The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘I still don’t …’

  ‘Let me finish, Detective. Because I promise, you’ll like my detective work. I started putting out my tin cans and strings for Michael Brand a long time ago. That means I’ve had a chance to do some things you haven’t done. I’ve built up a scrapbook. A database, sort of, except that databases are on a computer and I don’t get on with computers. These are just notes I’ve taken, as I went along. Backs of old envelopes, kind of thing. A fact here, a fact there.’

  He leaned towards her across the table, fixed her with an Ancient Mariner stare. ‘It’s not just the name. There are other things he doesn’t change. If he gives a false address, it’s always the same false address. Garden Street. Or Garden Road, Garden Crescent, Avenue, Mews, Terrace, whatever, but Garden something. Where did your Michael Brand say he lived?’

  ‘Campo del Jardin,’ Kennedy murmured. ‘You could have got that straight out of the file.’

  ‘I haven’t read your file. But I would have bet good money on it. Anyway, there’s more. I met one of Brand’s contacts in Russia – sorry, the former Soviet Union – who told me the man I was chasing was coming to London. That was how I caught on to your investigation in the first place. But you’re right, it could still have been a different Michael Brand. A total coincidence. So I turned over a few rocks and got the address of the hotel he’d been staying at.’

  ‘The Pride Court. Bloomsbury.’

  ‘Exactly. Did you go take a look at the room?’

  ‘No,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘Not personally. One of my colleagues carried out a search.’

  ‘Did one of your colleagues find anything?’

  ‘Not to my certain knowledge.’

  ‘No. Well, I did. I found this.’ Tillman reached into his pocket, took out something small and bright, held between finger and thumb, and put it down on the table between them. It was a silver coin.

  Kennedy just looked at it for a moment. It was like a sliver of her dream, made solid, and it unsettled her very deeply. She pulled herself together with an effort she hoped he couldn’t see, reached out to pick it up – but then stopped and shot Tillman a look: may I? ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Go ahead. There are never any fingerprints on them. Never any spoor at all, anywhere, after Brand has cleaned out. Except for these.’

  The coin looked old and worn: the only way you knew it was a coin at all was because it was a small, flat piece of metal bearing the outline of a human head. It was far from circular, far from regular in shape. The head had blurred to the point where you couldn’t even tell if it was male or female, but there was a series of tiny bumps across the forehead that could have been some kind of head-dress, maybe a laurel wreath. She turned the coin over. The obverse was even harder to make out: a figure that could have been a bird with its wings folded, or maybe just a sheaf of wheat, and a few symbols that seemed to include a K and a P.

  The anomaly struck her after she’d turned the coin over and over several times. Silver oxidised quickly and developed a black patina that was hard to remove. If this coin was so old, why was it so bright? It had to be a reproduction of some kind. But it was heavy enough to be solid metal.

  ‘He left it inside the U-bend of the wash basin,’ Tillman told her. ‘Your colleague should have looked a little harder. Brand – my version, Brand one-point-zero – always leaves one of these things behind, in any place where he stays for longer than a day. He used to put them some place fairly obvious, like on top of the lintel of a door or behind the headboard of a bed. He still does, sometimes, but these days he usually shows a little more imagination.’

  Kennedy shook her head. ‘I don’t get it,’ she muttered. ‘If he’s going to the trouble of giving false addresses, why leave a calling card?’

  ‘Why stick with the same name?’ Tillman countered. ‘That’s the real question, and I don’t know the answer. But he does. I used to think he was playing a game with me. Taunting me, maybe. Like, “I can make it as obvious as I like and you still won’t ever catch up with me.” But I don’t think he knew until a couple of years back that I was even looking for him, and he was doing this all through that time. So it’s something else. Something that will maybe make sense when we know what it is he’s doing.’

  What it is he’s doing? Kennedy’s common sense asserted itself in one last effort of rebellion. ‘There’s no kind of mission statement that could include kidnapping your family thirteen years ago and murdering four history teachers today.’

  ‘Three history teachers. One IT lecturer.’

  ‘Still and all. And I don’t want to burst your bubble, Tillman, but there were two killers at Park Square. Not one. It’s possible that neither of them was Michael Brand.’

  ‘It’s certain that neither of them was Michael Brand,’ he said. ‘I don’t think he does his own killing.’

  ‘Then what does he do?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. But not for free. I’ve given you a lot already. You share with me everything that comes up in your investigation – everything you’ve got so far and everything you get from now on – and I’ll give you what I’ve got.’

  Kennedy didn’t even have to think about it. She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m a police detective, Tillman, and you’re not anything. I’m really grateful that you stepped in when that guy was about to cut slices out of me, but I can’t discuss active investigations with people who aren’t on the case team. And more especially, people who aren’t even on the force.’

  Tillman stayed silent, studying her face. ‘You’re serious?’ he asked her, finally.

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Then I guess we’re done.’ He held out his hand for the coin. Kennedy held on to it.

  ‘This is evidence,’ she said. ‘It’s relevant to a murder investigation, and you don’t have any right to keep it.’

  ‘Give me the coin, Detective. This isn’t a one-way street. I came here with an offer, you turned me down. We go back to where we were.’

