The Dead Sea Deception (11 page)

‘Well, I’ll take any clue I can get,’ he said. ‘You see any sign of it some place else?’

The man frowned, seeming momentarily troubled or irritated, then countered with a question. ‘Why are you looking for it? Is it important?’

‘Might could be, yeah. It’s got all the intel on it about how that plane come down. There’s a whole lot of people looking all over for this thing.’

The woman nodded. The guy didn’t react at all.

‘Well, keep your eyes open anyway,’ Gayle said, just to make a hole in the silence.

‘We’ll strive to do so,’ the woman promised. Again, as with her partner, there was that measuredness and that weight, like the words had been written down for her to say. And again, the accent was unplaceable but definitely not local. Gayle, for whom
local
was the measure of all things benign, experienced that strangeness as mild discomfort.

The young man reached up a hand to wipe his eye, as though there was a dust speck in it. When he lowered his hand again, there was a smear of red across his face, right under the eye. It gave Gayle a little bit of a shock. Forgetting his manners, he pointed.

‘You’ve got something,’ he said, inanely, ‘on your cheek there.’

‘I weep for witness,’ the man said. Or at least that was what it sounded like.

‘For what?’ Gayle echoed. ‘It looks like you … did you cut yourself or something? It looks like you’re bleeding.’

‘You could perhaps search over there,’ the woman broke in, ignoring Gayle’s solicitude. ‘Where the scree is. If the box had fallen there, it would have slid down into the weeds at the bottom of the bank. It would be out of sight unless you came very close to it.’

Now the measured pace sounded like a lawyer in court, picking his words to skirmish his way around something he wasn’t going to admit to. Gayle wondered whether these two knew something they weren’t saying. He didn’t have a damn thing to hold them on, though, and something about them was still giving him a crawly feeling at the nape of his neck. He just wanted this encounter to be over, and he was about to give them a nod and a thank you kindly, then move on.

The strangers moved first, both at the same time, and without there seeming to be any signal between them. As slow as they talked, when they moved it was like drops of water running on a greasy griddle. They were past Gayle in a split-second, parting to go around him. Wrong-footed, embarrassingly slow, he turned to watch them go. Saw them walking by his car and on up the road, fast and smooth, falling into step with one another like soldiers.

The nearest building – a gas station – had to be five miles up that road, and it wasn’t a walk that anyone would make by choice in the middle of the day. All the same, that seemed to be what the strangers were proposing to do. Was that how they’d gotten here? They just walked from somewhere? How could they do that without having their faces and hands burned all to hell and gone?

Gayle opened his mouth to call after them. A man could die of heatstroke just walking around out here like that, without a hat. But the words sort of died in-between his brain and his mouth. He watched the two figures top a slight rise and walk on out of sight.

With an effort, Gayle pulled his mind back to the task in hand.

This little stretch of the arroyo was empty, too, but he saw plenty of sign that those oddballs had walked around here some: footprints and scuff marks in the sand and the darker dirt of the creek bed, a bit of sage that had been torn up as they walked through it. It looked like they’d done pretty much what he was doing: come down from the road, walked as far as they could along the near bank, then stopped and turned around when they hit a gully they couldn’t cross.

Could just be an afternoon stroll. Drug transaction. Pay-off for some political backscratching. Sexual assignation. No, not the last. The two had something about them that made Gayle believe they were related – very closely related – and his imagination rebelled against the vision of stereo onanism that rose in his mind. He tidied it out of sight and tried to forget about the creepy duo. They hadn’t done anything out of place; had been extremely polite and helpful, in fact, and didn’t have to explain to the law any more than anyone else did what they were doing walking along a dry arroyo on a hot day.

He climbed the bank, abruptly aware that he was sweating like a pig. As he walked back to the car, he could hear Connie’s voice chattering on the radio-phone, asking him to pick up if he was there.

He hooked the handset out through the open window and pressed the talk button.

‘Checking in, Connie,’ he said. ‘I’m on Highwash three miles out from 66. Just working my way up the road, here. You need me?’

‘Hey, Web,’ Connie replied, her voice half broken up with the crackle from the tall rocks up here. ‘You can come back in. We’re all done on that black box thing.’

Gayle swallowed this information with a certain dour resignation. He’d put a lot of hours into this business. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Where’d they find it?’

‘They didn’t.’

‘What?’ Gayle stuck his head in through the car window to shut out the sound of the wind, which had sprung up at just the wrong moment. ‘What did you say?’

‘They didn’t find it. It just stopped transmitting, and they gave up on it. But that FAA woman you’re always talking to said they got everything they needed out of the wreck. The whole damn circus just up and rolled out. She said to tell you bye. Over and out.’

Gayle shoved the phone back on to its rest, feeling more perplexed than aggrieved – although he had to admit that he was pretty sore, when it came down to it. Just gave up? One second it’s crucial, the next it doesn’t matter a damn?

Gayle was a stubborn man and that didn’t sit right with him.

It wasn’t over until he said it was.

An incidental benefit of being a cop was that you got to ignore the congestion charge, central London parking restrictions and the speed limit. Kennedy drove back into London along the A23 with the windows open – not quite like a bat out of hell, but fast enough to air-cool her overclocked imagination.

Three dead historians at the same conference. In the words of Oscar Wilde, that seemed to be considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance. It could still be nothing, probably
was
nothing. Even now, an outrageous coincidence seemed more likely than a ruthlessly efficient killer, stalking and striking down people who had strong opinions about the Rotgut Codex and superannuated Christian sects.

