by Adam Blake
Ros considered this for a number of seconds, in silence.
‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll take my chances. I want these bastards hanging by their heels. What do you want to know?’
‘Anything you can tell me. Anything about your brother’s work.’
‘Stu didn’t talk about his work. But you know your bully-boy colleague took his computer.’
Yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘There’s nothing there.’
‘Nothing relevant, you mean?’ Ros asked.
‘The hard drive has been wiped clean.’
Ros’s eyebrows rose. ‘Then why are you still wondering about the motive?’ she demanded. ‘They’re trying to kill off the book. They have to be.’
‘That’s still not an explanation, Ros. Not unless we know why. You said yourself there was nothing in this book that mattered – no reputations at stake. The Rotgut has been around since the fifteenth century, right? And it’s just another translation of a gospel that already existed in a lot of different versions.’
‘Stu said that was the whole point,’ Ros shot back.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That the Rotgut was so well worn, and so worthless. Why did Captain De Veroese give a full barrel of rum for something that wasn’t ancient, wasn’t unusual and wasn’t rare?’
Kennedy shrugged. ‘So what’s the punchline?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ros admitted, glumly. ‘I just remember Stu saying that to someone he was having an argument with.’
‘Who? Who was the someone?’
‘He was talking on the phone. I have no idea who to. It was months ago. Most likely one of the others on the team.’
Kennedy chewed the conundrum over. ‘It might be something about the document itself,’ she speculated. ‘Something besides what was written on it. The material it was made of, or the binding, or a hidden message that had been missed …’ She fell silent, suddenly realising how little she knew about this document that had got five people killed that she knew of, and possibly a sixth. It was a thought that made her feel faintly ashamed.
‘Ros, where is the Rotgut? The original, I mean?’
‘The scriptorium at Avranches,’ said Ros, promptly. ‘Brittany. Or Normandy. Northern France anyway. But the British Library has a beautiful photographic copy: every page, in really high resolution. That was the one Stu used, most of the time. He only went to see the original twice.’
Kennedy decided to raise the other thing that was on her mind. ‘I told you that your brother’s computer had been wiped,’ she said. ‘Sarah Opie had all her files backed up on to her college’s network, and they have been retrieved intact. But we found nothing relating to the project.’
‘Could those files have been tampered with as well?’ Ros asked.
‘We don’t think so. To remove every trace of a whole set of files from a large server, without leaving some sign that you’d been there … it’s possible, but it calls for a very high level of knowledge and skill. And if they could do that, the brute-force wipe they did on your brother’s computer doesn’t make any sense. They’d have tiptoed in and out both times.’
‘What are you asking me, Sergeant Kennedy?’
‘Well, I was thinking that your brother knew he was being followed and might have known that it was in connection with his research. Is it possible he had another hiding place, either at the cottage or in London, at Prince Regent’s, where he could have kept hard copies or discs that relate to the project? If he had a secure stash like that, he might have told the others to erase everything they had in case their machines were compromised.’
‘That’s a lot of maybes,’ Ros observed.
‘I know. But is there somewhere?’
‘If there is, he never shared it with me.’
Kennedy felt her spirits sink a little. She was down to her last shot – or rather, her last two shots. ‘Okay,’ she said, trying to sound neutral and detached. ‘I’d like to bounce a couple of things off you. If they trigger any associations for you, I’d like to know what they are.’
‘All right,’ Ros said.
Kennedy took from her purse the photograph she’d found under the floor tile in Stuart Barlow’s office. She’d transferred it to a clear evidence bag, with date, time and place written on a standard ID label at lower left: a half-hearted attempt to dress up its complete illegitimacy. She put it down on the table and pushed it across to Ros.
Ros stared at the image for a long time, but finally shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I’ve never seen this before. And I don’t know where it was taken.’
