We Are Death

by Douglas Lindsay

  He was trying not to catch the eye of Baschkin at the door. He wondered if Baschkin felt similarly out of his depth but very much doubted it, even if he was hardly in a position to do his job. There were at least eleven men with guns dotted around the room, and Baschkin was the only one on Harrow’s side.

  He wondered where Carter and Connolly were now. He could have been them. Rather than being greedy, he could have had the carefree life they would have enjoyed since the expedition. Instead, he’d taken on this burden. He’d persuaded Geyerson to give him the burden.

  The chatter stopped suddenly, and he looked up. Some of them were looking at him, others had let their eyes drop. The man across the table, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, silk tie knotted at the neck, grey Brooks Brothers suit, wrapped his long fingers around each other, his forearms resting on the table.

  ‘My friends want to know why you would even think to bring such a thing as this to an Islamic country?’

  Syria is not defined by being an Islamic country, thought Harrow. It’s defined by being a war zone. That’s why I’m here.

  He stared silently across the table, too pusillanimous to let the words ever cross his lips.

  *

  Late in the evening, Badstuber’s phone pinged, the funny little jingle she had set for messages from her family. It was a photo of her husband, lying in bed, his erection in his hands, asking her to call.

  She smiled. She was already lying naked in bed. She positioned the iPad so that it could film her body, then put the Face Time call through. He answered straight away. He smiled. They didn’t say much.

  She watched the movement of his foreskin, the end of his penis already glistening. She licked the middle three fingers of her right hand and ran them over the lips of her pussy, moaning already at the first touch.

  28

  Up early, Haynes and Leighton ate breakfast in a small café near Parc de la Planchette. Croissant, coffee, orange juice. Haynes had an extra pain au raisin, as though he was making sure they didn’t eat exactly the same thing, like that would be one step away from wearing matching pullovers.

  Haynes had been to Paris on a school trip, fifteen years previously. He felt like he remembered much about it, but perhaps it was just because the city was so familiar from film and television. When it came to moving around, he realised that Leighton had true comfort and familiarity. She spoke the language far better than she’d indicated, and seemed at every point to know where she was going, and how to get there.

  They arrived at the door of number 127 Rue Maxime Bossis at three minutes to nine. A simple wooden door, painted blue, a small plaque on the wall beneath the number. La Bibliothèque de Paris de l'Héraldique. She tried the door handle and, finding it locked, rang the bell.

  She smiled at Haynes, then turned and together they took a moment to look at their surroundings. A quiet street, nothing to see. Two lanes of traffic, parked cars on either side of the road. Grey Haussmann apartment blocks, a few shops, a couple of cafés, an art gallery along the bottom. A few more shop windows boarded up than she had ever noticed before.

  One end of the street was a T-junction, a similar building staring straight back at them from a hundred yards away. The other end opened out onto Rue Gilles Berger, with large summer oaks in the park across the road, the other side of four lanes of traffic.

  The day was already warm. Haynes in an open-necked shirt, mustard trousers, Leighton in a light blue dress, her hair tied back but not pulled off her forehead.

  ‘Too bad we have to work,’ said Haynes, staring at the trees at the far end.

  She smiled, didn’t reply. She knew they were both looking forward to the work.

  Then, to her delight, as she was rather enjoying this detective story she’d found herself part of, a slat was pulled back in the door and a pair of suspicious eyes looked out at them.

  ‘Oui?’

  ‘Bonjour! Je suis Professor Leighton, le professeur de la British Library.’

  She smiled brightly, and got nothing in return.

  ‘I have an appointment,’ she said boldly.

  The eyes regarded her almost grudgingly, acknowledging that she did indeed have an appointment, then turned to Haynes.

  ‘Et, qui?’

  ‘My colleague, Mr Haynes.’

  The thrill of lying about his profession!

  There was another pause, the eyes moving slowly back towards Leighton, and then the man seemed to give up. There was the sound of a bolt being pulled back, the key turning in the lock, and then the door opened.

  *

  ‘How long have you been married?’

  They had been walking for over an hour, their guide slightly ahead of them, on the path between Imlil and Aroumd. They were making decent time, although they didn’t know it. They were just following the man they’d hired, each of them with a backpack on their shoulder. Badstuber had hers resting fully on her back, Jericho had his over his right shoulder, his arm bent, the strap hooked round his thumb. Neither of them had spoken since the basic introductions with the guide.

  They were closing in on a group of fifteen or so up ahead. For the most part, they had passed very few people along the way. It was very warm, the ground and the surrounding hills parched and pale brown. The homes they saw all seemed rudimentary, all with satellite dishes on their flat roofs. Rugs hung on lines outside. The air was dry, the heat seemed to increase with every step, and Jericho was glad that Badstuber had at least had the good sense to bring sun cream.

  ‘Twelve years,’ she said, slightly surprised that he’d asked at all.

