A door opened off to one side of them and a uniformed security guard appeared. He seemed to be barely out of his teens, with the overstretched rangy look that in girls is called coltish and in boys (if they’re lucky) is politely overlooked. His fair hair was worn in a severe military crew cut, but his blue eyes had a baby-doll clarity of colour that undercut the effect. He all but saluted as he presented himself to Gassan.
‘Rush, sir,’ he said. ‘Mr Thornedyke said you need me to open some doors.’
‘Actually,’ Kennedy said, ‘I think what I really need before anything else is a tour of the building. Would that be okay, Professor?’
‘By all means,’ Gassan said.
The young man looked doubtful. ‘I should be on the staff door,’ he said. ‘I should probably check in with Mr Thornedyke before I—’
‘This is on my authority,’ Gassan huffed, dismissing the objection. ‘Sergeant Kennedy is a professional security consultant – an expert, with many years of police experience. We’re very lucky to have her and we need to facilitate her investigation in any way we can.’
The tour took a lot longer than Kennedy had expected. It seemed to cover all or most of the building, but it was hard to tell because the interior structure of Ryegate House was homogenous to the point of nightmare. It consisted of dozens of more or less identical rooms, high-ceilinged, cool, with energy-efficient lighting that came on as gradual as a sunrise; hundreds of yards of corridor with ID-swipe checkpoints at every turn and angle, and occasional fire doors that closed down the corridors into short stretches like narrower rooms. There was a subtle but pervasive smell that was hard to identify. It was a little like the passenger cabin of an aeroplane, Kennedy decided at last: like the air had been recycled many times, and was going to be recycled a few times more before being allowed to go about its business.
As they trekked through the storage facility, Rush extolled its wonders. Kennedy felt that he was trying for the casual assurance of an old hand, but it sounded as though he were parroting stuff from an orientation lecture. The security systems were really good, he said. In most respects, state-of-the-art. There were pressure and breach alarms on all external doors and windows, movement sensors in most rooms and at nodal points throughout the building, full electronic records of every key usage and every entry and exit.
‘CCTV?’ Kennedy asked – she hadn’t seen any cameras yet.
‘Oh yeah, everywhere,’ Rush assured her. ‘But if you’re looking for the cameras, you won’t see them. They’re built into corners, angles, mouldings and stuff. We use a system called CPTED, Sergeant Kennedy – Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. It’s like, you show people where your cameras are if you want to regulate behaviour in a big public space, right? In a shopping centre, say, or a multistorey car park. Big Brother is watching you, sort of thing. But we camouflage our cameras, because this is a sealed facility. Nobody unauthorised is going to come through here unless they’ve broken in. So the CCTV is meant to catch criminals in the act.’
Including your own employees
, Kennedy thought. Because conspicuous cameras would do both things – deter criminals and catch transgressions. What they wouldn’t do was regulate the behaviour of people who worked with the collection on a day-to-day basis. This was a system that forestalled unpleasant surprises by treating everyone as the enemy.
What Rush never bothered to mention in the midst of all of these technological wonders was the collection itself; but as they moved from room to room, Kennedy couldn’t keep her gaze from wandering, drawn by massive sculptures, Native American totem poles, bark canoes, suits of armour. The smaller items, as she’d expected, were safely stored in packing cases that lined the walls of the rooms or were neatly stacked in miles of grey-steel shelving. The big, uncompromising things were sitting right out in the open.
Room 37 was one of the least remarkable in this respect. It was full of shelf units and boxes and nothing else. They glanced inside but didn’t go in, because Kennedy wasn’t ready to focus in on it yet. She wanted to get a decent overview of the place first.
‘Our environmental control is also state-of-the-art,’ Gassan said, as they walked on. ‘Temperature, humidity, light – they’re all regulated and monitored in real time.’
‘What are these?’ Kennedy asked. She pointed to a grey box on the wall, right next to the more familiar red box that was the fire alarm. It was identical in size and shape, but was labelled SECURITY where the other was labelled FIRE. Like the fire alarm, it had a rectangular glass insert, bearing the words PRESS HERE.
