by Adam Blake
With some effort, his leg already stiffening, he somersaulted in the water and swam further down. There were no directions in the midnight-black of the water, so he couldn’t be sure where he was in relation to the ferry. Staying down as long as he could was the best way to get some distance from it.
When his breath began to give out he stopped swimming and let himself rise. At this moment, his lungs empty and screaming for air, he glimpsed something falling away from him into the depths below, where he couldn’t now follow it. Something pure white, which picked up the unsteady, murky gleam of the ferry’s stern lamp and flashed like the wing of a bird.
It was Mr Snow.
Tillman broke the surface a long way behind the ferry. He saw no figures on the deck looking or pointing back towards him. The night would hide him, and the assassins would hardly report that he’d jumped. There probably wouldn’t be a search. The intensely cold water would lessen the bleeding from his wounds, and he was unlikely to miss the south coast of England, given how big a target it was.
He also had an answer to his question, at last. The people who’d been following really did want him dead. Perhaps that meant Michael Brand was afraid of him. He hoped so.
But he couldn’t hope to find Mr Snow in the dark and the biting cold of the water. He needed every ounce of his strength if he was going to survive to make the shore. ‘I’m sorry,’ Tillman muttered, as the waves rocked and pawed him. Not to the toy, but to the daughter he’d lost so many years before. He felt as though he’d broken faith with Grace, in some way. And as though he’d lost a link that he really couldn’t afford to lose.
Survival. It was all that mattered now. He used the ferry’s wake to orient himself towards the north and the shore that was still ten miles distant.
14
When Kennedy called in from Prince Regent’s to check on Harper’s progress, he told her – with pardonable smugness – that he’d found a link between the three dead academics. It was spectacular news, but it shrank in the telling, as Kennedy kept coming up with other questions that he should have asked Sarah Opie while he had her on the line: were the three dead Ravellers only in direct contact through the website or did they know each other from elsewhere? How long had their shared project been going on, and who knew about it? Was anyone else collaborating with them, who wasn’t at the London History Forum? She wasn’t giving him a bollocking: it was just the way she operated, as he knew even from their brief acquaintance. She was putting things together in her mind, figuring out what they had, and what they needed.
‘I thought some of this could wait until we go to see her,’ Harper said, chagrined. ‘I mean, this is the breakthrough, right? We’ve got the link. If we’ve got the link, we must be really close to getting a motive. But I knew we’d need a full statement, and I didn’t want to put ideas into her head in advance.’
‘You did good, Harper. But tell me what this thing is that they were translating.’
‘The Rotgut Codex,’ Harper said. ‘It’s sort of a standing joke on the Ravellers board, apparently. Most people think it’s fake. But Barlow had a new take on it, Dr Opie said, something that came out of his research on those early Christians. The Acrostics.’
‘Gnostics.’
‘Or whoever. So it all comes back to Barlow. He started trying to translate this Rotgut thing and he brought the other two on board.’
‘Just the other two? I mean, there’s nobody else involved? Nobody who needs to be warned that someone might want to kill them?’
Harper was on firmer ground here. ‘No other collaborators. Barlow did approach one other guy, because he’s a big expert on all these early documents. Emil Gassan, his name is – works up in Scotland somewhere. But he refused point blank to have anything to do with Barlow. Told him to sod off, essentially.’
‘What about Opie herself? How does she know all this?’
‘Postings on the forum?’ Harper said, but he made it into a question. ‘Okay, I admit that was just a guess. I asked her a couple of times, straight out, but she managed to give me a body swerve both times. She’s a friend of Barlow’s. Well, he knew her anyway, because he posted on this message board when she got a big prize of some kind. But she said she wasn’t part of this. Very definitely. Nothing to do with the project. She said that twice.’
‘And yet she knew what the project was all about?’ Kennedy asked.
Harper began to feel that the subtext here was that he was an idiot and couldn’t debrief a suspect. ‘It’s not like it was a secret,’ he reminded Kennedy, trying not to sound truculent. ‘This woman is active on the Raveller site, so I didn’t think there was anything unusual about her being in the know. Anyway, you can ask her yourself. I should set up a meeting, right?’
