The Dead Sea Deception (24 page)

The problem was built into the very charter of the Messengers because it was the way they worked, and had always worked, and must continue to work until the thirty centuries were done (and it was getting late, already; the count could be argued, but the count was close). They took the drug,
kelalit
, and it gave them the blessings of strength and speed. It was a sacrament.
Also, a neurotoxin, and in the end it either killed them or drove them mad. So Kuutma was constantly engaged in training new Messengers and had endless trouble finding team leaders of sufficient experience.

Mistakes had been made in the handling of the Rotgut project, just as mistakes had been made in the handling of Flight 124. Loose ends had been left untied, opportunities had been missed, convoluted methods used where simple ones were available. It fell to Kuutma, now, to manage these situations and to bring them to happy outcomes.

Being an honest man, he acknowledged, too, his own errors of judgement. Tillman still lived: Kuutma had to bear the responsibility for that disastrous circumstance and he had to put it right.

He could almost make the argument for going in himself at this point. But the strength of his desire to do so had to be taken as a warning that he must not: his emotions were involved, and therefore he couldn’t trust his judgement.

But Abidan’s team was depleted now. Hirah had been shot in the chest and in the hand. Both wounds had already partially healed, another side effect of kelalit, but in this, as in everything else, the drug both gave and took away. The chest wound was fine, but the bones and muscles in the hand had become twisted as they healed and set into an unnatural position. The hand was useless.

Kuutma pondered, and reached a decision. ‘You must take Hirah back to Ginat’Dania,’ he told Abidan. ‘He needs to rest and to be with his family. The injury done to him – to his soul, as well as his flesh – will heal faster there.’

Abidan looked dismayed. ‘But
Tannanu
,’ he said, ‘the mission …’

‘I know, Abidan. There’s work still to be done. A lot of work, perhaps, now that this Tillman is involved.’

‘Tillman?’

‘The man who shot Hirah. That was who it was.’

Abidan’s tone expressed shock and perhaps alarm. ‘But Tillman – Leo Tillman – was the man who—’

‘Abidan.’ Kuutma silenced his Messenger with that gentle rebuke.

‘Yes,
Tannanu
?’

‘Go back to Ginat’Dania. Take your team with you. I have another team in that country now. They pursued Tillman from France and will welcome another chance to engage with him.’

‘May I ask,
Tannanu
, what team is this?’ Abidan was cautious, but unhappy. It hurt to be taken out of the line, as Kuutma well understood.

‘Mariam Danat’s team. Mariam herself, Ezei and Cephas. Go well, Abidan, and be proud of what you’ve done.’

He switched off his phone and stared at the wall facing him. It was adorned with a painting of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow as imagined by a Soviet painter, whose signature at the bottom of the canvas was illegible. In the painting, Napoleon slumped in his saddle, staring hollow-eyed at an endless corridor of swirling snow. Behind him, a line of defeated, dying French soldiers stretched into infinity, all wearing variations on the same expression: the humiliation of the conqueror magnified and duplicated magically, as in a hall of mirrors.

Kuutma thought about seeing that expression on Tillman’s face.

‘Will he forget you?’

‘Never.’

‘Then he’s a fool.’

‘Yes. And you should be afraid of him. He’s far, far too stupid to know when he’s lost, or when to surrender. He’ll ignore that note. He won’t stop coming. He’ll look into your eyes, some day, Kuutma, and one of you will blink.’

Mariam’s team. He’d brief them personally. And although he wouldn’t go to London himself, he’d watch over their shoulder and steer them; not directly at Tillman because the Rotgut situation was the problem that demanded an immediate resolution. But clearly, Tillman had put himself on a collision course with Rotgut.

One way or another, whatever momentum he had accumulated and whatever resources he brought, he would be destroyed by that collision.

It was a partial victory, and if Kennedy had had anything left to lose in the department, it would have been a pyrrhic one. Whereas Summerhill had been content before to leave her to her own devices and to the not-so-tender mercies of the bear pit, now he was on her case in a much more committed, much less casual way.