‘It looks like an abandoned factory of some kind,’ Kennedy said. ‘Or a warehouse. Do you know of your brother having any kind of a connection to a place like that, or having visited one?’ When Ros shook her head again, Kennedy turned the photo over to show her the strings of characters on the other side. ‘What about these? Ring any bells?’
‘No,’ said Ros. ‘Sorry. What’s the other thing?’
‘The other thing is even more tenuous,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘As Dr Opie was dying, she said something that I didn’t understand. She mentioned a dove.’
Ros looked up from the photo, which she still held and was continuing to study. ‘A dove?’
‘I only heard a few words. She said, “a dove, a dove got”, and whatever followed that, I didn’t manage to—’
She broke off. Ros was staring at her intently: a stare that seemed either nonplussed or suspicious.
‘I’m going to assume this is for real,’ said Ros, ‘and not some weird joke. Because you don’t strike me as the sort of person who plays weird jokes.’
‘It was real,’ Kennedy assured her. ‘Why? Do you know what it was that she was trying to tell me?’
Ros nodded slowly. ‘Not “a dove got”. It was “Dovecote”. Or maybe it was “at Dovecote”.’
There was more. There had to be more. Kennedy didn’t ask. She just waited and watched while Ros Barlow took a gulp of coffee.
She put the cup down again and it rattled against the saucer, as though her hand had been unsteady. ‘Sorry,’ Ros said. ‘It just brought it all home to me again. We used to go there a lot when we were kids.’ She fell silent for a moment, shook her head and looked squarely at Kennedy. ‘My parents owned two properties,’ she said. ‘The cottage, and the farmhouse. It’s called Dovecote Farm. It’s down in Surrey, near Godalming. Just off the A3100, in fact, and you can’t miss it because Dad had this horrendous sign put up. He was a great fan of the Goodyear blimp – so the D of Dovecote has a bird’s wing coming out of it, like Hermes’s helmet. Bloody ridiculous, but he thought it was wonderful.’
Kennedy said nothing for a moment. She didn’t want the excitement to be audible in her voice. ‘You said that Stu had gotten to be a little paranoid in the weeks before he died,’ she said at last.
‘Only, as it turns out, not paranoid enough,’ Ros pointed out, bitterly.
Kennedy accepted the qualification with a grim nod. ‘So it’s at least possible that he held meetings at the farm, for the members of his team. If he thought he was being watched at the college, and if your house had been broken into …’
‘It would make sense,’ Ros agreed.
‘Do you have a key to the farm?’
‘I’ve got all the keys. Four of them. They’re all on the same ring, in the kitchen drawer at home. I would have said nobody had been near them in years. Do you want to come out and collect one?’
Kennedy thought about this for what felt like a long time. ‘Actually,’ she said at last, with some reluctance, ‘no, I don’t. I really believe that Harper and I were followed to Luton, and we didn’t see the people who were doing it. Let’s take the worst-case scenario. If they’re still watching what I’m up to, they know we’re meeting up now. It seems insane to talk like this but you said yourself that your brother’s paranoia wasn’t enough to save him. Let’s make sure you don’t go the same way.’
Ros didn’t exactly take this in her stride, but she seemed to accept the logic. ‘All right,’ she said, her tone almost matter-of-fact. ‘What did you have in mind, then?’ She handed the photo back across the table to Kennedy, and Kennedy returned it to her purse.
‘Do you send stuff out by courier, when you’re at work?’ she asked, still rummaging in the purse and therefore not meeting Ros’s gaze.
‘All the time.’
‘Take one of the copies of the key into work with you tomorrow. Put it in an envelope and send it to Isabella Haynes. She’s my neighbour.’
‘What’s the address?’
‘22, East Terrace, Pimlico. Flat 4,’ Kennedy said. ‘Two and two make four – do you think you can remember it without writing it down?’
‘I work in investment banking, Sergeant Kennedy,’ Ros told her, dryly. ‘I have to remember currency rates to four decimal places, and they change every day. 22, East Terrace, flat 4.’
