The Dead Sea Deception (2 page)

Gayle was about to say something to her, but at that point, as he trudged up the rising gradient of the earthworks, his head crested the ridge and he saw what they were seeing. He stopped dead, involuntarily, his brain too overloaded with that horrible image to maintain any commerce with his legs.

Bassett’s North 40 was sown with corpses: men and women and children, all strewn across the chewed-up earth, while the clothes disgorged from their burst suitcases arced and twisted above them in the searing thermals, as though their ghosts were dancing in fancy dress to celebrate their new-found freedom.

Gayle tried to swear, but his mouth was too dry, suddenly, for the sound to make it out. In the terrible heat, his tears evaporated right off his cheeks before anyone could see them.

The photo showed a dead man sprawled at the foot of a staircase. It was perfectly framed and pin-sharp, and nobody seemed to have noticed the most interesting thing about it, but it still didn’t fill Heather Kennedy with anything that resembled enthusiasm.

She closed the manila folder again and pushed it back across the desk. There wasn’t much else in there to look at anyway. ‘I don’t want this,’ she said.

Facing her across the desk, DCI Summerhill shrugged: a shrug that said
into each life a little rain must fall
. ‘I don’t have anyone else to give it to, Heather,’ he told her, in the tone of a reasonable man doing what needed to be done. ‘Slates are full across the department. You’re the one with the most slack.’ He didn’t add, but could have done,
you know why the short straw is your straw, and you know what has to happen before that stops
.

‘All right,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m slack. So put me on runaround for Ratner or Denning. Don’t give me a dead-ball misallocation that’s going to sit open on my docket until five miles south of judgement day.’

Summerhill didn’t even make the effort of looking sympathetic. ‘If it’s not murder,’ he said, ‘close it. Sign off on it. I’ll back your call, so long as you can make it stick.’

‘How am I meant do that when the evidence is three weeks
old?’ Kennedy shot back, acidly. She was going to lose this. Summerhill had already made up his mind. But she wasn’t going to make it easy for the old bastard. ‘Nobody worked the crime scene. Nobody did anything with the body in situ. All I’ve got to go on are a few photos taken by a bluebell from the local cop-shop.’

‘Well, that and the autopsy report,’ Summerhill said. ‘The north London lab came back with enough open questions to bring the case back to life – and possibly to give you a few starting points.’ He pushed the file firmly and irrevocably back to her.

‘Why was there an autopsy if nobody thought the death was suspicious?’ Kennedy asked, genuinely puzzled.
How did this even get to be our problem?

Summerhill closed his eyes, massaged them with finger and thumb. He grimaced wearily. Clearly he just wanted her to take the file and get the hell out of his morning. ‘The dead man had a sister, and the sister pushed. Now she’s got what she wanted – an open verdict, implying a world of exciting possibilities. To be blunt, we don’t really have any alternative right now. We look bad because we signed off on accidental death so quickly and we look bad because we stonewalled on the autopsy on the first request. So we’ve got to reopen the case and we’ve got to go through the motions until one of two things happens: we find an actual explanation for this guy’s death or else we hit a wall and we can reasonably say we tried.’

‘Which could take for ever,’ Kennedy pointed out. It was a classic black hole. A case that had had no real spadework done at the front end meant you had to run yourself ragged for everything thereafter, from forensics to witness statements.

‘Yes. Easily. But look on the bright side, Heather. You’ll also be breaking in a new partner, a willing young DC who’s only just joined the division and doesn’t know a thing about you.
Chris Harper. Straight transfer from St John’s Wood via the academy. Treat him gently, won’t you. They’re used to more civilised ways over at Newcourt Street.’

Kennedy opened her mouth to speak, closed it again. There was no point. In fact, on one level you had to admire the neatness and economy of the stitch-up. Someone had screwed up heroically – signed off way too fast and then got bitten on the arse by the evidence – so now the whole mess was being handed off to the most expendable detective in the division and a poor piece of cannon fodder drafted in for the occasion from one of the boroughs. No harm, no foul. Or if it turned out there was, nobody who mattered was going to be booked for it.

