The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘Please,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Because of its aerodynamic properties. It belongs to a class of bladed objects that can be thrown at a target and hit it without spinning end over end. The modern flying knife is the most famous example. That was designed by a Spanish engineer, Paco Tovar, who wanted to avoid the annoying habit most knives have of occasionally hitting the target handle-first. His knife uses longitudinal spin to impart stability and is thrown in very much the same way as a cricket ball. The sica doesn’t spin longitudinally, and was never designed to be thrown, so it’s a little mysterious why it should be so steady in flight. It turns out to depend on the blade’s unorthodox shape. I attended a symposium on the subject when the flying knife was first displayed, in Müncheberg in 2002. I was standing in for a colleague, and had a dreadful time, since my knowledge of knives is minuscule, and my interest in them substantially less.’

  ‘Well, I’m grateful that it stayed in your mind, despite that,’ Kennedy said, sincerely. ‘Mr Partridge, are you saying that this property – the flying straight – is fairly rare?’

  ‘In bladed and edged weapons, yes,’ said Partridge. ‘There’s usually a requirement in such things for the grip to be thick enough to fit the hand comfortably and to allow easy carrying and use, while the blade typically needs to be thinner and lighter. The imbalance normally imparts spin.’

  ‘So would that be reason enough for people still to use knives like this?’

  Partridge pursed his lips as he considered the suggestion. ‘Possibly,’ he allowed. ‘But I’d assume that the flying knife does the same job a lot better – as do the half-dozen or so variants that have appeared since.’

  ‘But they’re all fairly recent?’

  The old man nodded. ‘Within the last ten years.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Partridge. That’s really useful.’

  ‘It’s been my inestimable pleasure,’ he told her, inclining his head in a slight bow.

  Kennedy left him still looking at the knives, his brow furrowed in concentration.

  She met up with Tillman at the City of London cemetery, where she found him sitting with his back to a tomb and with a gun – the same weird-looking thing he’d used at Park Square – in his lap. He was watching a funeral in progress way over at the cemetery’s further end, closest to the gates. From where he was sitting, on a slight rise, he had a panoramic view.

  ‘Do you mind putting that thing away?’ Kennedy asked.

  Tillman favoured her with a brief, slightly unnerving grin. ‘As the actress said to the bishop.’

  He made no move to holster the gun, which she now realised he was cleaning. She leaned against the tomb and watched him work. ‘You’re in a good mood,’ she commented, dourly.

  ‘I am.’ He was jabbing a bore brush into the barrel of the gun with fastidious care. A small tub of Hoppe’s No. 9 solvent was open beside him on the grass, and the pungent smell of amyl acetate hung heavy in the air. ‘I feel pretty good about all this, Sergeant.’

  ‘About the deaths, specifically, or just the general mayhem?’

  Tillman laughed – a rich, throaty chuckle that had a slightly ragged edge to it, as if he were forcing it beyond its natural limits. ‘About where we’ve got to. You have to understand: I’ve been looking for Michael Brand for a long time now. Longer than you’ve been a detective, maybe. And in all that time I’ve never felt as close to finding him as I do now. We met at the perfect time. What you know and what I know – it dovetails, pretty near perfectly. We’re in a good place.’

  He slid a wadded rag into each of the gun’s six chambers in turn, with minute attention. ‘A good place,’ he murmured again, more to himself than to her.

  ‘I’m glad you think so,’ Kennedy said. In spite of herself, the peculiar revolver – like a lopsided six-gun – had caught her interest. She’d finally figured out what it was about it that looked so strange, and she was trying hard not to ask. She didn’t want to show any interest in the damn thing. But he caught the glance and offered the gun to her to look at.

  ‘I’m good, thanks,’ she said. And then, in spite of herself, ‘The barrel’s lined up with the bottom of the cylinder. What the hell is that about?’

