The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  As far as Tillman could tell, there was never any real investigation. He got progress reports, at odd intervals; sightings, which according to the Met were always followed up but always turned out to be false alarms; sporadic news articles, which seemed at one point to be building into some kind of conspiracy theory in which he’d murdered his wife and kids or else murdered his wife and sold his kids to Belgian paedophiles. But that kind of phenomenon has to have something to feed on, and since there was no news after the first day, it petered out without reaching critical mass.

  Tillman contemplated the ruin of his life. He might have gone back to work, tried to forget, but he never seriously considered it an option. To forget would be to leave Rebecca, and their children, in the hands of strangers whose agenda he couldn’t even begin to guess at. If they hadn’t gone willingly, and he knew they hadn’t, then they’d been taken, from a populous city without so much as a trace. And they were waiting now to be rescued. They were waiting for him.

  The problem with this, as Tillman was intelligent enough to appreciate, was that he wasn’t even close to being the man they needed: the man who could find and free his family from the hands of their captors. He didn’t even know where to start.

  Sitting in the kitchen of their home, a week after the disappearance, he thought it out with ruthless and clear-headed logic. What needed to be done could not be done by him and could not be trusted to anyone else.

  He had to change. He had to become the man who could find and fight and liberate and do whatever else was required to restore equilibrium to the world. The resources he had at his disposal were fourteen hundred pounds’ worth of savings and a mind that had never yet been tested to its limits.

  He took Rebecca’s note from his pocket. Don’t look for us. For the thousandth time he read those words, for surface and then for hidden meanings. Maybe, but only maybe, the space after the first word was wider than the other spaces: Rebecca’s yearning for him projected into that minuscule void, begging him to see what her heart was really shrieking as her hand wrote.

  Don’t

  look for us.

  I’m coming, he told her in his mind, his hand balling into a fist. It won’t be soon, but I’m coming. And the people who took you away from me are going to bleed and burn and die.

  The next day he joined the army – the 45th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery – and began, methodically, to rebuild himself.

  6

  Back in the bear pit, later, Harper’s fellow officers were keen to debrief him on his day out with the ball-breaker. He disappointed them by having nothing of substance to say.

  ‘We were together in the car for like, ten minutes,’ he pointed out. ‘The rest of the time we were squeezing the scene, two weeks late. We barely even talked. It’s not like we were out on a date.’

  ‘If you were,’ Combes pointed out, ‘she’d just go around afterwards telling everyone you shot off too early.’ This got big laughs all round, despite being just another limp variation on the default Kennedy joke that had been running the circuit for the past six months. As jokes went, it earned its keep, turning up in anonymous emails, graffiti in the toilets, bottom-of-the-barrel drunken rambles at the Old Star. Why did Kennedy leave her boyfriend? What did Kennedy tell the marriage guidance counsellor? Why does Kennedy never reach orgasm?

  They told Harper the story. He knew it already, intimately, as every officer in the Met knew it by this time, but the detectives recounting the legend did it for their own enjoyment more than for his. Kennedy had been an ARU, an armed response unit. She’d gone in as part of a team of three. Guy outside a terraced house in Harlesden at two in the morning, shouting, waving a gun. Neighbours had heard windows smash. One said she’d heard a shot.

  Kennedy took point, approaching the guy head-on while Gates and Leakey, her two colleagues, moved in behind parked cars to flank him. The guy in question, one Marcus Dell, aged thirty, was as high as a kite on something or other, and the thing he was waving in his right hand did look like a gun. But his left hand was bleeding like a bastard, and according to Kennedy’s statement after the fact, she’d had a suspicion that he’d broken the window by punching it in rather than with a bullet.

  So she’d gone in a little closer, talking, talking, talking all the way, till she was ten feet away and she’d seen what Dell was carrying: a broken clamshell phone, its top half sticking out at a suggestive angle.

  She called the all-clear and the other two officers came out of covert, full of that mixed adrenalin, relief, anger and slightly surreal buzz that comes with being close to a life-or-death decision and then being told to stand down.

  Dell threw the phone at Leakey, hitting him square in the eye. Then both Gates and Leakey cut loose, firing off eleven bullets between them in the space of six crowded seconds. Four of those shots were direct hits: arm, leg, torso, torso.

  Amazingly, though, Dell didn’t go down. He went for Kennedy instead, and since by this time she was just a few feet from him, he only had to take a step forward to fasten his hands around her neck.

  Consequently, it was Kennedy who fired the bullet that put him down: through the left ventricle at a distance succinctly noted on the incident file as ‘zero feet’. She’d blown his heart out through his back, more or less, and then stood there robed in his blood while Gates and Leakey confirmed the kill.

  This was the story as told by the dead man’s wife, the single eyewitness willing to come forward. It turned out Dell had been trying to break into his own house, a result of a marital disagreement that had its roots in the dope he’d ingested and his unwillingness to share. Lorina Dell was very clear about the sequence of events and the respective roles that the three armed officers had played.

  Gates and Leakey told the story differently, of course. They claimed they’d fired before Dell threw the phone, and in the still-unaltered belief that it was a handgun.