  He was troubled by the fact that Haynes and Dylan had been trying to reach him, and had decided that he’d better speak to Haynes the next time he called. He’d made his assumption about why they were looking for him, but it was always possible he was wrong. However, he presumed that if there had been anything else important they would have made the effort to contact Badstuber. The fact that they hadn’t, meant the problem was Jericho-specific.

  He’d decided he needed to talk to her about Amanda, so he’d started the conversation in a somewhat convoluted way. Nevertheless, having got the answer, he wasn’t entirely sure where to go next.

  ‘Is your husband in the police?’ he asked.

  They were walking in single file, Jericho a pace behind her, the guide three or four paces ahead.

  ‘No, he’s an accountant. He works at home. He only needs to work four hours a day. Has just a few clients. Charges them a lot of money. He tells me I don’t need to be in the police.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’

  ‘I like my work.’

  They walked on. Jericho didn’t know where to take the conversation after that, and it hadn’t got him any closer.

  ‘Is there something you wanted to tell me, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered bluntly.

  ‘Then, please...’

  He nodded, although she wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘My wife, Amanda, you know the story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Before she disappeared she was working on a large international insurance case. It never really fed into the reports of her disappearance because there was nothing to report. There was no reason to think that the case had anything to do with it. But she used to bring her work home with her. The company never found anything on file or on her computer, and all her work disappeared with her. I looked into it for a couple of months, but there was nothing but closed doors. The claim, as far as I know, was dropped some time after she vanished. It was just another peculiarity in a list of them. And although I never knew what happened to her, I always thought... I didn’t think it was anything to do with what she’d been working on. I always thought the most likely reason was that someone...’

  He swallowed, shook his head. It wasn’t a matter of still not being able to say the words. The fact was, he’d never said the words. Not since he’d left London had he actually spoken to anyone about it in order to voice his fears.r />
  There was a slight slowing in Badstuber’s pace, as if she was letting Jericho close the already meagre gap between them.

  ‘I presumed someone had abducted her, raped her maybe, killed her, dumped her body at the bottom of, I don’t know, the sea, a river, a lake. Wherever they’d done it, and whatever they’d done, they’d done it well, that’s all.’

  ‘And has something changed your mind?’

  He almost walked into her back. She felt him close and started to pick up the pace again.

  ‘The case Amanda was investigating involved the deaths of four climbers who had reached the summit of Kangchenjunga.’

  She glanced back over her shoulder but did not slow down. Turned away again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is significant. Thank you for telling me.’

  ‘But like I said, there was very little I knew, and the files vanished with her.’

  ‘You didn’t talk about work?’

  ‘Generally, no. We would sit together in the evening, after dinner, and we’d both be going through files. Occasionally we’d comment, but not often.’

  ‘Companionable, but not talkative.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘But now this angle takes on significance.’

  ‘Yes, it does. We need to find out if there are any other instances of climbers dying having reached the summit of Kangchenjunga.’

  ‘Can you remember, before your wife disappeared, did she travel anywhere? Did she speak to anyone specific? Was there anything at all unusual in the previous couple of weeks, or even couple of months?’

  He nodded, walking along, eyes down, focused on Badstuber’s heels.

  ‘Paris,’ he said. ‘She went to Paris. Had to go there to do some research, but I’ve no idea what. It was a couple of weeks beforehand, and I just never thought about it. Never seemed to have any bearing on anything.’

  She walked on in silence for a while. He allowed her the time, hardly expecting her to have anything dramatic to say as a result of this new information.

  ‘Paris is a big place,’ she said eventually.

  Behind her, Jericho smiled.

  29

  Nearly two in the afternoon. Haynes and Leighton in amongst old books. They had been in their element at first. Walls lined with old volumes, rooms from which treasure troves are made, desks at the end of each row for readers to sit and look through whichever volume they’d collected.

  This was no expensive, high-tech, Vatican-esque library, everything sealed, the books carefully protected from the elements. The lighting was low, the windows were sealed and covered, the doors kept shut. That was all. This obscure little library was kept hidden away, little used and without much support. It survived, somehow, much as it had done for over two hundred years.

  Books were arranged according to subject matter, and then by date. They had settled on north European heraldic symbolism, eighteenth and nineteenth century. How could they possibly know where to start? They just had to begin somewhere and get on with it. Leighton thought they would end up going back to the previous two centuries, where at least the number of volumes was considerably lower.

  Their initial delight and wonder had faded with the hours. So many books to look through, so little time, and only two of them to the task.

  Any books in English went to Haynes, Leighton took the French, any other languages were evenly split between them. Regardless, with most of them they were searching for depictions of the images. A lifetime would barely have been enough to have gone through the library, reading every word.

  Haynes had one lead. A small book in Latin, in which, in one chapter, the four images – not identical to those on Death’s standard, yet the same four beasts – had all appeared. It was a start, albeit neither of them could translate the Latin. For their nearly five hours of searching, they had two other books with potential links, neither offering much hope.

  Early on, Haynes had shown one of the blown-up images of the death tarot card to the two small men who were working in an open office at the end of the library. It had elicited zero response.

