by Adam Blake
Izzy had followed her into the room. ‘Is something the matter?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you meant to be at Shithouse Brigadoon this morning?’
‘It’s Sandhurst Ballantyne.’
‘Yeah. Them.’
‘I was.’ Kennedy turned to face her, bottle in hand.
‘And you gave in your report?’
‘I tried to.’
Izzy cocked her head on one side and looked comically puzzled, which in another mood Kennedy would have found appealing. Right now it just irritated her.
‘The client refused to be briefed. He told me not to submit the report. He offered to pay me a performance bonus if I binned it and gave his ratty little department a clean bill of health.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Izzy said.
Kennedy shoved the whisky bottle back into the cabinet, then got it out again and poured herself a shot after all. ‘Plausible deniability,’ she muttered, as she did these things. ‘The report says there’s at least one and probably two people in the firm doing insider trading in client shares. If Kenwood knows about it, he’s got to do something about it. And since one of the two crooks – the definite one, not the probable one – is his boss, he decided he’d rather not know.’
‘Then why hire you in the first place?’ Izzy demanded. ‘That’s stupid.’
Kennedy nodded, and took a swig of the harsh, blended whisky. She grimaced. Izzy’s taste in booze was reliably horrendous. But she went ahead and drained the glass anyway. ‘Compliance is part of his job. He had to look like he was doing something – but he was hoping I’d come back empty. Then when I didn’t …’
She lapsed into silence.
‘So did you take it?’ Izzy asked.
‘Did I take what?’
‘The performance bonus?’
Kennedy sighed and put down the empty glass. ‘No, Izzy, I didn’t take it. He was getting himself off the hook by sticking me onto it. If I take the bribe, and then a year or so from now there’s an internal inquiry or an FSA investigation, he can say I withheld information. Then he’s in the clear and the fraud department comes after me.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ Izzy’s expression changed. ‘So?’
Kennedy showed her knuckles, covered in her own congealed blood. Izzy took the hand and kissed it. ‘Good for you, babe,’ she said. ‘Unless he sues. Is he going to sue?’
‘I don’t think so. Whenever I’m in a one-to-one, I make voice-tapes. So I’ve got him making that indecent proposal on the record. And I’m sending the report in anyway, to him and his boss and the CEO. Unfortunately, he still owed me half my fee. And when I left, he wasn’t reaching for his cheque book.’
‘Any other clients in the pipeline?’
‘The pipeline is dry all the way to the Caucasus, Izzy. This was meant to get me a lot of referrals to other city companies with security needs they couldn’t meet in-house. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen now.’
Izzy seemed perversely cheered by the bad news. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘so you can be a kept woman for a while. Live off my immoral earnings.’
She was joking, but Kennedy couldn’t laugh, didn’t feel able to cut Izzy the smallest amount of slack. ‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘that sounds like one of the lower circles of hell.’
She realised at this point that what she’d come home for was an argument – a stand-up row about fidelity and responsibility that would probably feel really cathartic for the first five minutes and then after that would feel like she was force-feeding both herself and the woman she was supposed to love handfuls of broken glass. She had to get out of there. Nowhere to go, really, but she had to get out.
‘I’m going downstairs,’ she muttered. ‘To box up some more of my dad’s stuff. If I hang around here, I’ll just put you off your stride.’
‘Or inspire me,’ Izzy said, but Kennedy was already heading for the door. ‘Heather …’
‘I’m good.’
‘I don’t have to clock on just yet. We could …’
‘I said I’m good.’
She was aware of another sound that Izzy made. A sigh maybe, or just a catch in her breath. She didn’t look back.
Downstairs, in her own flat, she threw random objects into boxes, opened wardrobe doors and slammed them shut again, walked from room to room in a futile pantomime of bustle and purpose.