  ‘Mateba Unica Number 6,’ Tillman said. He opened up the cylinder to show her, sliding it up and to the left. ‘Yeah, the cylinder is mounted above the barrel. Means there’s very little recoil and most of what there is pushes straight back at you, rather than up and back. There’s no muzzle flip to speak of.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘It’s the only automatic revolver in production. Webley-Fosbery hung in there for a time, but its hour passed. Mateba still makes the Unica because enough people out there want that combination: fantastic accuracy with a real heavy round.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘You should. I know whereof I speak. I’m only a medium good shot, but with this thing in my hand, I tend to hit what I aim at.’

  She remembered the knife at Park Square that he had shot out of the killer’s hand. Hard to argue with that.

  She sat down beside him. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you got the lecture about the knife?’

  ‘Partridge filled me in. It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? Your murder victims were looking at a really old gospel and these killers use a really old knife. Same point of origin: Judea-Samaria, first century AD.’

  ‘It’s interesting, yes. I don’t know where it gets us, exactly.’

  ‘Neither do I. I’m relying on your keen detective skills to piece it all together so it makes sense.’

  ‘This isn’t funny, Tillman.’

  ‘I’m not laughing. This would be the wrong place to make a joke. But I mean it when I say we’re close to something.’ He sat silent for a moment, working the action of the gun to make sure the cleaning fluid got into every small crevice. ‘The truth is …’ he said, thoughtfully. Another pause made her look around, stare at his face. It was blank, meditative. ‘This – all of it, your case – came at the right time for me,’ he went on. ‘I was about ready to give up. I hadn’t told myself that but I was losing momentum. Then I got a lead on this, from a guy way over on the far side of Europe, and I came here, I met you …’

  ‘There’s no such thing as destiny, Tillman,’ Kennedy told him, alarmed by his tone.

  He looked up at her, shook his head. ‘No. I know that. No plan. No providence. “No fate but what we make.” Still. I’m glad we’re on this. I’m glad we’re on it together.’

  Kennedy looked away. She didn’t like to be reminded of how thin a line her de facto partner was walking. It made her own situation look that bit more desperate.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a possible lead on Barlow’s project.’ She told Tillman about the suggestive absence of any Rotgut files on Sarah Opie’s computer, and about Dovecote Farm. But she stopped short of actually naming the place.

  ‘Sounds worth a look anyway,’ he said. ‘You want to do it tonight?’

  ‘No. Barlow’s sister is sending a key tomorrow morning. And I want you to stay clear until we’ve worked it as a possible crime scene. If you go in first, any evidence will be contaminated – and you might leave behind some evidence of your own. I don’t want the rest of the case team to get you in their sights by accident.’

  Tillman didn’t seem convinced. ‘What evidence?’ he asked her. ‘What crime scene? You’re going in on the assumption that the thin white dukes don’t even know about this place, right?’

  ‘I’m hoping they don’t.’

  ‘So there’s nothing to contaminate.’

  ‘If I’m right, that’s true. But we don’t really have any idea what we might be walking into. And since that’s the case, I want to walk into it first. Alone.’

  He stood and faced her, his expression serious. ‘The deal is that we share all the information we get,’ he reminded her. ‘It only works if we keep to that.’

  ‘I swear to God,’ Kennedy said, ‘w
hatever we find, I’ll pass it right along to you. I just want to do a book pass.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A pass. By the book. Means go in really carefully and disturb nothing. It may be that nothing’s all I’ll find. In which case, I come out again and I was never there. Because the other factor in all this is Ros Barlow. If these … whoever they are get the impression that she knows anything, they might close her down the same way they did Sarah Opie.’

  ‘Put her in protective custody, then. The way you did with that other guy – Emil what’s-his-name.’

  ‘Gassan. Emil Gassan. I’d do that if I could. But I’m not the captain of this ship. I’m more like Roger the cabin boy. I’ve been told to stay in Division and count case-relevant paper clips.’

  Tillman looked at her shrewdly. ‘So you need me as much as I need you,’ he said.

  ‘If that makes you feel good, Tillman, then yes. I need you. And I’m going to need you a lot more if we get a solid lead out of this. Which is why I want you to stay out of it and keep your powder dry until I’ve given the place a once-over.’

