We Are Death

by Douglas Lindsay

‘We need to try to get Geyerson to talk,’ said Haynes. ‘It’s clear that–’

  ‘And how d’you suppose to do that?’ snapped Dylan. ‘What exactly can you offer him?’

  ‘I don’t suppose we can offer him anything,’ said Haynes. ‘But his life is in danger, and the quicker someone works out why and from whom, the less chance there is he’ll get killed. Maybe a couple of days will have persuaded him that he needs help, and that he can’t keep running forever.’

  The fingers started tapping. She glanced at Jericho, then looked away quickly. Jesus, she thought, he’s shut down again. Fuck you, you pompous bastard.

  She knew Jericho understood her, which was why she was annoyed. This wasn’t about her men wanting to go off on another investigative excursion. They clearly didn’t care either way. This was about the potential to solve an international mystery. This was about the Swiss sending their people after Geyerson, and she didn’t want it to be them who ultimately solved a crime that had happened three miles outside Wells.

  Her lips pursed, the intensity of the drilling fingers increased.

  ‘Honestly, Chief Inspector, do you think the sergeant would have a better chance of getting Geyerson to talk?’

  Jericho looked up. Where had he been? Not paying attention, certainly. Mind running off elsewhere. After so long, so many years wondering about Amanda, now it was possible they were getting somewhere – or were being allowed a little more access – and he was having trouble concentrating.

  Would he even know her anymore, he wondered. Recognise her, yes, but would he know the person she had become? They had been together for seven years in all. Now it was almost eleven since she’d gone. And what would she think of him, sullen and withdrawn, easily two stones heavier than when they’d parted?

  There is no Amanda. There was no Amanda in his bedroom the previous summer, and even if what was happening now was connected to her, it didn’t mean she was still alive. In all that time, all those years, he would have heard something.

  ‘I didn’t catch that,’ he said.

  She caught her breath; the muscles in her jaw tensed.

  ‘Is it possible that the Sergeant would have more luck with Geyerson? Your people skills are questionable, at best.’

  Jericho surprised her by looking as though this was not something he’d ever realised or thought about, and indeed, he had never wondered if Haynes was better at getting people to talk. His own demeanour and its impact on others had never been of interest to him.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said eventually.

  She looked sceptical.

  ‘Go to Oslo. Both of you. Don’t take too long about it. And I mean, I want you back here by Wednesday evening.’ She looked at her watch as she said it. ‘Probably best if you leave in the morning, then you’ll only be spending one night. If you find out in the interim period that he’s moved on, we’ll reconsider the position.’

  She looked between the two of them. Haynes was looking at his watch, Jericho staring at the floor.

  ‘You can go.’

  *

  Professor Leighton had a certain amount of catching up to do. The weekend had been fun. Her mind was inexorably drawn to Haynes after the fashion of so many before her who had fallen in love, but the work of the library was still there, still not going anywhere until she did something about it. There was no one else on the same desk, no one else covering for her when she took time off, no one else filling in during unexpected absences.

  Not that any of that was the case on this occasion anyway. She’d gone away for the weekend and had started a relationship. Hardly the stuff of passing your work onto colleagues.

  She had a short passage to translate from the original, mediaeval French, she had three or four phone calls to make regarding the library’s purchase of a series of books from a private collection in Tuscany, she had to look over the latest cataloguing of the seventeenth and eighteenth century French history section, she had to write two staff reports, albeit one of them was almost complete, she had to build a funding case for another small project she wished to undertake, which would involve someone, although perhaps not her, spending around a week in Normandy, and she had to put together a programme for a visiting professor from Harvard for the middle of September. All of that, fitted in around the usual day-to-day firefighting of any public service department which had been cut back to within an inch of its existence.

  She was sticking to the short piece of translation for the moment, as she was expecting a visitor and didn’t want to get bogged down in phone calls, or to start a task she would soon have to abandon. The other plus of the translation was that it seemed to be the task that was best suited to emptying her mind of Stuart Haynes and the peculiar mystery of Kangchenjunga.

  There was a knock at the door, and Matt put his head round.

  ‘Your four o’clock’s here,’ he said.

  Leighton nodded, not yet looking away from her monitor, before turning and smiling.

  ‘Thanks, Matt. Can you bring in some coffee, please?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Matt started to close the door, when he caught Leighton’s eye, the professor looking slightly abashed.

  ‘What’s the guy’s name?’ said Leighton, almost mouthing the words rather than speaking them, in case he was right outside the door.

  Matt smiled. There was something childish about the professor sometimes that made her the best boss he’d ever had to work for.

  ‘Develin,’ he said, with no attempt to lower his voice. ‘It’s all right, he’s in the waiting room.’

  Leighton exhaled, not knowing the name.

  ‘Develin,’ she said, ‘right. Thanks!’

  The door closed. Forty-three seconds later there was a knock, the door opened again, and Develin walked in.

  Leighton’s eyes widened.

  *

  Jericho lifted his head. Had he drifted off to sleep? He looked outside, the sun lower in the sky, the light dimmer than when he’d put his head in his hands, his elbows on his desk.