Moving in with Izzy had seemed like the logical thing to do, after Kennedy’s father died. In the last year or so of his life, Izzy had been Peter Kennedy’s de facto nurse, or maybe babysitter, or maybe both. That was what had brought them together. Kennedy was a rising star in the detective division of the Met: her hours were long and unpredictable, and she needed someone close at hand who could come in and pinch-hit at a moment’s notice. Izzy was perfect, because although she already had a job, it was on a phone-sex line. Acting as a cheerleader for other people’s masturbation was light work you could do from pretty much anywhere. All the equipment she needed was a mobile phone and a dirty mind, and she had both.
The process by which they became lovers was anything but inevitable. It had started around the time Kennedy was kicked out of the Met on her ear, which meant she was around the flat a lot more when Izzy was there. The relationship had developed through the months that followed and it had seemed natural when Peter finally died for Kennedy to move in with Izzy. The flat she’d shared with her father felt like an exhibit in a museum, its associations permanently fixed. Moving out – even though she was only moving upstairs – felt like escaping from at least some of those associations.
But escape depended on a lot of things, and it had its own rules. One of them was that you can’t escape from stuff you’re still carrying with you. Exploitative and degrading though Izzy’s work was, she had never thought about quitting. She liked sex a lot, and when she wasn’t having it she liked to talk about it.
And, as it turned out, she liked having it even when Kennedy wasn’t around.
Their life together was now stalled: a perpetual tableau of the adulterers discovered, with Izzy scrambling to cover herself up, a sheepish young man trying to figure out what was going on, and Kennedy standing in the doorway, wide-eyed and reeling.
Izzy had never promised to be faithful, and in any case, she drew an absolute distinction between women and men. Women were lovers, partners, soul-mates. Men were an itch that she occasionally scratched. Kennedy had never thought that extorting promises was either necessary or desirable. In the patchy history of her sex life, one was the highest number of lovers she’d ever had on the boil at the same time, and it had generally felt like enough.
She ought to forgive Izzy. Or she ought to walk out with some cutting remark along the lines of ‘check out what you’re missing, babe’. She couldn’t do either. The passive aggression of guilt, reproach and sullen withdrawal was the horrendous unexcluded middle.
Kennedy’s phone rang. She glanced at the display, saw it was Emil Gassan again. She gave in and took the call, but only to tell him that this was a bad time.
Gassan got in first. ‘Heather, I’ve been playing phone tag with you all day. I’m so glad I finally caught up with you.’
She tried to head him off. ‘Professor—’
‘Emil,’ he countered. She ignored him. She didn’t want to be on first-name terms with Gassan: on some level, it felt wrong that the dry, spiky academic should even have a first name. ‘Professor, I really can’t talk right now. I’m in the middle of something.’
‘Oh.’
Gassan sounded more than usually cast down and Kennedy experienced a momentary compunction. She knew why he was calling and what it meant to him. It was all about that old case. The biggest find of his scholarly career was something that he could never discuss, on pain of death, except with her. Every so often, he had to vent. He had to tell her things that they both already knew and she had to listen – as a personal service. It gave her some sense of what Izzy must go through in the course of a working day.
‘It’s just …
you know … pressure of work,’ she temporised. ‘I’ll call you later in the week.’
‘So your slate is full?’ Gassan said. ‘You wouldn’t be free to accept a commission?’
‘To accept … ?’ Kennedy was baffled, and – in spite of her sour mood – amused. ‘What, you need a detective, Emil? You want me to track down a missing library book or something?’
‘Yes. More or less. If you’d been free, I was going to ask you to take on some work – very sensitive and very well paid – for my current employer.’
Kennedy hesitated. It felt hypocritical and ridiculous to make such a rapid and shameless turn-around: but she really needed the money. Even more, she needed to have something that would keep her out of the flat until she could figure out what she wanted to do about Izzy.
‘So who’s your current employer, Professor?’
He told her and her eyebrows rose. It was definitely a step up from city sleaze.
‘I’ll come right over,’ Kennedy said.
