The Dead Sea Deception (20 page)

They’d missed the worst of the rush hour by the time they hit the M1, but it was still slow going. Harper was all for mounting the roof light and turning on the siren. Having lost so much of the morning already, Kennedy didn’t see the point.

Unlike Prince Regent’s College, Park Square still seemed to be swarming with purposefully moving students despite the time of year, and the car park was pretty much full. They circled the asphalt twice, just ahead of a white Bedford van that was doing exactly the same thing, before Harper pulled into a faculty space on which the word
RESERVED
had been blazoned in big yellow letters. The van nosed past them and Heather caught a brief glimpse of its driver: a man in early middle age, strikingly handsome in an austere, patrician way. His black hair was tightly frizzed and short, as sleek as though it had been anointed with oil. His face, though, looked as pale as the face of a Greek statue, and his gaze as she briefly met it gave her an unwelcome jolt of recognition. It was like the look her father got in his eyes when he was drifting off into the inner landscapes of his dementia. A look that never quite made it as far as the outside world, or else went clear past it. Unnerved, she looked away.

From the main gate, they were directed to the computer science faculty, which was on the far side of a ragged, bleached expanse of lawn, and then up to a lab on the third floor where a hundred students were working silently on a hundred new, gleaming machines. No,
silently
was the wrong word. The room was filled with a susurrus of fingers tapping on soft-touch keyboards, like the clucking of a hundred birds in covert. Sarah Opie was sitting at a workstation that looked no different from any of the others, except that it faced them and was attached by a hanging cable to a huge LCD screen above her head. The screen was switched off.

Dr Opie looked younger than Harper had been expecting: younger, and a lot more attractive, with strawberry blonde hair worn shoulder-length and lightly tousled. She had to be in her mid-twenties, young enough that the doctorate must be a very recent achievement. Young enough that the students in the room, who she was presumably teaching or supervising in some way, looked more like her contemporaries than her charges. She’d tried to distinguish herself from them by going for a formal look, but the dark-blue pinstriped two-piece she had on came across almost like fancy dress – the outfit of a sexy secretary strippergram.

Opie was expecting them. She stood and went without a word into an inner office whose glass frontage formed the rear wall of the main lab. She waited with her hand on the doorknob until they joined her, then closed the door. Some of the students had glanced up from their work when the detectives arrived and were still covertly watching now. Dr Opie turned her back on them to face the two officers, her arms stiffly folded.

Her glance went to Harper first. ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ she said, quietly.

‘This is Detective Sergeant Kennedy,’ he said. ‘She’s in charge of the case, and she’d like to hear the story, too. I’ve also got some follow-up questions from our talk yesterday. I hope that’s okay.’

The set of Opie’s face indicated that it probably wasn’t, but she moved her head in what was almost a nod and a moment later sat down in one of the two chairs in the office. Kennedy took the other, leaving Harper to lean precariously against one of the aluminium uprights that separated the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass.

‘So we’ve got three fatalities,’ Kennedy said, as soon as she’d set up her voice recorder and got Opie’s permission to use it. ‘Stuart Barlow. Catherine Hurt. Samir Devani. They’re all interested in history – or at least, in old documents – and they’re members of this group of yours, that likes to discuss that stuff. Now, you say that they were all working on one particular project?’

Dr Opie frowned a little impatiently. She seemed to feel that this was ground that had already been covered.

‘Yes,’ was all she said.

‘And the project was something that they discussed on the message board? On your online forum?’ Kennedy pursued.

‘Yes.’

‘Which is a historical forum. But you’re not a historian, obviously.’

‘No.’

This time Kennedy waited, staring at Opie in silent expectation. Harper knew what she was doing, and was careful not to jump into the gap. Closed questions were good because they were focused, but if you weren’t careful, and if the witness wasn’t the loquacious type, you could fall into a pattern of closed question/one-word answer – and then you could end up chasing your own tail. The silence stretched for a few seconds, but in the end it had its intended effect.