  She opened her handbag and dropped the coin inside.

  ‘Kennedy—’

  She cut him off. ‘No. By rights, I should bring you in as a witness, if not a suspect. I’m not going to do that because I owe you, and because you’ve been through enough already that I’d feel bad about adding any more. But you don’t get to keep this. Tillman, there’s a line. I’m on one side of it and you’re on the other. I have the right to hunt for criminals. It’s my job. You don’t. So what you did to that man – the one who was about to stab me – that makes you a criminal too.’

  Tillman made an impatient gesture. ‘You’re talking technicalities,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be someone who could see past garbage like that.’

  ‘No, I’m really, really not.’ She thought it was important to explain to him, although it was so obvious and basic to her that it didn’t even need saying. ‘There are bad things I can do and not lose a second’s sleep over them, but this isn’t one of them. I can’t share information with you, Tillman. Not and stay a cop myself. That puts me over a line. A line that still matters to me.’

  It mattered a lot, she realised now. Her voice was shaking. Talking about these things had brought up in her mind the complex of emotions and anxieties that wound themselves around what she’d done to Marcus Dell. What Tillman had done to Harper’s killer was different – and what her father had done, all those years ago, different again. But somehow the differences felt a little tenuous right then.

  She stood up, and Tillman withdrew his hand. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Keep the coin. I’ve got others. You’ll have a hard time explaining where you got it, though, and an even harder time logging it as evidence. I’m sorry we couldn’t do business, Sergeant Kennedy. If you change your mind, well, you’ve got my number on your mobile, now, haven’t you? But don’t call me up unless you decide to share. That was your last freebie.’

  The look in his eyes as he said it was what stayed with her. It stayed because it was so mu
ch at odds with his words. He talked like a tough guy out of a movie. He looked like a man hanging on the ledge of a tall building as his fingers lose their grip, one by one, counting him down to disaster.

  He walked away, leaving his whisky untouched.

  Kennedy drained hers.

  At home, after thanking Izzy and putting her dad to bed, Kennedy went back to the file. She panned its murky depths for an hour or so, without coming up with a single nugget of gold.

  But there were things she could chase, all the same: three of them, all told.

  There were Dr Opie’s last words, as she lay dying. Kennedy had mentioned them in her report, but they didn’t seem to lead anywhere and the reference had been ignored. It was difficult to see what anyone could do with it anyway.

  There was the photo she’d found in Barlow’s office. A photo of a ruined building in a nondescript, anonymous place, with some meaningless strings of characters on the back. Barlow had hidden it; his killer, or maybe someone else, had searched both his home and his office but not found it. Or else – not so good, but it had to be considered – had found it and put it back because it was irrelevant.

  And there was the knife.

  It took her a long while to get to sleep. She kept thinking about Tillman’s haunted eyes just before he walked away, and about his journey: a thirteen-year trek through the wilderness that couldn’t possibly lead him to a land of milk and honey. In abduction cases, most detectives counted in three-day blocks. The first three days were fifty-fifty: the supposed victim was about as likely to turn up alive as dead. Every three days after that doubled the odds against alive.

  Did Tillman really believe in his crazy quest or was he using it to distract himself from the near-certainty that his wife and kids were dead?

  Either way, she suspected, it was only the hunt that kept him going. Like a shark, he’d die if he ever came to a standstill.

  26

  The morning shout was one of the things that try men’s souls. Women’s souls, too, for that matter. Summerhill began it by closing one line of inquiry completely.

  ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘we brought in all of Professor Barlow’s computers – the two at the college and the one at his home – on warrant. We gave them to the IT forensic support team to see what they could squeeze out, but they came up empty. There’s nothing on the machines at all. No files, no emails, no pictures, not even an internet cache. Someone’s done a clean system install over whatever was there, on all three of them.

  ‘Barlow had a couple of external hard drives and they’re empty, too. Half a dozen recordable discs, which turned out to be blank, not even formatted. That’s all there was. We’re going over the paper records at the moment, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there that’s new, or relevant.’

  Kennedy thought about the break-ins at Barlow’s office and at the bungalow. Maybe that was all they’d been for: not a fishing expedition but a wipe-clean. If the ITF data hounds, who could not just get blood out of a stone but give you a choice of blood types, had come up empty-handed, then this was professional work. Most people thought that clicking DELETE got rid of a file, whereas in fact it just added a flag to it, allowing it to be overwritten later. Whoever had killed Barlow had been a lot more thorough.

  ‘What about the other victims?’ she asked. ‘Did we requisition their files and papers as well? I mean, if we’re assuming that the motive relates to Barlow’s Rotgut project in some way …’

  Combes was sighing and shaking his head, but it was Summerhill who cut her off. ‘We’re emphatically not assuming that, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘At least, if the project provides a motive, our best guess is that it was in an indirect way. The project was what brought the victims together – although, even then, there seems to have been an existing relationship through the Ravellers message board. Once assembled, Barlow’s team got itself into something that drew the attention of a very professional and well organised crew of killers. Possibly they bought some document or artefact on the black market and accidentally trod on the toes of the criminal cartel they bought from. There are any number of scenarios that might explain this pattern of deaths, and very few of them bear directly on the contents of Barlow’s research. People don’t generally become murder victims because of an academic disagreement.’

