The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘That’s not the point, though, is it? Not really. I’m assuming that wasn’t the point.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be? You think Marcus Dell doesn’t matter because he was black and stoned?’

  ‘Jesus.’ Harper shrugged brusquely, as though the words had settled on his shoulder and he wanted to dislodge them. His tone became more serious. ‘Listen, I put my name down for ARU as soon as I got my transfer into Detective Division. The shortlist is three years, I knew that. But I didn’t even get short-listed because the psych tests are so sensitive – I mean, really hair-trigger. I didn’t score quite high enough on impulse control. So I think it pretty much follows that anyone who did get their hand on a gun has proved their fitness to carry one. You hear what I’m saying, Kennedy? You put yourself into an elite group. Self-selecting. Top of the class.

  ‘So once you’re in a situation like that, I’m thinking your team is first and last and everything. Doesn’t matter if this guy, Dell, was carrying or not. He looked like he was carrying, and he assaulted an officer. You don’t second guess the luckless bastards who have to make that call, right? I would have said that was basic. So what am I not getting?’

  Harper fell silent, staring at her expectantly. They could have sat there like that until the crack of doom. Kennedy didn’t feel that she owed him an explanation, or care overmuch what he thought about her. But she did care about the false logic. She knew where it led.

  ‘You have any idea how many kills the Met has to its name, Harper?’ she asked him. ‘Total. Going all the way back to 1829, when they kicked out the Bow Street Runners and formed the modern service?’

  Harper made a tutting sound. ‘No. And neither do you.’

  ‘Right. You’re right. But I can tell you how many we bag in an average year. Shootings, I mean. Not accidents. Officers shooting to kill.’

  Harper chewed it over, along with a stray piece of fried bread. ‘Well, I’d be guessing, but I know it’s a lot less than—’

  ‘It’s one.’

  Harper’s eyebrows did a dip and rise. He said nothing.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kennedy. ‘Some years it bumps to two, or God forbid three, but some years there aren’t any. So on average, over the long haul, it’s just the one.’ She didn’t say: and last year, the one was me. It didn’t seem to need saying.

  Harper nodded, accepting the figure, inviting Kennedy to get to the point.

  ‘Across the whole of the country – and I’m counting in Wales and Scotland – the worst year so far this century was 2005. That was a bad one, all right. A shame and a scandal. Three times the body count of the previous year. That brought it up to six. Six shootings in a year. In the country. You got that, Harper? But you know, we can drop the bar a little lower. All deaths arising from civilian contact with police officers – beatings in remand cells, dodgy restraint techniques, high speed chases that go that little bit too far. What’s the score now? Any guesses?’

  ‘No,’ Harper said. ‘No guesses, Kennedy. But I’m sure you can tell me.’

  ‘It’s less than a hundred a year. A whole lot less. Most years, say sixty and you’ll be close. There are cities in America – and not even particularly big cities –that have more deaths in police custody than our whole island. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because most cops aren’t out there to score points or fight wars. They’re out there to do a job. A job that’s hard. Blood, sweat and tears hard.’

  ‘Okay.’ Kennedy’s tone had a hard enough edge to it that it would have taken a brave man to disagree. But Harper wasn’t about to disagree in any case. ‘That was sort of my point before it was your point,’ he said. ‘That the job is really tough and if you’ve been doing it for any length of time, you maybe deserve a bit of love and understanding. But you draw a different conclusion, obviously.’

  ‘Not just a different conclusion, Harper. The opposite conclusion. If you’re proud of those figures, or if you just think they mean anything, then you hold serving officers to a higher standard, not a lower one. Because the worst thing anyone can do is let things go by on the nod. Between the three of us, my team and me, we killed a man, when there was no good reason to. If you think we should get away with that, then sit back and watch those numbers climb and climb. Sit and watch accountability go out the window while brain-dead cowboys like Gates and Leakey go back into the division and get clapped on the back as though they took one for the team.’

