‘I’m not sure that counts as irony, exactly,’ Kennedy said. ‘But I take your point. Ms Parminter, what do you think the intruder was after?’
‘Whatever he could get his hands on.’ The answer sounded flip, but it was spoken with a definite emphasis.
‘What, you don’t think he had a plan? A specific target?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Why is that?’
Parminter almost sneered. ‘Well, let’s just say that if he did, and if he ended up in that wing, in that room, he must have taken a wrong turning.’ She stood up, without asking Kennedy if the interview was over, and headed for the door.
‘He’d have had better luck going through our rubbish,’ she said over her shoulder.
*
Before Kennedy could get to interviewee number two, Izzy called. She was still on the train.
‘Hey, you,’ Izzy said, trying to sound jaunty through the misery and the hurt. ‘What you up to right now? Smiting evildoers?’
‘Interviewing witnesses,’ Kennedy said. ‘Smiting comes later. I thought you’d be there by now.’
‘Train got held up outside Leicester. We’ll be pulling in soon.’
There was a pregnant silence. ‘Give them my love,’ Kennedy said, for want of anything else to say that actually had any kind of a meaning attached.
‘Obviously,’ Izzy said.
They
were Izzy’s brother Simon, his homophobic wife Caroline, who crossed her legs whenever Kennedy entered the room as though she feared her vagina was under direct threat, and their weirdly quiet but otherwise okay kids Hayley and Richard. They lived in a well-to-do suburb of Leicester, kept rabbits, and – considered as a family unit – had a Stepford kind of serenity that Kennedy observed with perplexity and mild suspicion. Caroline was something in the City, but at long-distance, making crazy money in a locked room at the top of the house that contained only a desk, a computer and three phones. Simon looked after the kids, the rabbits, the house and pretty much everything else.
It had been Kennedy’s idea that Izzy should spend some time with her only sibling and his family – or at least, that she should get some distance from Kennedy until Kennedy was able to establish which chicken from her former life was coming home to roost. It had to be that. There was no conceivable way that the attack could have anything to do with her work at Ryegate House, which had barely begun. It was only the timing – and the unsettling visual echo of the black stealth-suit, so like the one she’d seen in the CCTV footage. But even if the Ryegate House intruder was crazy enough, and desperate enough, to commit a murder in order to hide a theft, there was no way that Kennedy presented a credible enough threat to motivate an attack like that. She knew nothing, had no leads and no ideas.
Izzy had been full of indignation and derision at the suggestion that she needed to be protected; but she thought it was hot as hell that Kennedy wanted to protect her, be her knight in shining armour. Once they were back in the comfort and privacy of Izzy’s flat, the sex they’d had on the back of that particular conversation had reached heights and depths that surprised both of them.
But when it was over, and they were lying across each other in a snarl of knotted sheets like the victims of some very localised tornado, both of the elephants – the relationship one and the near-death-experience one – were still in the room. One hour of sweaty apotheosis didn’t mean they were safely over the dead ground. And the fresh bandage on Izzy’s forehead was a potent reminder that someone had just tried to cement their fate with actual cement.
Kennedy came up with the idea of a trial separation – partly so they could figure out how they felt about each other, partly so that Izzy could get out of harm’s way while Kennedy tried to find out where the harm was coming from and shut it down.
It was a hard sell for Izzy. The great sex, and Kennedy’s protectiveness, had completely changed her prognosis for the relationship. Now she wanted to capitalise on these gamechanging events and get Kennedy to tell her that she was forgiven. ‘Don’t ask me to go to bloody Leicester!’ she pleaded. ‘I can stay out of trouble right here. I’ll go and stay with Pauline and Kes, down in Brixton.’
‘Too close, too current,’ Kennedy told her bluntly. ‘And you’d still be seeing all the people you normally see. Anyone who was halfway trying could find you inside of a day.’
‘But what about my work?’
Kennedy picked up Izzy’s phone from the arm of the sofa and waved it briefly in her face before dropping it into her handbag. ‘That’s your work. You can do it just as well from two hundred miles away. Better, you won’t be tempted to invite a regular up for a face to face.’