  He licked his lips, checked the time. Almost nine o’clock. Haynes had said goodbye about half an hour earlier.

  He rubbed his hands over his face, wearily got to his feet. He should have gone home when Haynes had left, when his sergeant had told him to leave. What exactly was he ever going to achieve, sitting here at this time of night, his mind completely distracted?

  It wasn’t about achieving. It was about not going home. It was about not being alone in the house with Durrant, assuming he was going to be there.

  He put on his jacket and stood at the window for a moment. The air was cooler, and finally the long burst of warm summer that had lasted through much of August was coming to an end. The gradual cooling would be replaced by rain and cloud, an early rush of autumn.

  Time to go home. There would be bread in the house, at least. He could toast it, have some cheese, a glass of wine. It would do.

  He opened the door to the outer office, and immediately stopped. At this time the office downstairs would be manned, but there wouldn’t usually be anyone up here. Except, there he was, the familiar figure, the shoulders hunched, head down.

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered Jericho.

  He was tempted to walk past, straight by behind him, down the stairs, have a word with Loovens or whoever was on the front desk. Yet he knew there was no point. There was nothing to be gained from continually running. Whatever was causing Durrant to still be here needed to be addressed.

  He was sitting at Adams’s desk. Jericho walked round, pulled out the seat at the desk opposite and sat down. He looked across the narrow width of the two desks, little between them except some stationery and two phones, waiting for Durrant to lift his head. He realised that the instant burst of fear had gone. Whatever he’d felt in Morocco wasn’t there tonight. Too encased in gloom to feel anything.

  Slowly Durrant lifted his head, the same dead eyes Jericho had always known. The two men stared across the desks, their eyes locked.r />
  Like looking in a mirror, thought Jericho. Those eyes. This man, this animal, had the same eyes. The same look, the same sociopathy, the same misanthropy. The same innate dislike, distrust and disinterest in human life.

  Had they been separated at birth?

  Too unlikely. Too absurd. Too convenient almost.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ said Jericho finally, finding his voice.

  This wasn’t talking to some superior officer, who wasn’t in fact superior at all. This was talking to a brutal killer, that was all. He didn’t have to be reticent; this was no time for his familiar diffidence.

  Durrant didn’t respond.

  ‘You want to come back to my house? You can sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ said Durrant.

  ‘What can you do?’

  He didn’t answer. Jericho, at last, found that he was able to ignore the fact he was talking to a dead man. It didn’t make sense, but ultimately he had to believe that this Durrant was no different from the old Durrant. Frightening, brutal and dangerous, certainly, but not someone from whom he’d ever backed away. Quite the reverse.

  ‘Are you speaking to anyone else?’

  There was a slight twitch in Durrant’s mouth, a look of resentment, then finally his eyes dropped. Jericho kept his eyes on him, then sat back slightly, feeling the tension go. Durrant, whatever this manifestation of his being actually was, had as much understanding of why he was here as Jericho had. If he was going to do something, if he was capable of doing something, surely it would have happened by now.

  Was that all he was? The person that the resentful look on the face implied? A pointless, toothless ghost, with no control over who he was or what he did?

  Jericho smiled, out of relief as much as at the thought of an impotent Durrant. He’d been scared of him the previous night. And now, what had it taken? A day of melancholy, tiredness, the look of hopeless resentment on Durrant’s face, that was all, and the fear was gone.

  ‘Can you talk to other people?’ asked Jericho.

  Durrant’s shoulders seemed to move a little lower. Whatever fight there was in him, seemed to be draining slowly away.

  ‘If I ask you to go downstairs and speak to whoever’s on the front desk, could you do it?’

  ‘You can’t ask me to do anything,’ growled Durrant, although he did not look up.

  ‘Is this all you’ve got? You’re in a room before I enter it, that’s all? Can you go anywhere else, see other people? The Inspector in Morocco, she heard you, when she was standing outside the room. So presumably, you could have spoken to–’

  ‘What does your head tell you I can do, Detective?’ said Durrant, his voice sounding hopeless.

  Jericho leant forward, his forearms on the desk. He’d never seen Durrant like this. This was what it was supposed to have been like thirty years ago, all the way back. Back when he’d been arrested. Durrant was supposed to have been at a loss, dismayed at his arrest, contrite perhaps, defensive, desperate, a little lost. He was supposed to have talked. Instead, he was the coolest, most elusive character Jericho had ever come across.

  Now, however, whichever version of Durrant this actually was, had lost it all. The cool was gone.

  ‘Have you thought that maybe you’re in Hell?’ asked Jericho.

  Durrant didn’t look up.

  ‘Maybe this is your own personal Hell. Cursed for all time to hang out with the one who put you in prison for thirty years. The one who killed you. Sitting there, sullen and broken, at my call.’

  ‘I am not–’

  ‘Perhaps that’s it. Bound to this earth until you’ve made some amends for everything you did wrong.’

  Durrant’s fists tensed, relaxed, tensed again, the hostility pulsing through him. Jericho watched him, so close across the desks that he could reach out and touch him if he wanted. And he did wonder; could he touch Durrant, or would a hand pass right through him?

