by Adam Blake
EG:
Well, possibly. Possibly the Gospel of Judas. Certainly a gospel in which Christ speaks to Judas alone, and in secret.
DSK:
So the Rotgut …
EG:
Well, we don’t know. We don’t know. The Rotgut at least appears to be a translation of a codex – a book that has the Gospel of John followed by the Gospel of Judas. But if that’s the case, then the original – the actual codex, written in Aramaic, from which this partial English translation has been taken – has never been found or at least never positively identified.
DSK:
That’s something of a let-down.
EG:
Isn’t it? Captain De Veroese should have kept his rum. What he bought was very much a pig in a poke.
DSK:
Wait. Maybe I’m not understanding you after all, Dr Gassan. I thought that what Barlow was doing was putting together a new translation of the Rotgut Codex.
EG:
No. It couldn’t have been that. The Rotgut is already a translation. It’s written in English. Quite bad English, but English, all the same.
DSK:
Then what was it that Barlow was proposing to do with it?
EG:
I’m afraid you’d have to ask him that.
DSK:
He didn’t tell you what he had in mind? When he spoke to you about all this?
EG:
He said he had a new approach. That there might be more to the Rotgut than anyone had ever imagined. But he wasn’t prepared to tell me any more unless I agreed to come on board, and I had no intention whatsoever of doing that.
DSK:
Would you be willing to speculate?
EG:
Certainly. I speculate that whatever it was, it was a complete and utter waste of time. Had he told me that he intended to shed new light on Christ’s life and works by means of a close examination of the lyrics of the musical Jesus Christ, Superstar, I would have had – if anything – slightly more interest in the enterprise. Is there anything else I can do for you, Sergeant Kennedy?
DSK:
Doctor, you’ve done more than enough. Thank you.
EG:
You’re very welcome. Goodnight.
17
Kennedy slept, and dreamed of Judas. He wasn’t very happy. He sat in a field, underneath a bare tree from which a knotted rope hung, so she knew what moment this was. The moment before his suicide. He seemed preoccupied, though, with counting the money in his hand.
At a certain point, he noticed she was there. He glanced up, met her gaze with sad, dark eyes, and showed the coins to her. Thirty pieces of silver.
‘I know,’ Kennedy said. ‘I know it’s serious.’
It was a line from a Smiths song, and she felt inclined to apologise for it. But Judas was hanging from the tree now, dangling slowly to and fro like the world’s ugliest wind chime.
The moment had passed.
18
It took Tillman a long time to get himself together and on-track again after he finally crawled up on to the beach at Folkestone. Drenched, freezing, weak from exhaustion and loss of blood, he knew he couldn’t afford the luxury of checking in to a hospital. He had to keep moving, if he wanted to stay alive. Otherwise he’d succumb to hypothermia, and shock.
He was lucky in one respect. Folkestone at three in the morning was a relatively easy place to go shopping. He broke into a chemist’s for bandages and sulfadine, and raided the plastic bags dumped outside a charity shop for a change of clothes. A gents’ toilet next to a caravan park became his dressing room and his operating theatre.
The wounds in his shoulder and thigh were bleeding way too freely, and the sulfadine didn’t even slow the process down. Tillman suspected that the chill water, close enough to freezing to constrict his arteries, had saved his life. Something nasty – something coated on the knife blades presumably – was stopping his blood from coagulating. He made another break-in, to a small convenience store, where he looked in vain for BIC lighters, settled in the end for Swan Vestas. He used a few of the matches to light a broken branch from someone’s hedge of over-tall Douglas firs. Then he bit down on his wadded T-shirt as he cauterised the clean, straight-edged gashes with naked flame. The heady smell of the fir-tree resin mixed nauseatingly with that of his burning flesh. When it was done, he applied a whole lot more of the disinfectant salve with hands that trembled slightly, and dressed the wounds as best he could.
Getting to London was the next hurdle. At least he still had his wallet, which had been in his trouser pocket rather than in the jacket he had left behind on the ferry. Tillman stayed away from railway stations, knowing that he looked bad enough that someone might be tempted to call the police if he tried to buy a ticket. A night coach seemed like a better bet. He felt pretty sure Folkestone had a coach station, and the town was small enough that he found it without too much trouble. The first coach of the day was before sun-up. He bought a ticket from a tiny booth next to a colossal NCP car park, waited out of the reach of the street lights until he saw the driver get on board, and joined the small queue at the last possible moment. He excited no comment, but a few wary glances. He looked like an unusually well-built wino, and probably smelled like a fire in a pharmacy. Good. Nobody would want to meet his gaze, let alone talk to him. He could sleep, as far as his wounds would let him sleep.
At Victoria, things got a little easier. He ordered a huge fried breakfast from a café on Buckingham Palace Road whose proprietor was used to dealing with homeless guys from the adjacent hostels and didn’t give a damn how Tillman looked or smelled. The food made him feel a lot better, and the fiery ache from the knife wounds began easing off just a little. Enough for him to function anyway, and to think clearly.
