The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Brooks acknowledged this answer only with a rustle and gathering of papers. ‘And he was left behind, when the van drove away?’

  ‘Yes. Briefly. Then he pursued it.’

  ‘Did you attempt an arrest, Sergeant?’

  Kennedy bit back her first answer, and her second. ‘As you’ll see from my report,’ she said at last, ‘I’d already tried to arrest the killers. The third man’s intervention came at that point, when they were turning on me and were about to attack me for a second time. Furthermore, I was unarmed. An unarmed officer, acting alone, is not required to accost an armed assailant if there’s no reasonable expectation that she can bring him down.’ Especially when he’s probably just saved her life.

  ‘So we come back to the absence of back-up.’

  ‘I suppose we do.’

  ‘Your description of the third man is very sketchy.’

  ‘I must have been distracted by my broken ribs and the incised wound to my shoulder.’

  Brooks raised her eyebrows in innocent amazement: the blameless victim of drive-by sarcasm.

  ‘Your tone isn’t helping you, Sergeant,’ Summerhill said.

  ‘I imagine not.’ She was running out of patience. Fortunately, they seemed to be running out of questions.

  But the DCI had saved the best for last.

  ‘Let’s come back to the events in the IT lab,’ he said. ‘Specifically, the shooting of Dr Opie. DC Harper was already wounded at this point, yes?’

  Kennedy nodded warily. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But the knife man – the one who’d attacked first him and then you – was down.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘When the second man produced the gun and aimed at Dr Opie, where were you in relation to the two of them?’

  She could see where this catechism was leading her, but she had no way to deflect it. ‘I was between them,’ she admitted.

  ‘Distance, what, about ten feet from the shooter?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Which? More, or less?’

  ‘Less, probably. Eight or nine feet.’

  ‘A couple of steps, then. And the gun was aimed past you at someone else. In your assessment, was there a possibility there for you to step in and try to disarm the shooter before he fired?’

  Kennedy remembered that moment of frozen horror, the draining away of her ability to think and move and act. It had been rooted in another memory: of Marcus Dell lurching towards her, locking his hands around her throat, and then of her own G22 kicking against the palm of her hand as she sent the .40 round on its short, eventful journey through Dell’s thoracic cavity.

  Some things hurt too much already to lay them open still further with a lie. ‘It happened very fast,’ she said, aware of the slight hesitation, the tremor in her voice. ‘Maybe … maybe I hesitated, for a second. It’s hard to remember. But the shooter was very quick. Very professional.’

  ‘He fired three times. That must have taken a few seconds.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘But there wasn’t sufficient time for you to intervene?’

  ‘I’ve said I don’t remember.’

  Summerhill began to collect up the papers and slip them back into the case file. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ll consider our recommendations. Please make yourself available to us for the rest of the day. We’ll give you a decision before you leave this evening.’

  It was too sudden, and Kennedy’s mind was still too full of images that defied and accused her. She’d been waiting for this moment, but when it came she wasn’t ready. ‘Is that it?’ she demanded, her voice sounding stupid and sullen in her own ears.

  ‘For now, yes,’ Summerhill said. ‘You may want to speak to Human Resources, if you’ve got any questions about how this procedure works. Mrs Brooks will be available throughout the day.’

  It was now or never: the hour of the knife. ‘Actually, sir,’ Kennedy said, ‘I’d like to speak to you. In private.’

  Caught in the act of closing the case file and, with it, her career, the DCI looked up again, surprised. ‘I think we have all the information we need, Sergeant,’ he said.

  ‘This is information that relates to the conduct of the case,’ Kennedy persisted, her voice level and courteous. ‘However, it’s of a sensitive nature and can only be discussed with case officers.’

  Summerhill’s face went through a range of emotions, all behind a slightly slipping mask of professional indifference. ‘Very well,’ he said at last, ‘we’ll discuss it in my office. And then,’ he added, addressing Brooks and Ladbroke, ‘I’ll rejoin you.’

