The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  She put the pen back and turned to face the rest of the team. ‘Like that,’ she said, going back to her seat.

  They stared at it. ‘Okay,’ McAliskey said, laconically. ‘It’s distinctive.’

  ‘Could be a smoothing knife for plaster,’ Cummings observed. ‘Or a cake slice. Doesn’t look much like a murder weapon, though.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to someone at the Royal Armouries,’ Kennedy said to Summerhill. ‘Unless you need me for anything else. I’d also like to go back over the Ravellers message board archives and see if there’s any information there about what Barlow was trying to do with his Rotgut project.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ said Combes. ‘We already went through that stuff. Barlow didn’t put anything up on the boards except that first call for volunteers. Nobody got to hear what he wanted them to volunteer for except the people he chose to be his team, and, oops, we just ran out of them, didn’t we?’

  ‘That’s enough, Sergeant Combes,’ Summerhill growled. ‘Yes. Fine. You do that, Kennedy. The URLs and access codes are in the case file.’

  ‘I’d also like to talk to Ros Barlow again.’

  ‘The professor’s sister? Why?’

  ‘Because the professor talked to her about Michael Brand, and Michael Brand now seems to be central to the case – whether you think of him as a witness or as a suspect.’ She was uncomfortably aware as she made this proviso that it was a smokescreen. After talking to Tillman, she was definitely thinking of Brand as the villain of the piece. She’d need to watch that. ‘Also, if Barlow was keeping the project close to his chest as far as the forum was concerned, it’s at least worth asking if he talked about it at home.’

  Summerhill nodded, but looked to Combes. ‘Follow that up, Josh,’ he said, and Combes nodded, scribbling a note to himself.

  ‘She already knows me,’ Kennedy pointed out, trying not to lose her temper.

  ‘Let’s not get territorial, Sergeant Kennedy.’ Summerhill clasped his hands together as though about to lead the group in a prayer, then opened them again, palms up. ‘Call me if you get anything. Otherwise, case notes on my desk for six. What are you waiting for, gentlemen? Peerages?’

  They folded up their tents and scattered. So Summerhill was keeping her on the farm, Kennedy reflected as she walked back to the bear pit. Or trying to anyway. But he couldn’t tell her not to leave the building. He could only assign all the promising leads to other people.

  Which just meant she had to turn up some other leads.

  Her call to the Royal Armouries was answered by an intern, who left her on hold for a long time and then put her through to a Ms Carol Savundra – the acquisitions manager for the collections. Savundra was perfunctory: her tone said that she had a full in-tray, a short fuse and zero time or patience for unusual requests that came in via unorthodox channels. Kennedy didn’t have high hopes, but she described the knife anyway.

  ‘Nothing springs to mind,’ Savundra said.

  ‘Well, can I fax you a sketch of the blade? It might spark an association – or you could circulate it around your colleagues.’

  ‘By all means,’ said Savundra, but she didn’t volunteer the number until Kennedy asked for it, and was vague as to when she might be able to get back in touch. ‘To be honest, antiquities are a smaller and smaller part of what we do.’

  ‘This knife was used in a recent murder.’

  ‘Really? Well, go ahead and send it in. Perhaps once I see it I’ll have a flash of inspiration.’

  Kennedy drew the knife again, on an A4 sheet, and faxed it over.

  Next she tried Sheffield Knives, where she spoke to a Mr Lapoterre, their principal design engineer. He was a lot friendlier, but had never heard of anything remotely resembling what Kennedy described. He called her back as soon as he got the fax, but only to confirm that he was clueless. ‘We do a lot of knives with asymmetrical blades,’ he said, ‘but that’s a new one on me.’

  ‘It doesn’t remind you of knives produced in a particular part of the world?’ Kennedy coaxed, a little desperate.

  ‘It doesn’t remind me of anything at all. It’s like – if you found the skeleton of a bird, you’d know it was a bird because the bones would be in the right places for a bird’s bones. This isn’t anything. It doesn’t fit any category I’ve got a name for. Sorry.’

