The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘Stu had already done that, when he realised he was being followed.’

  ‘At the conference.’

  ‘Yes. Then.’

  ‘But if he was actually threatened …’ Kennedy was tentative. She could see that the other woman disliked being interrogated, was likely to see any question as a challenge unless it was phrased as neutrally as possible. ‘Did he explain all this at the time?’ she asked. ‘I mean, when he called the police and told them that he was being followed?’ Or was there something more? Something he kept to himself? I’m asking because I’ve read the case file now and there was no mention of any actual threats.’

  Ros shook her head, frowning. ‘I said he felt threatened, not that he’d actually been threatened. He told the police everything he could tell them, everything that was verifiable. The rest was … impressions, I suppose. But I know that he was afraid. Not generally afraid. Afraid of something specific. Sergeant Kennedy, my brother wasn’t a level-headed sort of man. When we were kids, he was always the one who’d have the sudden enthusiasms – the collecting crazes, the addictions to comics or cult TV shows, all that sort of thing. And emotionally, too, he was always … just all over the place. So I had every reason to think he was exaggerating, making something out of nothing. But that’s not how it was. This time was different.’

  ‘How was it different?’

  ‘Someone broke in here, late at night, and went through all of Stuart’s things. That wasn’t imaginary.’

  Kennedy’s response was automatic. ‘Did you report it?’ Meaning, is there an evidence trail? Is this documented anywhere?

  ‘Of course we reported it. We couldn’t claim on the insurance otherwise.’

  ‘So things were stolen?’

  ‘No. Nothing, as far as we could see. But we needed new locks and the back door had to be repaired. That’s how he got in, whoever he was.’

  ‘Was this before or after Professor Barlow noticed he was being followed?’

  ‘After. And that was when I started to take the whole thing seriously. But you evidently didn’t.’

  Because nobody put the case-work together, Kennedy thought, even after Barlow turned up dead. Barlow’s reporting a stalker had only come to light after the autopsy results came in – and any file entries for this breaking and entering were probably still lost in the system. It was farcical. The central criminal register wasn’t exactly new, or complicated. It was supposed to operate automatically now, cross-referencing old cases as new ones were entered on the division’s database. So long as you filled in your fields correctly in the first place, the old stuff just got flagged up for you without you having to do anything.

  But not this time.

  ‘We do seem to have been slow out of the gate,’ Kennedy admitted, trying to forestall Ros Barlow’s hostility by throwing her a bone of contrition. ‘But if you’re right, why didn’t the assailant attack your brother here, after getting entry to the house? Was he surprised in the act or something? Did you hear him come in?’

  Ros shook her head. ‘No, we didn’t,’ she said. ‘We only found out someone had broken in when we came down in the morning.’

  So assuming there was any through-line at all here, the motive had to go beyond just killing Barlow. He could have been murdered as easily here as at the college; more easily, if he’d been surprised in his sleep.

  Kennedy thought again about the spectacular mess in Barlow’s office. Maybe that wasn’t the normal state of things: someone could have broken in there, too. She looked at the slanted column of sunlight coming in through the parted curtains, the dust motes suspended in the still air. The word murdered seemed a bit unreal in this room – and the scenario she’d imagined, of Barlow’s corpse being dragged up the stairs at the history annexe to be thrown down again, ridiculous and melodramatic. But unlike Stuart Barlow, she wasn’t acting on feelings. She was responding to the evidence, and the evidence was pointing towards something complicated and nasty. A murder preceded by a completely separate break-in meant a plan or a motive that went beyond just wanting someone dead.

  ‘Did you discuss with your brother what this intruder might have been looking for?’ she asked. ‘If Professor Barlow was afraid, was it because he had something specific in his possession? Something valuable that he thought people might come looking for?’

  Ros hesitated this time, but finally shook her head again – an admission of ignorance. ‘It’s possible, but Stu almost never discussed his work with me because he knew it bored my arse off. He’d been talking to the Ravellers a lot lately. So he was working on something old. But mostly they work from photos or transcriptions, not from originals. There’d be no reason why he’d have valuable artefacts in the house.’