‘That’s another security feature,’ Gassan said. ‘Installed by my predecessor, Dr Leopold. Breaking the glass or pressing the button triggers a lockdown. All internal doors are deactivated. External doors and windows lock, and security shutters are lowered. It turns the building into a jailhouse, essentially.’
Rush was standing several yards further on, holding a door open for them. He fell in next to Kennedy, after Gassan had gone through. ‘Not all that much use,’ he told her, in a confidential murmur.
She looked at him. ‘How come?’
‘Well, it’s manually operated, for starters. It’s not tied to the movement sensors or the cameras. There’s no automatic triggering.’
Sotto voce
or not, Professor Gassan had overheard them. ‘Because of the risk of injury to an intruder,’ he said, giving Rush a look of schoolmasterly disapproval before he turned his attention back to Kennedy. ‘We have legal and ethical responsibilities.’
‘The alarm is linked to a local police station, sir,’ Rush pointed out. ‘And the average response time is twelve minutes.’
‘The liability would still be ours,’ said Gassan.
Rush walked on ahead again. He knew when he was beaten.
He rounded off the tour by taking them up onto the roof. He pointed out the pressure and movement alarms, CCTV rigs and the grid of outward-tilted razor wire around the whole roofspace to a height of five feet.
‘This is all new,’ Rush told Kennedy. ‘We used to be pretty vulnerable up here. Now we’re …’ He hesitated.
‘State-of-the-art?’ she hazarded.
‘Yeah, really. It’s pretty amazing.’
Kennedy took a little wander, looking for any points of entry. There were air-conditioning ducts big enough to take a human body, but their mouths were covered by heavy metal grilles, riveted into place, and there was no sign that any of them had been touched. The door by which they’d accessed the roof was plate steel, with a combination lock, a key lock and three padlock-secured bolts. There wasn’t even a handle on this side.
The two men were waiting patiently for her to complete her inspection. Kennedy walked to the edge of the roof, scanned the ground below and the approaches. The building had no near neighbours. It stood on its own ground, with at least six feet of clearance on all sides. No trees or telegraph poles or lamp stanchions for an intruder to shinny up. Drainpipes, obviously, but at intervals along their length Kennedy could see the spiky crowns of anti-climb brackets. She could also see the cameras swivelling back and forth on their mounts, quartering the landscape below them.
She went back to Rush and Gassan. ‘You didn’t catch anything on these, I assume?’ she said, pointing at the cameras.
‘From the night of the break-in, you mean?’ Rush shook his head. ‘No. We went through all the outside footage, right from when we locked the doors the night before. Nothing. Not a dicky bird.’
‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m done up here. Thanks for waiting.’
‘So did you figure anything out yet?’ Rush asked her, almost shyly.
His faith in the detective’s art was touching. ‘Not yet,’ Kennedy said. ‘But I’d like to see the CCTV footage from Room 37 – the segment where your intruder shows up on camera. And then I’d like to go back in and take a proper look at the room itself.’
They went to the surveillance room, which was about the size of a broom closet. Rush opened up a locked steel cupboard and selected a disc from a hundred or so that were racked there.
There was only one seat, which Gassan insisted Kennedy take, even though this meant Rush having to squat to operate the DVD playback. He slid the disc into a reader that was a blank steel slab without controls, opened up an interface window on the computer right next to it and typed in a time signature. A second window popped open on the screen: the camera playback, delivered in an area about the size of a credit card.
As the image resolved, Kennedy found herself looking at a space that could have been any one of the dozens of rooms she’d just walked through.
‘Room 37,’ Rush said, with just a hint of melodrama. ‘Night of Monday the twenty-fourth.’
The point of view was from up near the ceiling. A shelving unit bisected the field of vision, so that they were looking down two parallel aisles. Everything was so still, the image might have been a freeze-frame except for the numbers of the time stamp cycling at top left.
‘Can you make this any bigger?’ Kennedy asked.
Rush fiddled with drop-down menus, but nothing happened. ‘Sorry. I don’t know the system that well.’