He looked at his watch as he said it. It was after six, which meant that they probably wouldn’t catch Opie on campus now. Harper would have to get her home number or her mobile and try to reach her on the fly. Opie wouldn’t be happy. Her mood had darkened in the course of Harper’s very tentative questioning. She’d been afraid, and shaken, as anyone might be to learn that three people they knew well could all have been victims of the same killer. Her answers had become more and more terse and monosyllabic, not because she was refusing to cooperate, Harper suspected, but because she was having trouble even getting her mind to touch this stuff. Physical trauma induces clinical shock. Psychological trauma gums up the wheels of thought so they won’t turn – which was the real reason why he hadn’t pushed Opie too hard for further details. He’d been afraid he might be pushing her towards some sort of mental crisis that he wouldn’t be able – at long distance – to talk her down from.
‘Not tonight,’ Kennedy said, to his relief. ‘I think the next step is to go back to the DCI. When he gave this to us, he thought he was kicking it into the long grass. He needs to know what it’s turned into, so he can make a decision about resources.’
Harper was scandalised. ‘You mean give it to a different team? No bleeding way, Sarge. This is my serial killer. Ours, I mean. And I’ve got a name for him.’
‘Harper, I don’t even want to—’
‘The History Man. You have to think about these things, Kennedy. If you want big headlines, you’ve got to give the media something they can get their teeth into. I can’t wait for that first press conference.’
‘That’s nice, Harper. But if there’s a press conference, there’s a good chance we won’t be on it.’
‘I’ll be on it if it bloody kills me.’
Her sigh rustled down the line. The sigh of a mother with a wayward kid. ‘They probably won’t want to sound any fanfares about any of this because of the screw-up over the Barlow investigation first time around. If they do throw a media-fest, you can bet that Summerhill will be at the mike himself. Maybe we’ll get to sit there and look solemn. Have you written up everything you’ve got?’
‘Pretty much,’ Harper lied. He only had the indecipherable scribble he’d jotted down as he went along. He’d typed nothing and filed nothing as of yet.
‘Leave it on my desk. I’ll add my own stuff to it and drop it into Summerhill’s tray tonight. In the morning we go see him, get him to call it. If a major witness interview is still pending, it forces his hand: he won’t want to hold things up in ways that might show on the file. Let me have that other guy’s number, though, the one in Scotland who said no to Barlow. I’ll call him now – dot the i’s and cross the t’s.’
‘Okay.’ Harper recited the number he’d been given for Emil Gassan, so that Kennedy could take it down. He felt uneasy. ‘You don’t really think Summerhill will move us off this, do you?’
‘Not you, maybe. He’s definitely going to put a different case officer on it, though.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if it stops being time-wasting bullshit, it stops being my special property. On second thoughts, don’t leave your notes on my desk. Send me the file and I’ll print the whole lot off in one go.’ Kennedy didn’t say it, but he
knew she was thinking about Combes and his posse. They wouldn’t scruple to pick up the stuff on Kennedy’s desk and read it over, whether out of mischief or just idle curiosity. If they saw something they wanted, they’d go all-out to get it, and suddenly he and Kennedy would be squeezed on two fronts. That was how Harper thought of it anyway: as though this multiple murder (triple slaying sounded even better) was a rosy apple that had fallen into his lap, proving the universal law, which he hoped would some day be named after him, that great detectives magically call forth cases worthy of their uncanny abilities.
After Kennedy had hung up, he realised that he’d forgotten to tell her about Michael Brand giving a false name and address. Dr Opie’s revelations had washed that little nugget clean out of his mind. Maybe Kennedy would have been more impressed if he’d led with the news that they might actually have a suspect. Well, she’d get it from the case notes, and then she could tell him what questions he should have asked the Spanish guy while he had him on the phone.
He typed up the notes – another tedious job he had a mildly embarrassing flair for – and started getting his stuff together to leave. But he hadn’t logged off. Stanwick ambled over and began to read the open file over his shoulder. Harper turned the monitor to an oblique angle, away from him.
