The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Tillman gave it two and a half hours before he went back up to the bedroom. Kartoyev hadn’t moved a muscle, as far as Tillman could see. The man’s face had gone white, his eyes were wide, his lips slightly parted so you could see the clenched teeth within. ‘What was the name?’ he asked, in a low and very distinct tone. ‘Who do you want to know about?’

  Tillman patted his pockets. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I wrote it down somewhere. Let me go check my jacket.’

  As he turned back towards the door, Kartoyev made a horrible, ragged sound – as though he was trying to talk around a caltrop in the middle of his tongue. ‘No,’ he croaked. ‘Tell me!’

  Tillman made a big show of thinking it over, coming to a decision. He crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, placing his weight with exaggerated care. ‘The first time you lie to me,’ he said, ‘I’m giving up on you. You understand me? There are other guys on my list, other people this guy uses, so you’re completely expendable – to me, as well as to him. You lie to me, or you even hesitate in telling me everything you know, and I’m gone. In which case, it’s going to be a very long day for you.’

  Kartoyev lowered his chin to his chest, then brought it up again, a slow-mo nod of acquiescence.

  ‘Michael Brand,’ Tillman said.

  ‘Brand?’ Kartoyev’s tone was pained, uncomprehending. Clearly he’d been expecting a different name. ‘Brand … isn’t anybody.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was important. I just said I want to know about him. So what have you got, Yanush? What does he come to you for? Weapons? Drugs? Women?’

  The Russian drew a ragged breath. ‘Women, no. Never. Weapons, yes. Drugs … yes. Or at least, things that can be used to make drugs.’

  ‘What sort of volume are we talking about?’ Tillman was careful to keep his voice level, not to let the urgency show, because the strength had to be all on his side. Any chink in his armour might make the Russian baulk.

  ‘For the weapons,’ Kartoyev muttered. ‘Not so very many. Not enough for an army, but enough – if you were a terrorist – to finance a medium-sized jihad. Guns: hundreds, rather than thousands. Ammunition. Grenades, one or two. But not explosives. He doesn’t seem to care much for bombs.’

  ‘And the drugs?’

  ‘Pure ephedrine. Anhydrous ammonia. Lithium.’

  Tillman frowned. ‘So he’s brewing meth?’

  ‘I sell meth.’ Kartoyev sounded indignant. ‘I said to him once, if that’s what you want, Mr Brand, why take away these bulky and inconvenient raw materials? For a small surcharge, I’ll give you crystal or powder in any amount you like.’

  ‘And he said?’

  ‘He told me to fill his order. He said he had no need of anything else I could offer him.’

  ‘But the amounts?’ Tillman pursued. ‘Enough to sell, commercially?’

  Kartoyev began to shake his head, winced. He’d been holding to a position of paralysed rigidity for several hours, and his muscles were agonisingly locked. ‘Not really,’ he grunted. ‘Recently, though – this last batch – much, much more than usual. A thousand times more.’

  ‘And it’s always Brand who collects and pays?’

  Again, the look. Why is he asking this? ‘Yes. Always … the man uses that name. Brand.’

  ‘Who does he represent?’

  ‘I have no idea. I saw no reason to ask.’

  Tillman scowled. He stood up suddenly, rocking the bed a little and making Kartoyev cry out – a choked, premonitory wail of anguish. But there was no explosion. ‘Bullshit,’ Tillman said, leaning over his captive. ‘A man like you doesn’t fly blind. Not even on small transactions. You’d find out everything you could about Brand. I already warned you about lying, you brain-dead scumbag. I think you just used up the last of my goodwill.’

  ‘No!’ Kartoyev was desperately earnest. ‘Of course, I tried. But I found nothing. There was no trail that led to him, or from him.’

  Tillman considered, keeping his face impassive. As far as it went, that matched his own experience. ‘So how do you contact him?’

  ‘I don’t. Brand tells me what he needs, then he appears. Payment is in cash. He arranges his own transport. Cars, usually. Once, a truck. Always these are hired, under assumed names. When they’re returned, they’ve been scrubbed clean.’