  Kennedy hoped for better from the British Knife Collectors’ Guild and the US Office of Strategic Services, which included knife procurement for the American army in its online boast-list, but neither was of any help.

  Discouraged, she turned to her other job for the day: the old message board threads of the Ravellers, which other people had trawled before her without result. Kennedy logged on to the forum and used the access code to get into the archived directories. Immediately she saw the scale of the task and realised that – however categorical Combes had sounded – he hadn’t been through this stuff. There were seven thousand pages of it, or rather seven thousand threads, each of which just ran on until it stopped. There had to be tens of thousands of posts. Probably a couple of months’ work just to read through it all once.

  Maybe you could sort it in some way. The site had no search engine, but she knew how to make the department’s bespoke engine, which had been written by MoD wonks, search a specific domain. Barlow’s nom de forum was written on the file under the access codes: BARLOW PRCL, his surname and his college ident. Evidently the Ravellers didn’t have so many members that they needed to get tricky and postmodern with their IDs.

  A first pass showed her that Barlow had posted comments on two hundred and eighteen threads, seventy one of them threads he’d started. She directed her attention to those, first of all.

  Immediately she ran into the same problem that Harper had complained about. The subject headers, which in theory stated the theme of each thread, were so arcane that in most cases they provided no clue at all to their possible contents.

  AWMC Catal-Hyuk omit/revise?

  Medial sigma misallocations by period stat 905

  Greensmith 2B won’t fly

  Proposed sub-fold matches for Branche Codex in M1102

  She clicked on a few threads at random. In the older ones, as she might have expected, the Dead Sea Scrolls got a lot of mentions. Barlow picked fights with existing readings, proposed counter-readings of his own, was shouted down or applauded or condescended to.

  Then the Scrolls faded out of the picture by degrees, and other things trickled in, the focus still on translation and textual interpretation, but the texts now mostly New Testament – odd fragments of gospels identified by strings of letters and numbers. Barlow’s views often seemed to be controversial, but Kennedy couldn’t tell why because the arguments were too abstruse and the in-jokes too thick on the ground.

  Eventually, she found the thread she was looking for. The header, as Opie had already told her, was: Does anyone have any appetite for a new look at the Rotgut? Under that heading, a couple of terse sentences: I’m thinking of coming at the Rotgut Codex from a new angle – for fun, and for a book I’m writing, not for funding. Hard slog, endless data crunching, possible fame and fortune. Anyone interested?

  It sparked a short chain of comments, most of them pugnacious or derisive. Why go back to the Rotgut? And without funding? Barlow couldn’t be serious. There was nothing new to find there, and the codex probably wasn’t even a translation, just a mash-up. The positive responses came from HURT LDM and DEVANI [field left blank]. Nothing from Sarah Opie. Barlow promised to get in touch with his collaborators by phone, and the thread petered out after a few more unsympathetic heckles from other forum members. Then, much later – almost two years later, according to the header, and only three months before Barlow’s death – another reply appeared, from BRAND UAS. Very excited by what you’ve achieved so far. Would love to talk, and maybe get you over a hump.

  After that, nothing.

  After that, fatal falls down darkened stairwells, electrified computers, hit-and-run drivers and dag
gers drawn in daylight.

  So how did Barlow reply to Brand? Kennedy wondered. He didn’t respond on the thread itself, even to ask for a contact number. Maybe he accessed Brand’s profile and picked up his contact information from there. She tried and found there was none. Brand’s profile was just a name, nothing else.

  UAS, she discovered in an on-site registry, meant University of Asturias, Spain. But if Barlow had gone by that route, he’d have found out at once that Brand was a fraud. Presumably, trusting that nobody would be on a historical forum except historians, he hadn’t bothered to do that.

  A private message, then. Private messages had a different access code, but the moderator of the Ravellers board had provided that, too. Kennedy opened the archive in a different window, found that the data was stored by member ID. Under Barlow’s name, a couple of dozen messages, but not to any member of the project team.