The incident committee gave her a clean bill of health, and they kept her on the case, but there was no question now of a mere sergeant heading it up. Summerhill had already appointed himself as case officer, which meant she’d be working directly under him. Right in his gunsights, every hour of the day.

Rather than just replacing Harper, he’d widened the case team to five, not counting himself. The other sergeant, to rub her nose in her failure as thoroughly as possible, was Josh Combes. Three constables rounded out the roster, and she knew them all. Stanwick was Combes’s lap-dog, pure and simple; McAliskey was competent but ground-hugging, and had failed sergeant twice; Cummings was his own man, good at everything except sharing.

Kennedy printed out a hard copy of the case file and took it home with her that evening. After a long, hot bath she sat down on the sofa in a robe, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, to read
it. The file wasn’t much thicker than she had left it the week before. The next briefing meeting – or shout, as they tended to be called in Division – was at nine the following morning. Summerhill would be looking to trip her up if he could, and everybody else there would enjoy the show.

Her father came and looked over her shoulder as she read, which was kind of unusual. He never picked up a book any more, or even a magazine. His attention span just wasn’t long enough to last out the average sentence. But the week she’d been away had left him unsettled. Her sister, Chrissie, had stepped in (with very bad grace) to look after him. She’d taken him down to her own place in Somerset, where nothing was where he remembered it being, and where he had last claim on the TV after her cricket-obsessed husband and teenage daughter. It must have been pretty miserable for him. Although if Alzheimer’s had an upside, it was that past miseries presumably stopped being real as soon as you forgot them.

‘Murder case, Dad,’ she said, deadpan. ‘Multiple. Multiple and then some. Four civilians dead and one cop.’

She thought he might react to that – to the death of an officer – but he didn’t seem to hear her. He wasn’t trying to read the file, either. He was just standing close to her, watching her intently. Maybe he’d missed her and was reassuring himself that she was back. Whatever it was, she didn’t like it much.

‘Swiss rolls in the kitchen, Dad,’ she said. He liked the little mini-rolls, the ones that came individually packed in foil, and his response to the phrase was Pavlovian. He shuffled off to look for them, leaving Kennedy to immerse herself in the file.

The working assumption on all three of the original deaths – Barlow’s, Hurt’s and Devani’s – was now murder. The car that had run Catherine Hurt down had been found by chance, abandoned a hundred miles away in Burnley, having (as it transpired)
been stolen only a few streets from where Hurt was killed. It stank of disinfectant and proved to be clinically devoid of fingerprints or fibres. CCTV footage showed the journey north, but wouldn’t resolve far enough to show anything of the driver.

The clothes fibres she and Harper had found at Prince Regent’s had correlated exactly with what Barlow was wearing at the time of his death, so the hypothesis of him having been dragged up the staircase unconscious looked robust.

From ballistics reports, the gun that had killed Sarah Opie was a Sig-Sauer P226, a popular gun with armies and police forces around the world. The ammunition had been bought in Germany as part of a large shipment originally intended for the Israeli Defence Force. As far as could be determined, the container in which it had been shipped from Lübeck to Haifa had gone astray somewhere and was never unloaded.

Emil Gassan had now been placed in protective custody. When he’d heard about the events at Park Square, he hadn’t even protested much – although he seemed to be in shock at the thought that Stuart Barlow’s work had inspired something beyond mild contempt.

Some gesture had been made towards mounting a search for Michael Brand, but he hadn’t been found. He’d paid by cash at the Pride Court Hotel, had shown a fake photo ID identifying him as a lecturer at the University of Asturias in Gijon, where – of course – nobody had ever heard of him. Combes now had an alert out on him, but so far he hadn’t surfaced. Descriptions of the two men who killed Dr Opie and Chris Harper, and of the third man who appeared from nowhere in the Park Square car park to tackle them, had likewise been circulated: no takers.