  ‘How does Brand contact you?’

  ‘By telephone. Cellphones, always. Disposables, always. He identifies himself by a word.’

  Tillman caught on this detail. It seemed unlikely: amateurish and unnecessary. ‘He doesn’t trust you to recognise his voice?’

  ‘For whatever reason. He identifies himself by a word. Diatheke.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Kartoyev shook his head slowly, with great care, once only. ‘I don’t know what it means to him. To me it means Brand. That’s all.’

  Tillman looked at his watch. He felt almost certain that the Russian had nothing more to tell, but time was against him. It was probably time to start packing up. But Kartoyev was the best lead he’d had in three years and it was hard to walk away without squeezing the last drop out of him.

  ‘I still don’t believe you’d let it go that easily,’ Tillman said, staring down at the rigid, sweating man. ‘That you’d do business with him, year in and year out, without trying to figure out what he’s about.’

  Kartoyev sighed. ‘I told you. I tried. Brand comes in on different routes, from different airports, and leaves, likewise, in different directions: sometimes by air, sometimes driving. He pays in a number of currencies – dollars, euros, sometimes even roubles. His needs are … eclectic. Not just the things you mentioned, but also, sometimes, legal technology illegally acquired. Generators. Medical equipment. Once, a surveillance truck, new, designed for the SVR – for Russian intelligence. Brand is a middle man, obviously. He fronts for many different interests. He acquires what is needed, for whoever is prepared to pay.’

  A tremor went through Tillman, which he couldn’t suppress or keep from the Russian. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘That’s what he does. But you say you’ve never sold him people.’

  ‘No.’ Kartoyev’s voice was tight. He could read the emotion in Tillman’s face and he was obviously concerned about what that loss of control might mean. ‘Not people. Not for work or for sex. Perhaps he sources those things elsewhere.’

  ‘Those things?’

  ‘Those commodities.’

  Tillman shook his head. He was wearing a hangman’s dead-pan now. ‘Not much better.’

  ‘I’m a businessman,’ Kartoyev muttered, tightly, sardonic even in extremity. ‘You’ll have to forgive me.’

  ‘No,’ Tillman said. ‘There’s nothing that says I have to do that.’ He leaned down and reached underneath Kartoyev’s body. The Russian yelled again, in despair and rage, stiffening in a whole-body rictus as he braced for the blast.

  Tillman pulled the squat, plastic box out from under him, letting the Russian see the blank, inert digital display and the words – ALARM, TIME, SET, ON-OFF – printed in white on the black fascia. A foot of electric cable and a Continental-style plug dangled from the device, on which the maker’s name, Philip’s, was also prominently emblazoned. The alarm clock was of eighties vintage. Tillman had bought it under Zyazikov Bridge, from a Turk who had his meagre wares spread out on the plinth of the President’s statue.

  Kartoyev’s incredulous laugh sounded like a sob. ‘Son of a whore!’ he grunted.

  ‘Where did Brand go this time?’ Tillman asked, slipping the question in fast and brisk. ‘When he left you?’

  ‘England,’ Kartoyev said. ‘He went to London.’

  Tillman took the Unica from his belt, thumbed the safety in the same movement and shot Kartoyev in the left temple, angling the shot to the right. The mattress caught the bullet, and some of the sound, but Tillman wasn’t worried about the sound: the windows of the house had been triple-glazed and the walls were solid.

  He packed his things quickly and methodically – the
clock, the gun, the xeroxed sheet and the rest of the money from the safe. He’d already wiped the room for prints, but he did so again. Then he gave the dead man on the bed a valedictory nod, went downstairs and let himself out.

  London. He thought about that dead ground in his mind, in his soul. He’d been away for a long time, and that hadn’t been an accident. But maybe there was a God after all, and his providence had a symmetrical shape.

  The shape of a circle.

  4

  Stuart Barlow’s study had already been examined by the first case officer, but there were no evidence notes in the file and nothing had been taken. Searching it was going to be a daunting proposition: every surface was stacked with books and papers. The strata of folders and print-outs on the desk had spread out to colonise large areas of the floor on both sides, which at least had the effect of hiding some of the goose-turd-green carpet tiles. Prints of Hellenic statues and Egyptian karyatids, rippled inside their glass frames by seasons of damp English weather and bad central heating, stared down at the shambles with stern, unforgiving faces.

