We Are Death

by Douglas Lindsay

  *

  Jericho lay in bed and did not think about The Pavilion. Nor about the tarot cards, nor Badstuber nor Geyerson nor the ghost, Durrant. He allowed himself a fantasy of his retirement. A small cottage on the edge of nowhere. On the west coast of one of the outer Hebridean islands, near a golden beach, the waters in the small bay turquoise and freezing. A quiet life, uncluttered and detached. He wouldn’t have to listen to the news, he wouldn’t have to hear about war in eastern Europe, or war in the Middle East, terrorism and fear. He wouldn’t have to watch television or hear about celebrities. Maybe he would run on the beach. Maybe he would go swimming every day.

  He pictured the idyll, and he fell asleep before he got to the part where he thought about what he would actually do with himself all day, living beside a beach on the edge of nowhere.

  *

  Badstuber put her kids to bed, read them stories – a different one for each girl – and then sat downstairs with her husband, drinking wine. They talked about the case; she told him about Emerick dying right in front of her, something she hadn’t mentioned over the phone; she told him about Jericho, pulling her down below the level of the table.

  He expressed his gratitude that Jericho had been there, but he also knew his wife well. He recognised the tone in her voice. He recognised that in the two days since he’d seen her last, she had discovered some affection for Jericho that hadn’t been there before.

  He didn’t want to ask about it though. He didn’t want to ask if Jericho would also be in Oslo. He didn’t want to think about the two of them being alone in a hotel the next night. The thought of it made him a little scared, a little forlorn. She knew her husband well enough to know what he was thinking, but she couldn’t put his mind at ease. How could she, without lying? She went instead for the lie of omission.

  There was little to omit at this stage anyway. Nothing had happened in Morocco, and it was possible she might never see him again. Her strange affection for the misanthropic detective would wither and die, and her husband would soon enough be all alone in her head.

  Nevertheless, the thought of the words unspoken affected them both. When they went to bed and made love, his hands gripping her buttocks as he slowly slid inside her, their heads pressed together, the sex was strangely melancholic, as though they both imagined this might be the last time.

  *

  Haynes tossed his phone onto the bed. Leighton’s phone still appeared to be turned off. He wasn’t counting how often he’d called since he’d received her message. He would be embarrassed if her phone was on and she was blocking him, aware of how often he was calling.

  She’d said she had some urgent family business to attend to in Lancaster, and would be gone for a couple of days. It might have been true. They hadn’t talked much about family yet, and he really didn’t know enough about her life to know if suddenly dashing off to Lancaster sounded plausible.

  However, there was no escaping the likelihood of one of two uncomfortable truths. That either she’d suddenly had enough of him, that he had completely misread the signs, and that she was intent on avoiding him until he got the message. Or, the more likely option, the one that was quite apparent once he had managed to expel the basic doubts that made him feel like some sort of lovesick teenager. They were involved in a murder investigation, and they seemed to have found themselves in the midst of a great international conspiracy. He knew that if he’d been looking at this from the outside, there would be no question that she’d been taken out of the game.

  On top of that, there were the two death cards that had been delivered to Haynes personally. Perhaps the cards were related to the deaths of Carter and then Emerick, but how could he tell? How could they ever tell? Why had there not been one for Connolly?

  At least she had sent the message, which suggested that rather than being killed, someone had wanted to keep her away from Haynes. It was bad but could have been a lot worse.

  He nearly called Jericho, a few times over, but stopped himself every time. He’d leave it until the morning, then he could call Leighton’s office. Kicking himself for not having done it before close of play, but that was another call he’d stopped himself from making, just in case. Hadn’t wanted to seem desperate.

  And so, eventually, he went to bed, but it was a long time before his troubled, agitated mind allowed him to get to sleep.

  *

  Morlock, as usual, was way ahead of everyone. He spent the night in the Thon Hotel, a top-floor suite looking out on Oslo Opera House, having checked in earlier in the evening as Abel Connors, a businessman from Cleveland.

  Abel Connors enjoyed a meal of prawns and salad, then spent a couple of hours with a couple of women in his room, before dispatching them into the evening, taking a quick shower and getting a relatively early night.

  40

  Jericho and Haynes were on a flight from Heathrow, by chance the same plane Develin and Leighton had taken the previous day. Jericho and Haynes were in economy.

  The sky above the North Sea was restless, even though it was blue and cloudless. The sea shimmered far below them, but the journey had barely been smooth from the take-off.

  Haynes was uncomfortable, edgy. Worried. They’d had the conversation about Leighton that morning while heading up to the airport. Haynes had called her office after nine and been given a general description of the man with whom Leighton had left the office.

  It sounded like the man they’d seen in the shop in Paris, but of course he couldn’t be sure, and he had neither a photograph nor an identikit picture to send through to the office.

  The one ray of light he’d been given was that she’d seemed happy, excited almost at having to leave, her PA had said. But it felt wrong, that was all, and she clearly hadn’t been called away by the guy from Paris to go and visit her family. She’d been swallowed up in it all, when she’d had no reason to be involved, other than the fact that Haynes had brought her into it.