  With his office door closed on the world, Summerhill sank into a chair, but pointedly did not invite Kennedy to take the other. She sat down anyway.

  ‘What do you want to tell me?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’ve got gypsy blood,’ Kennedy said, her voice still far from steady.

  Summerhill stared at her in faint bewilderment. ‘What?’

  ‘Straight up, Jimmy. I can tell your fortune. A couple of months from now, maybe three, I see you emptying out those desk drawers and walking off into the sunset. And it’s raining. It’s raining really hard.’

  Summerhill’s expression indicated that this was still nonsense to him. ‘You said you had information pertinent to the case,’ he reminded her, coldly.

  ‘Pertinent to the conduct of the case,’ she corrected. ‘Yes. I do. It’s in your inbox already, where it’s been for a week. On the departmental mail server, too, and God knows where else. Central Support keeps copies of everything, right? So it’s all over the place, if anyone wants to look. Header: “Stuart Barlow case file”. Go ahead and look.’

  Summerhill did, found her email of a week before, and shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘So check the dateline. That was the night before we went to Luton to see Sarah Opie. It was right there waiting for you when you clocked in the next day. Only you clocked in late. I know that because we waited for you for well over an hour before we finally gave up and went to interview the witness.’

  Summerhill made a brusque gesture: get to the point.

  ‘Did you even read the email, Jimmy? I told you the case had blown up into something really scary. I suggested that you should review the size of the case team and the scope of the investigation. I asked you to make a ruling – urgently – on immediate priorities.’

  ‘All of which,’ Summerhill said, ‘makes no difference to the facts. You went in without back-up and a civilian died. So did your fellow officer, who was new to the job and taking his cue from you.’

  Kennedy nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, grimly. ‘He did. He died in my arms, Jimmy. I’m not likely to forget that. But I thought your first question back there was why we waited so long. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that we waited for you.’

  Summerhill was already shaking his head. ‘No, no, Sergeant. I’m sorry. That won’t do. I was absent because I was at Westminster, on divisional business. And in my absence, you’re required to go through another senior officer.’

  This was as far as Kennedy had taken it in her mind. The rest was just a guess, and she was either right or wrong. She thought of Harper lying across her lap, bleeding out. The horror of that moment, still fresh, acted like a plumb line, keeping her level and composed in this one.

  ‘Maybe,’ she allowed. ‘Maybe you were at Westminster. But that’s about the fifth or sixth time I’ve heard that select committee story, and one of those times was in January, before Parliament even came back from recess. You used to have a booze problem, didn’t you, Jimmy? A couple of reprimands, almost a disciplinary hearing once, or so the story goes. I’m out of the loop now, for obvious reasons, but I don’t think a problem like that just goes away. So my theory is that WPC Rawl has two big crosses to bear around here: a general brief to cover up for you when you come in late, and a complete lack of imagination.’

  She paused again. This was where the roof would fall in, if it was going to. It seemed a long time before
Summerhill spoke. When he did, his voice was a lot more controlled than she’d been hoping for and a lot more aggressive: turning full on to the salvo, not wallowing and waiting for another broadside.

  ‘Detective Sergeant,’ he said, ‘you seem to think that you can take the heat off yourself by attacking me. Let me repeat, in case you didn’t hear me the first time: an officer is dead because of your actions. Attempting to blackmail me can’t possibly affect—’

  ‘I’ll bring you down too,’ Kennedy said. Summerhill carried on speaking over her, so she couldn’t be sure that he’d heard her, but most of the message was in her face and her tone.

  ‘—the decision of an independent tribunal of which I’m only—’

  ‘If Rawl was covering for you, I will sink you.’

  ‘—one member. The decision comes from all of us.’