‘Jesus, I was only looking,’ Stanwick grumbled. ‘Anyway, I thought your case was a turd that wouldn’t flush. That’s why they gave it to you and Calamity Jane. So where’s the big secret?’
‘The killer’s someone in the division,’ Harper said. ‘Could be the Super. Could even be you.’
Stanwick stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’
‘Yeah,’ said Harper. He reached down and pulled the plug on the computer with the file still open. ‘It’s supposed to mean mind your own damned business.’
He walked away, expecting a hand on his shoulder, expecting the big man to haul him round and plant one in his face. But Stanwick only whistled, the dipping-then-rising note that signifies surprise. If he hadn’t made a good impression earlier, refusing to join in the trashing of Kennedy’s reputation, that whistle clearly said that Harper had put himself into a file drawer now. One that everybody else in the division was going to be using as a urinal.
Harper truly didn’t care. He was ambitious, in a general way, but more for experience than for career rewards. He wanted to see and do extraordinary things. The uniformed branch had been too small for him, and maybe Detective Division would turn out the same. He just wanted it to be a wild ride.
After Harper left, the early evening currents swept a few more people through the bear pit, but mostly this was ebb tide. The DCs and DSs trickled away one by one or in small knots until, by the time Kennedy got there at around eight, the great room was empty. She didn’t mind that one bit.
It took her a while to write up the day’s work. It wasn’t that she’d covered a vast amount of ground: the findings, sensational though they were, could be condensed into a few explosive paragraphs. She was just covering her back. Even though the screw-ups on this case predated her involvement, that wouldn’t offer much protection if a head had to roll. And with three overlooked murders instead of one, a decapitation for the sake of morale was looking like less and less of a longshot.
So she made sure the case notes were immaculate. She and Harper had adhered punctiliously to every rule and protocol, had been unfailingly courteous and endlessly explanatory to witnesses, had paused in their diligent, by-the-book slogging only to keep full and simultaneous notes on everything they were doing. In short, they were saints of policework.
Reading through Harper’s notes, she discovered the Michael Brand bombshell and swore aloud. A false address? An invented phone number? Christ. Why hadn’t Harper put that to Opie, and asked her what Brand had to say for himself on the Ravellers forum? Was he still posting there? Did the site moderators hold any contact information on him? If Brand was lying about his address, there was no telling what else he might have lied about – and Rosalind Barlow had said that her brother met with Brand on the night before he died. This could be their man, or else a potentially vital witness, and he had a three-week head-start on them already.
What did that leave? It left the Scottish guy. Emil Gassan. She called him on the number that Harper had given her, but found it was just the university switchboard. She was told that Dr Gassan had left for the evening, and got the desk clerk – after the usual foofarah of identification – to release the doctor’s personal contact numbers to her. She tried him on his home phone, where she got no answer, and on his mobile, which was switched off. Out of options, she left her own contact information on his voicemail, along with a message saying that she wanted very much to talk to him in connection with a pending investigation. She made a mental note to try the home and mobile numbers again later.
Troubled and preoccupied, she printed up Harper’s notes and added them to her own. She hated this game of catch-up – the sense of being hamstrung by the bad policework of other officers. They were going to be three weeks too late for everything, all the way down the line. She forwarded the notes to Summerhill as an email attachment, then made the short walk up the corridor to his secretary’s desk and placed the hard copy, along with the rest of the case file, on top of his in-tray where he’d see it the next morning.
Done. There was nothing to keep her from going home now. No good reason to put it off any longer.
She collected her coat from the bear pit, noticing as she did so that the steel rat-trap had gone from her waste bin. Whoever brought it in to intimidate her must have wanted it back. Or maybe it would turn up in her file cabinet next, or her locker.
Compared with what awaited her now, those petty provocations shrank to their proper proportions.
15
It was ten o’clock before Kennedy got back to her flat at the cheaper end of Pimlico, and she got there in time to hear Izzy talking dirty in front of her father for the fourth time in a row. That meant she had to apologise to Izzy while simultaneously being pissed off with her. It was the kind of bitter-sour cocktail that left Kennedy bilious.