  The small, cluttered space was claustrophobic, and indefinably sad. Kennedy wondered whether Barlow would have been ashamed to have his private chaos exposed to public scrutiny in this way, or if the heaped ramparts of notebooks and print-outs were a professional badge of pride.

  ‘Mr Barlow was in the history faculty,’ she remarked, turning to the bursar. Ellis had returned as promised to let them in, and now stood by with the key still in his hand, as if he expected the detectives to admit defeat when they saw the intractable mess of the dead man’s effects. ‘What did that entail? Did he have a full teaching schedule?’

  ‘Point eight,’ Ellis said, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Five hours remission for administrative duties.’

  ‘Which were?’

  ‘He was second in department. And he ran Further Input – our gifted and talented programme.’

  ‘Was he good at his job?’ Kennedy demanded, bluntly.

  Ellis blinked. ‘Very good. All our staff are good, but … well. Yes. Stuart was passionate about his subject. It was his hobby as well as his profession. He’d appeared on TV three or four times, on history and archaeology programmes. And his revision website was very popular with the students.’ A pause. ‘We’ll all miss him very much.’ Kennedy mentally translated that as: he put arses on seats.

  Harper had picked up a book, Russia Against Napoleon, by Dominic Lieven. ‘Was this his specialism?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ Again, Ellis was categorical. ‘His specialism was palaeography – the earliest written texts. It didn’t come into his teaching very much, because it’s a tiny part of our undergraduate syllabus, but he wrote a lot on the subject.’

  ‘Books?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘Articles. Mostly focused on close textual analysis of the Dead Sea and Rylands finds. But he was working on a book – about the Gnostic sects, I think.’

  Kennedy had no idea what the Gnostic sects were, but she let it pass. She wasn’t seriously considering the possibility that Professor Barlow had been murdered by an academic rival.

  ‘Do you know anything about his private life?’ she asked instead. ‘We know he wasn’t married, but was he involved with anyone?’

  The bursar seemed surprised by the question, as though celibacy was a necessary side effect of the scholarly life. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It’s possible, obviously, but he didn’t mention anybody. And when he came to departmental functions, he never had anybody with him.’

  That seemed to let out wronged husbands or jealous ex-lovers. The odds on finding a suspect were getting longer. But Kennedy had never had high hopes. In her experience, most of the work that solved a case was done in the first couple of hours. You didn’t return to a case that was three weeks cold and expect to jump the gap in one amazing bound.

  All this time, Harper had been skirmishing around in the books and papers – a token effort, but maybe he felt that having missed the mark with Napoleon, he had nothing to lose by bobbing for insights a second time. This time he held up what looked like a picture, but turned out to be a news clipping, pasted neatly on to card and then framed. It had been leaning against one of the legs of the desk. The headline read, ‘Nag Hammadi Fraud: Two Arrested’. The man in the accompanying photo was recognisable as a much younger Stuart Barlow. His face wore an awkward, frosty smile.

  ‘Your man had a criminal record?’ Harper demanded.

  Ellis actually laughed. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘not at all. That was his triumph – about fifteen years ago, now, perhaps longer. Stuart was called in as an expert witness in that case because his knowledge of the Nag Hammadi library was so extensive.’

  ‘What was the case?’ Kennedy asked. ‘And while we’re on the subject, what’s Nag Hammadi?’

  ‘Nag Hammadi was the most important palaeographical find of the twentieth century, inspector,’ Ellis told her. She didn’t bother to correct him on her rank, though out of the corner of her eye she saw Harper roll his eyes expressively. ‘In Upper Egypt, just after the end of the Second World War, near the town of Nag Hammadi, two brothers went digging in a limestone cave. They were only interested in finding guano – bat excrement – to use as fertiliser for their fields. What they found, though, was a sealed jar containing a dozen bound codices.’

