‘What do you think?’ asked Badstuber. She was standing a few yards away at the edge of the small copse.
‘I think,’ said Jericho, ‘that we’re dealing with a master, and that there’s absolutely zero chance we’ll find him.’
He turned and they looked at each other through the trees.
‘Nevertheless,’ he continued, ‘let’s go to Marrakech. Someone should try to save Geyerson, I suppose.’
‘Of course,’ said Badstuber.
Going to Marrakech had never been in doubt.
23
‘The curse?’ said Dylan, raising her eyebrow.
Haynes had noticed immediately that she was more relaxed today. Jericho was gone, and the outsider from Switzerland was gone. Perhaps, she was also happy that the professor was gone, although Haynes didn’t think too much about that.
‘That’s what I read.’
‘And this was in... what? The Ripping Yarns Book for Boys? Climbing For Men, January issue. It’s a Curse Special, everyone who’s died and why an ancient god killed them?’
‘Read it in a blog.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who wrote the blog?’
‘It’s unclear.’
‘This is all you’ve got?’
‘No, but I thought it was of interest. If there was considered to be a curse.’
‘I’m not entirely sure how, but humour me, please.’
Haynes had been called into the superintendent’s office too early. Much too early. Really didn’t have anything worthwhile to share with her, but here he was, having to do it, nevertheless.
‘Let’s say–’
‘Oh, I love it when an explanation begins with “let’s say...” So do the courts. Not a judge nor jury in the country that won’t be swayed by a let’s say.’
‘I need to establish how many people actually got to the summit of the mountain. I mean, not just a successful climb, but actually reached the top.’
‘Maybe some did, but didn’t admit to it.’
‘Yes, exactly, there’s that too. Having done that, we need to then follow up the lives of each of these people. How many of them actually died thereafter.’
‘You’re still being serious, right, Sergeant?’
‘Hear me out,’ he said.
‘Sure. As long as you’re not just talking so you can sit in the air conditioning.’
‘It’s not too bad out there today,’ he said.
‘I’m pleased. You were talking about the curse.’
‘So, what if it’s a recurring feature? What if, really, people have been dying after reaching the summit. Is it an ancient curse? Probably not.’
‘I’m glad you think that.’
‘More likely there’s someone, or some group, who don’t want anyone to get to the summit. This group, presumably, might well have been around for a long time. The summit’s been around for a long time. Perhaps there’s some idea of a curse, but it’s actually just a plain old, real thing, perpetuated by this group who are willing to kill anyone who reaches the summit. For whatever reason.’
‘That sounds like a lot of people are going to have been killed.’
‘Possibly. I’m not sure yet. That’s what I’m working on. But as a theory–’
‘Courts love theories.’
‘As a theory, it ties in with the other side of the investigation, where we’re looking for some strange, all-powerful and old organisation.’
She tapped a contemplative pen, looking across the desk. The theory, such as it was, had occurred to Haynes at some point in the previous hour, and he’d liked it, as it had fitted in with what he knew so far, and what he was looking for.
Yes, it sounded far-fetched, but the story of Jericho coming to inherit twenty-three million euros was also absurdly far-fetched. Far-fetched seemed to be the territory this case was inhabiting.
‘All right, Sergeant, I’m not immediately going to toss you out the window for this. However, should you find that a majority of those who have reached the summit are alive and happy and waltzing up the Dawn Wall in Yosemite of an afternoon, will you drop your fantasy and move on to something more rooted in the real world?’
‘Of course,’ said Haynes.
‘And don’t take too long about it.’
‘Of course.’
‘Have you heard from the Detective Inspector?’
‘No.’
‘And what happened to your Professor?’
‘You saw the heraldic symbols on the flag carried by the Death figure on the cards. She’s chasing them down, speaking to a couple of people up in London.’
‘You’re speaking to her later?’
Haynes hesitated, but there was no particular reason to lie.
‘I’m going to London later. Might spend the weekend up there.’
‘Might you?’
‘It’s the weekend, ma’am.’
Dylan leant forward, letting out a sigh, trying to think of a reason she could make him stay in Wells. Stopped herself, unusually, when she realised she was doing it entirely out of spite. Just because Jericho was away, it didn’t mean she had to treat his next in command in exactly the same way.
The pen tapped again. She sat back, looked out the window.
‘Isn’t it odd... wouldn’t it be odd if this secretive organisation, whoever any of us think they are, who seem to be so powerful and, indeed, secret, were to leave a clue on the card? Would they really do that? So some professor somewhere can look it up in a book and say, oh, look, it’s The Black Hand of Nicaea or The Brotherhood of The Huish & Langport First XI?’
‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’
‘So, what are you thinking?’