  Haynes stretched, looked up and down the shelves of books before them. He had seven books to place back, before he would take any more out.

  ‘Feel like getting something to eat?’

  It was the first time either one of them had spoken in nearly an hour. There was a moment, and then Leighton looked up.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Something to eat?’ said Haynes.

  ‘We can wait for lunch,’ she said, her eyes immediately returning to the volume before her. It was apparent from the way she was studying it that it was giving her no more help than anything else she’d looked at, but her concentration was immense. Haynes wondered, not for the first time in the previous five hours, if he was liable to be missing anything.

  ‘It’s two o’clock,’ he said.

  Another pause, then she raised her eyes again.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s two o’clock. We’ve been doing this for almost five hours.’

  She looked at her watch.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Weird. I thought it was about ten.’

  She turned back to her book, but her concentration had been broken.

  ‘All right, all right. I guess we should. I doubt they’ll want us bringing food in here.’

  ‘I think they were concerned we might be breathing too much, so you’re probably right.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Right. Not sure when they’ll shut, but we’ll check we’ve got time. As long as they let us back in for–’

  She looked over Haynes’s shoulder. The librarian who had let them in that morning was walking along the corridor towards them. He had a key in his hand, which seemed ominous.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ she said. ‘Monsieur?’

  He stopped beside the desk, on which they were sitting either side, was about to speak, then hesitated when he noticed one of the books that Haynes had set aside. Sed Intellectus Vetera.

  He took a moment, a look of resignation came across his face.

  ‘Monsieur?’ said Leighton.

  ‘I need to ask you to leave,’ he said, the first time he had spoken to them in English. ‘My colleague and I are going to lunch.’

  ‘Will you be back later?’ she asked.

  His eyes dropped a little farther, as if this was the last thing he wanted.

  ‘We will be back in one hour,’ he said, reluctantly.

  He began to turn away, then stopped himself, turned back.

  ‘You have Sed Intellectus Vetera.’

  Leighton, who hadn’t looked at it in the three hours since Haynes pointed it out to her, glanced at it as if she’d forgotten it was there, then nodded.

  ‘Yes, we’d like to take it out, if that’s possible.’

  The librarian placed his hands on the desk, as if steadying himself, his lips pursed.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked. ‘You did say on the phone that it might be possible for us to borrow particular items.’

  ‘That one is very rare,’ he said.

  ‘It was placed in amongst all these books on the shelves, same as all the others,’ said Haynes.

  Deep breath from the librarian. His eyes seemed to settle on a particular point on the desk. Thinking something over. Melancholy and resignation seemed to wash over him.

  ‘Someone was bound to come back. It’s been longer than I thought.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Haynes.

  The librarian still wasn’t looking at them. Haynes and Leighton shared a glance.

  ‘This book has attracted attention in the past.’

  ‘From whom?’ asked Leighton.

  The librarian looked up.

  ‘Walk with me, please. You can leave those books where they are and see to them after lunch.’

  He turned his back and started walking back towards the office. Haynes glanced at Leighton, then lifted the small volume, held it in his left hand, then gripped his light jacket
in the same hand, the book obscured from view.

  Leighton nodded without looking at him, then walked after the librarian.

  Even though they were barely a few seconds behind him, by the time they arrived at the office, the librarian – his colleague looking on dismally from behind a stack of old books on his desk – had taken a business card out of his drawer and was holding it out for Haynes to see.

  Amanda Raintree, Zurich Insurance plc, London Tel.: 020 7008 1500

  ‘She was here,’ said the librarian. ‘I thought one day she might return.’

  Haynes showed it to Leighton, who looked curiously at him.

  ‘The boss’s wife,’ he said, then he turned back to the librarian.

  ‘You’ve kept that a long time,’ he said, then suddenly wondered if in fact she’d been here more recently than that. That she was still out there, hunting them down, and had spent all this time undercover. A few seconds for his imagination to run away, an instant for it to be quashed again.

  ‘Over ten years,’ he said. ‘Nearer eleven.’

  ‘Yet you remembered it all this time.’

  ‘He remembers everything,’ said a sardonic voice from the other side of the office, much more heavily accented. ‘That is why he’s a librarian. He remembers everything, yet he knows nothing.’

  Haynes looked over at the other librarian, who hadn’t lifted his head as he’d spoken.

  ‘Is that true?’ asked Haynes, turning back. ‘Is that the only reason you remember this, or was there something else?’

  ‘What else could there be?’ asked the librarian.

  ‘Did she stand out in any other way? Did anyone else come to look at the same book? Did anyone come to ask about her?’

  The librarian held his gaze for a few moments, then turned and glanced over his shoulder, up towards the corner of the ceiling and the small CCTV camera. Haynes followed his gaze.

  ‘They didn’t need to.’

  For the first time, Leighton felt a slight chill of fear, the thought that perhaps this undertaking she’d quite happily set out on might be a little too big for her. They were watching, whoever they were.