  She was talking a little too loudly by the time she’d finished, and a few people at other tables were shooting her nervous glances. ‘All right,’ Harper said. ‘All right, Kennedy. Point taken. I guess that was what I wanted to hear. I guess I know where you’re coming from now.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she assured him, grimly. Because she’d left out the main point of the story. She hadn’t particularly meant to. She just found, when she came to it, that it was the hardest part to put it into words.

  But Harper was still looking at her, waiting for the punchline. So she gave it to him, without quite knowing why.

  Before there was Kennedy, H., Det Sgt 4031, there was Kennedy, P., Det Sgt 1117. He served twelve years in uniform and twenty-eight in Division. He got his ARU in 1993, although they didn’t call it that back then, they called it Open Carry, because that was an American phrase that was getting some currency and it sounded pretty damn cool.

  On the 27th of February, 1997, openly carrying, Detective Sergeant Peter Kennedy pursued an armed man, Johnny McElvoy, who was fleeing the scene of a gangland shootout. The chase led Kennedy into an alley, where, in the dark and thinking – as it turned out, wrongly – that he was walking into an ambush, he fired three rounds at a pregnant woman at a range of twenty feet.

  Amazingly, the woman survived. But the bullet that passed through her uterus and mulched its contents also passed through her lower spine and left her paraplegic.

  Kennedy was devastated. His friends, though, were supportive, and agreed between them a version of events that spared both him and the force a great deal of pain and embarrassment. McElvoy, they said, had taken up a defensive position in the alley and was firing on them. Kennedy had returned fire, and the woman, panicked, had run into the path of his bullet.

  Kennedy got to this point in her account and just stopped. Harper was looking at her, clearly expecting more, but this was where it got complicated and ugly and harder to explain. ‘They covered his back,’ she summarised.

  ‘I got that,’ Harper said. ‘But it was an accident, yeah? Just a horrible accident.’

  ‘Harper, it was an accident that wrecked one life and aborted another.’

  ‘So … ?’ He looked blank.

  Kennedy was exasperated that he didn’t get it. ‘So rallying around your mates isn’t the right response in a situation like that. If it was a reasonable mistake, the truth should be good enough. If it was a screw-up, then the truth has to come out and a copper has to lose his gun licence because he wasn’t good enough to have it in the first place.’

  Harper settled back in his chair, staring at her shrewdly. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What’s the bit you’re leaving out?’

  ‘I’m leaving nothing out,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Yes, you are. I’ll agree with you this far: what your dad did was terrible. It was really terrible. And I could see where that would leave a scar on you. But it didn’t stop you from joining the force, or going out for detective, or applying for your ARU. So where’s the scar, Kennedy? Which bit hurts?’

  Kennedy didn’t answer. She left a tenner to cover the breakfasts and the tip, and they walked back to the yard. She was silent as they walked, and so was Harper. He seemed to have that interrogator’s knack of making a silence push against you, until you felt like you needed to do something to fill it.

  ‘Okay,’ Kennedy said at last. And she told him what was, for her, the worst thing. The thing that, even after all this time, she couldn’t describe in a level voice. How Peter Kennedy had lined up his wife and two kids and schooled them in the fine
detail of the lie, in case anyone – a friend at school, a journalist, someone they met in Sainsbury’s – should ever ask. Because God forbid there should be a crack big enough for a stranger to pry a crowbar into and overturn the rock under which he was now hiding. Heather and Steve and little Chrissie, along with their mother, had to parrot back to Sergeant Peter Kennedy the exact sequence of events, in the right order, again and again, and when they got it wrong he shouted at them in a fury that came undiluted from the panic in his soul, and when they got it right he hugged them with fervent love.

  ‘It pretty much wrecked us, as a family,’ Kennedy said. Over the hump now, she could at least do the summing up dispassionately. ‘We had that big lie sitting in between us, then, all the damn time. You couldn’t talk around it, so you didn’t talk at all. What was saved, Harper? He never got past sergeant, because whatever the docket said, everyone knew what had happened. Everyone could see the monkey on his back. He started drinking like a maniac, and I think that brought his Alzheimer’s on. The stress – well, maybe it didn’t cause my mother’s cancer, but it seemed to make her give in to it a whole lot quicker. And none of us feel anything for each other any more. I haven’t seen my brother for ten years. I see Chrissie once in a blue moon. We … we stopped working, and we fell apart. Game over.’