‘They’re playing us, they must be. I realise that, as does the Chief Inspector. They want us to look for something. But what, in the face of that, are we supposed to do? Not look for it? Do nothing? If it’s a trap, we have to walk into it, but hopefully somehow get ahead of the game before it happens. And there’s always the possibility of grand hubris. They think they’re invincible. Maybe they think we won’t find anything. Maybe they’re showing off. We have absolutely no idea who’s doing this, or why they’re doing it. We need to track down every possible lead there is. At the moment, this is all they’ve given us.’
Dylan hadn’t been looking at him as he spoke, and she still didn’t turn. Staring out at the slight movement of the trees. There was a breeze in the air, which there hadn’t been for a while. The days had cooled very slightly. Now the change was coming.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘It’s not you who’s looking into it anyway. But, Sergeant, please don’t walk into a trap alone. At least call for back-up before it happens.’
Haynes smiled and got to his feet.
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
*
‘You seem troubled, Chief Inspector. I think you must not like flying.’
Jericho shook his head.
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Flying is perfectly safe. The very fact that any time a plane crashes it makes the news, is proof of its rarity.’
‘I don’t mind flying,’ said Jericho.
No tone in his voice.
‘Very well.’
Sitting on a Swiss Airbus A330-300, Zurich to Marrakesh, the plane taxiing to the runway. Row sixteen, window and middle seats, no one sitting at the aisle.
The Swiss police had taken care of the plane tickets and the hotel in Marrakech. Jericho was along for the ride, unsure if he was ultimately going to be contributing anything.
‘What then is the problem?’ she asked, after a few moments.
The plane had turned onto the runway and was awaiting its moment to move off and accelerate.
Jericho stared straight ahead at the seat in front of him. He didn’t want to be having this conversation. He didn’t want to be having any conversation. Not with Badstuber, not with anyone, and certainly not about this. Not the thing that was haunting him.
&n
bsp; And yet, suddenly, there they were, the words coming out of his mouth, as the plane began to move forward and the dull white noise of the engines increased in intensity.
‘You know the story?’ he said. ‘Of Durrant?’
‘Yes, of course. I studied the case of Durrant when I was in police college.’
Jericho looked sharply at her, as the plane juddered and thundered along to take-off velocity.
‘You studied it?’
‘Yes, of course. It is a famous case. And naturally I followed what emerged in January. We were all surprised that such a man was allowed out of prison. Britain must be more liberal than we thought.’
She smiled in her peculiarly stiff manner. The smile that wasn’t really a smile.
‘That he was allowed out of prison, I think, is testimony to just how powerful these people are.’
‘Yes, I see that now.’
The plane lifted off, immediately seemed to move slightly in the cross wind, then settled down and began to rise more smoothly.
‘You are still haunted by Durrant? I would not be surprised. It must have been a great shock for you to come across him again. Did you know before you encountered him that he had been released?’
‘I hadn’t been told, but I’d worked it out.’
Jericho looked out the window, as the airport disappeared behind them and the terrain began to get hillier, leading to the mountains in the distance, currently obscured from view by the wing of the aircraft.
‘Have you ever had trauma counselling?’ she asked.
‘No, I’ve never had trauma counselling.’
‘You should have done. I know this kind of thing did not happen in the 1980s, but it is taught as part of the course that the officers involved never received the proper support. That the same thing should have happened this year seems inexcus–’
‘That’s not the problem,’ said Jericho, his voice with a little more snap than he’d intended, so he quickly muttered an apology, shaking his head.
She didn’t immediately respond, and he wondered if that had been enough to end the conversation. She had a directness about her that wasn’t about to change, and he had to stop himself snapping every time she cut too quickly to the core.
‘He’s back,’ he said, unbidden.
‘Durrant?’
‘Yes.’
‘Durrant is back?’
‘Yes. I saw him at the airport.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘He was sitting in a seat, waiting, his head bowed.’
He didn’t look at her, but there was a pause, and he could tell she was looking at him, her face curious.
‘I know it was him,’ he said, in response to the unspoken question, ‘because he was in my kitchen last night, sitting at the table. His head was down, and he was wearing the same clothes. It was Durrant I just saw in that airport. I know it was.’
‘You spoke to him last night?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘What about?’
Jericho shook his head.
‘I can barely even remember. He was just there.’
‘But you talked?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he threaten you?’
‘No.’
‘Was he the Durrant you remembered?’
‘He was more talkative. The Durrant I knew barely spoke.’
‘Did he sound the same?’
‘Yes... I’m not sure.’
‘Was it perhaps someone else you mistook for Durrant?’
Jericho paused before answering. He regretted starting the conversation, and it was time to close it down. Everything she was asking was perfectly reasonable, as was her scepticism.
‘I know it sounds... impossible. But he’s tied to me in some way. He always said it. There’s a link between us, and the link seems to have survived his death.’
There came the standard ping from above, and as always Jericho looked up to see if the seatbelt sign had been switched off – which made no difference to him, anyway, as he never unbuckled the belt – but of course it was too early. He glanced out the window, straightened his shoulders, rested his head back against the seat.
‘Durrant is back,’ he said, ‘and no good will come of it.’