  There was a message to Sarah Opie, a little later than the correspondence with the other three team members: Sarah, you remember the conversation we had at the Founders’ dinner? Do you think it would be possible to do what I was asking for, using your own system, or your work machines? Call me, and let’s discuss.

  And one message to Michael Brand, dated on the same day as his forum post: Mr Brand, you intrigue me. I know Devani talked to you at FBF, but I also know he didn’t tell you anything. How did you hear about us? Please don’t reply through the forum. I’d rather dampen speculation on this than inflame it. My college extension is 3274.

  Nothing after that. Nothing that seemed to relate to the ongoing project anyway. On an impulse, she searched through the other Ravellers’ private messages to see if anyone mentioned the Rotgut Codex there. Probably she was in technical breach of the search warrant, but it would only matter if she turned anything up, and she didn’t. The Rotgut wasn’t a hot topic. Nobody was gossiping about Barlow’s big project or speculating about what it was for. Nobody seemed to give a damn. Of the message headers she could actually understand, most seemed to relate to money – research grants, departmental budgets, per diems, bursaries, bids to the Lottery fund, capital allocations, loose change found behind sofa cushions. Nobody had enough and nobody knew where the next pay cheque was coming from.

  It was tough all over, except for Stuart Barlow and his little band of irregulars: they’d been doing it for fun. And they were dead.

  The day passed in this almost directionless searching, grindingly slow and inert. One of the breaks in routine occurred when Kennedy went over to Harper’s desk to clear it of any case-related paperwork that might still be there. Underneath a stack of unrelated intra-departmental rubbish, she found the Interpol data requests he’d filled in on Michael Brand. These were the originals, kept because what had been sent out were faxes. Looking them over, Kennedy found that Harper had made an elementary mistake. He’d only asked to be copied on cases in which Michael Brand had been linked as a suspect or listed as a potential witness. There was a huge middle ground in which Brand’s name might have come up in other people’s testimony, and she wanted to see those listings too. She sent an amended request – the same form, with a few boxes ticked. Because it was the same form, she didn’t need to bounce it back up to Summerhill for authorisation, but she added her own signature and ID at the bottom and – with a brief ache of unhappiness – crossed out Harper’s.

  She made a few more knife-related calls, with nothing more to show for it, and walked out of Division on the dot of five – the first time in seven years that she’d done so.

  Izzy was amazed to see her turn up at the flat before six: almost indignant. ‘You’re never back this early,’ she said, gathering up her things. ‘What, weren’t there any crimes today?’

  ‘I’m Serious Crimes,’ Kennedy said. ‘There were crimes today, but they were funny ones.’

  As always, they walked to the door together. ‘Well, he’s in a rotten mood,’ Izzy reported. ‘He was crying earlier and listening to that bloody awful twang-twang-twang music. He was talking about your mum.’

  Kennedy was surprised and disconcerted. ‘What did he say about her?’

  ‘He said he was sorry. “Sorry, Caroline. Sorry I ever hurt you.” Stuff like that.’

  Kennedy would have said she was beyond feeling anything for her father now beyond the mixture of pained affection and half-healed-over resentment that she was so used to. This hurt: it came right on the heels of too much other stuff that made the wound feel raw. She drew in her breath and Izzy realised that she’d somehow put her foot in it.

  ‘What?’ she said, distressed. ‘I’m sorry, Heather. What did I say?’

  Kennedy shook her head. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just …’ But there was too much to explain from a standing start. ‘My mother’s name was Janet,’ she muttered.

  ‘Yeah? So who was Caroline? His bit on the side?’

  ‘No. Just a woman he killed. Goodnight, Izzy.’

  She closed the door.

  27

  They had no shout the next morning. Summerhill was in the building but kept to himself, and the other detectives scattered early and without consultation. Kennedy was left to cool her heels in the bear pit, and service her knife experts once again – without any joy.

  Nothing had come in from Interpol, but she could access their online archives and see if there was anything among the older, written-off cases where no interdepartmental clearances would be necessary.