  ‘And your dad’s dead?’

  Kennedy thought about the shambling set of mannerisms she shared her flat with. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘My dad is dead.’

  ‘So. Did you become a lesbian to get even with him?’

  Kennedy stiffened, stopped, turned to face Harper, ready to tear a number of thin strips off his facetious little ego. But Harper was grinning and he threw up his hands in surrender.

  ‘Trying to lighten the tone,’ he said.

  ‘Idiot.’

  ‘No, really. Sigmund Freud said—’

  ‘I’m probably going to get my gun licence back at some point, Harper. Bear that in mind.’

  He nodded, still grinning, and bailed out of the joke right there.

  Summerhill still hadn’t shown. Rawl said he hadn’t even gone into the committee room yet.

  Kennedy called it. They’d head out to Luton and be back by lunchtime. Probably they’d still return before Summerhill surfaced. She went to retrieve the case file, so they could add in Opie’s statement if she said anything pertinent, and to leave a handwritten note for Summerhill explaining what they were doing. In the meantime, she asked Harper to shoot out an Interpol trawl for Michael Brand. You never knew your luck, after all.

  The car they’d been driving the day before was unavailable for some reason, so they signed out another one from the pool and found it, after a short search, in the Caxton Street garage: a bottle-green Volvo S60, in good condition apart from a deep scratch down the full length of the driver’s side where somebody had keyed it. Opening the doors released a miasma of stale smoke, which made Harper swear and Kennedy wince. But it wasn’t worth the trouble of going back inside and working through two more sets of paperwork.

  They’d missed the worst of the rush hour by the time they hit the M1, but it was still slow going. Harper was all for mounting the roof light and turning on the siren. Having lost so much of the morning already, Kennedy didn’t see the point.

  Unlike Prince Regent’s College, Park Square still seemed to be swarming with purposefully moving students despite the time of year, and the car park was pretty much full. They circled the asphalt twice, just ahead of a white Bedford van that was doing exactly the same thing, before Harper pulled into a faculty space on which the word RESERVED had been blazoned in big yellow letters. The van nosed past them and Heather caught a brief glimpse of its driver: a man in early middle age, strikingly handsome in an austere, patrician way. His black hair was tightly frizzed and short, as sleek as though it had been anointed with oil. His face, though, looked as pale as the face of a Greek statue, and his gaze as she briefly met it gave her an unwelcome jolt of recognition. It was like the look her father got in his eyes when he was drifting off into the inner landscapes of his dementia. A look that never quite made it as far as the outside world, or else went clear past it. Unnerved, she looked away.

  20

  From the main gate, they were directed to the computer science faculty, which was on the far side of a ragged, bleached expanse of lawn, and then up to a lab on the third floor where a hundred students were working silently on a hundred new, gleaming machines. No, silently was the wrong word. The room was filled with a susurrus of fingers tapping on soft-touch keyboards, like the clucking of a hundred birds in covert. Sarah Opie was sitting at a workstation that looked no different from any of the others, except that it faced them and was attached by a hanging cable to a huge LCD screen above her head. The screen was switched off.

  Dr Opie looked younger than Harper had been expecting: younger, and a lot more attractive, with strawberry blonde hair worn shoulder-length and lightly tousled. She had to be in her mid-twenties, young enough that the doctorate must be a very recent achievement. Young enough that the students in the room, who she was presumably teaching or supervising in some way, looked more like her contemporaries than her charges. She’d tried to distinguish herself from them by going for a formal look, but the dark-blue pinstriped two-piece she had on came across almost like fancy dress – the outfit of a sexy secretary strippergram.

  Opie was expecting them. She stood and went without a word into an inner office whose glass frontage formed the rear wall of the main lab. She waited with her hand on the doorknob until they joined her, then closed the door. Some of the students had glanced up from their work when the detectives arrived and were still covertly watching now. Dr Opie turned her back on them to face the two officers, her arms stiffly folded.

