Department 18 [04] A Plague of Echoes

by Maynard Sims

  Bailey could sense that Impey was saving the best until last. “Get to the point, Martin,” he said.

  “Stonegate, a house in Knebworth, Hertfordshire. The family seat of the Blackstone family. It was built in the seventeenth century and is currently empty. The last reports of a Blackstone living there was in 1930. As far as I can see from the records there hasn’t been anyone else, certainly no Blackstones.”

  “So who owns it now?”

  “It was bought in 1981 by a company called Eastlight Holdings. That in turn, through a network of holding companies and offshore investments, is a subsidiary of the Schroeder Corporation. And 1981 was about the time that Pieter Schroeder came to this country.”

  “There’s the link,” Bailey said, took the phone away from his ear and spoke to the others. “There’s a house in Hertfordshire called Stonegate. Schroeder owns it, but the place has been empty for years.” He put the phone back to his ear. “Can you print up everything you’ve got on this Stonegate?”

  “Already done. Maggie’s on her way down with it as we speak.”

  “Thanks, Martin. Nice job.” He rang off. Thirty seconds later there was a tap at the door and Maggie Fitzgerald, Impey’s senior assistant came into the office, a manila folder tucked under her arm.

  She laid the file down on the desk. “Martin’s still trying to locate a floor plan of the place,” she said.

  “I’ll have it as soon as he gets it,” Bailey said.

  “If he gets it. Sometimes you expect miracles from him,” Maggie said on her way out of the office.

  “And normally he comes up trumps. Tell him to do his best.”

  “When doesn’t he?”

  McKinley was at the desk, flipping through the file. Along with the documents there were three photographs. The first pictured a sprawling russet brick house with a grey slate roof. An aerial shot showed that Stonegate was built in the shape of a U with two wings set at right angles to the main part of the building. The third photograph was a close-up of the front of the house. There was a heavy oak door and sash windows painted white.

  “Interesting,” Carter said, studying the close up. “How long has it been empty?”

  “Martin reckons more than eighty years.”

  “Check out the security system. I’m no expert but I would say that the cameras monitoring the doors and windows are less than five years old.”

  McKinley leaned forward to get a better look. “He’s right,” he said to Bailey. “They’re digital, state of the art.”

  “Then we assume that someone’s living there,” Bailey said. “Shame. I hoped it was going to be a quick in and out.”

  “So we’re going to Hertfordshire?” Carter said.

  “Oh, I think so. If nothing else we’ll take a bloody good look at the place.”

  “When?” McKinley said.

  “Right away. I’ll call Stern. We can pick him up on the way there.”

  Stern was standing outside the synagogue as they pulled up in the Department’s black SUV.

  “I haven’t had my lunch yet,” he grumbled as he maneuvered himself onto the backseat.

  Bailey tossed him a brown paper bag, streaked with grease marks. “Salt beef with all the trimmings,’ he said. “There’s tea in the thermos.”

  Stern smiled his appreciation, unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite. “Not bad,” he said. “Almost as good as…” He stopped as he noticed the name printed in red on the bag. “You went out of your way.”

  “It was only a slight detour,” Carter said from behind the steering wheel.

  “But Hatton Garden? I’m impressed.”

  “Just eat your sandwich,” Bailey said. “You can make it up to us when we get there.”

  McKinley was poring over a map laid out on his knees. “It looks like we can use the woods surrounding the place for cover. We can park up under the trees and make our way into the estate on foot.”

  “Direct me when we get closer,” Carter said. “We’ve a few miles to go yet.”

  The A1 was congested, blocked by trucks heading north. Carter drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as they hit yet another tailback. An exit slip road was coming up. He flicked on the indicator. “Scenic route,” he said as he took them off the main road and onto the narrower but faster country lane.

  “What do you hope to achieve when we get there?” Stern said as he swallowed the last mouthful of his sandwich.

  “We’ll check out the house,” Bailey said. “And if we find that it’s where Schroeder’s been hiding his original body, then we find it and destroy it.”

  “As simple as that?” Stern said.

  “Basically, yes.”

  “It’s another human life,” Stern said.

  “Another life, but I wouldn’t describe it as human,” Madaki said. “Not after what it did to Byron.”

  “Neither would I,” Bailey said. “If it’s our only way to stop the dybbuk, then we have to take it. Do you have a problem with that, Abe?”

  Stern shook his head. “Extreme problems sometimes demand extreme solutions,” he said and poured himself a cup of tea from the thermos.

  “They’ve left the A1 and they’re making their way towards you on the B roads.”

  Leon Sultan took his cell away from his ear and glared at it. How the hell did Bailey find out about Stonegate? All the Liscombe files had been destroyed and it had taken all his skill to drag the information out of Everett Deayton before he killed him. He put the phone back to his ear. “How long before they get here?”

  “Twenty—twenty-five minutes I should think.”

  It was all right. He was nearly finished here. By the time they arrived he’d be long gone.

  “The van’s loaded,” Don Mason, hired muscle, said as Sultan walked into the house.