‘In Pimlico.’
‘In Pimlico. You can give me the postcode, if you like. I’m not going to forget it. Or get it confused with the flat number.’
Kennedy gave it to her, then put her credit card down on the table. Ros Barlow pushed it back to her. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘You’ll hear from me tomorrow. And I’ll settle up here. All of this on one condition.’
‘Go on,’ said Kennedy. She was on her feet, putting her jacket on.
Ros stared up at her. ‘Anything you find, tell me. When you can.’
She saw the unreconciled grief and guilt behind the other woman’s eyes, wondered if that was what Ros saw when she looked at her.
‘I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘I promise.’
Back in the bear pit, Kennedy wrote up the meeting with Ros Barlow in full paranoid mode, but omitted any details that could imply either one of them had access to relevant information about the case.
You’re learning, she told herself, with a sort of fatalistic satisfaction. Which meant, really, that she was going down the rabbit hole: accepting that she now moved in a world where unidentified cabals might be stalking her informants with a view to murdering them before they could tell her anything useful.
Anything useful about what? The answer – a bad medieval translation of a readily available Christian gospel – still made no sense whatsoever. But at the bottom of the rabbit hole, where bottles labelled DRINK ME could change your life for ever, you just rolled with things.
Her mobile, which she’d turned to mute during the conversation with Ros, vibrated in her pocket. She took it out and flipped it open.
‘Kennedy.’
‘Busy day?’ Tillman asked.
‘Busy. Not necessarily productive.’
‘Maybe the best part comes last. I talked to Partridge – and he’s found our knife.’
29
Kennedy spotted John Partridge at once because he was exactly as Tillman had described – and the polar opposite of what his cultured, diffident voice had led her to expect. He was a barrel-chested, florid-faced man who looked as though he could have stepped straight out of an advertisement for premium pork sausages. He wore a grey turtleneck sweater and cargo trousers rather than an apron, and carried a cellphone instead of a cleaver, but the image of a smiling butcher stayed with Kennedy as she threaded her way through the milling schoolchildren and Japanese tourists to join Partridge on the front steps of the British Museum, where he stood out like a monk in a massage parlour.
Kennedy crossed to him and stuck out a hand. ‘Mr Partridge?’
‘Sergeant Kennedy?’ he enquired, giving her the briefest and most gingerly of handshakes. ‘It’s good to meet you. Good to meet any friend of Leo’s.
‘You’re doing me the favour,’ she reminded him. ‘Where’s the knife?’
Partridge smiled. ‘It’s close at hand,’ he said. ‘In Middle Eastern antiquities. Come.’
He led the way, and as Kennedy fell into step beside him began what turned out to be a long list of reasons why he wasn’t the right person to ask about this. ‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘that your little problem lies far outside my specialism, and doesn’t touch on any field in which I’m even marginally competent. I’m actually a physicist.’
‘Leo Tillman said you were an engineer.’
‘A physicist by training. An engineer de facto, by profession. I studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in their materials science programme. So my comfort zone is, broadly speaking, the physical properties of objects and substances. Within that field, which is a great deal bigger than it sounds, I have a narrower specialism: ballistics. The past year of my life – more than a year, in fact – has been dedicated to the supposedly obsolete Lagrange ballistics equations, which relate to the pressure of expanding gases in the chamber of a gun after ignition of the primer. Really, I’m as innocent as a child when it comes to edged weapons.’
‘And yet you solved my problem inside of a day,’ Kennedy said, hoping not to be diverted on to the subject of obsolete equations. ‘That’s impressive.’
‘Even more impressive than you know,’ Partridge said, gleefully. ‘This falls outside my discipline in so many ways, Sergeant Kennedy.’ He turned to smile at her and to watch her reaction. ‘It’s not even a weapon.’
Kennedy frowned. Harper’s messy, drawn-out death rose in her mind, against her will. ‘I’ve seen what it can do,’ she said, as neutrally as she could.