Izzy lived in the flat upstairs and was able to combine looking after Kennedy’s father – and the kids of their downstairs neighbour – with her regular job. But her regular job was being the receiving end of a sex phone line, and her shift started at nine most nights. If Kennedy came home late, Izzy just whipped her phone out and clocked on – and Peter got to hear a-hundred-and-some variants on ‘Would you like to, babe, would you like to stick it in me?’
Izzy seemed to cope with this a lot better than Kennedy did. It didn’t inhibit her at all to have the old man listening to her perform. It even kept her up to the mark, she said, trying to elicit some slight flicker of a reaction from Peter. She knew that her boss sometimes monitored the calls to make sure that his girls were pulling their weight while the customers, as it were, pulled theirs. She didn’t want to get a reprimand for the quality of her smut, and raising a ripple in Peter’s almost Zen-like calm gave her a target to aim for.
Kennedy found this disturbing on a lot of levels, and her feelings were complicated still further by the fact that she found Izzy insanely attractive. The woman was a petite brunette with a tiny waist and a huge butt, which was close to Kennedy’s perfect type. But because of the convenience of the dad-sitting arrangement, and because Izzy was almost ten years younger than her, she’d never felt able to make a pass.
Every time she had to hear Izzy conducting phone sex with lonely self-abusers, she experienced a bittersweet surge of arousal and frustration.
But it wasn’t as though she had much of a choice. The truth of it was that the intermittent supervision her father had always needed was becoming more and more continuous now. Kennedy apologised profusely to her neighbour. Izzy waved the words away, the phone still jammed to her ear even though she was between performances.
‘He’s already eaten,’ she said, as she pocketed the little sheaf of notes that
Kennedy had given her. ‘Spaghetti Bolognese, because I was cooking it anyway, for the little monsters downstairs. Only I didn’t give him any spaghetti because he can’t handle it. So he’s just had meat sauce. Maybe you’d better see if he wants toast or something for supper.’
Kennedy walked Izzy to the door, listening with half an ear to the status report: Peter’s eating and drinking through the day, Peter’s mood, Peter’s incontinence pants. Izzy always considered the information dump as part of the contract, so Kennedy had to listen to it, or at least stand there while Izzy recited.
Finally Izzy left, and Kennedy went to check on Peter for herself. He had the lights out and the TV on – a Channel 4 documentary on the latest immunisation scare – and was sitting in front of it, watching it for the most part, although his gaze also wandered around the walls and floor quite a lot. He was dressed in trousers and a shirt, but only because Izzy had a phobia of old men wandering around in their pyjamas: she would have chosen the clothes for him and helped him to dress. Peter’s white hair looked wild, his chiselled face all inconstant shadows in the TV’s rippling spotlight, like speeded up footage of clouds scudding over a mountain.
‘Hi, Dad,’ Kennedy said.
Peter looked in her direction and nodded. ‘Welcome home,’ he said, vaguely. He rarely called her by name, and when he did he only had a one in four chance of getting it right. He called her Heather about as often as he called her Janet (her mother), Chrissie (her sister) or Jeannine (her niece). Occasionally he called her Steve (her older brother), even though nobody in the family had seen Steve since he turned eighteen and walked out the door.
Kennedy put the light on and Peter blinked a couple of times, troubled by the sudden glare. ‘You want some toast, Dad?’ she asked him. ‘A cup of tea? Maybe a biscuit?’
‘I’ll wait for dinner,’ Peter said, and returned his attention to the TV. She fixed him a couple of rounds of toasted rye anyway, and brought them in to him. He wouldn’t remember having said no, and he could definitely use the carbs if all he’d had to eat was a bowl of spaghetti sauce. She put the toast on a tray in front of him, along with a cup of instant coffee, and retreated to her bedroom, which had a TV set and a sound system and a desk. It was like the whole of the rest of the place was a granny flat and this one room was her territory. It was smaller than some of the rooms she’d lived in as a student, but it pretty much had all she needed – which at this point in her life sounded a lot more like an indictment than any kind of a boast.