Footprints. Number plates. Roadblocks. Searches. No fingerprints or clear sightings. Like trying to clutch at ghosts, but
she couldn’t fault Summerhill’s methods. He seemed to be doing everything he could do, everything she’d be doing in his place.

The phone rang, breaking a train of thought that was going round in a tight, unavailing circle. She picked up, hooked the receiver absently under her jaw: it was probably going to be someone from Division, with some bullshit coming out of the incident committee.

‘Kennedy,’ she said, shortly.

‘Good name,’ said a male voice. ‘Any Irish in the family?’

It was a voice she knew, without being able to place it immediately. It was also a voice that made her come upright, sending some of the papers from the case file sliding from her lap on to the sofa and the floor.

‘Who is this?’ she asked. The answer came into her head even as the man told her.

‘We met at the Park Square campus. A week ago. I was the one who wasn’t trying to kill you.’

A pause, while she thought about how the hell to answer that.
Go for the obvious
. ‘What do you want?’

No pause at his end. ‘To talk.’

‘About what?’

‘The case.’

‘What case?’

The man breathed out loudly, sounding annoyed or impatient, she couldn’t tell. ‘I was a good Catholic boy,’ he said. ‘But nobody’s asked me to recite the catechism in a long time. I’m pretty much up to speed on what you’ve been doing, Detective. That’s why I was at Park Square in the first place, watching you try to make an unarmed arrest on two stone killers. I know about Barlow’s murder, and I know it’s part of a pattern – although you haven’t managed to sort out a motive yet or a link between the victims besides the obvious one that they all knew
each other. I know that you’ve been in a firestorm because your partner died, and I know you’re not running the show any more. But I’m guessing you know more about what’s been happening than any of these other guys who jumped on board last week. Plus I like to think we’ve broken the ice already, so it seemed to make sense to call you first.’

It was Kennedy’s turn to breathe hard. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m grateful for what you did. It got me out of a tight spot. But with respect, all I know about you is that you can handle a gun and you don’t bother with a warning shot or a challenge. That could make you a lot of things, and cop isn’t one of them.’

‘I’m not a cop. Got some good friends who are, though, and a lot more who used to be.’

‘So you’re what? Somebody’s hired security?’

‘No.’

‘Military?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Corporate muscle of some kind?’

‘We’re getting into that catechism territory again. If we’re going to talk, the phone’s not the best way to do it.’

‘No? Where, then?’

‘There’s a café up by the Tube station. Costella’s. I’ll be there in five minutes. Gone in about seven.’

‘That doesn’t give me much time, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t. Specifically, it doesn’t give you the time to set up any surprises for me. Seriously, Detective, we could do each other some sizeable favours, but I’m not asking you to trust me and I’m not stupid enough to trust you. Wait for me outside the café, be alone, and bring your cellphone. We’ll take it from there.’

She heard a click and the line went dead.

Kennedy considered her options, but she was hauling on
jeans and a sweater, street shoes, as she did it. Nothing she could do about her hair, which was only half-dry and as wild as a haystack. She corralled it into a baseball cap and ran upstairs to Izzy’s.

Izzy was on the phone, unsurprisingly. ‘Well, I
like
them big,’ she said, looking at Kennedy but talking to whoever was on the other end of the line. ‘I like them
very
big. Tell me you’re touching it now, lover.’ Kennedy held up both hands, fingers spread. Ten minutes. Izzy shook her head violently but Kennedy already had a twenty-pound note in her hand. Izzy changed her mind mid-shake, snatched the note and waved to Kennedy to
go, go go
.

Kennedy went.

Kennedy got to the Costella Café around about the end of the seventh minute. The place was empty – it was small enough so that there wasn’t anywhere someone could sit without being visible from the street – and nobody was waiting outside to meet her. She turned a slow circle on the pavement, scanning everyone in sight, but none of them looked remotely like the brick shithouse of a man who she’d met so briefly the week before.