  The story got a little muddy here. Leakey also offered as evidence a handgun, a cheap Russian GSh-18, with a full magazine, which he claimed to have found tucked into the back of Dell’s belt. Gates confirmed that this was the gun’s provenance, even when it turned out not to have a single fingerprint of Dell’s on it.

  The testimony that was going to nail them, when this finally came to trial, wasn’t that of the dead man’s stoner wife. It was Kennedy’s. She denied that the GSh-18 had been found at the crime scene (a great many guns had recently arrived in the evidence lockers from a raid on a container ship that had turned out to be smuggling weapons, hashish and – incongruously – cloned viagra pills). She accused both of her fellow officers of having fired on Dell when he manifestly offered no threat.

  Kennedy’s decision to play the George Washington gambit took everyone by surprise. It meant her own ARU licence got trashed, along with those of Gates and Leakey, and it set her against the department in a fight that ultimately she couldn’t win. The guy had died with his hands around an officer’s throat: it didn’t even have to come to court if they all kept their stories straight.

  In successive interviews, Kennedy had been invited to repeat her version of events probably a dozen times, without a single word being written down. Tactful interviewers invited her to consider the order in which key events had superseded each other, and the full extent of the danger posed by Mr Dell’s attack on her own person. These review sessions had been used in other controversial cases with positive outcomes for the force and all officers concerned. But you could only do so much for a cop with no sense of self-preservation. Kennedy continued to assert that she, Gates and Leakey had used lethal force against a confused drug addict who could barely stay upright. She invited the crown prosecutor to throw the book at her.

  So far, that hadn’t happened. The case had now become a three-way running skirmish between the Met, the CPS and the Police Complaints Commission. A full inquiry was underway and would have to report before any charges were preferred. Until then, Gates and Leakey were suspended on full pay, while Kennedy got to st
ay on in the division, sans gun licence, plying her normal trade.

  Except that nothing had come back to normal for anyone concerned. Kennedy was in Coventry: a pariah in the bear pit, a walking target for anything the DCIs felt like throwing at her, and maybe, Harper thought, damaged in less tangible ways – holed below the waterline. When she’d warned him off, he’d gotten the sense that it was cold pragmatism rather than quixotic generosity. Something like the way the officers trapped on the Titanic had finally told the rescue boats to stand off so they wouldn’t get sucked down when the big liner went under.

  Harper realised that Combes was still looking at him, waiting for a response to the cautionary tale.

  ‘She doesn’t seem like the easiest person in the world to work with,’ Harper said, throwing a sop to Cerberus.

  ‘You got that right,’ someone – Stanwick? – agreed.

  ‘But I guess she felt pretty strongly about how those other guys messed up the arrest.’

  The mood in the room turned a little colder. ‘What did the little bastard expect?’ Stanwick demanded. ‘He assaulted an officer, he went down. Good riddance.’

  ‘Fine,’ Harper said. ‘And they’ll all probably walk on that basis. So Kennedy’s not hurting anyone by sticking to her story.’

  ‘Fancy your chances, do you?’ Combes enquired, with a definite edge. ‘She’s a real looker, isn’t she?’

  Considered objectively, Kennedy had everything you’d need to merit that description: a figure that went in and out in the right places, striking acid-blonde hair that she wore pulled severely back in a way that suggested she could loosen it and shake it out as a prelude to sex, and that this would be something to see, and a face that – although maybe a little too emphatic at nose and chin – still had an intensity of expression you’d have to call attractive.

  But she was ten years older than Harper’s girlfriend, Tessa, and that relationship was new enough to skew his judgement on all other women. He shrugged non-committally.

  ‘He fancies his chances,’ Combes announced to the room. ‘Well, you can forget it, son. She’s a dyke.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Harper was interested now, but only as a detective. ‘How’d you know?’

  ‘We did a day-at-the-races thing last March, the whole department,’ Stanwick told him, as though he was talking to an idiot, ‘and she brought a bird with her.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that make half of you dykes as well?’ Harper asked, innocently. His tone was light and friendly, but the chill in the room grew: on some level, this was a test, and he wasn’t doing well.

  ‘Anyway, you’d better get your jollies while you can, mate,’ one of the other DCs summed up. ‘She’s not going to be around for much longer.’

  ‘No,’ Harper agreed. ‘Probably not.’

  The conversation turned to other things, and flowed around him, leaving him out. He let it. He had a lot of phone calls to make, and he might as well make a start while Kennedy was off interviewing Barlow’s sister.

  The London Historical Forum was a biannual event hosted by the university. He tracked down the relevant office, which was at Birkbeck, and after doing the phone-tag runaround with a job lot of receptionists and assistants, he was able to requisition a copy of the contact list from the last conference. It came through as an email attachment half an hour later – but instead of a word-processed document, they’d sent jpegs. Each page had been separately mounted on to the copier plate and scanned in, in some cases very sloppily, so that first letters of surnames were clipped off on the left, and the bottom two or three lines of each sheet appeared to have been missed out.

  Harper emailed back to ask if there was a Word version of the list somewhere in the system, then printed the scans out. He could work with what he’d been given for now.