It was deliberately cruel – a pre-emptive bid to end the discussion. And it worked really well, as far as that went. Izzy absorbed the low blow without a word and took over the packing for herself. When she left, an hour later, they embraced, but it was clumsy and tentative.
Just like their conversation now.
‘I had a thought,’ Izzy said.
‘What about?’
‘Sleeping around.’
‘Izzy—’
‘Hear me out, babe. I was thinking I could set you up with someone. Someone really cute. And you could, you know, be unfaithful right back. Get it out of your system. You wouldn’t even have to enjoy it. It would just relieve the tension, you know? So we could get back to being us again.’
‘Izzy, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.’
‘Okay.’ Izzy abandoned the notion quickly, got some distance from it. ‘I thought it was stupid. I just wanted to put it out there.’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll call you tonight.’
‘I love you.’
Kennedy hung up and grabbed the next file.
Second Assistant Director Allan Scholl – a Boris Johnson lookalike with a mop of blond hair he obviously thought was a selling point – was a whole lot smoother than Parminter and a whole lot more courteous. But he had even less to say. He was keen to stress his pivotal role on the day the break-in was discovered. It had been him who called the police, told security to seal off the room and organised the preliminary trawl through the collection to find out what had been stolen. He’d overseen the process himself, because his PA had been away sick and although he returned that day, he got in late.
‘And you found that nothing was missing?’ Kennedy said.
‘Nothing that we could definitely verify,’ Scholl corrected her. ‘We’ve done a more detailed search since and everything appears to be where it belongs. But it’s hard to be categorical on that point.’
‘Why is that, Mr Scholl?’ Kennedy knew the answer, but it never hurt to seem more clueless than you actually were: the Columbo principle.
‘Because there are literally millions of items in the collection. To tick every one off the list would be hugely time-consuming. And visual verification might not be enough, in some cases. If you wanted to steal a very valuable artefact, and then to sell it on, one of the things you might do would be to replace the original with a copy so that its loss went undetected. Then there are the books …’
‘Which aren’t catalogued.’
‘Which
were
catalogued, but the catalogue is both massively out of date and not here. It’s at Euston Road, on completely separate premises. So yes, we think we dodged the bullet, and that’s our public position, as it were. But privately, I’m agnostic.’
Kennedy thought back to the CCTV image of the man in black, with the tiny shoulder bag. Whatever he’d come for, it wasn’t a bulky item. And he hadn’t been on a random shopping trip, either.
So her position went beyond agnosticism. She was pretty near certain that something had been taken. The intruder had been picked up on camera and had dropped a knife (after he’d used it, which was a piece that didn’t seem to fit anywhere in the puzzle), but he’d still got away clean, and she had no reason to assume that his mission was aborted.
What was the mission? And who was he? And how had he gotten in and out?
And in back of those questions: did he try to kill me last night?
As she went on through the morning, she got back into the rhythm of it. In her former life as a cop, she’d been good at this stuff. She’d understood, intuitively, that it wasn’t about the questions. Not at first. You kept them bland and general, and people told you what was on their mind. The questions were like Rorschach inkblots.
‘I got to work late that day,’ said a man with bleach-blond hair, a dancer’s narrow build and intense, over-large brown eyes.
Kennedy glanced at the corresponding file. Alex Wales. She made a connection in her mind. ‘So you’re Mr Scholl’s PA?’
The man nodded at some length, as though Kennedy had made a point he profoundly agreed with, but he said nothing. Maybe his eyes weren’t too big: they were just very much darker than his face, so that they drew your gaze.
‘You were away from work all day on the Monday,’ Kennedy said. ‘Then you got in around eleven on the Tuesday. Why was that?’
There was a silence that was long enough for her to register it as awkward. ‘I have pernicious anaemia,’ Wales said. ‘Every so often, I get fainting fits. I take pills to keep it under control – but even with the pills, the iron level in my blood fluctuates a lot. When it’s really low, I can’t even get out of bed.’
‘So you took the Monday off because you were ill.’
Another pause. ‘I just lay there all through Monday. And Tuesday morning, too. Then I got up.’