  He nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I trust you.’

  ‘You do?’ Kennedy was puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m a good judge of character. I’m an especially good judge of the characters of sergeants. I was one myself for a dog’s age – and I knew dozens more. The bastards were easy to tell from the saints.’

  ‘What about the ones in-between?’

  ‘There weren’t that many. Other ranks have their grey areas. Sergeants are polarised.’ He’d been watching her closely throughout this conversation, but now he looked off towards the cemetery gates, where the last of the mourners had finally trickled away and the sextons had finished their work.

  ‘If you want to pay your respects,’ he said, ‘now would be the time.’

  ‘My respects?’ She followed his gaze. ‘Why? Whose funeral was that?’

  ‘Sarah Opie. Would have been sooner, I guess, but your people couldn’t release the body until they’d done the autopsy.’

  She had a momentary feeling of disorientation – of being pulled out of normal time, like Scrooge; visiting the way-stations of her life so far, with Tillman as the spirit of screw-ups past. ‘What were you doing at Sarah Opie’s funeral?’ she demanded.

  ‘I wasn’t at the funeral. I was watching it from way over here. Just in case.’

  ‘In case what?’

  ‘In case our untanned friends decided to do a stake-out here. For me, or for you, or for anyone else they might have missed. I did a pretty extensive recon before, and another one during. Nobody showed.’

  Kennedy had no answer to that. And she could think of nothing she wanted to say to Sarah Opie’s grave. In this thing, at least, she belonged to the school that views actions as speaking louder than words.

  30

  The next morning seemed long. Kennedy spent most of it in the bear pit, reviewing the case notes and finding little that was new or significant in them.

  The one area where she did make a little progress was in cross-checking the witness statements from Park Square, as taken down and collated by Stanwick and McAliskey. The first time around, she’d missed the account they’d obtained from Phyllis Church, a desk clerk at the car rental agency who had rented the white Bedford van to Sarah Opie’s killers. (That had been yet another promising lead that went nowhere: the men had used extremely good fake ID, identifying them as Portuguese wine merchants in London for a trade show.)

  Church’s description of the two men was broadly in keeping with everybody else’s. She remembered their tightly curled black hair and pale complexions, had wondered if they were related, since they shared these striking features. But she also said that one of them must have been injured because he’d been bleeding.

  Kennedy read the account three times, absently highlighting different words as she chewed it over.

  It was the younger one. He wiped his eye. Then, when I was photocopying his passport for the file, I looked at him and I thought he was crying. But it was blood. He had blood coming out of his eye. Only a little bit. As though he was crying, like I said, but blood instead of tears. It was a bit creepy, really. Then he saw me looking at him and he turned round, so I couldn’t see any more. And the other one said something to him in Spanish. Well, I suppose it was Spanish anyway. I don’t speak it. And the younger one went outside to wait. I didn’t see him again after that.

  The words stirred an echo, made Kennedy’s memory dredge up an image of the man who had killed Harper. It was true: there had been red tears running down his cheeks. In the chaos and horror of that moment, she’d forgotten it until now. It could so easily have been a trick of the light. But no. When the other man turned to face her, to aim at her, his eyes had been bloodshot too. The pale face and reddened orbs had given him the look of a dissipated saint, drunk on communion wine.

  She did some research on congenital conditions and drug side effects. Bloodshot eyes; bleeding eyes; bleeding tear ducts; weeping blood; ocular lesions. These and many variations on them told her nothing beyond the obvious. Almost anything could rupture the tiny capillaries in the eye, from a strong cough or sneeze to high blood pressure, diabetes or blunt force trauma. Changes in external air pressure could do it, too, but any physical exertion would be enough in itself, even in people who had good overall fitness.

  Weeping blood was something else again. It had a name, haemolacria, but that just described the symptom. The actual phenomenon seemed to be much rarer – and more often associated with statues of Christ or the Virgin Mary than with medical conditions. A cancerous tumour in the tear duct could bring it on. So could certain rare forms of conjunctivitis. Kennedy decided to rule out for the moment the possibility that the Park Square killers could both simultaneously have been suffering from one of those conditions.

