by Adam Blake
‘How did they die?’ she asked.
‘Accidents in both cases. Or they were recorded as accidents. But so was Barlow, right?’ Harper raised his left hand, knocked down the index finger and then the forefinger as he recited the brief litany. ‘Catherine Hurt, hit and run. Devani, electric shock from a badly earthed computer.’
‘Did you get the files?’
‘There’s only a file for Hurt. It’s on my desk, but seriously, there’s sod all in it. No witnesses, no CCTV footage, no nothing.’
Kennedy took that on the chin. She’d heard on a TV documentary that the UK had twenty per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras, but it was a sad fact of twenty-first-century policing that they were never where you needed them to be. ‘Is it just those two?’ she asked Harper. ‘Or are you still working your way through the list?’
‘I’m about two-thirds done. Still waiting on a lot of people to get back to me, though – so I’ve talked to a little under half of them. Before you ask, I’ve been trying to find a link between the three victims, but I haven’t come up with anything so far. Well, apart from the convention itself. They’re not even all historians. Devani is the odd one out – he’s a modern languages lecturer at a community college in Bradford. Hurt is a teaching assistant at Leicester De Montfort. Their names don’t come up together anywhere when you feed them into a search engine.’
Kennedy was surprised at that. In her experience, if you typed any collection of random names into Google, you automatically got a million hits. Maybe the absence of a connection was suspicious and anomalous in itself. ‘Are you all right to keep working through the list?’ she asked Harper.
His chagrin showed on his face. ‘We’ve got two new victims,’ he pointed out. ‘Shouldn’t we go and do some site work?’
‘Possible victims. And the sites are as old as Barlow’s. Tomorrow we’ll go out and do some recce. First, let’s make sure we didn’t miss anybody else.’
‘What are you going to be doing?’ Harper demanded, suspicion in his voice.
‘I’m going back to Prince Regent’s, to have another look at Barlow’s office. His house was burgled a while back. I’m wondering if someone might have gone through his things at the college, too.’
‘What would that prove?’
Kennedy was going on instinct – the indefinable sense that she’d missed something the first time she was in that room – but she didn’t want to say that: it was too hard to defend. ‘For starters,’ she said instead, ‘it would prove that the stalker existed. And it might give us a line on a possible motive. Old artefacts, manuscripts, something like that. Smuggling them, forging them, stealing them. I don’t know. Barlow thought someone was following him and maybe he thought he knew why. I can ask about these other two at the same time – see if anyone at Prince Regent’s knows of any connection between them and Barlow.’ She paused. ‘Do something else for me?’
‘Oh, anything. I’ll be sitting here with all this time on my hands.’
‘Call a hotel – the Pride Court, in West one. Somewhere around Bloomsbury. Ask for contact information for someone who was staying there recently. Michael Brand.’
‘Yeah, okay. Who is he?’
‘He was in some sort of online club that Barlow belonged to. They call themselves the Ravellers. In fact, it would be great if you could get a membership list from somewhere. If either of these other two DOAs were in the same gang, we might be on to something.’
Harper made her spell the name out before she left. ‘When are you going back to Summerhill?’ he asked her, as they walked back along the corridor.
‘When we know what we’ve got. Not yet. The DCI threw this to us because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. When we bring it back to him, the first thing he’s going to think is that we’re trying to put one over on him. We’ll need to make a case.’
‘Three dead historians don’t make a case?’
‘They do if they were murdered. We don’t know that yet.’
‘Oh, they were murdered all right.’ Harper sounded almost cheerful. ‘Congratulate me, Kennedy.’
‘On what?’
‘This is my first case in Division. I hit a serial killer on my first case.’