  Jericho had hardly been able to put his mind at rest. There was no hiding the seriousness of it, no denying that she was only involved because Haynes had invited her in. All they could do was work their way through the investigation as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. No mistakes.

  Jericho was thinking the same thing Haynes was thinking, though. If these were the same people who had taken Amanda, it was quite possible he would never see Leighton again.

  Jericho gripped the seat in front of him, as the plane juddered suddenly, dropped sharply, before falling into smoother air. Someone a couple of rows behind cried out at the drop.

  ‘Shit,’ muttered Haynes.

  Jericho swallowed, stared at the seat in front. If the plane crashed, he thought, if he died sometime in the next ten minutes, would Durrant be waiting for him? Would they be tied together for all eternity?

  Perhaps they were anyway.

  Haynes was reading a book on Kangchenjunga, which he’d picked up at Waterstones in town the previous lunchtime.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d read an actual book, with a spine and a cover and pages printed on paper. When he read, it was on an iPad. Virtually every single piece of research he did was on the Internet.

  The plane had settled down, as though it had needed to fall through the air for a short period in order to find a smoother ride. As though it had ignored the pilots and searched it out for itself. Jericho released his grip on the seat in front, Haynes finally found himself able to concentrate.

  ‘Wonder how they decided which mountain was the highest back in those days,’ he said, coming to the description in the book of Kangchenjunga in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘Just by looking at it, maybe.’

  He paused, looked out the window at the flat calm of the North Sea thousands of feet below.

  ‘For that matter, I’ve no idea how they do it now.’

  Jericho made a small acknowledgement and settled back into staring straight ahead. Happy to sit for long periods without diversion.

  The cabin staff were a
pproaching slowly, handing out drinks and salted snacks. The plane was so still it might hot have been moving. All around were people on phones and laptops and iPads. Haynes alone was reading a book, Jericho alone was doing nothing.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Haynes, his voice low, and without the exclamation that the word might have suggested. ‘Did you know this?’

  Jericho glanced over at the book, at a double page with just text and no photographs, and waited for Haynes to share what he’d read.

  ‘Local legend suggests that there is a valley of immortality concealed on the slopes of the mountain. A valley of immortality?’

  He looked round at Jericho, starting to smile. For a moment, and it would be just that, the gnawing worry of what had become of Leighton was gone.

  Jericho looked down, thought back to everything he’d read about Kangchenjunga all those years ago. He couldn’t recall if he’d known that, but in all likelihood, if he’d read that information when searching for Amanda, he would have dismissed it as being of little interest.

  ‘So our guy goes off into the mountains in northern India, then reappears thirty years later seeming not to have aged. He then lives way longer than anyone else was living at the time.’

  ‘Yet hardly immortal.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t stay in the valley of immortality, did he?’ said Haynes.

  Jericho nodded, then exhaled slowly, shaking his head.

  ‘It fits, Sergeant, I’ll give you that. But Jesus... I’d prefer, as much as possible, if we can keep this on some sort of level playing field of existence. Let’s leave the wacky ancient myths out of it if we can.’

  Haynes nodded.

  ‘I know. But... we should keep it in mind, that’s all.’

  Jericho nodded. His look drifted away, and this time he didn’t stare at the seat in front of him. His eyes dropped to the floor, and a strange, nervous feeling squirmed through his stomach.

  A hidden valley of immortality. Seriously? Utterly, stupidly, preposterously ridiculous, and how ludicrous would it be for him to take this to Dylan? Or anyone else for that matter?

  And then there was the other thing. The other person. The dead person who seemed not to be dead, who was plaguing his life. What of him? Had he too been through the hidden valley of immortality?

  Jericho closed his eyes, lowered his head slightly, and hoped that Haynes was not going to say anything further.

  41

  Leighton sat blindfolded in the back of the car. Her hands were not tied, and she could have whipped off the blindfold at any moment, but these people held her in their thrall and she dared not do anything unexpected.

  She was trying to cling to the idea she was in an episode of Ripping Yarns, but it was no longer working. She’d been kidnapped, quite possibly by the same people who had engineered the disappearance of Jericho’s wife. The same fate might well await her.

  This wasn’t just about whether or not she’d get to see Haynes again. This was about her parents and her sister. Her niece. Her home. The inside of her office.

  Her mind had started running all over the place and she couldn’t stop it. The ways in which they could kill her, and all those things that would be even worse. Brutal incarceration, rape, torture. Maybe they would sell her. Maybe they would do nothing violent, but would demand something of her. Something completely unpalatable which would be accompanied by a threat to her family.

  She had always thought herself something of a Mitty character. The slightest thing could bring it out in her, cause her to drift off into brief fantasy. Now that imagination had been given full wing and was flying to every dark and gruesome corner, into every conceivable horror.

  The car stopped again, as it had been doing intermittently. She presumed they were driving through Oslo town centre, stopping at lights. This time, while the engine kept running, the driver door opened and closed again. She could feel there was still someone else in the car, however.