  A long article on a fringe medical website discussed the spontaneous occurrence of blood-enriched tears in the adherents of ecstatic religions during rituals where gods were called down into them. It turned out, though, that there were no authenticated instances. The article leaned heavily on anecdotal sources from the Caribbean in the nineteenth century: voodoo bokors claiming to have Baron Samedi or Maître Carrefour riding them, and producing bloody tears and bloody sweat by way of a clinching argument. Stage magic, most likely. Another dead end.

  She called Ralph Prentice in the police morgue, an old not-quite-friend with whom she hadn’t spoken since the shooting of Marcus Dell and the subsequent loss of her ARU licence. He made no reference to either of those things, though he must certainly have heard.

  ‘I was looking for your help on something,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Go for it,’ Prentice invited her. ‘You know I’m a goldmine of useless information. And the three stiffs on my table this morning are all a good deal less attractive than you.’

  ‘I got lucky, huh?’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Oh yeah. I had a real looker in yesterday.’

  ‘Leaving your sex life out of this, Prentice, do you know anything that could make people weep tears with blood in them?’

  ‘Oestrus,’ Prentice said, promptly.

  It was completely irrelevant, but momentarily stopped Kennedy in her tracks. ‘What?’

  ‘Oestrus. Ovulation. Some women do it every month. If you’re aiming to get pregnant, it’s sometimes a pretty reliable marker.’

  ‘“Some women”?’

  ‘It’s pretty damn rare. Maybe two or three in a million.’

  ‘Okay, what about men?’

  ‘Not so much. I’d imagine you could get an infection of the tear duct itself that would lacerate the inner surface and cause a little blood leakage. In fact, I’m sure conjunctivitis can bring it on – although just plain old bloodshot eyes are the more usual symptom there.’

  ‘Two men at the same time. The two men who killed Chris Harper last week.’

  ‘Ah.’ A long silence on the other end of the line. ‘Well,’ Pren
tice said at last, ‘leaving aside the scenario where one of them gets an eye infection and passes it on to the other by reckless, close-up winking, two possibilities spring to mind.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Drugs. Stress. Possibly some combination of the two.’

  ‘What drugs, exactly?’

  ‘No drugs I’ve ever heard of,’ the pathologist admitted. ‘But that doesn’t mean it ain’t so, Kennedy. I’ve got a formulary sitting behind me on the shelf that lists twenty-three thousand pharmaceutical delights – with a good thousand of them coming online in the last twelve months.’

  ‘Is there a list of possible side effects?’

  ‘Always. That’s one of the things the book is for. It lets doctors see if there are any contra-indications for a particular patient. Like you wouldn’t prescribe venlafaxine to someone who already had high blood pressure because it would make their heart explode.’

  ‘Got you. Well, could you do a search for me, Prentice? See which drugs list haemolacria as a—’

  ‘Twenty-three thousand different compounds, Heather. I already told you that, remember? Sorry, but there aren’t enough hours in the day, or days in the week. And I have my own job to do here.’

  She adopted a tone of contrition. ‘Understood. I’m sorry, Ralph, I wasn’t thinking. But there’d be online formularies, right? Places where you could just run this stuff through a search engine?’

  ‘Bound to be,’ Prentice admitted. ‘But you have to understand, those lists of side effects run to three or four pages sometimes. Any condition that manifested in the trials, even if it only showed up in one patient, has to be put in there. So you’re probably going to find that you get a hundred or so drugs where the literature cites blood in bodily secretions as a possible concomitant. I honestly wouldn’t bother, unless you’ve got some other way of narrowing it down.’

  Kennedy thanked him and hung up. She went online anyway, found an internet drugs database run by a hospital trust in New York State as a service to local hypochondriacs, and did the search. But Prentice had overestimated: only seventeen drugs listed haemolacria as a rare but known side effect. All were derivatives of methamphetamine, apparently designed to treat either attention-deficit disorder or exogenous obesity.