  “Okay, let’s get out of here.” He followed Mason out of the house to the van, a large grey Mercedes Sprinter. Karl Offler sat behind the wheel, gunning the engine. Mason slipped in beside him. Sultan pulled open the back door of the van and climbed inside, closing the door behind him. He moved to the front and slapped his hand on the bulkhead that separated the driver’s compartment from the rest of the van. The Mercedes moved forward slowly. There was an aircraft seat bolted to the bulkhead. Sultan settled into it and pulled a Sat-Nav from his pocket. The route was a wavy red line that guided them away from Knebworth to a spot just inside the Cambridgeshire borders. He smiled to himself. Now let’s see if Schroeder would refuse him a place at his table. Somehow he doubted that he would.

  Carter pulled off the road through the woods onto a narrow track the led through the trees, finally stopping in a small clearing encircled by silver birches. They could see the house in the distance, its grounds separated from the surrounding woodland by a rusting chain-link fence.

  “If there’s anyone in the house, they’re going to see us coming,” McKinley said.

  “That’s why I brought these,” Bailey said, holding up a pair of high-powered binoculars. “I want to check the place out first before we move in.” He checked his watch. “There’s only an hour or so of daylight left. We’ll go in once the sun goes down.” He moved to the fence and put the binoculars to his eyes.

  He scanned backwards and forwards, checking the windows for any sign of movement.

  “Anything?” Carter said, coming up behind him.

  “Nothing that I can see. The place looks deserted. But the cameras on the doors and windows are active so that would suggest otherwise.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  Bailey handed him the binoculars. “Be my guest.”

  Carter took them and peered through.

  There was a small cluster of outbuildings to the right of the house. They looked like old abandoned stables and a small barn. Carter focused and refocused. “Did you check out the barn?” he said.
>
  Bailey shook his head. “I didn’t get that far.”

  Carter handed him back the binoculars. “In the doorway.”

  “It’s a body,” Bailey said, taking the binoculars away from his eyes.

  “Yeah,” Carter said. “That’s what I thought.” They went back to join the others.

  “Well?” McKinley said as they climbed back in the SUV.

  “It looks empty,” Bailey said.

  “But there’s a body in the barn,” Carter added.

  “A body?”

  “Unless somebody’s decided to take a nap in there, but that seems unlikely,” Bailey said. “We’ll drive round to the front and go in that way. I’ve a feeling that something very nasty has happened here.”

  Schroeder entered his study and nearly tripped over the supine body of Gabrielle sprawled out on the rug. Putting his walking frame to one side and gritting his teeth against the pain he dropped to his knees and bent over her.

  She was breathing deeply but her breath made a ragged sound in her chest.

  “Poppy?” he said softly, brushing a wayward strand of hair away from her face. “Poppy?” And finally, “Gabrielle!”

  Her eyelids fluttered and she made a small sound in her throat. Her eyes finally opened. “Papa? What happened?” She struggled to a sitting position.

  Schroeder shook his head. “I don’t know. I just came in here and found you unconscious on the floor.”

  “I must have fainted. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind since I arrived in England.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No, no, I’m okay, but I haven’t eaten all day and the rehearsals are full on.” She got to her feet.

  Using his aluminum frame for support, Schroeder hauled himself from the floor.

  “Here, let me.” She stepped forward and put her hand under his arm, helping him upright.

  “What a pair of crocks we are,” Schroeder said.

  “I only fainted,” Gabrielle said. “I’m fine, really.”

  “And me?”

  “You can’t expect to skip around like a twenty-one-year-old.”

  “No I suppose not.” But he was finding it increasingly frustrating being confined to this frail and failing body. Necessary, yes, but after tomorrow…

  “I have some people coming over tomorrow evening, for dinner,” he said.

  “You? Hosting a dinner party? I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “Of course, you’re welcome to join us.”

  A shadow passed over her face. “I’d love to. But I can’t, I’m afraid. Ashley’s scheduled an extra rehearsal for tomorrow evening. Shame,” she said.

  “Not to worry. There will be other times,” he said. “Now, so long as you’re all right, I must get on.”

  “Yes, of course. I could do with an early night anyway.”

  When she’d left the room, Schroeder sat down behind his desk and opened a drawer to his left. He took out a plain manila envelope and shook its contents out onto the desk. A dozen ten-by-eight photographs, each with a sheet of paper stapled to them.

  He picked out a photograph at random and studied it. All of the photographs were headshots and this one showed a good-looking man in his early forties. A face with almost saturnine features, capped with dark wavy hair. Edward Lawrence—Ted to those closest to him—was American, a multi-billionaire and a major player in Hollywood. He had directed a dozen movies and a cluster of highly regarded television shows, before moving into production. Now his production company had financed and brought to the screen three blockbusters, each of them grossing many times more than their budgets. But none of this took into account Lawrence’s political ambitions. He was being vaunted as a future governor of California and many pundits believed he had the contacts and the popularity to achieve this goal.

  Schroeder dropped the photograph back on the pile and picked up another.