Kennedy didn’t share his enthusiasm. That cluster pattern of supposed accidents was still troubling her a lot. One killer, working his way through a list? Not likely. Not likely at all. You’d need to be really lucky, or else to have done immaculate recon, to get three people in two days and come away clean. Serial killers were often obsessives, and they were very good at finding the victims that matched the needs of their particular psychosis, but they mostly treated each murder as a separate project. And spree killers just exploded, at a time and place of their own choosing. If she and Harper were dealing with a murderer, it was a murderer who didn’t seem to fall into either of those categories.
She stopped a couple of turns of corridor short of the bear pit, sparing Harper’s reputation, and turned to face him. He was looking at her expectantly. He made a beckoning motion with one outstretched hand, coaxing her.
‘Fine. Congratulations, Harper.’
‘Like you mean it.’
She punched him on the shoulder.
‘Good going, Chris. You rock. First of many, man.’
‘Thank you. Makes up for spending the day on the phone.’
‘Tomorrow will be different.’
She remembered that promise later and wondered whether he’d believed her.
10
Solomon Kuutma was a mystery, even to himself. A man who revered honesty and transparency, he moved in secret and hid the deepest truths in the deepest wells: seeing all life as sacred, he killed without compunction and ordered others to kill.
If anything about his life troubled him, it was the thought that these contradictions, seen from the outside, could look like mere hypocrisy. Other men might not trouble to think through the paradoxes to the simple truth at their core. They might judge him, and judge him unfairly, and though the judgements of men weighed as much as a feather weighs (those of women, infinitely less), the unfairness – purely hypothetical – was irksome to him.
He had thought, therefore, of writing a memoir, to be given to the world after his death. All names, all circumstantial details, would be removed, but the central fact of a good man bending his conscience to fit through the needle’s eye would be clearly explained, and so would be understood by those who read with open eyes and minds and hearts.
Obviously, this was madness. The memoir would never be written, the explanation never offered. Even without names, the truth would be apparent and all his labours of many years would be made meaningless at a stroke. His masters would be horrified to hear that Kuutma had indulged such a wild idea even for a second. They might even call him home – a homecoming without honour, and for that reason unbearable: the greatest joy turned into the most trenchant pain.
All the same, Kuutma composed, within the privacy of his mind, the explanation for his actions. He recited it to himself, not like a prayer, but like a prophylaxis – a ward against evil, because a man doing the things that Kuutma did was at risk of falling into evil without even knowing it. Sitting on the rooftop terrace of a café in Montmartre, with Paris sprawled wanton below him like a submissive lover, he considered the situation that had arisen because of the actions of Leo Tillman, and he explained, to no one but himself and perhaps God, what he intended to do to resolve that situation.
My greatest skill, he thought, my greatest gift, is love. You can’t defeat an enemy without knowing him, and you can’t know him without loving him, without letting your mind move into silent sympathy with his. Once that Herculean task is done, you will be ahead of him always and without effort, able to lie in ambush along all the pathways of his life.
But Kuutma could not love Tillman. And perhaps that was why Tillman was still alive.
Kuutma had been following the ex-mercenary ever since Turkey, trying to decide what approach migh
t be appropriate, given that Tillman had now murdered Kiril Kartoyev and presumably, before murdering him, had spoken with him.
It was a dynamic problem, played out across four dimensions as Tillman moved across the face of the continent. Tillman moved very quickly, but that was not in itself a source of difficulties. Much more troublesome was the fact that he moved in a deliberately scattershot way, complicating pursuit and requiring Kuutma to withdraw and redeploy his teams many times over. Tillman would book a taxi and then walk, buy a train ticket and then steal a car. And as though he knew about the American debacle, which at this stage seemed impossible, he never, ever flew.
Tillman only stayed in Erzurum for a few hours, not long enough for Kuutma to move a team into place around him. Barely long enough, in fact, to change his clothes, to shave and perhaps to check whatever networks he used to see whether there was any fall-out from the raid on Kartoyev’s house in Ingushetia that might personally affect him.