  ‘But if we at least knew—’

  ‘We’re not ruling any of this out.’ Summerhill’s tone was sharper this time: stop rocking the boat, he was saying, when you should be grateful you’re even in it. ‘Of course we searched the other victims’ computers. Opie’s particularly, since all her files had been backed up to the college server and we were able to go back a long way. We didn’t find any correspondence with Barlow or any references to his name. We also failed to locate any files or folders that referenced the Rotgut Codex, or the project, or anyone else connected to it. Obviously there are other search parameters that could be applied, but we didn’t want to get too deep in among the trees at this stage. You’d be talking, at a conservative estimate, about thousands of pages of material, tens of thousands of emails, possibly millions of words. Until we’ve got a compass to steer by, trying to read every single word didn’t seem to offer much of a way forward.’

  Summerhill looked away from Kennedy, caught Combes’s eye. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve all been up to,’ he said. ‘Josh, start us off.’

  Combes brought them up to date on the search for the elusive Michael Brand. He’d put out a query to major hotel chains in the UK and Spain to see whether the man had ever checked in anywhere else under that name. He’d also mailed out a verbal description and photofit, both provided by the desk clerk at the Pride Court: a middle-aged man, bald, above average height, with brown eyes and pale skin, his accent foreign but hard to pin down.

  It wasn’t a lot to go on and there hadn’t been any ping-backs yet. In the meantime, Combes had also requisitioned searches of airline, train and ferry operational databases, to see if he could map Brand’s movements prior to his arrival at the Pride Court, and after. A parallel search of prison and police records had already come in negative. There was no Michael Brand anywhere in the known universe who had a criminal record and made a possible match to their own man by age or description.

  Combes was now working through the other members of the Ravellers forum to see whether any of them had met Brand or had any private correspondence with him.

  Stanwick and McAliskey had been taking corroborative statements from the students who had witnessed Sarah Opie’s death. They’d also gone over camera footage from the college’s security system, hoping to find some film of the two murderers either in the computer lab or on their way to it. Their luck was out. The cameras saved on to disc, and the relevant disc had developed a formatting error, which meant that it could not be accessed. They’d found a technician who might be able to extract some usable data from the disc, but it was turning out to be a slow process. In the meantime, they’d put out identikit images both to the other regional forces and on Crimewatch programmes, and were asking anyone who’d seen the two men to call a dedicated helpline. Half a dozen PCs from the uniformed branch were sorting through the hundreds of calls that had come in already.

  Cummings had picked up the slack on Samir Devani’s death, the only one that could still conceivably have been an accident. By dismantling and examining the components of the fatal computer, he had been able to rule that prospect out, more or less. The power cable had come loose inside the machine and then somehow bent back on itself to touch the casing. The angle was an acute one, and the wire had had to be threaded through the heat sink of the motherboard to keep it in place, so that when the computer was turned on at the wall socket the handsome retro-styled metal casing went live. Now Cummings was trying to determine who had had unsupervised access to the machine in the sixteen hours between its last use and the fateful throwing of that switch.

  Summerhill heard all of them out, interpolating questions and suggestions. He kept it fast, kept up a se
nse of urgency and purpose. Then he paused when he got to Kennedy.

  ‘Anything from your end, Detective Sergeant?’ he asked, with suspicious mildness. Nothing had been assigned to her, and she’d only been out of hospital a day. Maybe that glint in the DCI’s eye was kindled by the expectation of a ‘no’.

  ‘I want to follow up on the murder weapon,’ Kennedy said. ‘I mean, the other murder weapon. We’ve got all this intel on the gun, but nothing on the knife that killed Harper. I think it’s worth—’

  ‘Wide, three-inch blade,’ Combes said. ‘Very sharp. Probably angled at the tip. Is there anything else you want?’ He talked over his shoulder, without looking at her.

  ‘I think it’s worth following up,’ Kennedy went on, still talking to Summerhill. ‘This Michael Brand had a foreign accent, according to witness statements, and in Luton the assailant with the gun spoke to me in what I’m fairly certain was a foreign language. Maybe all three men are from the same region – the same country. The knife was of a very odd design. It’s just possible that it’s geographically specific. If it is, we might end up with enough data for a shout-out to another force.’

  Summerhill looked unimpressed, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. ‘Did you see the knife clearly enough?’ he asked. ‘Really? Clearly enough to recognise it again if you saw it?’

  Kennedy nodded at the flip-chart in the corner of the room, with some marker pens left over from somebody else’s meeting. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  She crossed to the board, took a pen and began to draw what she’d seen. Behind her, someone muttered, ‘Can you tell what it is yet?’ and someone else laughed. She ignored them, trying to remember the exact shape of that weird, ugly blade. It had only been as long as the knife’s handle, and thicker, and it was asymmetrical, flaring out at the top on one side like one half of the head of a mushroom. It looked clumsy and unfit for purpose, but it had been as sharp as a razor and it had done for Chris Harper on a single pass.