The Dead Sea Deception (17 page)

Kennedy walked Izzy to the door, listening with half an ear to the status report: Peter’s eating and drinking through the day, Peter’s mood, Peter’s incontinence pants. Izzy always considered the information dump as part of the contract, so Kennedy had to listen to it, or at least stand there while Izzy recited.

Finally Izzy left, and Kennedy went to check on Peter for herself. He had the lights out and the TV on – a Channel 4 documentary on the latest immunisation scare – and was sitting in front of it, watching it for the most part, although his gaze also wandered around the walls and floor quite a lot. He was
dressed in trousers and a shirt, but only because Izzy had a phobia of old men wandering around in their pyjamas: she would have chosen the clothes for him and helped him to dress. Peter’s white hair looked wild, his chiselled face all inconstant shadows in the TV’s rippling spotlight, like speeded up footage of clouds scudding over a mountain.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Kennedy said.

Peter looked in her direction and nodded. ‘Welcome home,’ he said, vaguely. He rarely called her by name, and when he did he only had a one in four chance of getting it right. He called her Heather about as often as he called her Janet (her mother), Chrissie (her sister) or Jeannine (her niece). Occasionally he called her Steve (her older brother), even though nobody in the family had seen Steve since he turned eighteen and walked out the door.

Kennedy put the light on and Peter blinked a couple of times, troubled by the sudden glare. ‘You want some toast, Dad?’ she asked him. ‘A cup of tea? Maybe a biscuit?’

‘I’ll wait for dinner,’ Peter said, and returned his attention to the TV. She fixed him a couple of rounds of toasted rye anyway, and brought them in to him. He wouldn’t remember having said no, and he could definitely use the carbs if all he’d had to eat was a bowl of spaghetti sauce. She put the toast on a tray in front of him, along with a cup of instant coffee, and retreated to her bedroom, which had a TV set and a sound system and a desk. It was like the whole of the rest of the place was a granny flat and this one room was her territory. It was smaller than some of the rooms she’d lived in as a student, but it pretty much had all she needed – which at this point in her life sounded a lot more like an indictment than any kind of a boast.

But she felt bad about leaving Peter alone, after being out all evening. It was ridiculous, she knew. The phantom figure of her
sister stood at her ear, delivering a phantom lecture. ‘After what that bastard put us all through …’ She had no defence: it was true. Peter had been a truly awful husband and father, was infinitely more bearable in his current condition, a placeholder for a personality that had gone AWOL. His cruelties, his failings, had shaped her, but so had his example and his expectations. In the long run, none of it mattered. It came down to whether you could walk away, and clearly she couldn’t.

So she took her own coffee back into the living room and sat through the rest of the programme with her father. When it finished and the ads came up, she turned the TV off. ‘So how was your day?’ she asked him.

‘Pretty good,’ he said. ‘Pretty good.’ He never gave any other answer.

Kennedy told him about her murder investigation in a reasonable amount of detail. Peter listened quietly, nodding or murmuring an ‘oh’ from time to time, but when she stopped he didn’t offer any comments or questions. He just stared at her, waiting to see if there was any more to come. Well, she hadn’t expected a reaction. She just felt a compulsion – intermittently, and up to a point – to treat him as a human being, since there was nobody else around who was prepared to do that for him any more.

She went over to the stereo and put some music on: the Legendary Gypsy Queens and Kings, singing
Sounds from a Bygone Age
. Kennedy’s mother, Janet, whose claims to gypsy blood Peter had always declared to be utter nonsense, had listened to nothing but Fanfare Ciocărlia through the year of her final illness. Peter scorned this while she lived, as he scorned most things his wife did and the basis on which she did them, but when she died he cried, for only the second time in his life as far as Kennedy knew. And then he took to playing the album
himself, late in the evening or in the early hours of the morning, in hypnotised silence. And then he started buying Balkan gypsy music in wholesale amounts. Kennedy had no idea whether he enjoyed it or not. She suspected, though, that sometimes, if they hit him at the right time and from the right angle, those albums could function for Peter as a sort of sound construct of his dead wife. The music had the power – intermittently anyway – to change him, both while it was playing and for a little while after it stopped.

Tonight it seemed to work. Peter’s eyes swam into a clearer focus as the skirling fiddle and bombastic accordion clashed with each other for domination of the tune. She only played three tracks, because clarity was a double-edged sword. If he remembered that Janet was dead, his mood would shift into something darker and more unpredictable, and he probably wouldn’t sleep that night.

‘You look tired, Heather,’ Peter said to Kennedy, while the last notes of ‘Sirba’ were still hanging in the air. ‘You’re working too hard. You should be a little more selfish. Look after yourself more.’