  ‘The Revellers?’ Kennedy echoed.

  ‘Not Revellers. Ravellers. It’s an internet community, for palaeographers – people who work with old manuscripts and incunabula.’

  ‘Professional academics, then, like your brother?’

  ‘And hobbyists. A lot of them do it for fun.’

  ‘How would I get in touch with them?’

  Ros shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know. I only use computers for spreadsheets and email. They’re … a forum? A website? I don’t even know. You’d have to ask one of Stu’s colleagues. But I think they’re definitely where you should start. I can’t think of anything else in Stuart’s life that could possibly have motivated anyone to follow him, or attack him.’

  Kennedy remembered something that Ellis had said. ‘He was writing a book. Could there have been anything sensational or controversial in that? A new theory or a refutation of an old one? Something that might have harmed someone else’s reputation?’

  Ros looked suddenly bleak. She didn’t answer for a moment and had a tremor in her voice when she did. ‘Stu had been working on that bloody book for the last ten years. He used to say he’d probably be writing the acknowledgements on his deathbed.’ She paused and then added, in a colder, flatter tone, ‘It didn’t help that he couldn’t make up his mind what his bloody subject was.

  ‘For a good five years, it was going to be about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Stu was convinced there were still big things to find in there, even though everybody in the field had been all over them for the last sixty-odd years. Do you know how many books there’ve been on the scrolls already? Hundreds. Literally, hundreds. When I asked Stu why anyone would want to read his, he’d get all mysterious and quote some lines from William Blake.’

  ‘What lines?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘Umm … something about “we both read the Bible, day and night. But you read black and I read white”. Stu thought it was terribly clever, whatever it was. But then he lost interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls altogether. He went into his Gnostic period. All the weird early Christian cults – Arians and Nestorians and the other assorted happy clappers. Then it was about Bishop Irenaeus. And then finally it was about the Rotgut. I think the last time we talked about it, that was where it was at. The Rotgut. It was going to be a complete re-evaluation of the Rotgut.’

  Kennedy made a ‘go on’ gesture, which saved her from having to admit verbally that she had no idea what the other woman was talking about. She assumed it wasn’t illicit alcohol.

  ‘The Rotgut Codex,’ Ros explained. ‘It’s a medieval translation of a lost version of John’s gospel. About as obscure as you can get, unless you want to research something like punctuation marks. I don’t think anyone’s reputation was tied up in Stu’s book. Not even Stu’s. Some universities require you to publish to stay on-staff. Stu had tenure, so he was taking his own sweet time.’

  Kennedy asked a few more questions, mostly about Barlow’s colleagues at Prince Regent and the friends he’d made online. Ros was vague about both. She clearly hadn’t been very much involved either in her brother’s public life or in his private enthusiasms.

  As she was seeing Kennedy to the door, though, something occurred to her. ‘Michael Brand,’ she said, as though in answer to a question Ken
nedy had already asked.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘One of the Ravellers. He’s the only one Stu ever mentioned to me by name. You might not even have to go too far, if you wanted to talk to him. He’s working in London at the moment, or he was up to a few weeks back. Stu met up with him the night before he died.’

  ‘Just socially or … ?’

  Ros opened her empty hands. ‘I have no idea. But he was staying in a hotel somewhere in the West End, close to the college. Close enough for Stu to walk there from work. Maybe they talked about all this. Maybe it’s why Brand was here.’

  They walked together to the door, Ros visibly still sorting through recent memories. ‘Not the Bloomsbury,’ she muttered. ‘And not the Great Russell. It was around there, though, and it was two words. Two short words.’

  She opened the door. Kennedy stepped through, then turned back to face her.

  ‘Pride Court,’ Ros said. ‘The Pride Court Hotel.’

  ‘You’ve been a great help, Miss Barlow,’ Kennedy said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ said Ros, without warmth. ‘Just return the favour.’

  Kennedy’s phone rang as she got back to the car. She recognised the number as being one of the bear-pit phones and was tempted to ignore it, but it might be Summerhill checking in on her. She thumbed it open one-handed as she fumbled for her keys with the other hand.