A figure came abruptly into view. Dressed from head to foot in black, with a black balaclava, it was the stereotype special ops agent of popular fiction. The eerie incongruity raised a slight prickle on Kennedy’s scalp. Despite what Gassan had said earlier, it was impossible to tell whether she was looking at a man or a woman – although whoever it was must be young and strong. The figure scaled the shelf unit as though it were a ladder, pushed at something that was off-screen and then hauled itself through, out of sight.
The whole sequence covered no more than twenty seconds.
Rush rewound to the moment when the figure disappeared off the top of the screen, and froze the image.
‘Ceiling panel,’ he said, tapping the monitor. ‘He went up into the drop ceiling.’
‘And then?’
‘No idea. We looked up there, but there was nothing, no trace of him.’
‘And has anyone been allowed into the room since the break-in?’ Kennedy asked.
‘Well, we went in. The security team, I mean. Right after we saw the camera footage. Then the police came and made a search of the room. And while the police were still here, some clericals did a count to see if anything was missing – but that was under police supervision. Since then the room has been permanently off-limits.’
‘Okay,’ said Kennedy. ‘Then I guess that’s where we go next.’
It was at this point that Gassan peeled off, with apologies, to deal with some other work he had to finish before he left for the evening. He asked Kennedy to drop in on him when she was done with her inspection – an injunction that Kennedy pretended not to hear.
On the way down to Room 37, she tried to get Rush talking about himself. Most of the security guards she’d met had been ex-cops, ex-army or occasionally ex-criminals working on the poacher-turned-gamekeeper ticket. She was curious as to why someone would go into the job straight from school. But Rush was shy and wouldn’t be drawn on that subject.
The room was just as unremarkable the second time around. Just row after row of wooden packing crates and cardboard boxes, with a stepladder leaning against one wall. There were none of the larger and more visually appealing items that had loomed above the shelf units in some of the other rooms.
Kennedy walked up and down the aisles. As she’d already been told, nothing appeared to have been touched. There were no tell-tale gaps on the shelves, no boxes out of place. Dust might have held fingerprints or indicated where something had been moved, but there was no dust. After three weeks of lockdown, the place was still spotless.
She returned to Rush, who was setting up the stepladder. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘That’s where he climbed up. Cobbett and me went up to check, while we were waiting for the police to get here. Then the police sent their own people up, so I can’t say nothing has been disturbed.’
He gave Kennedy an electric torch, which he’d brought with him from the CCTV room, and held the ladder steady while she ascended.
‘Mind how you go,’ he said.
Although Kennedy was wearing trousers, she noticed that the boy was keeping his face modestly averted from her ass – except for a sidelong glance as it bobbed past his eye level. Impeccable manners. Or more likely she was just too old for him.
The dropped ceiling was made of expanded polystyrene tiles in a rigid metal grid. She pressed her hands against the tile that Rush had indicated, pushing it up and then aside. From the top of the ladder, she was able to thrust her head and shoulders through into the narrow space above her. There was, she could see now, a gap of about three feet separating the drop ceiling from the real ceiling above.
She flashed the torch. It revealed an airless and featureless expanse only a couple of feet high but identical in its lateral dimensions, as far as she could tell by eye, with the room below. There were no vents, ducts, holes or grilles through which the intruder could have escaped.
‘Am I missing something?’ Kennedy called down to Rush. ‘It doesn’t look to me like there’s any exit from up here.’
‘We didn’t find one either,’ he shouted back. ‘Walls are solid. Ceiling is solid. If he found a hole up there, he pulled it in after him.’
Kennedy did one more circuit with the torch, looking not for the intruder’s escape route now but for anything even slightly out of place. There was nothing. She leaned forward to take a closer look at the nearest wall, which was just within her reach. She rapped her knuckles against it. Solid.
‘Is it brick all the way round?’ she called to Rush. ‘No plasterboard?’
‘No plasterboard. No voids. No hidden panels. Nothing but what you see, Sergeant.’
She looked down through the hole, meeting Rush’s curious, slightly nervous gaze. ‘It’s not “Sergeant”,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘Heather will do fine.’
‘Okay.’
There didn’t seem to be any more sights worth seeing up in the ceiling space, so she came back down. When she was back on terra firma, she asked Rush to talk her through the whole sequence of events from the moment when the break-in was discovered.