The Dead Sea Deception (29 page)

‘We’re still working in the dark when it comes to motive, but I’m thinking it’s significant that Barlow and his team felt the need to be so secretive about what they’d found – what they were looking for, even.’

‘Significant how?’

‘I have no idea. But there’s an overlap between legitimate historical research and treasure-hunting. You remember those big Anglo-Saxon finds last year – Viking gold, worth millions? It becomes treasure trove if you declare it. Finders and landowners get a reward, state gets the property. Suppose Barlow had stumbled on something like that? And then someone else found out what he had?’

‘It works as a motive for murder,’ Tillman allowed.

‘You don’t sound all that convinced.’

‘Neither do you, Sergeant.’

‘Heather. It’s Heather, Tillman. Heather Kennedy. This isn’t a cop talking to you right now. I took it as far as I could as a cop. You’re talking to a concerned citizen.’

‘Okay. Heather. I’m Leo.’

‘I know. I looked you up. And you’re right, I don’t buy that this is just about money. That’s a big, all-purpose motive, and people will do more or less anything to get it, but those people in Luton – they behaved more like soldiers than anything else. And they killed three people over the space of two days, in three different ways. They’ve got reach, and trained muscle.’

‘Organised crime cartels can operate like armies.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure. But correct me if I’m wrong, don’t they also operate like businesses? Import-export, distribution, sales divisions, reliably sourced product and massive turnover. If it weren’t for the fact that the things they’re selling are illegal, they’d be in the Fortune Top 100. Would they be chasing stolen antiquities? I don’t think so. It would be another kind of criminal. The kind who doesn’t have worldwide infrastructure.’

‘So where does that leave you?’

‘It leaves me wondering about Michael Brand, Leo. That’s one reason why I called you. I think maybe this case doesn’t crack open by inductive logic, like something out of Sherlock Holmes. Maybe we need what you’ve got.’

‘One reason? What’s the other?’

‘I’ll get to that. Tell me about Michael Brand.’

‘If you’ll tell me one thing first.’

‘Shoot.’

‘I notice you don’t have Brand pegged as Barlow’s stalker. You refer to them as two different people. Why is that?’

‘Oh, right.’ She had to think before she answered. She’d made the assumption very early on, and it had been a while since she’d thought about it. ‘It’s mainly because Barlow already knew Brand online. At some point – not long before Barlow was murdered – they met. Obviously that gives us a connection, but why would Brand take the trouble to set up this fake persona of an interested academic, if he’s going to follow Barlow around like a cheap gumshoe?’

‘So it’s two different approaches to the same problem,’ Tillman said.

‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think it’s exactly that. We know someone’s been turning over the victims’ stuff – houses, offices, computer data. So they’re looking for something and they keep
coming up blank. Brand cosies up to Barlow. That’s the softly-softly-catchee-monkey side of the equation. But he’s got one of his people sitting on Barlow’s ass in case they can find what they want by following him or frisking him.’

‘And when both approaches fail, they kill everyone.’

‘And go over their possessions with a fine-toothed comb.’

‘Okay.’ Tillman was silent for a while. Kennedy waited. Brand was the centre of everything for Tillman, had to be, because of what he’d told her the last time they met. She guessed he was about to touch again on the agonising knot that had become the centre of his life. So she was completely unprepared for what he finally said.

‘Brand is a buyer.’

‘He’s a
what
?’

‘Or a procurer, maybe. Someone who sources and obtains things on behalf of someone else.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Anything. Everything. There’s no pattern to it. Weapons and medicines are the two constants, but all kinds of other stuff mixed in with that. Computers and motherboards. Software. Machine tools. Electronic surveillance equipment. Timber. Vitamin supplements. And … in among all that …’

Kennedy filled the static-laced silence. ‘Women with exactly three children.’

‘Yes.’

‘All right. So let’s assume that what’s happening now is part of the same pattern. Brand is trying to get his hands on something else – something that Barlow and his people found, or made, or just knew about. He moved in. He moved his people in. He sweet-talked Barlow, then killed him and ransacked his house. But he didn’t find what he wanted because the team didn’t leave yet. They’re still looking.’

She heard nothing but Tillman’s breathing for a few seconds. ‘They’re still looking,’ he agreed. ‘But your scenario doesn’t work.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they didn’t try to talk to Sarah Opie, they just shot her down. I don’t think this is procurement. I don’t think it’s business as usual. I think it’s something else, and that makes me think maybe we’ve got a chance here. Brand is an expert at coming into a place out of nowhere, getting what he wants and then disappearing again. He never sticks around and he never leaves a trail. But it’s, what, getting on for a couple of months now since Barlow was murdered? And Brand’s people are still here. So the situation isn’t entirely under his control. It’s—’

Kennedy filled in the missing words again. ‘Damage limitation.’

‘I’m thinking. Yeah. Look, you said there was something else you wanted from me.’

She told him about the knife and her failed efforts to identify it. He sounded happy to engage with a discrete and concrete problem. He made her hang up so she could take a photograph of her own sketch and send it to him via the phone. Then he called her back.

‘I met a knife like that just recently,’ he said.

‘Met it? Met it how?’

‘Someone threw it at me.’

‘Are you sure it was the same kind?’

‘I had to cauterise the wound by setting fire to myself to stop it from bleeding.’

‘Okay,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘It was the same.’

‘It never occurred to me to chase the knife itself,’ Tillman said, sounding maybe a little unhealthily animated. ‘You see? This is why it’s better to have two minds on the problem.’

Kennedy laughed in spite of herself. ‘But we’re both clueless,’ she pointed out.

‘Agreed. But I know someone. An engineer.’