‘It’s a hobby for me,’ Sarah Opie said. ‘I did classics at school, and I’m pretty good at Ancient Greek. People think that’s a bit weird, for an IT specialist, but I love languages. And I’m good at them. I had a Jewish boyfriend once, who taught me some Hebrew, and I worked backward from that to Aramaic. It fascinates me, with Aramaic and Ancient Greek, how the character sets are almost the same as for the modern languages but sometimes there’s been a phonic shift, so that the same sign designates very different sounds. Of course, in some cases we don’t even know how the living language actually sounded. The dry versus nasal pronunciation of mu plus pi – you know, where does that come in? You’ve got ancient texts and modern speakers, and it’s not easy to—’

‘Can you tell us what you know about Stuart Barlow’s Rotgut project,’ Kennedy interrupted. Harper almost grinned. Having coaxed Opie to move beyond monosyllables, the sergeant was now having to rein her in again. Always a feast or a famine.

‘Professor Barlow came on to the board to ask for collaborators,’ Opie told them. ‘That was how it all started. He said he wanted to look at the Rotgut again from a new angle, and he
asked if anybody had an appetite for that. That was the title of the thread: “Does anyone have any appetite for a new look at the Rotgut?”’

‘And this was when?’

Opie shook her head, but answered anyway. ‘Two years ago at least. Maybe three. I’d have to go back and look at the threads. They’re all still available on the site.’

‘So who responded?’ Harper asked.

Opie’s voice trembled just a little as she reeled off the names. ‘Cath. Catherine Hurt. Sam Devani. Stuart went after Emil Gassan because he’s so good on New Testament Aramaic, but Gassan didn’t want to know.’

‘Why was that?’

‘He thought Stuart sort of lacked the academic credentials. Well, the whole team, really. He didn’t want to be associated with them.’

‘So it was just those three,’ Kennedy said. ‘Barlow. Hurt. Devani.’

‘Yes. Just those three.’

‘Nobody else you’ve forgotten?’

Opie let her irritation show. ‘No. Nobody.’

‘What about Michael Brand?’

‘Michael Brand …’ She repeated the name with no particular emphasis. ‘No. He was never part of this.’

‘But you know him?’

‘Not really. I think I’ve seen his name come up on the board once or twice. He’s never been part of any discussion that I was in. And I only turn up on the board, not at the symposia. I’m not a historian, obviously – so I couldn’t get funded to go to a history conference, and I couldn’t afford to do it out of my own salary.’

‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ Kennedy pursued. ‘That you could
be part of the same message board group and not know each other?’

Opie shrugged. ‘Not really. How many registered members has the Ravellers board got? Last time I checked the counter, it was up over two hundred. There’s a counter on the front page so you can see when someone new joins – and a thread where they introduce themselves. They don’t all post regularly. I don’t. Not unless I’ve got an actual project on the go. I’d say I know maybe twenty or thirty of them well, and I could tell you the names of twenty more besides. Their screen names, I mean.’

‘You say “when you’ve got a project”,’ Harper began, but Kennedy clearly wasn’t interested in getting Dr Opie to talk about herself. She wanted to know about Stuart Barlow’s group and what they were doing. She rode over Harper’s question, which annoyed him a little – but she was ranking officer, and she had the right to take the lead in the questioning. ‘Did Professor Barlow ever talk to you about exactly what it was he was trying to do?’ she asked now. ‘What he meant by his new approach?’

‘Well, yes,’ Opie said, looking puzzled. ‘Of course he did.’

‘Why of course?’

‘Stuart and I were pretty good friends. I said I didn’t go to any of the conferences, and that’s true – but when the conferences were in London, sometimes I’d get a train down there and meet one or two of the people I knew after the sessions were over on the Friday or the Saturday. We’d go for a few drinks, maybe for dinner. I met Cath that way, and Stuart, too. He was really funny – like the cartoon of an absent-minded professor in a TV show. But he was one of the most intelligent people I ever met. I think that was why he never published. He found it hard to settle on one thing. He’d have an amazing idea, but then while he was working on it he’d have another amazing idea and just leave the first thing unfinished. He talked like that, too.’ She
smiled, probably remembering some specific conversation, but then got serious again almost at once. ‘So, you know, there’s no way he wouldn’t at least mention something this big to me. He probably told me about it before he told anyone else.’