  ‘Bound what?’ Harper asked.

  ‘Codices. A codex is a number of pages sewn or fastened together. The first books, essentially. They began to be used in the early Christian era, where up to that time, the norm would have been to write on scrolls or single sheets of parchment. The codices in the Nag Hammadi find turned out to be texts from around the first and second century AD: gospels, letters, that sort of thing. Even a heavily rewritten translation of Plato’s Republic. An incredible treasure trove from a period just after Christ’s death, when the Christian church was still struggling to define its identity.’

  ‘How did that become a court case?’ Harper asked, cutting off the lecture just as the bursar took a deep breath for what looked like another, bigger info drop. Deflected, he looked both indignant and slightly at a loss.

  ‘The court case came much later. It concerned forged copies of Nag Hammadi documents, which were being sold online to dealers in antiquities. Stuart appeared as a witness for the prosecution. I think he was there mainly to give an opinion on the physical differences between the original documents and the forgeries. He knew every crease and ink stain on those pages.’

  Harper put the article down and rummaged some more. Ellis’s face took on a pained expression. ‘Detective, if you’re planning to conduct an extensive search, can I please get on with my duties and come back later?’

  Harper looked a question at Kennedy, who was still thinking about the court case. ‘What was the verdict?’ she asked the bursar.

  ‘Equivocal,’ Ellis said, a little sullenly. ‘The dealers – a husband and wife, I think – were found guilty of handling the fraudulent items, and of some technical infringements relating to proper documentation, but innocent on the forgery charge, which was the main one. They had to pay a fine and some of the court’s costs.’

  ‘As a result of Professor Barlow’s testimony?’

  Ellis made an ‘oh!’ face, finally seeing where she was going. ‘Stuart wasn’t that big a part of the case,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘To be honest, everybody thought it was funny that he set so much store by it. I think most of the relevant evidence came from the people who’d bought the forged documents. And as I said, it only resulted in a fine. I don’t really think …’

  Kennedy didn’t either, but she filed the point away for later. It would be worth following up if they drew a blank on everything else. Not that everything else amounted to very much, so far. ‘Why hasn’t Professor Barlow’s sister collected all this?’ she asked. ‘She’s the only surviving relative, isn’t she?’

  ‘Rosalind. Rosalind Barlow. She’s in our files as next of kin,’ Ellis agreed. ‘And we’ve corr
esponded with her. She said she wasn’t interested in any of Stuart’s things. Her exact words: “Take what you want for the college library and give the rest to charity.” That’s probably what we’ll do, eventually, but it will take some time to sort through it all.’

  ‘A lot of time,’ Harper agreed, adding after a beat, ‘All good here, Inspector?’

  She shot him a warning look, but his expression was as bland as runny custard. ‘All good,’ she said, ‘Detective Constable. Let’s go.’

  She was heading for the door as she spoke, but she hesitated. Something had registered on her inner eye, without her realising it, and was now clamouring to be admitted to her conscious attention. Kennedy knew better than to ignore that fish-hook tug. She slowed to a halt and looked around once more.

  She almost had it, when Ellis jangled his keys and broke the slender thread by which she was pulling the thought up into the daylight. She shot him a glare, which made him falter slightly.

  ‘There are other things I need to do,’ he said, with no conviction at all.

  Kennedy breathed out deeply. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Ellis,’ she said. ‘We may have to ask you some further questions later, but we won’t need to take up any more of your time today.’

  They headed back to the car, Kennedy turning over in her mind the little they knew about this already badly mangled case. She needed to talk to the dead man’s sister. That was priority number one. Maybe Barlow really did have a nemesis in the palaeographical arena; or a student he’d gotten pregnant, or a younger brother he’d stiffed in some way that might have left a festering grudge. You were about ten times more likely to catch a killer by having his name given to you directly than you ever were by climbing a ladder of clues. And they didn’t have a ladder as yet. They didn’t even have a rung.

  Yes, they did. The stalker, the guy who Barlow had said was following him. That was the other way into this. Harper was going to hate her, because she was determined to talk to the sister herself, so most of the grunt work in all of this would fall on him.