‘An engineer? Tillman, my point is that the weapon’s origin might—’

‘He knows a lot about weapons. He’s a real oddball. His name is Partridge. Let me talk to him and get back to you.’

Tillman hung up, and Kennedy gathered her things. Right then, she felt a sort of weird kinship with the mysterious Michael Brand. If he was involved in damage limitation, trying to corral a difficult, messy, intractable situation back under control, then so was she: compensating and correcting for other people’s mistakes, and her own; trying to find the one safe course through a minefield she had helped to lay. Then again, there might not even be a safe course.

But she knew where she had to start.

‘I don’t mean to be difficult,’ Ros Barlow said. ‘I just have a low tolerance for bullshit. Your colleague kept lying to me. And he wouldn’t stop, even when I asked him to point blank. So I told him to leave.’

She cut a Danish pastry into slices, spaced them out on the plate with what Kennedy considered an obsessive-compulsive level of care. The plate bore the logo of the restaurant where they’d agreed to meet, in the City, a hundred yards or so from the Gherkin building where Ros worked:
Caravaggio
. It was an unfortunate choice, in several ways: the price was one, the unwelcome reminder of knife fights another.

‘I don’t think Sergeant Combes would have told you any outright lies,’ Kennedy answered, scrupulously. ‘But perhaps he didn’t give you the full picture.’

Ros snorted. ‘He didn’t even give me the preliminary sketches. He came in with a lot of self-important blather about how the investigation was a lot wider now than it had been, and it was really important that he went over my earlier statements to make sure I hadn’t missed out anything … what was the word he used? … anything material. But when I asked what had happened to change things, he wouldn’t give a straight answer. I said I thought you were leading the case, and he laughed and
said no. Just no – but as though he could say a lot more if he wanted to. I asked what no meant, and he tried to slap me down like a schoolgirl: that wasn’t really my concern, and he was there to go over my statements, and he only had a limited amount of time, and – this was the one that did it – if I cared about catching my brother’s murderer, I’d do as I was told and let him do his job. So then I dug my heels in.’

Kennedy nodded. It wasn’t unpleasant at all to imagine that scene. ‘It’s true about the investigation getting wider,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. She told Ros about the other deaths – most of them anyway. She found herself skirting around what had happened to Harper. Ros had read about it in the papers, though, and knew the rough shape of what Kennedy was leaving out.

‘Were you there?’ she asked. ‘When the other man died? This Constable Harper?’

‘I was there,’ Kennedy said. ‘Yes. Sarah Opie was the last member of your brother’s project team left alive. We didn’t know that when we got there, but it became clear as we talked. We decided to take her into protective custody, but we’d left it too late. They got her, too.’

‘Right in front of you,’ said Ros, looking at her searchingly.

‘Right in front of me,’ Kennedy agreed. She knew this was sympathy, not accusation, but it was still hard to keep her voice level, her emotions locked down. Ros seemed to see the strain she was under. She didn’t say any more about Harper.

‘Why go after Dr Opie just then?’ she asked instead. ‘After so long a wait, I mean? I thought the other deaths were all …’ She hesitated, leaving a gap for Kennedy to insert the technical term.

‘Clustered? Yes, they were. And I think the answer is that she died because we went to see her. It can’t have been a coincidence that the killers were there at the same time as us. They were
watching us – either to figure out how much we knew or to fill the spaces in what they knew.’

‘Or both.’

‘Yes. Or both.’

With admirable composure, Ros polished off half the Danish – three slices, each consumed in a mouthful, in the way people eat oysters, straight down. She touched the sticky tips of her fingers together.

‘So there’s more than one of them,’ she said. ‘Killers, plural, not one killer.’

‘I saw two,’ Kennedy told her. ‘And there’s a third man floating around in the background – the man your brother met as Michael Brand. We still don’t know what his role is, but it’s hard to believe it’s entirely innocent.’

‘And you don’t know why they did it? Why they killed Stu, and all these other people?’

‘Not yet, no.’

‘Do you think they’ll come after me now?’

‘I don’t know that either,’ Kennedy admitted, frankly. ‘But I don’t think so. They didn’t come after you the last time we talked. If we’re right, and your brother’s research project is the key factor, the real link between the victims, then the only way you’d be at risk is if they thought you knew something. And for the moment, they seem to have decided that you don’t. Of course, we still don’t really have any idea what they’re trying to achieve – what their motive is. Until we know that, we can’t quantify the risk in any meaningful way.’

Ros considered this for a number of seconds, in silence.

‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll take my chances. I want these bastards hanging by their heels. What do you want to know?’

‘Anything you can tell me. Anything about your brother’s work.’

‘Stu didn’t talk about his work. But you know your bully-boy colleague took his computer.’

Yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘There’s nothing there.’

‘Nothing relevant, you mean?’ Ros asked.

‘The hard drive has been wiped clean.’

Ros’s eyebrows rose. ‘Then why are you still wondering about the motive?’ she demanded. ‘They’re trying to kill off the book. They have to be.’

‘That’s still not an explanation, Ros. Not unless we know why. You said yourself there was nothing in this book that mattered – no reputations at stake. The Rotgut has been around since the fifteenth century, right? And it’s just another translation of a gospel that already existed in a lot of different versions.’

‘Stu said that was the whole point,’ Ros shot back.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That the Rotgut was so well worn, and so worthless. Why did Captain De Veroese give a full barrel of rum for something that wasn’t ancient, wasn’t unusual and wasn’t rare?’

Kennedy shrugged. ‘So what’s the punchline?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ros admitted, glumly. ‘I just remember Stu saying that to someone he was having an argument with.’

‘Who? Who was the someone?’

‘He was talking on the phone. I have no idea who to. It was months ago. Most likely one of the others on the team.’