  ‘Take off the blindfold.’

  She didn’t recognise the voice. Took a deep breath, brought her nerves under control. Getting on with it, however, was so much better than being allowed to stew in her imagination, and she could feel her determination harden as she removed the blindfold and opened her eyes gingerly against the brightness of the day. As it was, the late August day had turned grey and muggy.

  The side windows were dark and she couldn’t see out, but looking through the windscreen, she could see they had driven into a large park. Trees and paths and a large open grassy area stretched out ahead of them for several hundred yards.

  The man in the front passenger seat might have been glancing at her in the rear-view mirror, but it was hard to tell. He was wearing expensive sunglasses against the dullness of the day.

  The door opened and another man, an identical man it seemed, stood over her, holding the door, waiting for her to get out. She unbuckled the seatbelt and eased herself warily out of the car.

  Standing up, she felt an immediate sense of relief. She knew where she was. Not only that, it was in one of Oslo’s most popular tourist destinations. You didn’t bring someone to a place like this in order to do them harm, surely.

  They had driven adjacent to the bridge in Vigeland Park. There were several people on the bridge and a few workmen nearby. A couple of them were looking warily at the car, but no one was approaching them to question what they were doing.

  She looked around, wondering if it was time to make a run for it. Her fear had gone, however. Something of the sense of adventure had returned.

  ‘You need to go and speak to Mr Develin.’

  She looked at the guy in the sunglasses, the words seeming to have come without him opening his mouth, then she turned and looked along the bridge, her eyes falling on Develin straight away, even though his position hadn’t been indicated. It wasn’t much, but just enough to have her feeling wary again.

  She walked away, muttering under her breath.

  ‘They’re still in charge, Margot.’

  Develin was standing beneath a statue of a woman fighting a dragon, the great beast wrapped around her in an ambiguously sexual embrace. Leighton had been here before. She was very familiar with the sculptures and did not look at them.

  She approached him, stopped a couple of yards short, turned and looked around. Still plenty of people on the bridge and in the park, the car still sitting with its engine running, fifty yards away.

  ‘You’re familiar with this place?’ asked Develin.

  ‘Vigeland Park,’ said Leighton.

  ‘The most popular park in all of Scandinavia,’ said Develin.

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘I brought you here to show you some level of trust. You don’t necessarily need to fear us, Professor Leighton.’

  ‘Necessarily?’

  ‘You have options.’

  His voice was cold and level. She hadn’t seen him since he’d left her in the hands of the others at the airport the previous evening. At least now he was talking.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  Develin was staring straight ahead at the small lake beyond the bridge, and the trees beyond that.

  ‘We have a very large organisation,’ he said. ‘People don’t really know about us. We like it that way. We don’t like it when someone starts to pry. People – police officers, academics, insurance investigators – really ought to learn to not stick their noses in where they’re not wanted.’

  ‘You consider yourselves above the law?’

  ‘We are the law, Professor,’ he answered pragmatically. ‘This is how it is, and it’s not for anyone else to judge.’

  She kept her eyes on him for a while, then looked away when it was obvious he wasn’t going to look at her.

  ‘So what are my options?’ she said.

  ‘You have two,’ said Develin, his voice barely changing in pitch or tone. ‘I brought you here to ask you if you would care to join us. It’s not our normal mode of recruitment. Similarly, we would not usually welcome in
someone who has already begun an unwelcome investigation, even one that has barely scraped the surface. Nevertheless, if you would like to join us, I’m in a position now to make that offer. As a history professor, it could be of the utmost interest to you. Of course, you would never learn anything that you could share or publish. Nevertheless, you appear to be a woman of some quality, and you would be welcome. The benefits to you, in terms of your own personal knowledge and career advancement, would be extraordinary.’

  Leighton glanced at him, but Develin was still staring across the bridge, across the park.

  ‘I don’t think that could be over-emphasised.’

  ‘What’s the downside?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t believe there is one, considering the advantages to you. You may see things differently.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You will work for us, therefore you will answer to us. You will occasionally have to do things you don’t understand, albeit rarely will they be things of which you don’t approve.’

  ‘You kill people,’ she said.

  ‘You won’t have to kill anyone.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief.’

  ‘You will have to discontinue your association with Sergeant Haynes.’

  She lowered her eyes. That one had been coming. Not that she was even remotely considering his offer.

  ‘You could bring him into the fold too,’ she said.

  ‘We have no need for Sergeant Haynes.’

  ‘And you’d expect me to suddenly disappear in the way I already have, then later today just go home, walk back into my office, and what...? What would I say when he calls?’

  ‘I believe you can say what you want. Honestly, the lie with which you are most comfortable.’

  ‘Honestly, the lie with which you are most comfortable? That’s a beautiful incongruity.’

  Develin did not reply and did not meet her gaze.

  ‘I don’t want to lie to him,’ said Leighton. ‘Or anyone else.’

  ‘You have a decision to make then,’ said Develin. ‘I get the feeling you’re not even thinking about it. I understand, the first flush of new romance.’