‘Like you always did,’ she countered. The bantering tone was wholly assumed. It was more painful than pleasant to hear him talk like himself again. It made her miss him, but it made her hate him, too, as it partially reconstructed him – took him some of the way back to being someone who was responsible for what he did, and could be hated.

‘I worked for you,’ Peter mumbled. ‘You and the kids. What are you working for?’

It was a good question, even if the way he phrased it seemed to confuse her with her mother. She gave a glib answer. ‘The public good.’

Peter snorted. ‘Right, right. The public will thank you the
way it always does, sweetheart. The way it did me.’ He tapped his chest on the
me
. It had been his characteristic gesture once, as though the words
I
and
me
needed an extra assist when they referred to Peter Kennedy.

‘You do what you know how to do,’ she said. A better answer, and Peter accepted it with a laugh and a nod. His eyes were changing again, the light in them softening as his mind slipped off the little island of awareness into the sea of fuzz and static in which it usually floated.

Involuntarily, Kennedy raised her hand and waved goodbye to him.

‘Piss off, Dad,’ she said, gently, and she blinked in quick staccato, half a dozen times, determined that the tear wouldn’t fall.

From her own room, later, Kennedy tried Emil Gassan again. This time she got lucky: someone picked up on the home number. He had a high-pitched, querulous voice, and his accent was pure RP rather than Scots. ‘Emil Gassan,’ he said.

‘Dr Gassan, my name is Heather Kennedy. I’m a detective sergeant with the London Metropolitan Police.’

‘The police?’ Gassan immediately sounded both alarmed and slightly indignant. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m investigating the death of a former colleague of yours – Professor Stuart Barlow.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘It’s possible that there might be something suspect about his death. Particularly in light of the coincidental deaths of two other academics with whom Professor Barlow had dealings.’

‘Are you suggesting that Barlow was murdered? I thought he fell downstairs!’

‘I’m not suggesting anything at this stage, Dr Gassan. Just
gathering information. I wonder if you have a little time to talk to me about Professor Barlow’s translation project.’

‘Barlow? Barlow’s project? Good god, you don’t mean the Rotgut?’

‘Yes. The Rotgut.’

‘Well, I’d hardly dignify that asinine proposal with the term “project”, Sergeant …’ He waited for the prompt.

‘Kennedy.’

‘And for that matter, I’d hesitate to call Stuart Barlow a colleague. He’s barely set his name to paper in the last two decades, did you know that? He floats wild hypotheses on his, what do you call it, Ravellers forum, but a few emails here and there don’t amount to serious scholarship. And as for the idea that anything new could be discovered about the Rotgut Codex at this stage … well, better minds than Barlow’s have foundered on that rock.’ The last statement was accompanied by a sour, supercilious laugh.

‘So when he approached you,’ Kennedy said, ‘and asked if you wanted to be part of his team …’

‘I said no. Emphatically. I didn’t have the time to waste.’

Kennedy chanced her arm. The entire case seemed to hinge on things way outside her comfort zone, and this guy’s arrogance had to be based on at least some degree of knowledge. ‘Do you have the time to explain to me exactly what the Rotgut is, Dr Gassan? I’ve heard various accounts now, but I’m still not clear.’

‘Well, read my book.
Palaeographic Texts: Substance and Substrate
. Leeds University Press, 2004. It’s available on Amazon. I can send you the ISBN number, if you like.’

‘I’m no expert, Dr Gassan. I’d probably get lost in the details. And while I’ve got your ear, so to speak.’

There was a slightly charged silence at the other end of the
line. ‘What was it you wanted to know?’ Gassan demanded at last. ‘I don’t have time to give you a thorough grounding in palaeography, Sergeant Kennedy. Not from a standing start. And even for an introduction, I’d normally expect to charge.’

‘I wish I could afford you,’ Kennedy said. ‘But really, I don’t want to know much. Just what you think Professor Barlow was trying to do, and why it might have mattered – to him or to anyone else in your field. Obviously, from your standpoint, he was making some elementary mistakes. I just wish I had the context to understand where he was going wrong because right now I’m floundering in the dark.’

Another hesitation. Had she gone overboard with the implied flattery? Presumably Gassan wasn’t a fool, whatever he sounded like.

Fool or not, he took the bait. ‘To explain the Rotgut, I’ll need to explain a few basics about Biblical scholarship.’

‘Whatever it takes.’

‘A quick run-through then. Because really, I have other things I need to attend to.’

‘A quick run-through would be great. Is it okay if I record this? I’d like my colleagues to have the benefit, too.’

‘So long as I’m credited,’ Gassan said, warily.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Very well, Sergeant. How much do you know about the Bible?’

TRANSCRIPT OF STATEMENT TAKEN FROM DR EMIL GASSAN, 23 JULY INSTANT, COMMENCING 10.53PM.