  ‘Kennedy.’

  ‘Hi. It’s Chris Harper.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘It’s going great. Seriously, sarge, my productivity rate is going through the roof here.’

  The car made a digital clucking sound as Kennedy pressed the key stud, but she made no move to open the door. ‘What? What do you mean?’

  Harper’s laugh carried a tremor of excitement, but he just about managed to get a bored, bravura tone into his voice. ‘When I sat down, we just had the one corpse. Now we’ve got three.’

  8

  The first zombie stories started to come in two days after the crash, but the real flood didn’t hit until day four. These things take time to get up their initial momentum, Sheriff Webster Gayle conjectured, but after they get to a certain point there’s no stopping them.

  There was only one story on day two – one real sighting, if you wanted to call it that, although in fact that was the one thing it wasn’t. Sylvia Gallos, the widow of one of the men who’d died on Coastal Airlines Flight 124, had woken in the night, hearing noises downstairs. Though distraught with grief, she’d still had the presence of mind to rummage in the drawer of her bedside table and find the little .22 calibre mouse gun her husband Jack had bought for her. His business had called him away from home a lot, and he used to worry about her safety.

  Gun in hand and hand more or less steady, Mrs Gallos had crept down the stairs to find the house empty and the door still securely locked. But the TV was on, a glass of whisky and water was standing half-drunk on the coffee table, and the air was full of the smell of her late husband’s favourite cologne, Bulgari Black.

  That was it for day two, but it played well and got a lot of air-time, usually at the end of ten or twelve minutes of more serious and solemn coverage. The authorities were still trying to figure out who to blame the crash on. The black box hadn’t been retrieved yet, although a whole lot of people were out looking for it, and opinion was divided as to what exactly had happened up there. Was it a terrorist atrocity? Maybe a long-term after-effect of all the volcanic garbage sitting in the upper atmosphere after that eruption in Iceland a year or so back? Or worst of all, from the industry point of view, a design flaw that meant all planes of that make (it was an Embraer E-195, and only four years old) would have to be grounded for the foreseeable future.

  By day three, according to the TV news, they had a part of an answer to that. Still no black box, but the insurance and FAA people had gone over most of the wreckage and it told a consistent if not yet quite complete story. One of the doors had blown open in mid-flight, causing a sudden and massive depressurisation. After that, a whole lot of other dominoes had gone and toppled over: the pressure bulkhead buckled, causing some hydraulic cables to snap, and a few seconds later the vertical stabilisers cut out. The engines stalled, the air flow broke, and the plane – which had an empty weight of thirty-two tons – was from that moment on about as aerodynamic as a great big bag of tyre irons. Gravity did its thing, enfolding Flight 124 into its ruinous embrace.

  In Peason, there was still a feeling of shock and grief for the dead strangers who’d come tumbling out of the sky, but for the nation at large there seemed to be a sense that the event was a lot less interesting now it had an explanation. Consequently, on day three the human interest stories took over from the stories about the crash itself. The focus now turned on the woman flying into New York to be reunited with her sister after a twenty-year feud; the guy who was going to pop the question to his childhood sweetheart; the three passengers who, although travelling separately and seemingly unaware of each other, had all been part of the same intake at Northridge Community High School.

  And in among all of these sell-by-the-inch soap opera tragedies there were the walking dead. On day four, they came out in force.

  A clerk in the New York Department of Public Works, who took Flight 124 to get home from some junket in Mexico City, had swiped in at his office, sent a couple of emails, surfed a little porn and then – without swiping out again or being seen by security or reception staff – disappeared without a trace. He was lying on a morgue slab in Peason at the time, but evidently routine is a powerful thing.

  A woman from New Jersey, also a casualty of 124, took her car out of the garage and drove to a local supermarket, where she drew out fifty dollars from her checking account and apparently bought a goldfish-on-a-string pet toy and a tin of anchovies, which were found in the trunk of the car later that day when the store closed and it was still there in the lot. Her boyfriend affirmed that she always bought her Burmese, Felix, treats of this kind when she’d been away.