  As he walked down the corridor to the printer, Harper thought about the conversation he’d just had. Why had he stood up for Kennedy, or at least refused to join in the general condemnation? She was far from likeable and she’d made it abundantly clear that she was happy to work the case solo.

  But it was Harper’s first case and some atavistic part of him rebelled against backing out of it: the angel who looked down on police work had to take a pretty dim view of officers recusing themselves for fear of rocking the boat. And Kennedy seemed to have good instincts, too: not flashy, but methodical and thorough. Harper had seen flash, preferred the core skill set intelligently applied. However far her mind was off the vertical as a result of the Dell shooting, the pending court case and having to live in exile within the department, she was still trying to do her job.

  So he was going to work with Kennedy and give her the benefit of the doubt – for now, at least. If she busted his balls too much, or if she turned out to be more unstable than he’d guessed, he still had the option of shouting up the ladder and pleading PD, as she’d suggested.

  In the meantime, being on the other side of an argument from the likes of Combes and Stanwick – who he had already identified as self-serving dicks – was single malt for the soul.

  He took the print-out back to his desk and started the arduous and unpleasant task of chasing up some eyewitness testimony that might not even exist.

  He was seven names into the list when he found the next dead body.

  7

  Rosalind Barlow’s address was Stuart Barlow’s address. The brother and sister lived together – had lived together – in a cottage-style bungalow, just outside the M25 ring in the probably-used-to-be-a-village of Merstham. Like William and Caroline Herschel, or the Wordsworths, or Emily, Anne and Charlotte with Bramwell. Kennedy had a brother of her own and therefore had her doubts about these domestic arrangements. Live-in boyfriends were bad enough: having a brother hanging around the place was an even more cast-iron guarantee of arrested development and neurotic co-dependency.

  Ten minutes into the visit, she’d shifted that initial estimate a fair distance. Ros Barlow was a tough, confident woman, tall and solidly built, with a head of auburn hair designed to be sculpted into something big and heraldic – the kind of woman who gets called ‘handsome’ a lot. She was fifteen years younger than her brother, and the house was hers, inherited from their parents. Stuart Barlow had been living in it rent-free for years while Ros held down a job in the securities department of a New York bank. She’d moved back to London only recently, to take up a better position in the City, and so had ended up sharing with her brother for a few months while he sorted something else out. Now, though, she said, she was looking for somewhere else herself.

  ‘I’ve got a friend I can bunk in with, for a few nights. After that, I’ll try to find somewhere a bit closer to the centre. If there’s nothing on the market, I’ll rent for now. I’m certainly not staying here.’

  ‘Why not?’ Kennedy asked, surprised by the woman’s vehemence.

  ‘Why not? Because it’s Stu’s. Every single thing here is his, and it took him years to get it just the way he wanted. I’d rather sell it to someone else who likes this kind of thing than spend the next two years changing it over piecemeal to something that works for me. I’d feel like …’ she groped for a simile ‘… like he was still trying to hang on to me and I was breaking his fingers one by one. It would be horrible.’

  Ros had taken the news that the investigation had reopened very much in her stride. ‘Good,’ was all she’d said.

  They were sitting in the living room of the cottage, which had nineteenth-century Punch cartoons on the walls and a drinks cabinet that someone had retro-fitted from a Victorian roll-top desk. An open staircase in a modern design, with no risers, divided the room in two – not something you expected to see in a bungalow. Presumably Barlow had had some extension work done in the loft space and there was now a room up there.

  ‘You asked for the autopsy,’ Kennedy said, putting down the small but extremely potent cup of espresso that Ros had given her when she arrived. ‘Was that because you suspected that your brother’s death wasn’t an accident?’


  Ros clicked her teeth impatiently. ‘I knew it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘And I told the constable who came out here exactly why. But I could see he wasn’t listening, so I had to demand an autopsy, too. I’ve been around overworked people long enough to know the signs. You have to make a noise – make yourself really bloody loud and obvious – or else they file you under business as usual and sod all gets done.’

  Kennedy agreed, as far as that went, but didn’t say so. She wasn’t here to play ‘ain’t it awful’. ‘That was a local officer, I’m assuming?’ she said. ‘In uniform?’

  ‘In uniform, yes.’ Ros frowned, remembering. ‘And I called him a constable, but actually I didn’t ask his rank. He had a number – a number and letters – on his shoulder, but no pips or stripes or stars. I’ve been abroad for a fair few years, but I think that makes him a constable unless they’ve changed the uniform regs.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kennedy said, ‘it does.’ She liked that Ros could call those details to mind after two weeks. It meant she might remember other things with the same clarity.

  ‘So what did you think had happened to Stuart?’ she asked.

  Ros’s expression hardened. ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘All right. Why do you say that?’

  ‘He told me.’ Kennedy’s surprise must have shown through her professional poker face because Ros went on more emphatically, as though she’d been contradicted. ‘He did. He told me three days before it happened.’

  ‘That he was going to be murdered?’

  ‘That someone might attack him. That he felt under threat and didn’t know what to do.’

  Ros was becoming more strident. In the face of her heightened emotion, Kennedy became deliberately emollient. ‘That must have been terrible for both of you,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you contact the police?’