Kartoyev’s death was inconvenient to Kuutma. The Russian was only a supplier, and a foulness unworthy even to be touched because the things he supplied served the basest impulses of men. Still, he’d been efficient and useful, and had learned long ago to keep to his assigned place in the scheme of things. Kartoyev asked no questions. He sourced difficult items quickly and untraceably. He kept his avarice within acceptable bounds.
Now a new Kartoyev would have to be found, and that was Tillman’s fault. Or perhaps the fault lay with Kuutma himself, for not addressing sooner the unique problems that Tillman presented.
I held back from killing you because I wanted to be sure beyond doubt that you needed to be killed: that there was no possibility my judgement was tainted. This was not cowardice but compunction. It does not diminish me.
Still, in Erzurum Kuutma held back a little more. Even if his worst presentiments were realised, there was time; time to move gently towards that synthesis of perspectives that was the heart of his mystery. Time to understand all, and to forgive all, and then to act.
From Erzurum, Tillman went to Bucharest, probably by way of Ankara. Most likely he’d taken the train, or rather a number of trains, doubling back through the mountains north of Bursa on foot. There was a place there where two branch lines passed within seven miles of each other, before veering away sharply to north and west. The traffic on the western line was mostly freight: it would have been relatively easy for Tillman to jump on board on a slow gradient and ride the rods, or force the door of a carriage, and be carried through three hundred bone-shaking miles, across two sloppily guarded borders, to the Romanian capital.
In Bucharest, though, he used his own passport – one of many passports, but one he’d used before and which was traceable to him – to obtain a room in the Calea Victoriei Hotel. Kuutma weighed his options with a fine discrimination. It was still far from clear what Tillman knew, or what his aims were, and in these rare, ambiguous instances the Messengers’ creed was Janus-faced. Do nothing that is not warranted. Do everything that is needful.
The killing of Kartoyev, Kuutma reasoned, had put Tillman over the invisible, wavering line into the second of those categories. He would need to be removed, and ideally he would need to be interrogated first. Kuutma would take care of the interrogation himself. He contacted local Messengers, and a team of four was despatched to the Calea Victoriei to detain Tillman long enough for Kuutma himself to arrive and take over.
But although Tillman had checked in at the hotel, and had paid for three nights in advance, it seemed to be yet another of the blind alleys he liked to set up wherever he went. When the Messengers moved in, it was to find the bed empty, the room untouched apart from a note that in due course found its way to Kuutma.
The note read, Cuts both ways.
Kuutma felt certain the note did not refer directly to him, even though it seemed to pun on his name. Tillman could not know his name. Only one person Tillman had ever met could possibly have told him, and that one person was secure, beyond reasonable or even unreasonable doubt. No, the note was a taunt – and therefore a juvenile and mistaken gesture on Tillman’s part. He meant only to say that Kuutma, and the powers he represented, could not move against him without revealing their hand and making his search easier.
He would learn that it did not cut both ways: it was only in the last and least era of human history, where the extraneous was sanctified, that razors were designed with a double edge.
From Bucharest Tillman went to Munich and from Munich to Paris, by paranoid and complicated means – the stolen car among them. Either he avoided border stations altogether or else he presented a false passport that Kuutma’s sources hadn’t yet linked to him. There were no official records of his journey, no footprints to follow, any more than there would have been if Kuutma had made the same pilgrimage himself.
In Paris a team had already been deployed, because Kuutma by this time had more than a presentiment of where his quarry was heading. The three Messengers there – chosen and assigned by Kuutma with due consideration for the nature of the task and the target – picked up Tillman’s trail on the Boulevard Montparnasse and moved in quickly. They assumed that Tillman was heading for the Metro station and had already decided to kill him there. Instead, Tillman walked into the underground parking garage of the Tour Maine. But when the team closed in to despatch him, he had disappeared. A thorough search of the area revealed no trace of him.
At this point, the team committed an enormous breach of protocol. Under their leader’s orders, they dispersed, as was right and proper, returning to their safe house by different routes. But they failed to use the check-reverse-check system instigated by Kuutma to ensure that none was followed.