  ‘Then give me a Viking funeral,’ Kennedy said, her throat tight. ‘Go ahead. Because that’s all I’ve got. But I swear to God, Jimmy, if you shit-can me, or even if you just try to keep me off this case, I’ll get my lawyer to shout it from the rooftops that Harper died because you were too drunk to show up for work. If I’m right, if you weren’t called to the Commons that day and you’ve got no MPs to vouch for you, then Rawl’s entry in the day book will be enough to prove you lied. They will crucify you. And that won’t bring Chris Harper back from the dead but it will mean a little bit of justice has been mixed in with the usual bullshit.’

  They’d both ended up on their feet, facing each other, and he ran out of words before she did. ‘Let me know, either way,’ she muttered, suddenly disgusted with him and with herself.

  She left Summerhill’s office without looking back, went to the bear pit to wait it out, but the atmosphere there was palpable. They all knew about the review, and they all knew what it was for. She’d gotten a detective killed. She’d gone from being someone they hated to something they wanted to disavow. No eyes met hers.

  She wasn’t even sure that she could have met her own eyes right then, if there’d been a mirror handy. She knew, objectively, that Harper had already taken his wound when she froze in front of the gun. Moving quicker wouldn’t have saved him, but it might have saved Sarah Opie.

  She’d been through it in her mind so many times now, the memories had stripped threads and came together in the wrong sequence, from the wrong angles, jumbled and incomprehensible. She endured them anyway.

  23

  Kuutma was a long way from London when he took the call from Abidan’s team. In fact, he was in Moscow, patching up communications networks that had been damaged by Tillman’s murder of Kartoyev. He was standing in the antechamber of the Russian business minister, a hall half the size of a football stadium, travelling under his customary identity and waiting to find out whether he would be seen.

  When Abidan told him about the mysterious shooter who had appeared only just too late to sabotage the mission, Kuutma knew at once from the description – the height, the build, the hair that was either the lightest of light browns or else pale red, and of course the accuracy of the shooting – that the man was Tillman. His concerns had proved only too well justified: Tillman had taken his time but he had been heading for London ever since Kartoyev’s death, and now he had picked up on the connection between Michael Brand and the recent deaths.

  The problem was built into the very charter of the Messengers because it was the way they worked, and had always worked, and must continue to work until the thirty centuries were done (and it was getting late, already; the count could be argued, but the count was close). They took the drug, kelalit, and it gave them the blessings of strength and speed. It was a sacrament. Also, a neurotoxin, and in the end it either killed them or drove them mad. So Kuutma was constantly engaged in training new Messengers and had endless trouble finding team leaders of sufficient experience.

  Mistakes had been made in the handling of the Rotgut project, just as mistakes had been made in the handling of Flight 124. Loose ends had been left untied, opportunities had been missed, convoluted methods used where simple ones were available. It fell to Kuutma, now, to manage these situations and to bring them to happy outcomes.

  Being an honest man, he acknowledged, too, his own errors of judgement. Tillman still lived: Kuutma had to bear the responsibility for that disastrous circumstance and he had to put it right.

  He could almost make the argument for going in himself at this point. But the strength of his desire to do so had to be taken as a warning that he must not: his emotions were involved, and therefore he couldn’t trust his judgement.

  But Abidan’s team was depleted now. Hirah had been shot in the chest and in the hand. Both wounds had already partially healed, another side effect of kelalit, but in this, as in everything else, the drug both gave and took away. The chest wound was fine, but the bones and muscles in the hand had become twisted as they healed and set into an unnatural position. The hand was useless.

  Kuutma pondered, and reached a decision. ‘You must take Hirah back to Ginat’Dania,’ he told Abidan. ‘He needs to rest and to be with his family. The injury done to him – to his soul, as well as his flesh – will heal faster there.’

  Abidan looked dismayed. ‘But Tannanu,’ he said, ‘the mission …’

  ‘I know, Abidan. There’s work still to be done. A lot of work, perhaps, now that this Tillman is involved.’

  ‘Tillman?’

  ‘The man who shot Hirah. That was who it was.’

  Abidan’s tone expressed shock and perhaps alarm. ‘But Tillman – Leo Tillman – was the man who—’

  ‘Abidan.’ Kuutma silenced his Messenger with that gentle rebuke.