  Anatoly Kazarezov, a Russian oligarch, worth billions, now based in England. He knew Anatoly well. He had been the first to sign on to Schroeder’s cartel. The Russian had so much money it now meant little to him. But the offer of immortality presented Kazarezov with something that, for all his wealth, he could not buy anywhere else. It had been easy to persuade him. A few well-placed images in his head of a future a century from now, with Kazarezov a leading figure in world economics and politics, were enough to convince him that what Schroeder was offering was genuine. And Schroeder made him pay, more than any of the others, to be accepted into the cartel.

  Not that Schroeder needed the money from any of them, but he understood psychology and knew that unless they felt they could barely afford to pay for the dream then it wasn’t worth having.

  “Well, you can consign him to the trash,” Sultan said, picking up the picture of Richard Bennington and dropping it the bin.

  “I wasn’t expecting you, Leon,” Schroeder said, anger flashing in his eyes. “I didn’t hear you arrive, and I certainly didn’t hear you knock.”

  “You weren’t expecting me and I didn’t knock. We need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “The dinner you’re organizing for tomorrow evening, and my lack of an invitation to it.”

  “You’re not invited.”

  Sultan smiled. “Think again, old man.”

  “I don’t have to. You’re not invited.”

  Sultan smiled. “You know I really think I can persuade you to change your mind,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  They approached Stonegate cautiously, but it soon became obvious that no one was going to challenge them.

  “They’re all dead,” McKinley said as he peered through one of the windows at the front. “There are three bodies that I can see.”

  Bailey made his way across to the barn. Carter was busy with the lock on the front door. He picked it easily and pushed it open. There were two more bodies lying in pools of blood on the floor of the hallway.

  “It’s a massacre,” Tevin Madaki said as he picked his way around the bodies and stared down a long corridor. “There’s another one down there.”

  There were common traits to all the bodies. They were all dressed in similar navy-blue trousers and jumpers. All of them wore laminated identity badges, with their photographs under a red Schroeder Security logo. They had all been shot through the head.

  As Carter and the others explored the downstairs rooms they made several more grisly discoveries.

  “All the efficiency of a hit squad,” Madaki said as they reassembled in the hallway.

  “Hit man,” Bailey corrected him. “There was only one shooter and he killed them all.”

  “How did you arrive at that conclusion?” Stern asked. The sight of the bodies and the blood was making him feel queasy.

  “Come and take a look.”

  He led them to a room that led off from the hallway. There were four television screens on the wall connected to a bank of electronic equipment. A small computer keyboard sat in front of the monitors. Bailey sat down in front of the keyboard and hit a key. “Watch,” he said.

  The four screens became animated.

  The two men standing in the lobby, deep in conversation, didn’t have time to look around as the tall blond man, dressed the same as them, pulled a silenced automatic pistol from the waistband of his navy-blue trousers and shot each of them in the head; one bullet each—a quick, clean kill.

  From the lobby they could watch him on the screens as he moved through the house, dispatching everyone he came across.

  “It’s carnage,” Stern said. “The poor souls didn’t know what hit them.”

  “What’s that on the bottom screen?” McKinley said. “It seems to be a clinic of some kind.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Bailey said as a young woman in crisp white uniform moved into shot.

 
She remained on camera until the door burst open and the blond man stepped into the room. A red flower bloomed on her chest as he shot her through the heart. Another shot blew the back of her head off and she crumpled to the floor.

  “What the hell is that on the bed?” Carter said.

  He was staring at the emaciated body of a man. The flesh had gone from the face and the eyes had sunken back into the skull. There were a few wisps of white hair sprouting from the scalp and a smattering of whiskers stuck out from the shriveled chin. The skin was grey and seemed slimy, as if it had been coated with a layer of mucus. The blond man ignored the figure on the bed. After killing the nurse he simply walked from the room.

  They picked him up again on an outside camera, heading towards the barn.

  “His was the body we saw from the fence. He blew his own brains out.” Bailey pointed to the top screen. “Keep watching.”

  They focused on the lobby screen again and stared as the front door opened.

  Three men entered the house. The first two, large men with cheap-looking suits, entered cautiously, guns drawn, alert, watching for any movement from the corpses.

  The third man entered nonchalantly, almost strolling into the killing field without a care. He was much more smartly dressed than the others—his suit neatly pressed, his shoes shining immaculately, his dyed brown hair combed neatly. He said something to the other two and they headed down to the basement, the larger of the two carrying what looked like a suit-carrier draped over his arm.

  They reached the basement and the clinic, stepping over the body of the nurse. One of the men stood by as the other removed the tubes from the body on the bed. Then, sliding his arms under the body he lifted it into the air while the other one unfolded the suit-carrier and laid it out where the body had been.

  “They’re taking it,” Madaki said as the two men zipped the body into the bag and carried it from the basement.

  In the lobby the brown-haired man was on his cell phone, anger flashing in his eyes.

  “And that’s about it,” Bailey said, hitting a key and freezing the screens on a close-up of the man on the phone.