The next time the Paris safe house was left empty, it was ransacked. Tillman had turned Kuutma’s sting back upon himself, with a certain grace. Fortunately, they kept no documents of any kind at the safe house. What documents did Messengers need? Tillman escaped, but he escaped with empty hands.
Kuutma felt he was learning from these failures. Tillman had been a mercenary for nine years and most of his experience had been in urban warfare. He was comfortable in cities, knew how to find invisibility in a crowd, or a doorway where someone else would see a dead end. So clearly, when they next sought to close the net on him, it should be somewhere those skills would be of no use.
Magas. Erzurum. Bucharest. Munich. Paris. The westward trend of Tillman’s journey was marked and unmistakable now, and it seemed inevitable that it would end in the one place where it was least convenient to have him go. Kuutma could be paranoid, too. He used all the resources he had ready to hand – not plentiful but certainly adequate – to watch the mainline stations northward from Paris and the ferry ports from Quimper to Hook of Holland.
In the meantime, he reviewed what he knew about the man who had become the most fascinating irritant in his far from serene existence. Most interesting to him, without a doubt, was the period of Tillman’s life that began with the day he returned home to find his family vanished and his house cold and empty.
Tillman could easily have gone back to what he was before – a man asleep, made docile first by his own idleness and then by bovine contentment. He could have found another woman, and been equally happy with her, since surely to a serious man all women were alike. But he did not do these things. He went in a different direction entirely and acquired a new set of skills. Seen in context, it formed an extreme but unsurprising response to grief and loss: to become a soldier, a man who kills without human feeling, since nothing in his own life seemed any longer to call for the exercise of such feeling. An extreme response, yes. But now, in retrospect, it was possible to read the same decision in another way.
Twelve years of soldiering, first in the regular army and then as a mercenary. For the first time, Tillman had seemed completely absorbed, completely committed. He had been promoted to corporal, then to sergeant. A commissioned rank had been offered him, but by then he was in a mercenary outfit, and ranks, in such an organisatio
n, were a loose fit at the best of times. Tillman chose to remain a sergeant so he could stay in the field, and his employers were happy to let him stay there because in the field he excelled. The soldiers who served with him gave him their taciturn worship and the name Twister – a tribute to an ability to get out of any situation with his hide and any other hides that he was minding miraculously unscathed.
It seemed like Tillman had found a new focus, a new family. But Kuutma, reviewing the evidence now, suspected that this had always been an illusion. Tillman had no interest in acquiring a new family. He was intent, still, on finding the one he’d lost. Throughout these years, he was equipping himself for a specific task. Building up a skill set that would be supremely and minutely appropriate when he stepped aside from soldiering and launched himself – suddenly and without warning – into his current search.
Kuutma remembered a conversation, with unsettling vividness. The last time … no. Not the last time. There was another time, after that. But close to the terrible end, the indelible moment.
‘Will he forget you?’
‘Oh God! Why would you care?’
‘Will he forget you?’
‘Never.’
‘Then he’s a fool.’
‘Yes.’
Tillman’s starting point was a name: Michael Brand. Rebecca Tillman had met with a Michael Brand on the day of her disappearance, by prior assignation. Unfortunately, she’d left a note of the name, the time and the place on a pad next to the telephone in her kitchen, where she’d taken the call, and though she’d torn off the sheet and taken it with her, Tillman had been able to make out the impression of the characters on the sheet beneath.
The name led nowhere, of course. The hotel where Rebecca Tillman had arranged to meet Brand was the scene of no carnal or criminal actions, and forensic investigation would unearth nothing there. It was simply the place in which she had been told what she needed to be told, so that the necessary arrangements could be made. It was even late, past the time when she should have been told, and lateness was always to be deplored in such matters. Perhaps if Brand had been more mindful of his duty … but Brand was by necessity a blunt and uncertain instrument.