  Jericho pushed his chair back and got to his feet.

  ‘I’m going home. You can give this some thought. That is, if you can think when I’m not in the room.’

  He pushed the chair under the desk and started to walk away.

  ‘See you in Oslo,’ he threw over his shoulder.

  And he meant it, because somehow he knew that Durrant wouldn’t be there when he got home.

  39

  Late Monday evening. The players had begun to converge on Oslo, although few of them yet realised this would be for the endgame, it often being hard in the middle of a narrative to know how near the end you are.

  Harrow was already there, having travelled from Syria, via Sochi. He had found talking to the Russians not unlike his experience of dealing with the Syrians, in that he had felt completely out of his depth. He did not understand these people, what motivated them, or what their ends might be. He also had to uncomfortably admit to himself that he genuinely had no idea what they were capable of.

  It’s a line from a movie, he’d thought. You have no idea what I’m capable of. That’s the kind of thing people said as a threat, and usually when you hear that line, you think everyone knows what you’re capable of. Everyone!

  And yet, he could not comprehend them. He had spoken to the Americans and the Australians. Those people he understood. However, the Chinese, the Arabs and the Russians were completely alien to him. Yes, it all came down to money and power, but Westerners came at it from an entirely different angle. That’s what he thought. That’s what he presumed. He understood, of course, that he just had no idea what angle the others came at it from.

  He was staying at the Radisson Blu, seeking international chain hotel comfort. Not the all-out luxury he had been accustomed to on his world trip, but he’d decided at last that it was time to keep a lower profile. Sitting alone at a table for four, with his rice and his chicken and his salad and his €117 bottle of white wine, Harrow felt one thing more than any other. Relief.

  He would be meeting Geyerson soon. He could pass the responsibility back to him, and he could walk away. He would get his share, hopefully, and then he would be able to disappear. The money would be nice, of course, but really, he’d got this far without too much of it, and the last few months of being pampered and courted now seemed in the past. Strange and surreal, and over.

  He may not have understood the motives of the people with whom he’d been negotiating over the summer, but he knew his own motives well enough. He didn’t want to die, that was all, and while he’d moved in those circles, death had always seemed a possibility.

  Two tables behind him, Baschkin sat with a cup of green tea and a plate of soup, the single man tasked with the unlikely job of keeping Harrow alive.

  *

  Develin was on a late flight to Oslo from Heathrow. British Airways, first class. Sitting in the front row, plenty of legroom, Leighton beside him for company. In truth he had kidnapped her, but Develin and the people he worked for never had to do anything with guns or knives or intimidation. Develin did everything with softly spoken words.

  Leighton had left her office willingly, the long list of things to do left undone. She had told Matt she would be back in on Wednesday morning. She ought to have been worried, as she well understood the things of which Develin was capable, yet his polite manner, the matter of fact way in which he had abducted her, seemed only to enhance the adventure of it all. She had spent so many years in academia, so much time sitting in an office, poring over books and looking at history. She still hadn’t been able to shake off the excitement of being drawn into something real.

  The worry of it – that she would be used against Haynes, that she could be threatened, that she could die – played its part somewhere in the background, but it was overruled by some general sense of well-being. That everything would be all right. Even if she tried to force herself to be anxious, the concern refused to stick. Despite everything, Professor Leighton was having fun.

  ‘So, are you going to tell me about The Pavilion then?’ she a
sked.

  She was drinking orange juice, eating peanuts. Develin had a glass of champagne, with the same snack. He had spent the entire journey scrolling through the inbox in his phone, and had barely spoken to her since leaving her office.

  ‘This is related to The Pavilion?’

  He still didn’t answer. His silence was so complete that she almost felt as though she hadn’t spoken. As though she wasn’t there.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me anything, are you?’

  She tipped some peanuts into her mouth.

  ‘I mean, fair enough. You’re a secret society. It’s not like you even can talk about it.’

  She glanced at him, but he wasn’t biting. She knew he wouldn’t, Develin giving off such a presence of complete control.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Can you talk about yourself? Where did you go to school, for example?’

  Develin took a sip of champagne, his thumb working the screen of his phone.

  ‘Maybe you never went to school,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’re all raised by monks in the Himalayas, and then when you come of age, you’re unleashed out into the world to do your secret society thing–’

  ‘It’s not one hundred per cent definite that at the end of this you and Sergeant Haynes will be dead. The more you know, however, the greater the chance that we decide you need to be. I don’t know you Professor, and neither do I wish to, but you seem on the face of it to be a decent enough person. There are enough dead decent people on earth. Spare us the trouble. Stay as ignorant as you can for as long as possible, and perhaps you really will be walking back into your office on Wednesday morning, as you predicted, however slim the chances of that actually are.’

  Leighton put the glass up to her face and took another drink. Develin wasn’t looking at her, indeed hadn’t done so while he had spoken to her, but it was all she could do to hide from him. She hadn’t thought he’d be able to get under her skin, to prick the protective bubble of anticipation, but of course she had pushed him far enough, and he had quietly, harshly, in his way, exploded the bubble and exposed the real fear within.