With a muttered oath, she headed for the door. Leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, Summerhill stared at her retreating back. ‘Bring them back alive, Heather,’ he exhorted her, languidly.

When she got back to her desk, Kennedy found the latest gift from the get-her-out-by-Friday brigade. It was a dead rat in a stainless steel break-back trap, lying across the papers on her desk. Seven or eight detectives were in the bear pit, sitting around in elaborately casual groupings, and they were all watching her covertly, eager to see how she’d react. There might even be money riding on the outcome, judging from the mood of suppressed excitement in the room.

Kennedy had been putting up quietly with lesser provocations, but as she stared down at the limp little corpse, a ruff of blood crusted at its throat where it had fallen on the trap’s baited spike, she acknowledged instantly what she ninety-per-cent already knew – that she wasn’t going to make this stop by uncomplainingly carrying her own cross.

So what were the options? She ran through a few until she
found one that at least had the advantage of being immediate. She picked the trap up and pulled it open, with some difficulty because the spring was stiff. The rat fell on to her desk with an audible thud. Then she tossed the trap aside, hearing it clatter behind her, and picked up the body, not gingerly by the tail but firmly in her fist. It was cold: a lot colder than ambient. Someone had been keeping it in his fridge, looking forward to this moment. Kennedy glanced around the room.

Josh Combes. It wasn’t that he was the ringleader – the campaign wasn’t as consciously orchestrated as that. But among the officers who felt a need to make Kennedy’s life uncomfortable, Combes had the loudest mouth and was senior in terms of years served. So Combes would do as well as anyone, and better than most. Kennedy crossed to his desk and threw the dead rat into his crotch. Combes started violently, making his chair roll back on its castors. The rat fell to the floor.

‘Jesus!’ he bellowed.

‘You know,’ Kennedy said, into the mildly scandalised silence, ‘big boys don’t ask their mummies to do this stuff for them, Josh. You should have stayed in uniform until your cods dropped. Harper, you’re with me.’

She wasn’t even sure he was there: she had no idea what he looked like. But as she walked away, she saw out of the corner of her eye one of the seated men stand and detach himself from the group.

‘Bitch,’ Combes snarled at her back.

Her blood was boiling, but she chuckled, let them all hear it.

Harper drove, through light summer rain that had come from nowhere. Kennedy reviewed the file. That took most of the first minute.

‘Did you get a chance to look at this?’ she asked him, as they turned into Victoria Street and hit the traffic.

The detective constable did a little rapid blinking, but said nothing for a moment or two. Chris Harper, twenty-eight, of Camden Ops, St John’s Wood and the SCD’s much-touted Crime Academy: Kennedy had taken a few moments in-between Summerhill’s office and the bear pit to look him up on the divisional database. There was nothing to see, apart from a citation for bravery (in relation to a warehouse fire) and a red docket, redacted, for an altercation with a senior officer over a personal matter that wasn’t specified. Whatever it was, it seemed to have been settled without any grievance procedure being invoked.

Harper was fair-haired and as lean as a wire, with a slight asymmetry in his face that made him look like he was either flinching or favouring you with an insinuating wink. Kennedy thought she might have run across him once in passing somewhere, a long way back, but if so, it had been a very fleeting contact, and it hadn’t left behind any strong impression for good or bad.

‘Haven’t read it all,’ Harper admitted at last. ‘I only found out I was assigned to this case about an hour ago. I was going over the file, but then … well, you turned up and did the dead rat cabaret, and then we hit the road.’ Kennedy shot him a narrow look, which he affected not to notice. ‘I read the summary sheet,’ he said. ‘Flicked through the initial incident report. That was all.’

‘All you missed was the autopsy stuff, then,’ Kennedy told him. ‘There was sod all actual policing done at the scene. Anything stay with you?’