‘So you can sum up the project for us,’ Kennedy said, pulling Opie back on track again. ‘I think that might be useful at this stage.’

Opie looked – maybe a little longingly – out through the window at her class. Some of them were still shooting the occasional glance in the direction of the inner office, but for the most part they were working quietly. No riots in progress. They could all be surfing porn or playing minesweeper, but they were doing it discreetly.

‘Okay,’ Opie said, looking resigned. ‘Stuart said he wanted to use a brute force approach.’

‘Which means?’

‘Well, I’m not sure whether he knew what it meant when he said it, but what it came down to, in the end, was crunching the numbers. Digitising the Rotgut and then interrogating it using a really high-end software array that practically had to be written from scratch. That was why Stuart particularly wanted to have IT support. You see, he thought the best way to find the source document for the Rotgut was to—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Harper blurted. ‘Say that again. He wanted?’

Opie blinked, startled. ‘He wanted IT support. Because what he had in mind was going to involve hundreds of hours of—’

‘Does that mean you?’ Harper demanded, interrupting again. ‘Does IT support mean you?’

‘Of course it means me. I wrote the software and ran it. How else do you think I know about all this?’

‘But you said you weren’t in the team!’ Kennedy exclaimed, coming to her feet.

Dr Opie still looked mystified, but now she also looked scared and defensive. ‘I wasn’t,’ she said, involuntarily pushing her chair a little back from Kennedy, who was standing over her, evidently a little too close. ‘I was only doing search runs and filter runs for them. Support. Stuart, Cath and Sam were the team. They were the ones going to write the monograph, if it ever got to be published. I mean, you know, if they found what they were hoping to find. Stuart just asked me to do tech support, and I said yes. That doesn’t make me—’

‘What it makes you,’ Kennedy snapped, cutting Opie off, ‘is a target. If someone is killing the members of this group, why should they draw a distinction between you and the other three? You say you were only helping them out – but you talked to them, worked with them. From the outside, doesn’t it look like you were on the team?’

Opie shook her head, firmly at first, but the conviction drained away in three easy stages.

Shake to the left – you’re crazy in some very well-progressed ways
.

Shake to the right – but then, there are a lot of people dead already
.

Shake to the left – and you’re saying … oh dear
.

She let loose an incredulous and slightly tortured-sounding laugh. Harper felt for her. Incredulity seemed like a reasonable response. If you live in the rarefied air of arcane theories and academic quibbles, you probably get to feel as though there’s at least a tower or two of good, clean ivory between you and the red, bleeding business of the world. But now the History Man was in town, and the walls were coming down. Just for a moment, he felt guilty about the part of himself that was enjoying this.

‘I’m not,’ Opie said again. ‘I’m not on the team.’ But it was
a weak protest now. An appeal to a non-existent court of natural justice.

‘Tech support,’ Kennedy said, reminding her of her own words. ‘Professor Barlow wanted you to help him. Who else would know that? Did you talk about it on the board?’

‘Of course I did.’ Opie stood up herself now, confronting Kennedy for a moment or two with her fists clenching and unclenching in unfocused but strong emotion. ‘Of course I did. It wasn’t a secret. All I did was run the programs. I didn’t even read the print-outs. They didn’t mean anything to me.’

Kennedy opened her mouth, but changed her mind and closed it again. She turned to Harper, looking a question at him. He nodded. The specifics didn’t matter. What she was asking him was whether this party needed to change venues, and the answer had to be yes. They could be wrong about everything else: the accidents that had killed Hurt and Devani could just be accidents, and the break-ins at Barlow’s cottage and his office at Prince Regent’s amazing coincidences. The disappearing Michael Brand – Harper suddenly remembered that he still hadn’t mentioned any of that to Kennedy – could be a complete innocent who was just absent-minded about his address. It made no difference. They had only one priority here, and only one way to take it. They had reason to believe a witness was in immediate, physical danger. They had to bring her in.