24
Morlock, of course, could kill people in all manner of ways. Trained assassin he might have been, but then he had been raised on stories of the brutality of World War II. He had been raised to believe that all men are capable of such things, and that the only way to make sure no one ever did anything like that to you, was to do it to them first.
The police in Seattle were still hunting him for a triple murder the previous year. The fact that they had no idea it was Morlock they were looking for meant they were destined to fail. Every psychologist and every criminologist they had spoken to had described the killer as sick, psychopathic, sociopathic, troubled and alone. Perhaps Morlock was all of these things, but none of them could calculate that he had killed in this manner to distract from who he was. That he had killed two of the women quite needlessly to cover up for the murder of the third. To make her look like just another victim.
He had crucified each of them against a wall in their own home. He had sexually assaulted them, his hands concealed in surgical gloves. Nothing of Morlock, not a fingerprint, not a hair, not a cell, not a fragment of DNA, had been left behind. And then he had slit their stomachs open, while they watched, allowing them to witness their viscera spilling out onto the floor, dangling from their crucified bodies.
After that he had sat back and watched them die. The final victim had still been dripping slowly congealing blood when Morlock had arrived at the airport to catch his plane to Hong Kong.
Although the police did not find the body until three days later, they would never have thought of closing the airports anyway. The killer, in their eyes, lived alone in his apartment, crazy and sad, his walls covered in newspaper clippings about the murders he’d carried out. That, at least, was what their people told them.
It was all misdirection. Morlock, the police in Seattle might have said had they known, could run play-action with the best of them.
He alighted from the train at Gar du Sud and stood for a moment in the middle of the platform, as passengers streamed by on either side, the air filled with the rumble and clatter of wheeled suitcases.
He hated Paris these days, almost as much as he hated London. All the great cities were going the same way. Too many damn people. At least he could afford to stay in a suite in a hotel in which most other people couldn’t even afford to order a coffee. He had space. The majority of these poor bastards currently walking past him would be heading off to some backstreet hotel, to a room with barely enough space to walk around the bed, before going to the Louvre to stand in a queue for an hour and a half for the privilege of standing at the back of a scrum, fifteen yards away from the Mona Lisa
No, Morlock did not like Paris, so he did not mind that he would not be staying long.
*
Haynes spent three hours on the phone talking to mountaineers and mountaineering experts, as far as he could define them, on the subject of Kangchenjunga. None of them had heard of the curse. More than one of them, however, had mentioned that there had been a team of Japanese climbers, eleven years previously, who had made the summit, and then at least a couple of them had died within the year.
It was all a little vague, no one seeming to know the exact details. None of the mountaineering experts thought, however, that whatever had become of them quite warranted being called a curse, especially since it hadn’t happened to them all, and it hadn’t happened to anyone else.
The day was progressing, and he hadn’t heard from Leighton. He was stopping himself from calling her. Maybe, he wondered at some point, she was stopping herself from calling him. But then, she was the one carrying out the investigation into the heraldic symbols, it would make sense for her to call him. And every time he thought about it, he realised he was thinking about it
too much, over-analysing as one so often does at the start of a relationship, when you can’t get someone out of your head. Except, he really needed to get her out of his head, so he would tell himself that he was seeing her that night, and the next day and the next, so it was all right to concentrate on what he was actually doing.
A few hours in, and he decided he’d made enough phone calls. He had been e-mailed a list of every expedition that had summited on Kangchenjunga, although no one had been able to tell him if there was a distinction drawn anywhere between those who had respected the tradition of stopping short of the summit, and those who had carried on to the top.
He was gradually working his way through names. How many of these people had died soon after climbing the mountain? That was his starting point. He decided to define ‘soon after’ broadly as five years, but was keeping particular note of those within six months.
For the moment, he was staying clear of people who had actually died on the mountain itself, as that was not what had happened with Carter and Connolly, but he knew it was something to which he might need to return.
Obviously what he needed, to allow him to establish some sort of connection, was for every member of an expedition to have died in a short time frame. That then would point to there being something specific about the mountain, rather than there being something specific about Geyerson’s expedition.
He made himself a coffee, realised he was hungry, decided he would do another hour before taking a break. If he hadn’t heard anything, he would call Leighton then.
He found a few climbers over the years who had died within five years, but there was no pattern. They were all one-off instances, not once with more than one person from the same expedition.
It was the same, but obviously even less frequent, for climbers who had died soon after completing the climb. A Hungarian climber in 1979, a German in 2001. He began to realise that it was coming down to the Japanese expedition that had been mentioned – if there was going to be anything, that would be it – but he stopped himself from jumping ahead.
Yet, by the time he came to it, he had nothing concrete. So far, it had felt like a typical piece of investigative timewasting. There was so much police work like this. Research that led nowhere. Interviews that didn’t answer any questions. You kept plugging away until something clicked, or something connected with a piece of seemingly useless information from three weeks previously.
We Are Death Page 12