2
The Great Court of the British Museum was like a whispering gallery, magnifying sound from all around Kennedy so that she felt surrounded by and cocooned in other people’s conversations. At the same time, sounds from close by seemed to come to her muffled and distorted: perfectly dysfunctional acoustics.
Or maybe she just hated the Great Court because when she’d come here with her father, as a young girl, it had been an actual courtyard, open to the air. She remembered clutching tightly onto his hand as he took her across the sunlit piazza into the cathedral of the past – a place where he’d been animated, happy and at home, and where just for once there was something he actually wanted to share with her.
Now the Great Court had a roof of diamond panes, radiating outwards from what had once been the reading room. The light inside this huge but sealed-off space was grey, like a winter afternoon with a threat of drizzle. It was an impressive feat of engineering, but she couldn’t help thinking there was something perverse about it. Why hide the sky and then fake it?
Kennedy took a seat at one of the court’s three coffee bars and started counting diamonds while she waited for Gassan. Knowing her man, she’d dressed formally in a light-blue trouser suit and grey boots, and pinned her unruly blonde hair back as severely as she could manage. Formality and order were big on Emil Gassan’s list of cardinal virtues.
She saw him from a long way away, bustling across the huge space with the purposeful dignity of a head waiter. He was dressed a lot better than a waiter, though: his blue three-piece suit, with the unmistakable zigzag stitching of Enzo Tovare on the breast pocket, looked new and unashamedly expensive. Gassan thrust his hand out before he reached her, then kept it out so that it preceded him into the conversation.
‘Heather, so good of you to come. I’m delighted to see you again.’
He really looked like he meant it, and she was disarmed by his beaming smile. She offered her own hand, had it grasped and engulfed and effusively wrung. ‘Professor,’ she said, and then, surrendering the point, ‘Emil. It’s been a long time. I had no idea you were working in London.’
He threw out his arms in a search me gesture. ‘Neither did I. Until last week, I wasn’t. I was still up in St Andrews – lecturing in early medieval history. But I was head-hunted.’
‘In the space of a week?’ Kennedy was as incredulous as he seemed to want her to be.
‘In the space of a day. The museum board called and asked if I’d like to be in charge of the stored collection. Well, they didn’t call me directly. It was Marilyn Milton from the Validus Trust, an independent body which has been sponsoring my research for the last two years. Validus is also a major sponsor for the British Museum and British Library. You know they used to be the same institution, until the library was moved in 1997?’
Kennedy shrugged non-committally. She wasn’t sure if she’d known that or not, but in any case she didn’t want to slow Gassan down by inviting further explanation.
‘Anyway,’ he told her, ‘a position opened up – under somewhat tragic circumstances, I’m sorry to say. The previous incumbent, Karyl Leopold, had a serious stroke. And Marilyn contacted me to suggest that I apply – with a promise that she would let the appointments committee know I was Validus’s approved candidate.
‘I was going to say no. Leaving in the middle of a term, you understand – causes all kinds of disruptions. But in the end, the museum board were so keen to get me that they cut a separate deal with the university. Hired a lecturer to replace me until … no, no, don’t get up.’ Kennedy had stood, indicating a willingness to go and get them both coffees and thereby stop the logorrhoeic flow. But Gassan would have none of it. He scooted off to the counter and when he returned, the tray he held had two slices of carrot cake on it, as well as coffees. Obviously he was seeing this as something of a celebration, and she was going to have to let him talk himself out before she got to be told why she was here.
‘So,’ she said. ‘You’re in charge of … what was it again?’
‘The stored collection.’
‘And what is that, Emil?’
‘Everything,’ Gassan said happily. ‘Well, almost everything. Everything that’s not on the shelves. As you can imagine, the museum collection is absolutely vast. The part of it that’s available for the public to see represents approximately one per cent of the total.’
Kennedy boggled politely. ‘One per cent!’