But Stuart Barlow’s death hadn’t been an accident. That was obvious, both from the autopsy and from the physical evidence. Kennedy had mixed opinions about autopsies: sometimes they were more about politics than facts, and politics is the art of the possible. With the physical evidence, she trusted her instincts – and mourned all over again the fact that nobody had bothered to call in a forensics team on the night when Barlow had yoyoed up and down that stairwell. She could be sitting on DNA, fibres, fingerprints, any amount of serviceable stuff, instead of flailing around in the dark looking for a direction.

Maybe on some level, too, she wished this hadn’t come up right now. She’d been living in a kind of suspended animation since the night when Marcus Dell got shot. Or rather, since the night when she’d fired the bullet that put Dell down. It was important to get the grammar right. Heather, active subject, as in
Heather pulled the trigger
. Dell, passive object, as in
the bullet hit Dell in the heart, and tore right on through
.

When you came up for an ARU licence, they tested you for a whole lot of things and mental stability was most of them. They just called it by a lot of different names, like ability to handle stress, emotional intelligence, panic index rating, psychological integration rating and so on. It all came down to the one question: would you lose it if you had to shoot someone or if someone was shooting at you?

And the answer, to put it baldly, was that nobody knew. Kennedy had scored top end on all of those scales. She’d also drawn her weapon on three occasions, and fired it twice, in one case exchanging shots with an armed suspect – a bank robber named Ed Styler who she’d brought down with a bullet in the shoulder. She’d survived all that well enough and never lost a single night’s sleep over it.

Dell was different. She knew why, too, but didn’t want to go there just yet. It was a can of worms that, once opened, could prove to be impossible to square away again. So she soldiered on without a weapon; relieved, really, to be without it for the time being, until the whole mess got sorted out. The problem, though – the wider problem, which made the pending prosecution shrink into a wrong-end-of-the-telescope perspective – was that she might have lost something else along with the gun and the right to carry it: the iron faith in her own judgement that had made carrying it possible in the first place.

She found Harper in the canteen and hooked him right out of
it into one of the interview rooms. There was no way she was having this conversation with anyone else from the division listening in. She closed the door and leaned against it. Harper sat on the desk, still with half a chicken sandwich in his right hand and a can of Fanta in his left. It was four in the afternoon and he was finally getting round to lunch. From his face, she could tell how happy he was with the way the case was going. The sweat-room smelled of piss and mildew, but Harper didn’t seem to mind.

‘Take it from the top,’ Kennedy said.

Harper, with his jaws working, gave her an ironic
salaam
but said nothing. Kennedy had to wait, with as much patience as she could manage, until he’d swallowed the mouthful and washed it down. ‘I got the list and started working through it,’ he said, finally. ‘Got nowhere on the stalker. Nobody else saw him. Nobody else even remembered Barlow talking about him.’

‘Tell me about the deaths,’ Kennedy said, bluntly.

‘Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Catherine Hurt and Samir Devani. They both attended that history conference and they’ve both died since. Amazing, yeah? And you know what’s even better? Hurt pegged it on the same night as Barlow, Devani the day after.’

Kennedy said nothing as she pondered on that timing. It was a very tight spread, by anybody’s reckoning. Out of nowhere, she remembered a garbled line or two from Hamlet: someone asking Death what the big occasion was in the underworld that caused him to take so many princes all on the same night.

‘How did they die?’ she asked.

‘Accidents in both cases. Or they were recorded as accidents. But so was Barlow, right?’ Harper raised his left hand, knocked down the index finger and then the forefinger as he recited the brief litany. ‘Catherine Hurt, hit and run. Devani, electric shock from a badly earthed computer.’

‘Did you get the files?’

‘There’s only a file for Hurt. It’s on my desk, but seriously, there’s sod all in it. No witnesses, no CCTV footage, no nothing.’

Kennedy took that on the chin. She’d heard on a TV documentary that the UK had twenty per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras, but it was a sad fact of twenty-first-century policing that they were never where you needed them to be. ‘Is it just those two?’ she asked Harper. ‘Or are you still working your way through the list?’

‘I’m about two-thirds done. Still waiting on a lot of people to get back to me, though – so I’ve talked to a little under half of them. Before you ask, I’ve been trying to find a link between the three victims, but I haven’t come up with anything so far. Well, apart from the convention itself. They’re not even all historians. Devani is the odd one out – he’s a modern languages lecturer at a community college in Bradford. Hurt is a teaching assistant at Leicester De Montfort. Their names don’t come up together anywhere when you feed them into a search engine.’

Kennedy was surprised at that. In her experience, if you typed any collection of random names into Google, you automatically got a million hits. Maybe the absence of a connection was suspicious and anomalous in itself. ‘Are you all right to keep working through the list?’ she asked Harper.

His chagrin showed on his face. ‘We’ve got two new victims,’ he pointed out. ‘Shouldn’t we go and do some site work?’

‘
Possible
victims. And the sites are as old as Barlow’s. Tomorrow we’ll go out and do some recce. First, let’s make sure we didn’t miss anybody else.’

‘What are you going to be doing?’ Harper demanded, suspicion in his voice.

‘I’m going back to Prince Regent’s, to have another look at
Barlow’s office. His house was burgled a while back. I’m wondering if someone might have gone through his things at the college, too.’

‘What would that prove?’

Kennedy was going on instinct – the indefinable sense that she’d missed something the first time she was in that room – but she didn’t want to say that: it was too hard to defend. ‘For starters,’ she said instead, ‘it would prove that the stalker existed. And it might give us a line on a possible motive. Old artefacts, manuscripts, something like that. Smuggling them, forging them, stealing them. I don’t know. Barlow thought someone was following him and maybe he thought he knew why. I can ask about these other two at the same time – see if anyone at Prince Regent’s knows of any connection between them and Barlow.’ She paused. ‘Do something else for me?’

‘Oh, anything. I’ll be sitting here with all this time on my hands.’