He had to set up a base, until he heard from Vermeulens. He had to find out what Michael Brand had been doing in London, and if he was still here. He had to be ready to move, and move fast, if there was anyone or anything for him to move against.
Tillman still owned the house in Kilburn where he’d lived with Rebecca and raised a family with her, but didn’t even consider the possibility of going back there. Whoever had tried to kill him on the ferry had to know a lot about his current movements, which were complex and cryptic. So they’d also know everything there was to know about his past, which was transparent and obvious.
After visiting a storage facility at St Pancras, one of his many emergency stashes, he went by Underground out to Queen’s Park. There he checked into a bed and breakfast. He paid with cash, showing as ID a fake passport in the name of Crowther – one of the last batch he’d bought from Insurance before she cut him off. It occurred to him to wonder whether the passport was safe now. Maybe not, for any purpose that would involve checking it against a database. The next time he took a plane – if he ever decided it was safe to do so – he should probably go shopping for some new identities first.
Laying out his few surviving possessions, and making a tally of the things that would have to be sourced and replaced in the next few days, he remembered the drowning of Mr Snow. The memory was like a fisherman’s line with a great white shark clamped to the other end of it. Tillman hauled on it, felt the tension and quickly, desperately, turned his mind to other things.
He took off his clothes and the bandages, and had a cold shower. He didn’t want to risk hot or even warm water on the burned skin of his barely closed wounds. He placed a call to Vermeulens, and left a message on the voicemail giving him the new cellphone number. It was a bright, sunny morning, but the thick curtains shut out most of the light. He lay down – on his stomach, which seemed less aggravating to his shoulder – and slept for eighteen hours straight.
What woke him was the phone. He groped for it, trying to pull his thoughts together and dredge up a memory of where he was. ‘Hey,’ he croaked into the phone – a stop-gap until he found out who the hell was calling him.
‘Hoe gaat het met jou, Leo?’
‘Benny.’
; ‘Yes, it’s me. You went off the radar for a while. I called you on your usual number, but the man who answered I didn’t know. He said he was a friend. I chose to assume that he was not.’
His phone had been in the pocket of his jacket. The knife men and their Girl Friday must have taken it. They would have checked for a phone book or list of memorised numbers, but Tillman never kept one. So they were keeping the phone turned on, in the hope that friends or contacts of Leo might call him. It was a clumsy, opportunistic strategy, and it wasn’t going to get them very far. Only half a dozen people had the number, and none except Vermeulens was likely to call Tillman without prior arrangement.
‘No friend of mine,’ Tillman confirmed.
‘And yet he seemed very anxious to know that you were well. Or at least, if you were unwell, where he could visit you.’
Tillman laughed. ‘Yeah. Flowers would have been forthcoming. Probably white lilies.’
‘You’re upsetting people, Leo. I know this because rumours are circulating about you that seem unlikely to be true.’
‘MacTeale.’
‘And other things. You’re dealing in drugs now, apparently, but also your partners in these deals have twice been arrested in sting operations. You walk, each time. So clearly you’ve decided that selling out your own people is a lucrative sideline.’
‘I’m not dealing drugs, Benny. Or snitching.’
‘Of course not. You never had that much of a work ethic. But rumours like these cost money, Leo. Someone wants to cut you off from comfort and supply. From your friends.’
‘From oxygen, too. I just got off a ferry where they tried to carve me up like a turkey. Professional job.’
‘Professional,’ Vermeulens agreed. ‘Very. That was, in fact, my point. That they are professionals and they are well connected, with access both to money and to channels. You should watch yourself.’
‘Is that why you called?’
‘No, Leo. That is not why I called. Mostly, although we’re friends, I don’t fret about your well-being so much that I call you to tell you to wear a scarf in the cold winter evenings. And anyway, it’s probably summer where you are.’
‘How do you know where I am, Benny?’ He heard the edge of paranoia in his own voice, the unfocused fear underneath the aggression. Something had changed in Tillman’s mind, in his world. He experienced it as a change in gradient, as though the flat ground had become a slope that he stood on, so that he needed to shift his balance from one second to the next to keep his footing.
‘The phone, Leo. Your new number is a UK number. Most likely that means you’re back in Britain, but you notice that I’m not asking. In the meantime, and let me come to the point here, there is Michael Brand.’
Tillman sat up. ‘What about Michael Brand?’
‘He has been indiscreet. Very.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘He’s wanted for murder, Leo. For many murders. I think your luck may finally have changed.’
19
The next morning they waited outside Summerhill’s office for a good forty-five minutes, but Summerhill didn’t show. WPC Rawl, on despatch, said he was on his way but running late. Then a few minutes later, she amended that.
‘He’s been diverted. Had to go to Westminster first, to talk to some select committee. Funding and appropriations, something like that. He’ll be at least an hour.’
Kennedy and Harper considered and conferred. The argument about leaving Opie pending so as to add urgency to the DCI’s decision still held. Summerhill was more likely to keep them on the case if there was something that needed doing right there and then. On the other hand, debriefing Opie properly was something that did need doing, the sooner the better.
