by Adam Blake
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.’
7
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.’
Kennedy nodded. ‘Yeah. That would be stupid.’
She got Rush to show her the two fixed cameras, and with his help she paced out the areas of the room that would be visible to each of them. The negative space, where the cameras couldn’t see, was where she began.
He watched her for a while, opening boxes and peering into them. He was perplexed. ‘Those ones are empty,’ he told her.
‘Yeah,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘And I bet nobody bothered to search them, right?’
‘I don’t know. There wouldn’t be much point, would there?’
‘Depends what you’re looking for.’
Rush waited for more, but Kennedy didn’t have any more to say. If she was wrong, she might as well be wrong off the record. There were hundreds of empty boxes on the endless shelves. The full ones were all the same size, since they all had the same contents: books from the British Library overspill. The empty boxes had just been put wherever there was space to put them, so they came in a variety of sizes to reflect the infinite variety of items in the museum’s collection.
Kennedy was only bothering to open the largest ones, and she struck gold before she’d gotten halfway along aisle D.
She beckoned Rush over and pointed into the open box. He stared down and his eyes widened. The box contained a black sweater and a pair of black leggings. Black boots. A black balaclava designed to cover the entire face. And a large quantity of what looked like ash.
‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed. �
�I don’t get it. Is that what the intruder was wearing?’
‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘It is.’
‘Then why is it still here? We saw him leave the room.’
‘No. We didn’t. We saw him climb up into the ceiling space. But we both know there’s no way out from up there. So whatever we saw, it wasn’t the great escape. It was something else.’ Kennedy was still piecing it all together in her mind, but the fact that she’d gotten this part right gave her confidence to pursue the other, more elusive aspects of the crime. If it even was a crime.
‘The room’s been locked and off-limits ever since the day after the break-in,’ she said – a statement rather than a question.
‘Yeah,’ Rush confirmed. ‘I already told you that.’
‘Clerical assistants did a tally of the contents, but they were watched the whole time. Nobody’s been allowed to come in here alone.’
‘Except the police.’
‘Except the police. Take a note of the box number, would you, Rush? And then close up here. Leave everything exactly as it is.’
‘Right.’
‘And don’t say a word to anyone.’
‘Right.’ He blinked rapidly, gave her a guarded look.
‘I’ll talk to the professor,’ Kennedy said. ‘And to Thornedyke. I’m not asking you to lie to your boss. Just don’t talk to anyone else on the staff here, okay? Word will spread around, our suspect will get to hear about it, and then we’ll be screwed. I think this is our chance to break this case.’
Rush seemed to like the word our, but he had to ask. ‘We’ve got a suspect? As of when?’
‘As of about five minutes ago. I won’t give you a name – not just yet. If you see this person, you’re going to need to behave absolutely normally, so as not to put them on their guard. But I promise you’ll be the first to know after the professor.’
Back in the boardroom, Kennedy picked out the two relevant files and took them down to Gassan’s office. She dropped them onto his desk and stood with arms folded while he read the names.
Gassan looked up at her, with blank amazement on his face. ‘You’re not saying these two had anything to do with the break-in?’
‘Actually, Professor, I’m saying they did it. And I believe I know how they did it. One inside, one outside – probably the only way it could be done. But I need your help for the next part.’
‘Which is?’
‘Figuring out what it was they did.’
Gassan rubbed his forehead, as though he had a slight headache. Clearly the news that the break-in might have been an inside job didn’t thrill him. He looked from one file to the other, then back to the first. ‘I hate to point out the flaw in your reasoning, Heather,’ he said at last, ‘but Mark Silver was already dead when the break-in occurred. You must be mistaken.’
‘Maybe,’ she allowed. ‘Get me the swipe records for that day and we’ll know. Because if I’m right, they’ll both have swiped out at the same time on the night of—’
Kennedy’s phone played a few bars of ersatz jazz – an incoming text, not a call – and she paused while she checked the message. It was from John Partridge and it was good news.
Swansea said yes. Kelvin probe plus operator. One day only. Tomorrow.
She took the files back from Gassan. ‘You don’t have to believe me,’ she said. ‘Just let me run with it. We’ll know a lot more tomorrow. Because tomorrow, we’ll be able to go where they went. See what they looked at, what they touched. Find out what they took, if they took anything.’
Gassan looked at her with a very patrician scepticism, as though she’d just tried to sell him a timeshare. ‘And how will we do that? By magic?’
‘Pretty much,’ Kennedy said.
8
‘Isobel and Heather aren’t here right now, but if you’ve got a message, go ahead and leave it after the beep. We’ll be right back at you.’
Nobody had a message. There was no red light on the phone’s base unit. Kennedy had only pressed the playback key so that she could hear Izzy’s voice. The flat was haunted by her absence – an anti-poltergeist of inimical stillness.
She wandered from the living room into the bedroom, back out into the hall. None of these places felt as though they wanted her.