Harper shook his head. ‘Not a lot,’ he admitted. He slowed the car. They’d run into the back end of a queue that seemed to fill the top half of Parliament Street: roadworks, closing the street down to one lane. No point using the siren, because there was nowhere people could move out of their way. They rolled along, stop-start, slower than walking pace.

‘Dead man was a teacher,’ Kennedy said. ‘A university professor, actually, at Prince Regent’s College. Stuart Barlow. Age fifty-seven. Place of work, the college’s history annexe on Fitzroy Street, which is where he died. By falling down a flight of stairs and breaking his neck.’

‘Right.’ Harper nodded as though it was all coming back to him.

‘Except the autopsy now says he didn’t,’ Kennedy went on. ‘He was lying at the bottom of the staircase, so it seemed like the logical explanation. It looked like he’d tripped and fallen badly: neck broken, skull impacted by a solid whack to the left-hand side. He had a briefcase with him. It was lying right next to him, spilled open, so there again, there was a default assumption. He packed his stuff, headed home for the night, got to the top of the stairs and then tripped. The body was found just after 9 p.m., maybe an hour after Barlow usually clocked off for the night.’

‘Seems to add up,’ Harper allowed. He was silent for a few moments as the car trickled forward a score or so of yards and then stopped again. ‘But what? The broken neck wasn’t the cause of death?’

‘No, it was,’ Kennedy said. ‘The problem is, it wasn’t broken in the right way. Damage to the throat muscles was consistent with torsional stress, not planar.’

‘Torsional. Like it had been twisted?’

‘Exactly. Like it had been twisted. And that takes a little focused effort. It doesn’t tend to happen when you fall downstairs. Okay, a sharp knock coming at an angle might turn the neck suddenly, but you’d still expect most of the soft tissue trauma to be linear, the damaged muscle and the external injury lining up to give you the angle of impact.’

She flicked through the sparse, unsatisfying pages until she came to the one that – after the autopsy – was the most troubling.

‘Plus there’s the stalker,’ Harper said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘I saw there was another incident report in there. Dead man was being followed.’

Kennedy nodded. ‘Very good, Detective Constable. Stalker is maybe overstating the case a little, but you’re right. Barlow had reported someone trailing him. First of all at an academic conference, then later outside his house. Whoever signed off on this the first time around either didn’t know that or didn’t think it mattered. The two incident sheets hadn’t been cross-referenced, so I’d go for the former. But in light of the autopsy results, it makes us look all kinds of stupid.’

‘Which God forbid,’ Harper murmured, blandly.

‘Amen,’ Kennedy intoned.

Silence fell, as it often does after prayers.

Harper broke it. ‘So that stuff with the rat. Is that part of your daily routine?’

‘These days, yeah. It pretty much is. Why? Do you have an allergy?’

Harper thought about that. ‘Not yet,’ he said at last.

Despite its name, the history annexe of Prince Regent’s College was aggressively modern in design: an austere concrete and glass bunker, tucked into a side street a quarter of a mile from the college’s main site on Gower Street. It was also deserted, since term had finished a week before. One wall of the foyer was a floorto-ceiling notice board, advertising gigs by bands Kennedy didn’t know, with dates that had already passed.

The harassed bursar, Ellis, came out to meet them. His face was shiny with sweat, as though he’d come straight from the bureaucratic equivalent of an aerobic workout, and he seemed to see the visit as a personal attack on the good name of the institution. ‘We were told the investigation was closed,’ he said.

‘I doubt you were ever told that by anyone with the authority to say it, Mr Ellis,’ Harper said, deadpan. The official line at this point was that the case had never been closed: that had only ever been a misunderstanding.

Kennedy hated to hide behind weasel words, and at this point felt like she owed little loyalty to the department. ‘The autopsy came back with some unusual findings,’ she added, without looking at Harper. ‘And that’s changed the way we’re looking at the case. It’s probably best to say nothing about this to anyone else on the faculty, but we’ll need to make some further investigations.’

‘Can I at least assume that all this will be over before the start of our summer school programme?’ the bursar asked, his tone stuck halfway between belligerence and quavering dread.