by Adam Blake
‘I’m going to want all the staff files,’ she told Thornedyke. ‘Hard copy or digital, whatever’s quicker.’
‘Yes. Very well.’ Thornedyke cast his eye across the files and papers on his desk as though he suspected that what Kennedy was asking for might turn out to be right there in front of him. She wondered what kind of turf wars he’d already fought with Gassan – the professor had been very keen to claim the overview of site security as part of his own brief. ‘I can certainly provide physical copies. Will you need anything else?’
The tone was balanced between hope and trepidation. Clearly, Thornedyke wanted her to say no and go away.
Kennedy had to disappoint him. ‘Yes, Mr Thornedyke. I’ll also want an office to conduct the interviews in. And someone to feed people through to me. I don’t know anyone’s face or where they work.’
‘I can’t allocate you a room,’ Thornedyke said plaintively. ‘Rooms are booked through the front desk. And if you take someone from my staff, I’ll have a hole in the rota.’
‘Well, how about if I take Ben Rush?’ Kennedy said.
‘The probationer?’
‘Yeah. Him. Would that be a hole you can live with?’
Thornedyke thought about it. ‘I suppose so. Yes. So long as it’s just for one day.’
‘Great. He’ll come and collect the files from you as soon as I’m ready.’
The security coordinator still didn’t look all that happy, but Kennedy left before he could raise any more objections.
Professor Gassan, only too eager to be of assistance – and maybe to demonstrate the size of his new empire – gave her the main boardroom to work out of. The space was about as big as a football field, with a conference table so long and wide it had obviously had to be brought up from the street in sections and assembled like a jigsaw. It was a vanity table, designed to make museum executives feel like they were wheeling and dealing in a serious, corporate world. The deep-pile carpet and thick, pleated curtains were identical shades of oatmeal.
Gassan also approved Kennedy’s loan of Rush for the day, and the gangly boy turned up about fifteen minutes later with an armload of manila folders. He dumped them down on the table and mopped his brow, miming exhaustion.
‘Thanks, Rush. Okay, you’re seconded to me for the day. I hope that’s okay. It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting.’
Rush nodded equably. ‘A change is as good as a rest.’
‘Okay, then. I’m going to take an hour or so to go through these files and make notes. After that, I’ll ask you to bring people in, one at a time, and act as chaperone while I interview them. In the meantime, did you get breakfast yet?’
Rush shrugged. ‘Cup of tea. Round of toast.’
‘Most important meal of the day, Rush. Is there anywhere around here that does coffee and bagels?’
Rush nodded. ‘Sam Widge’s, on Gerrard Road.’
‘Lox and cream cheese and double espresso for me. Dealer’s choice for you.’
She gave him a twenty pound note, and he was off.
The personnel files were as bare and banal as she expected them to be, and Kennedy was able to get through them easily inside the hour she’d allowed. The coffee helped. The flaccid bridge roll – ‘no bagels left, sorry’ – not so much.
All of Ryegate House’s staff, both full-time and part-time, had impeccable employment records. None of them had any spent convictions or debt problems, or at least, any that had showed up at the fairly superficial level of investigation that the museum deployed. Most had been here since before the flood, and almost everyone above the entry level had been promoted internally.
On the face of it, a closet with no skeletons.
So Kennedy narrowed her search, looking for repeating patterns. It was standard police procedure with any possibility of conspiracy – or where you wanted to eliminate that possibility – to look for the common ground in which it could have grown: if two or more of the Ryegate House staffers had attended the same school or college, had worked together in another context, or were members of the same club or society, it would have been worth following up. But they didn’t, hadn’t, weren’t. The only thing they had in common was Ryegate House itself.
Kennedy took a different tack, looking for hobbies or work experience that might translate into burglary skills. Not much there: two of the security team were ex-army, but their background – Royal Corps of Transport and Household Guard – didn’t suggest that either had seen much in the way of special ops training.
Finally, without much more sense of direction than she’d had when she started out, she pushed the stack of files across the table at Rush. ‘Shuffle and deal,’ she said. ‘Put them into some sort of order that makes sense to you and then feed them through to me one at a time.’
He seemed nervous with that much responsibility. ‘Is alphabetical okay?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Kennedy, on an impulse. ‘Surprise me.’