He seemed to be picking his words with care, as though afraid of being accused of something; faking a sickie, maybe.
‘What was happening when you arrived on Tuesday?’ Kennedy asked him.
‘You mean, what was the first thing I saw on Tuesday?’
‘Yes. Exactly.’
‘The police were all over the place. Going through the rooms.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I went to my desk. Logged onto my computer.’
‘Just like normal?’
Wales nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘You weren’t surprised to see that massive police presence? You didn’t stop to ask them what was happening?’
‘I thought they were probably investigating a break-in.’
‘You thought that? Right away?’
Kennedy got another long, hard look from those big, dark eyes. ‘Yes. Right away.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘Well, it seemed like the obvious explanation. But I suppose it could have been a lot of worse things.’
‘Such as?’
Silence. Stare. Wait for it.
‘Well,’ Alex Wales said, ‘it’s not like the police ever come with good news, is it?’
She was finished before she knew it.
She was expecting one more clerk or curator to step timidly across the threshold, but when the door opened it was Rush instead.
‘All done,’ he said.
Kennedy looked down at the remaining file, sitting by itself next to the stack of those pertaining to people she’d already seen. ‘What about Mark Silver?’ she asked, and memory stirred as soon as she spoke the name aloud. She answered her own question. ‘Mark Silver is dead.’
Rush nodded solemnly. ‘Yeah. The weekend before the break-in.’
‘Traffic accident.’
‘Is correct.’
‘So why did you give me his file?’
‘Sorry,’ Rush said. ‘You said to put the files in some kind of order, and you said it couldn’t be just alphabetical, so I went by start date. You know, when they came on-staff here. The people you saw first were the people who’d worked here the longest. So I was looking at the dates instead of the names. Otherwise I would have taken Mark out.’
There was a silence. Kennedy couldn’t think of anything to fill it with.
‘Do you want me to get you some more coffee?’ Rush asked her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. The truth was that she was too tired to move. As though she needed some excuse to go on sitting there, she opened up the cover of Silver’s file and scanned the details. Born in Birmingham, educated in Walsall and Smethwick, and then buggered off to join the British Army on the Rhine. Obviously Mark had felt the need to shake off the dust of his home town and get out into the big world. Couldn’t blame him for that.
As her gaze wandered across the page, Kennedy was struck by a mild sense of déjà vu. It was something recent, too. Dredging up the memory, she checked Silver’s file against one of the others she’d just been looking at. Not a perfect match, but close enough. In order of start date, Rush had said.
Kennedy looked up at him. He was giving her a slightly puzzled stare, watching the expressions chasing each other across her face. ‘Those break-ins,’ she said.
‘Break-in, you mean. Singular.’
‘No. The other ones. The abortive attempts.’
Rush frowned. ‘Oh, right. Those. That was a while ago now. We added some external cameras, up on the roof – you saw them yesterday. Whoever it was, they didn’t come back.’
‘Right.’
She almost had it now. Had some of it, anyway. Change the perspective, and the impossible becomes banal. Was that Columbo again, or Sherlock Holmes?
‘Get your keys out,’ she told Rush. ‘I want to take another look at the room.’
Eight parallel aisles of boxes. No empty spaces on the shelves, although Gassan had told her the room was only at one third of its capacity. That was the first thing.
‘So some of these boxes don’t have anything in them, right?’ Kennedy asked Rush.
‘All the ones from about the end of aisle C onwards,’ he confirmed. ‘The clericals normally fill the space up from the front. But there’s probably a few more empty boxes mixed in with the full ones – spaces that didn’t get filled or things that were moved to new locations and left a gap.’
‘So why bother to have boxes with nothing in them?’ Rush gave this question some thought. ‘I suppose it’s got some value as a smokescreen,’ he said at last.
‘You mean because it forces a burglar to open every box?’ ‘Yeah. But I think it was more about space, to be honest. The boxes are rigid, reinforced sides, high quality. They don’t come flat-packed. So where else would we stack them? It’d be stupid to have rooms set aside for empty boxes when we can just fill the shelves here and then have everything set up ready for new stuff as it comes in.’