  And maybe the creepiest of all, another passenger, a Mrs Angelica Saville, had called her brother in Schenectady to complain that the plane had been circling for hours in a fog so thick that nothing could be seen outside the windows. The call had come a full sixty-one hours after 124 hit the ground.

  ‘Did you read this stuff?’ Webster Gayle asked Eileen Moggs, over their regular midweek lunch at the Kingman Best of the West café, two miles out of town on the 93. He showed her the story about the New Jersey woman and she winced as though it gave her physical pain.

  ‘This one gets trotted out every ten years or so,’ Moggs said. The look on her face was sour and Gayle was sorry he’d put it there. He found her face – lined, strong-featured, emphatic, topped with a frizz of red hair like low brush fire – an amazing and beautiful thing to look upon. ‘They wait just long enough for everyone to have forgotten the last time, and then damn it if they don’t go right ahead and do it again. It’s a hack tradition. Goes all the way back to the Boston Molasses Flood.’

  Gayle thought he’d misheard. ‘The what, now?’

  ‘The Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Stop grinning, Web. It was a real disaster and two dozen people died. A storage tank burst. They drowned in molasses, which must be a pretty horrible way to die.’

  Chastened, Gayle nodded, agreeing that it was. Moggs carried right on making her point. ‘For weeks afterwards, the papers carried stories about how the dead were still turning up for work. Or their ghosts were. They quoted survivors – colleagues and relatives – as giving all kinds of corroborating details. Yeah, that was John’s shirt, Mary always sat in that chair, and so on and so forth. Only they never said those things. Or maybe one or two of them did. After that it was just the hacks making it up and the nut-jobs and hoaxers playing along. That’s all it ever is.’

  Sheriff Gayle said he took her word for it, as he usually did on most things outside his own very limited experience – which essentially meant outside the
Coconino County limits. But it was sort of a lie: on some half-buried level he was drawn to these stories of strange revenants. A whole bunch of people had died all at once, suddenly and traumatically. Was it too much of a reach to imagine that some of them might come back? That maybe their spirits might have passed over so quickly that they didn’t even realise they were dead, so they kept right on doing the same-old-same-old until the news caught up with them and they faded away? It was a haunting image. He didn’t share it with Moggs, but he kept turning it over and over in his mind.

  On the fifth day, the walking dead stories only got a limited airing in the mainstream media, but you could find a zillion of them on the internet. With the help of Connie, who was a lot less sceptical than Moggs, he went looking for them and began to compile a master list. It didn’t bother him that they weren’t always attributed and that details like names and ages changed from one report to the next. There’s no smoke without fire, he reasoned. And since that metaphor raised the hideous, indelible memory of the crash itself, it almost seemed to have something of a timeless truth about it. There were more things, in heaven and in earth. You just never knew, until it happened to you and you suddenly did.

  All this time, the County Sheriff’s Department was involved in the investigation of the crash, but only in what you’d call a facilitating capacity. They kept the crowd away from the wreckage on the first day and coordinated access for the ambulances and paramedic crews. Journalists by and large were kept well away from the site, except for Moggs who was allowed to wander at will so long as she didn’t make a big deal out of it. Nobody begrudged her this privilege: Sheriff Gayle was highly regarded, and most of his deputies and troopers felt kind of a warm glow from the reflection that he was getting some.

  Then when the airlines’ experts and the FAA’s experts and the insurance company experts came in, Gayle and his people took the lead in the search for the black box, which could have been a needle-in-a-haystack deal if it had been left to the out-oftowners. The thing was putting out a signal, and the locators were very fancy majiggers, locked to that one wavelength, so sensitive you could almost feel them pulling on your arm like a pointer dog. You still needed to know the area to get anything out of them, though. If you just kept to the right heading, you’d hit a mesa or a dry creek bed after a couple of miles or so, and have to go around. And then you’d be off of your line and you’d tear away in a different direction, jam your car in a box canyon and so on. So the Sheriff’s Department had four people working with those search parties, just helping them to negotiate the terrain, as it were.