  Interpol’s digital records service had an overly complicated user interface that required you to fill out a whole raft of often irrelevant data parameters before you could start to interrogate the system. But Kennedy had plenty of time on her hands and was feeling bloody-minded enough to hack her way through the digital deadwood to get to the sap within.

  And there was some sap, once she got there. Michael Brands had been involved in petty larceny and date rape, but their ages and descriptions were worlds away from the Michael Brand she was looking for. But ten years ago, in Upstate New York, and then seven years ago, in New Zealand, South Island, there were missing persons cases that tripped the Michael Brand search field.

  Kennedy drew down what was available on both cases, and was amazed and appalled by what she found.

  The New York case: a woman, Tamara Kelly, and her three children, all reported missing by the woman’s husband, Arthur Shawcross, a sales rep for a stationery company. He came home from a week on the road to find the house stripped, his wife and kids vanished into thin air. The day before, a call had been made to the house from a number Shawcross didn’t recognise. It turned out to be registered to a Michael Brand, but subsequent investigation failed to turn up the man himself.

  New Zealand: Erwin Gaskell, a carpenter and cabinet-maker, had been away from home for two days, visiting his mother, who was recovering from a heart op. He came home to find the house a burned-out shell. His wife, Salome, and their three children, were gone. Because of the fire, and the suspicion of arson, residents at a nearby motel had been questioned. One of them, Michael Brand, had not been questioned because he had never returned to his room to retrieve the few belongings he had left there. He’d been seen talking to Salome Gaskell on the day she disappeared – or at least, someone answering to his description had been seen. It was a pretty circumstantial description, too: the bald head and the dark eyes stayed in people’s minds.

  Woman and three kids, every time. What the hell did that mean? For one thing, that Tillman might be less crazy than he looked. For another, that Michael Brand was in the women and kids business on a hitherto unsuspected scale.

  Sex slavery? But why go for whole families, in every case? And why always for families with that exact configuration? Also, why would the women agree to see and talk to Brand, as Rebecca Tillman had and as it seemed each of the other women had, too? What line was he selling them?

  Serial murder? Was Brand a psychopath, recreating some primal moment in his own past? That sounded ridiculous, if he was the same Brand who was able to call up a
phalanx of assassins to take out Stuart Barlow and his luckless team.

  At that point, momentarily out of ideas and suffering badly from cabin fever, Kennedy just started to improvise wildly. She did a repeat of her knife trawl, calling up museums and archives and reading down the phone to them the strings of letters and numbers from Barlow’s carefully hidden photograph.

  P52

  P75

  NH II-1, III-1, IV-1

  Eg2

  B66, 75

  C45

  Nobody admitted to any knowledge as to what they might mean.

  Kennedy switched tack, using online search engines. But it was useless because random alphanumeric strings turned up everywhere – in the serial numbers of products and components, the identifying plates of cars and trains, the makes and model numbers of everything under the sun. There was just no viable way to narrow down the search.

  She decided, while she was at it, to check everybody else’s case notes on the departmental database, to see what if anything had been added to the sum total of their knowledge. Her log-in didn’t work.

  She looked around. None of the other case officers had returned yet, but McAliskey had left his machine switched on and logged in – a disciplinary offence, if anyone had cared to report it. Kennedy crossed to his desk and opened the file from there.

  What she saw made her swear at the screen, eyes wide with amazement.

  She wasn’t given to storming but her progress from the bear pit to the DCI’s office could fairly be called a serious squall. Rawl seemed amazed to see her.

  ‘He’s … he’s not taking any—’ she began.

  ‘I’ll just be a moment,’ Kennedy said, already striding past her.

  Summerhill was on the phone. He looked up as she entered, but made no other response. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir. I’m aware of that. We’ll do our best. Thank you. You too.’

  He put down the phone and looked across the desk at her, shrugging with his eyebrows to invite her to speak.

  ‘You cut me out of the case file,’ she said.