The next few hours were gruelling. With no steer from her, Rush sent in the top brass first. The topmost brass – excluding Emil Gassan – was a Valerie Parminter, who bore the title of Assistant Director. She was in her fifties and austerely attractive, with a well-maintained figure and pink-tinted hair that made a virtue of its unnaturalness. To judge from her face, she saw this interview as a huge affront to her dignity.
Parminter’s responses to Kennedy’s questions began as sparse sentences, but quickly degenerated into monosyllables. Her face said: I have to endure this, but I don’t have to hide my contempt for it.
Kennedy went for the jugular without a qualm.
‘So,’ she said, ‘this happened on your watch, so to speak. In the period between the departure of the old director and the arrival of Professor Gassan.’
Parminter stared at her, a cold, indignant stare. ‘I don’t think the timing is relevant to anything,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ Kennedy said.
Those who live by the monosyllable shall die by the monosyllable. Parminter waited for more, and when it wasn’t forthcoming she voided her hurt feelings into the accusing silence. ‘For the record,’ she said acidly, ‘I suggested a full security review nine months ago. Dr Leopold said he’d take that under advisement. Which of course meant he’d sweep it under the carpet and forget it.’
‘You had concerns about the adequacy of the security arrangements,’ Kennedy summarised, scribbling notes as she spoke.
Parminter shifted in her seat. ‘Yes.’
‘But you only raised them on that one occasion. A pity, given the way things turned out.’
‘I was ignored! You can only beat your head against a brick wall so many times.’
Kennedy pursed her lips. ‘And these concerns. You voiced them in an email? A memo?’
‘No.’
‘At a minuted meeting, then.’
‘No.’ Parminter looked exasperated. ‘It was a private conversation.’
‘Which Dr Leopold will corroborate?’
The older woman laughed, astonished, indignant, faux-amused, but with a nervous edge underneath these things. ‘Dr Leopold suffered a massive stroke. He can’t even talk. But I’m not on trial here. Security is the Director’s remit.’
‘Of course,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘Nobody is on trial here. It’s just that I was asked to submit a report on staff awareness and efficiency, in addition to the case-specific inquiry. I want to make sure I do you full justice.’
So start talking.
‘This is absurd,’ Parminter protested.
Kennedy shrugged sympathetically. ‘I know.’
‘We had a spate of attempted break-ins,’ Parminter said. ‘A cluster, all together, around seven months ago.’
‘Attempted?’
‘Yes.’
‘No actual loss or damage?’
‘No. But it made us all aware that in some ways we were falling short of best practice. I’d been on a course the year before where there were talks on how you should go about protecting very small and ver
y valuable items.
‘I pointed out to Dr Leopold that some museums and archives use a double-blind system for storage. When an item has to be brought out of the stacks into any other part of the building, a requisition form has to be filled in first. Assistants use the item code to generate a physical address from the computer and the box is brought up from the stacks, sealed. The curator who requested the box knows what’s in it, but not where it is. The assistant knows where it is, but not what’s in it.’
‘Which has the effect of …’
‘It makes targeted theft impossible. Our system, by contrast, depends on physical barriers and deterrents. Which are fine until somebody figures out a way to bypass them. And when they do, they know exactly where to look. Well, except for the books, of course.’
‘The books?’
‘The legacy collection from the old British Library. That’s what Room 37 is full of, isn’t it?’
Kennedy’s interest quickened, despite the woman’s lecturing delivery. Gassan had said that the British Library and the British Museum used to share the same premises. At the time, she’d wondered where that random factoid had come from. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What makes the books different?’
‘Well, we don’t have an extant catalogue for them,’ Parminter said, as though stating the blindingly obvious. ‘The catalogue and all the access codes went to the new library building on Euston Road. If they wanted to find a specific book, they’d have to give us a physical location – room, rack, position, box number. The only alternative would be to search every box until you found it.’ The older woman smiled. ‘It’s ironic, really.’
‘Is it?’ Kennedy asked. ‘How?’
‘Well, the lack of a physical address means we’ve achieved a level of security for those books that goes beyond anything we’ve got for the other artefacts. And yet the books – at least the ones that were left with us after the move – are the least valuable part of the collection.’
‘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 rol
e 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.