‘Oh yes, it’s dangerous,’ Partridge agreed, still smiling. ‘Deadly, even. But its significance lies in the fact that it was never meant to wound or to kill.’
‘Explain,’ Kennedy requested.
The smile widened by an inch or so. ‘All in good time.’
Partridge paused in front of an open door. The sign beside it read, ROOM 57: ANCIENT LEVANT. Through the door, Kennedy glimpsed a cabinet full of unpainted clay pots. It was what she had always associated the British Museum with as a child: and why she’d preferred both the Natural History and the Science Museums, and even the Victoria and Albert.
‘The Levant,’ Partridge said, with the slow precision of a lecture, ‘is the area that today comprises Syria, the Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Territories adjacent to Israel.’
‘So how long ago was it the Levant?’ Kennedy asked. She was wondering whether this was a wild goose chase after all, and if so, how long it would take to disentangle herself from this well-meaning but somewhat irritating man.
‘I’m not a historian,’ Partridge reminded her. ‘I think most of the exhibits here date from a period between eight thousand and five hundred years before the birth of Christ. Ideally, I’d have liked to show you a later example of your asymmetric blade, but to do that I’d have to take you to the Museumsinsel in Berlin. There are none here in the UK from the appropriate period.’
He stepped into the room, and again Kennedy followed. They walked past the pots, past stone slabs with bas-relief sculptures carved into them, before stopping in front of a cabinet full of metal tools.
‘The second shelf,’ Partridge said, but Kennedy had already seen it. In spite of herself, and in spite of knowing that Partridge didn’t need any confirmation, she raised a hand and touched the glass, pointing. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That one.’
In terms of physical condition, it was completely unlike the weapon that had sliced through her shoulder, had ended Harper’s life. Age had eaten it. The discoloured surface had become pitted with verdigris to the point where you couldn’t even tell what the original metal had been, the handle worn away to a slender spike. But the blade had the exact shape that stood out so clearly in her memory: very short, almost as wide as it was long, and with an asymmetric extension at the tip, rounded on top and hooked underneath.
Now that she saw it in cold blood, it looked a bit ridiculous. What was the point of such a piddling little knife? And what was the point of the rounded extrusion at its tip, where you’d expect it to narrow to a point? But something constricted in her chest as she stared at it, squeezed
out her breath in a short huff. It wasn’t fear: she had been afraid when the Park Square assassin had pointed the gun at her. This knife, though it had killed Harper and taken a tithe out of her, she only hated.
‘What is it?’ she asked Partridge. She was relieved to find that her voice was level, the emotion locked down inside her for later disposal ‘It’s a razor,’ Partridge said. ‘A man would use it to shave and sculpt his beard. That one is bronze, and as you can see from the accompanying notes it was found in a tomb at Semna. But the design is most commonly associated with a later era and a different part of the Middle East.’
He turned to face her, clasping his hands behind his back. ‘During the Roman occupation of Israel-Palestine,’ he said, ‘the conquered Jews were forbidden to carry weapons. But you couldn’t be arrested for carrying your shaving gear. Not at first, anyway. So freedom fighters took to walking abroad with razors like this in the sleeves of their robes. When they passed a Roman soldier or civil official, the razor could be put to immediate use and hidden again in the space of a few seconds. An assassin’s tool, and a very effective one. The Roman term for a short-bladed knife was a sica, and so the insurrectionists who used these weapons came to be called Sicarii: knife-men.’
‘But that was two thousand years ago,’ Kennedy said.
‘More or less,’ Partridge agreed. ‘And if you want to know anything further about your blade’s historical context, I’m afraid I won’t be able to help. We’ve already exhausted my knowledge of that subject. But not – not quite – my knowledge of the object itself. Shall I tell you how I was able to recognise your blade, in the end? I mean, why it has something of a profile in contemporary weapons theory, despite its great antiquity?’