‘Count it,’ he suggested playfully, holding up a bony finger. ‘One. The rest of the collection spreads across more than twenty thousand square metres of storerooms, and it costs the Museum twelve million pounds a year to maintain and manage it.’
Kennedy took a sip of her coffee, but ignored the treacherous blandishments of the cake. Back when she was on the force, the stresses and physical rigours of the job had kept her slim no matter what she ate or drank. In the last few years, she’d had to learn abstinence. ‘You must be very proud,’ she said to Gassan. ‘That they went to such lengths to get you.’
The professor went through a miniature pantomime of faux-modest shrugs and eye-rolls. ‘It feels like a culmination, in a lot of ways,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve always felt that lecturing was a dilution of my contribution to the field. Now … I’ll be allowed, even encouraged, to publish, but I’ll have no public duties at all.’
Kennedy considered that, and was reminded of what she’d said to Izzy about the circles of hell: the idea of spending her life in a subterranean vault, with no reason for stepping outside it, made Izzy’s endless smut treadmill seem like the earthly paradise.
‘So,’ Kennedy said, cutting to the chase at last. ‘Where do I fit in?’
Gassan had just taken a mouthful of cake, producing the short silence into which she had projected her question. Now he struggled to get it down so he could answer. ‘There was a break-in,’ he said at last, fastidiously wiping his lower lip with the corner of his serviette. ‘A month ago. The night of Monday the twenty-fourth of July.’
‘In the stacks?’ Kennedy asked. ‘The storerooms, rather than the museum proper?’
He nodded emphatically. ‘In the stored collection, yes – which is now my responsibility. Whoever it was, they were very skilled. They were able to get in and out again without triggering a single alarm.’
‘Then how did you know they’d been there? Wait, let me guess. From the gaps on the shelves.’
‘Not at all,’ Gassan assured her. ‘In fact, as far as we can tell, nothing is missing. No, we found out about this several hours after the fact – and in a rather alarming way. The intruder left behind a knife. One of the security guards found it, the next morning, just lying on the floor. And it appeared to have been used. At least, there was blood on the blade. After that, they did a more thorough search for evidence and it transpired that a CCTV camera had caught the intruder climbing up through one of the panels of a false ceiling as he left.’
‘Wait,’ Kennedy said. ‘So let me get this straight. You’ve got a brea
k-in with nothing actually stolen and a bloody knife with nobody actually hurt?’
‘Well, we assume that somebody must have been hurt. But it’s true that there was no dead body at the scene – God forbid – and we have no way of knowing who was injured, or how. It’s deeply troubling. And we’ve had a terrible time trying to keep the story out of the news. Something like this would generate the most sensationalistic coverage.’
‘Yeah, I’d imagine,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But you say you’ve got some closed-circuit footage of your burglar?’
‘Yes, but he’s masked, and it’s hard to tell anything about him beyond the fact that he’s male – and empty-handed. If you look at the image closely, he seems to be carrying a small satchel, but it couldn’t have held more than a few items. And a quick stocktaking exercise showed nothing out of place. Although there are three and a quarter million artefacts in the collection, so it’s entirely possible that we’ve missed something.’
Kennedy thought about this for a moment or two. A skilled burglar getting past a serious array of locks and alarms, to break into a collection presumably full of items both highly valuable and highly portable. But he didn’t bother to bring a decent-sized shopping bag with him, and he didn’t swipe anything prominent enough to be noticed. That meant iron self-control or a very specific mission statement. And then there was the knife. Was it a message of some kind? A threat? A bad practical joke? Whatever internal organ governs the detective instinct was making its presence felt. She had only come here as a favour to the professor, and for the money. Already, she had to admit, she was genuinely interested.
‘What’s my brief?’ she asked Gassan.
The professor held up one hand, with the little finger folded down – then used the forefinger of the other hand to count off. ‘It’s three-fold,’ he said. ‘It will be three-fold, if you accept. First, we want to know how the break-in was accomplished, so we can close the security loophole.’