‘Have you had breakfast?’ Harper asked Kennedy.
‘No,’ she admitted. Breakfast was very rarely part of her routine.
‘Well, let’s grab something, then. Work up the questions while we eat, come back in half an hour. If he’s not back, we head out.’
Kennedy agreed, suppressing a qualm of reluctance. Her working day tended to be a straight sprint. Eating, like everything else in ordinary life, was relegated to the margins.
But someone had recently reopened the Queen Anne Café and Business Centre on the corner of Broadway, a whimsical enterprise that Kennedy had always had a certain amount of time for. So she agreed, and they went.
The place was a lot more crowded than she’d expected, and talking about the details of the case seemed awkward in the presence of so many possible rubber-neckers. They tried various circumlocutions, but murder sounds like murder through any number of gauzy veils. They gave up around about the time when Harper’s fried breakfast and Kennedy’s toast and butter arrived.
‘You know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right?’ Harper said, eyeing Kennedy’s monastic platter.
‘For me, that would be dinner,’ she replied.
‘So what, with dinner you add an extra slice? A muffin? Strawberry jam?’
Kennedy considered telling him it was none of his business what she ate, but she looked at his face and saw that the joke was meant as an ice-breaker, nothing more. He still didn’t know exactly how to talk to her, what basis their professional relationship was on. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since she told him to press the ejector-seat button.
‘Marmalade,’ she said. ‘With bits in.’
Harper whistled. ‘With bits in. Now you’re talking.’
He ate fast, and was a good way into his sausage, egg and bacon while Kennedy was still spreading butter.
‘So did you always want to be a detective?’ he asked, between forkfuls.
‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘Always.’ It wasn’t the literal truth but close enough that it would do. She’d always wanted to be something that earned her father’s approval, that took her out of the poisonous, perilous hinterland of his contempt. ‘What about you?’ she answered, instinctively turning the conversation away from that territory.
‘What about me?’
‘When did you decide this was the life for you?’
‘Year seven,’ Harper said, without hesitation.
The numbering system had changed since Kennedy’s day. She had to do a mental translation. ‘The first year of secondary school,’ she said. ‘You would have been twelve.’
Harper was polishing off his last piece of sausage, having used it to mop up some yolk from the fried egg. It occupied his full attention, although he seemed to be thinking, too, about the explanation he was about to give. ‘I was a skinny little kid,’ he said at last. ‘And a bit of a dreamer. One of the quiet ones. I was pretty wet, to be honest. So wet you could have shot snipe off my back, as my mum used to say in her nastier moods. I got picked on in primary school, but nothing too bad. The teachers were there to see that it didn’t get out of hand, and I used to hide behind their skirts. I had no shame.’
He pushed his empty plate away. ‘Then I moved up to Burnt Hill – to comprehensive school. And it all went bad. Little mummy’s boy, suddenly thrown right into the fiery furnace.’ He grinned at Kennedy, as though inviting her to laugh at the image. ‘The first time I saw a kid pull a knife in a fight, it was a real eye-opener. It was like … there’d been a balance before and now there wasn’t. The willingness of the kids around me to do harm – and their ability to do it – had escalated by about n per cent, where n is a really big number.
‘But the system of control hadn’t changed much at all. We were still being threatened with detentions, demerits, loss of privileges. Pint-sized Al Capones, malevolent little bastards with weasel minds and heavy weaponry, being told that if they didn’t buck their ideas up they’d have to stay behind after class. I realised right there and then what cops were for, and I started wanting to be one.’
He grinned at her again. ‘And eight years later, my dream came true. Don’t you love a story with a happy ending?’
Kennedy acknowledged the potted autobiography with a sol
emn nod. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I understand you a little better now, Harper. The strict disciplinarian keeping the naughty schoolchildren of the world at bay. Do uniforms figure in this fantasy at all?’
‘I only just got out of uniform,’ Harper reminded her. ‘Uniforms aren’t sexy for me. Plainclothes – that’s where it’s at, Kennedy.’
‘Of course.’ He was looking at her in a speculative way. She met that look squarely, a little irritated by it. ‘What? What’s on your mind?’
‘You are. I’m wondering about something, and maybe you can explain it to me. You seem pretty focused on the job – and you seem to be pretty good at it. I’ve only known you for a day or so, and I’ve already got you clocked, more or less, as career police. I mean, this isn’t even a little bit casual to you. You’d never describe it as “just a job”. Am I wrong?’
‘Is this relevant to anything?’
‘Well, maybe not. I’m just asking because it would be a good thing to know. I mean, since we find ourselves working together.’
‘It’s not just a job. So what?’
Harper threw out his hands. ‘So how do you find yourself in such a ridiculous mess? It’s like you chose it. Like you wanted to be shoved out on your own, and hated. I mean, going your own way instead of backing up the rest of your unit. Briefing against other officers, in an official inquiry. That’s a marked choice, isn’t it?’
Kennedy went through several answers in her mind. Most involved telling Harper to shove it up his arse and work it in really deep. She finally settled for: ‘The rest of my unit had just put four bullets into an unarmed man.’