  Her glance went to Harper first. ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘This is Detective Sergeant Kennedy,’ he said. ‘She’s in charge of the case, and she’d like to hear the story, too. I’ve also got some follow-up questions from our talk yesterday. I hope that’s okay.’

  The set of Opie’s face indicated that it probably wasn’t, but she moved her head in what was almost a nod and a moment later sat down in one of the two chairs in the office. Kennedy took the other, leaving Harper to lean precariously against one of the aluminium uprights that separated the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass.

  ‘So we’ve got three fatalities,’ Kennedy said, as soon as she’d set up her voice recorder and got Opie’s permission to use it. ‘Stuart Barlow. Catherine Hurt. Samir Devani. They’re all interested in history – or at least, in old documents – and they’re members of this group of yours, that likes to discuss that stuff. Now, you say that they were all working on one particular project?’

  Dr Opie frowned a little impatiently. She seemed to feel that this was ground that had already been covered.

  ‘Yes,’ was all she said.

  ‘And the project was something that they discussed on the message board? On your online forum?’ Kennedy pursued.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which is a historical forum. But you’re not a historian, obviously.’

  ‘No.’

  This time Kennedy waited, staring at Opie in silent expectation. Harper knew what she was doing, and was careful not to jump into the gap. Closed questions were good because they were focused, but if you weren’t careful, and if the witness wasn’t the loquacious type, you could fall into a pattern of closed question/one-word answer – and then you could end up chasing your own tail. The silence stretched for a few seconds, but in the end it had its intended effect.

  ‘It’s a hobby for me,’ Sarah Opie said. ‘I did classics at school, and I’m pretty good at Ancient Greek. People think that’s a bit weird, for an IT specialist, but I love languages. And I’m good at them. I had a Jewish boyfriend once, who taught me some Hebrew, and I worked backward from that to Aramaic. It fascinates me, with Aramaic and Ancient Greek, how the character sets are almost the same as for the mod
ern languages but sometimes there’s been a phonic shift, so that the same sign designates very different sounds. Of course, in some cases we don’t even know how the living language actually sounded. The dry versus nasal pronunciation of mu plus pi – you know, where does that come in? You’ve got ancient texts and modern speakers, and it’s not easy to—’

  ‘Can you tell us what you know about Stuart Barlow’s Rotgut project,’ Kennedy interrupted. Harper almost grinned. Having coaxed Opie to move beyond monosyllables, the sergeant was now having to rein her in again. Always a feast or a famine.

  ‘Professor Barlow came on to the board to ask for collaborators,’ Opie told them. ‘That was how it all started. He said he wanted to look at the Rotgut again from a new angle, and he asked if anybody had an appetite for that. That was the title of the thread: “Does anyone have any appetite for a new look at the Rotgut?”’

  ‘And this was when?’

  Opie shook her head, but answered anyway. ‘Two years ago at least. Maybe three. I’d have to go back and look at the threads. They’re all still available on the site.’

  ‘So who responded?’ Harper asked.

  Opie’s voice trembled just a little as she reeled off the names. ‘Cath. Catherine Hurt. Sam Devani. Stuart went after Emil Gassan because he’s so good on New Testament Aramaic, but Gassan didn’t want to know.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘He thought Stuart sort of lacked the academic credentials. Well, the whole team, really. He didn’t want to be associated with them.’

  ‘So it was just those three,’ Kennedy said. ‘Barlow. Hurt. Devani.’

  ‘Yes. Just those three.’

  ‘Nobody else you’ve forgotten?’

  Opie let her irritation show. ‘No. Nobody.’

  ‘What about Michael Brand?’

  ‘Michael Brand …’ She repeated the name with no particular emphasis. ‘No. He was never part of this.’

  ‘But you know him?’

  ‘Not really. I think I’ve seen his name come up on the board once or twice. He’s never been part of any discussion that I was in. And I only turn up on the board, not at the symposia. I’m not a historian, obviously – so I couldn’t get funded to go to a history conference, and I couldn’t afford to do it out of my own salary.’