  ‘Yes, Tannanu?’

  ‘Go back to Ginat’Dania. Take your team with you. I have another team in that country now. They pursued Tillman from France and will welcome another chance to engage with him.’

  ‘May I ask, Tannanu, what team is this?’ Abidan was cautious, but unhappy. It hurt to be taken out of the line, as Kuutma well understood.

  ‘Mariam Danat’s team. Mariam herself, Ezei and Cephas. Go well, Abidan, and be proud of what you’ve done.’

  He switched off his phone and stared at the wall facing him. It was adorned with a painting of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow as imagined by a Soviet painter, whose signature at the bottom of the canvas was illegible. In the painting, Napoleon slumped in his saddle, staring hollow-eyed at an endless corridor of swirling snow. Behind him, a line of defeated, dying French soldiers stretched into infinity, all wearing variations on the same expression: the humiliation of the conqueror magnified and duplicated magically, as in a hall of mirrors.

  Kuutma thought about seeing that expression on Tillman’s face.

  ‘Will he forget you?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then he’s a fool.’

  ‘Yes. And you should be afraid of him. He’s far, far too stupid to know when he’s lost, or when to surrender. He’ll ignore that note. He won’t stop coming. He’ll look into your eyes, some day, Kuutma, and one of you will blink.’

  Mariam’s team. He’d brief them personally. And although he wouldn’t go to London himself, he’d watch over their shoulder and steer them; not directly at Tillman because the Rotgut situation was the problem that demanded an immediate resolution. But clearly, Tillman had put himself on a collision course with Rotgut.

  One way or another, whatever momentum he had accumulated and whatever resources he brought, he would be destroyed by that collision.

  24

  It was a partial victory, and if Kennedy had had anything left to lose in the department, it would have been a pyrrhic one. Whereas Summerhill had been content before to leave her to her own devices and to the not-so-tender mercies of the bear pit, now he was on her case in a much more committed, much less casual way.

  The incident committee gave her a clean bill of health, and they kept her on the case, but there was no question now of a mere sergeant heading it up. Summerhill had already appointed hi
mself as case officer, which meant she’d be working directly under him. Right in his gunsights, every hour of the day.

  Rather than just replacing Harper, he’d widened the case team to five, not counting himself. The other sergeant, to rub her nose in her failure as thoroughly as possible, was Josh Combes. Three constables rounded out the roster, and she knew them all. Stanwick was Combes’s lap-dog, pure and simple; McAliskey was competent but ground-hugging, and had failed sergeant twice; Cummings was his own man, good at everything except sharing.

  Kennedy printed out a hard copy of the case file and took it home with her that evening. After a long, hot bath she sat down on the sofa in a robe, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, to read it. The file wasn’t much thicker than she had left it the week before. The next briefing meeting – or shout, as they tended to be called in Division – was at nine the following morning. Summerhill would be looking to trip her up if he could, and everybody else there would enjoy the show.

  Her father came and looked over her shoulder as she read, which was kind of unusual. He never picked up a book any more, or even a magazine. His attention span just wasn’t long enough to last out the average sentence. But the week she’d been away had left him unsettled. Her sister, Chrissie, had stepped in (with very bad grace) to look after him. She’d taken him down to her own place in Somerset, where nothing was where he remembered it being, and where he had last claim on the TV after her cricket-obsessed husband and teenage daughter. It must have been pretty miserable for him. Although if Alzheimer’s had an upside, it was that past miseries presumably stopped being real as soon as you forgot them.

  ‘Murder case, Dad,’ she said, deadpan. ‘Multiple. Multiple and then some. Four civilians dead and one cop.’

  She thought he might react to that – to the death of an officer – but he didn’t seem to hear her. He wasn’t trying to read the file, either. He was just standing close to her, watching her intently. Maybe he’d missed her and was reassuring himself that she was back. Whatever it was, she didn’t like it much.