Ever since she first found out what gypsies were, back when she was about seven, Kennedy had nursed a secret fantasy that involved ditching everything except the clothes she stood up in and going on the road. When she was down, she tended to see rooms as prisons. That feeling came back to her now, stronger than it had ever been.
She took out her phone, looked at it as though expecting it to ring, or else defying it to. It didn’t, but she noticed another text that she hadn’t registered when she read Partridge’s. It was from Ralph Prentice.
Might have something for you on the knife wounds. Just checking it out now. Probably be in touch tomorrow.
She keyed in Izzy’s number, let her thumb hover over the call button for a good long while.
But in the end, she just put it back in her pocket.
The evening was a mausoleum. Kennedy tried – in quick, futile succession – to watch TV, read a book and tidy the flat. Her mind refused to focus down on anything. She ate supper – a defrosted lasagne and two stiff whiskies – then lay on the bed fully clothed, staring up at the plaster ceiling rose. The insane events of the night before sat undigested in her mind. Now that she’d seen it up close, the resemblance between the outfit modelled by the Ryegate House burglar and the one her own attacker had worn was even closer than she’d thought at first. Black is black, but the design of the balaclava was identical to the one she’d held in her hands after the attack on her and Izzy.
She had to face the possibility that someone wanted to halt her investigation – at a time when she barely had one. And wanted it badly enough to kill her. That thought shook loose a very disturbing memory. She’d met some people once who thought nothing of killing for a book. She really, really didn’t want to meet them again.
The heat was oppressive. Kennedy went through into the living room and fixed herself another drink, then sat in front of the open window to feel the breeze. A thick bank of cloud hid the moon, but there were a few stars visible high up near the zenith of the sky. She imagined she was looking down from there – a psychological technique taught her by a crisis counsellor after the incident that had cost her the licence to carry. The exercise was meant to encourage a healthy decentring, putting your own problems in perspective. Kennedy found it useless in that respect, but it did give her a pleasant, mild sense of vertigo.
While she was still sitting there, trying to get lost in inconsequential thoughts as a defence against the scary ones, the end of the cloud bank unrolled with slow theatricality from the face of the moon. In its sudden spotlight, Kennedy saw something move on the roof of the building opposite. It was only for a second. Probably a cat, or nothing at all, a piece of garbage light enough to be lifted on the wind. Except that it was moving against the wind.
As casually as she could manage, Kennedy took another sip of her drink, set the glass aside and ambled away from the window, out of the door of the room into the hallway that ran the length of Izzy’s flat. As soon as she was through the door and out of any possible line of sight from the roof, she sprinted down the hallway, took the stairs three at a time and got to the street door inside of twenty seconds.
Then she slowed and walked out onto the street at a casual pace, her head down, trusting to the darkness to cover her. She strolled away down the street, turned the corner, quickly crossed the road and took an alley that led behind the buildings on the opposite side.
The building directly facing Izzy’s was another residential block. Kennedy was in luck: a teenaged boy and girl walked out of the back door as she approached it, and the girl obligingly held it open for her.
She found the stairs and climbed them, quickly but quietly. At the very top, there was an emergency door that led out onto the roof. Conveniently clos
e to hand, a fire extinguisher sat in a niche on the wall. It was of the black CO type, small enough and solid enough to make a reasonably good weapon. Kennedy snatched it up and slammed the door open.
And found she was facing the wrong way. The door opened towards the rear of the building, not its front. In the echo of the door’s slamming, there were some other sounds – a scrape of stone or gravel, and then a rustling insinuation that died away quickly.
She ran out onto the roof and around the low housing in which the fire door was set. There was nothing else obstructing her view and no sign of anyone or anything that shouldn’t be there.
Still wired, still suspicious, she patrolled the length of the roof, looking across directly at the windows of Izzy’s flat. She could see where she’d been sitting, her empty glass still on the sill, and she tried to work out from that where the movement would have been.
She found it, in the end. The surface of the roof was gravel laid on green mineral felt and a small area of it bore both the scuff of footprints and the indentations of someone sitting or kneeling there for a long time.
Not paranoia. She was being watched.
And it seemed like the watcher must have wings, because there was no other way off the roof that she could see.
9
Partridge was waiting outside Ryegate House’s main entrance when Kennedy arrived the next morning, with the smallest dog-end she had ever seen wedged between his index and forefinger. He had two companions, both standing nervously upwind of Partridge’s cigarette: a shy, slightly fey-looking young man and a serious, bespectacled woman, both in their early twenties and dressed in what looked like their Sunday best. Partridge himself wore a shabby donkey jacket over a plain white T-shirt and dark-blue trousers with more pockets than anyone could actually need. He took Kennedy’s hand and greeted her with old-world civility.
Then he introduced the other two: ‘Kathleen Sturdy and William Price, of the University of Swansea’s School of Engineering.’ They were standing to either side of a solid-looking steel box with rows of handles bolted to its sides and foam-rubber chocks affixed to each corner.