘Yeah. Bloody hell indeed.’

  What the photo showed was a small shred of light-brown cloth caught on the jagged lip of that tiny imperfection in the wood. The forensic photographer had been careful to get it in very clear focus, presumably assuming at that point that he was participating in what could be the start of a murder inquiry.

  The ragged tuft of cloth had been logged as evidence, too, and was therefore still sitting in a labelled bag in a labelled box on a shelf back in the division’s forensic support wing. But nobody seemed to have given any real thought to it since. After all, you usually didn’t have to work too hard to establish the presence of the victim at the scene of the crime.

  Also in the photo, in the background but still more or less in focus, was Stuart Barlow himself, in a tan jacket with leather pads sewn in at the elbows – the stereotypical bachelor academic, except with his neck bent at an impossible angle and his staring face livid in death.

  ‘I looked through the pack, but I didn’t really register this,’ Harper admitted. ‘I was mostly just looking at the body.’