The Dead Sea Deception (27 page)

Summerhill heard all of them out, interpolating questions and suggestions. He kept it fast, kept up a sense of urgency and purpose. Then he paused when he got to Kennedy.

‘Anything from your end, Detective Sergeant?’ he asked, with suspicious mildness. Nothing had been assigned to her, and she’d only been out of hospital a day. Maybe that glint in the DCI’s eye was kindled by the expectation of a ‘no’.

‘I want to follow up on the murder weapon,’ Kennedy said. ‘I mean, the other murder weapon. We’ve got all this intel on the
gun, but nothing on the knife that killed Harper. I think it’s worth—’

‘Wide, three-inch blade,’ Combes said. ‘Very sharp. Probably angled at the tip. Is there anything else you want?’ He talked over his shoulder, without looking at her.

‘I think it’s worth following up,’ Kennedy went on, still talking to Summerhill. ‘This Michael Brand had a foreign accent, according to witness statements, and in Luton the assailant with the gun spoke to me in what I’m fairly certain was a foreign language. Maybe all three men are from the same region – the same country. The knife was of a very odd design. It’s just possible that it’s geographically specific. If it is, we might end up with enough data for a shout-out to another force.’

Summerhill looked unimpressed, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. ‘Did you see the knife clearly enough?’ he asked. ‘Really? Clearly enough to recognise it again if you saw it?’

Kennedy nodded at the flip-chart in the corner of the room, with some marker pens left over from somebody else’s meeting. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Go ahead.’

She crossed to the board, took a pen and began to draw what she’d seen. Behind her, someone muttered, ‘Can you tell what it is yet?’ and someone else laughed. She ignored them, trying to remember the exact shape of that weird, ugly blade. It had only been as long as the knife’s handle, and thicker, and it was asymmetrical, flaring out at the top on one side like one half of the head of a mushroom. It looked clumsy and unfit for purpose, but it had been as sharp as a razor and it had done for Chris Harper on a single pass.

She put the pen back and turned to face the rest of the team. ‘Like that,’ she said, going back to her seat.

They stared at it. ‘Okay,’ McAliskey said, laconically. ‘It’s distinctive.’

‘Could be a smoothing knife for plaster,’ Cummings observed. ‘Or a cake slice. Doesn’t look much like a murder weapon, though.’

‘I’d like to talk to someone at the Royal Armouries,’ Kennedy said to Summerhill. ‘Unless you need me for anything else. I’d also like to go back over the Ravellers message board archives and see if there’s any information there about what Barlow was trying to do with his Rotgut project.’

‘There isn’t,’ said Combes. ‘We already went through that stuff. Barlow didn’t put anything up on the boards except that first call for volunteers. Nobody got to hear what he wanted them to volunteer for except the people he chose to be his team, and, oops, we just ran out of them, didn’t we?’

‘That’s enough, Sergeant Combes,’ Summerhill growled. ‘Yes. Fine. You do that, Kennedy. The URLs and access codes are in the case file.’

‘I’d also like to talk to Ros Barlow again.’

‘The professor’s sister? Why?’

‘Because the professor talked to her about Michael Brand, and Michael Brand now seems to be central to the case – whether you think of him as a witness or as a suspect.’ She was uncomfortably aware as she made this proviso that it was a smokescreen. After talking to Tillman, she was definitely thinking of Brand as the villain of the piece. She’d need to watch that. ‘Also, if Barlow was keeping the project close to his chest as far as the forum was concerned, it’s at least worth asking if he talked about it at home.’

Summerhill nodded, but looked to Combes. ‘Follow that up, Josh,’ he said, and Combes nodded, scribbling a note to himself.

‘She already knows me,’ Kennedy pointed out, trying not to lose her temper.

‘Let’s not get territorial, Sergeant Kennedy.’ Summerhill clasped his hands together as though about to lead the group in a prayer, then opened them again, palms up. ‘Call me if you get anything. Otherwise, case notes on my desk for six. What are you waiting for, gentlemen? Peerages?’

They folded up their tents and scattered. So Summerhill was keeping her on the farm, Kennedy reflected as she walked back to the bear pit. Or trying to anyway. But he couldn’t tell her not to leave the building. He could only assign all the promising leads to other people.

Which just meant she had to turn up some other leads.

Her call to the Royal Armouries was answered by an intern, who left her on hold for a long time and then put her through to a Ms Carol Savundra – the acquisitions manager for the collections. Savundra was perfunctory: her tone said that she had a full in-tray, a short fuse and zero time or patience for unusual requests that came in via unorthodox channels. Kennedy didn’t have high hopes, but she described the knife anyway.

‘Nothing springs to mind,’ Savundra said.

‘Well, can I fax you a sketch of the blade? It might spark an association – or you could circulate it around your colleagues.’

‘By all means,’ said Savundra, but she didn’t volunteer the number until Kennedy asked for it, and was vague as to when she might be able to get back in touch. ‘To be honest, antiquities are a smaller and smaller part of what we do.’

‘This knife was used in a recent murder.’

‘Really? Well, go ahead and send it in. Perhaps once I see it I’ll have a flash of inspiration.’

Kennedy drew the knife again, on an A4 sheet, and faxed it over.

Next she tried Sheffield Knives, where she spoke to a Mr Lapoterre, their principal design engineer. He was a lot friendlier, but had never heard of anything remotely resembling what Kennedy described. He called her back as soon as he got the fax, but only to confirm that he was clueless. ‘We do a lot of knives with asymmetrical blades,’ he said, ‘but that’s a new one on me.’

‘It doesn’t remind you of knives produced in a particular part of the world?’ Kennedy coaxed, a little desperate.

‘It doesn’t remind me of anything at all. It’s like – if you found the skeleton of a bird, you’d know it was a bird because the bones would be in the right places for a bird’s bones. This isn’t anything. It doesn’t fit any category I’ve got a name for. Sorry.’

Kennedy hoped for better from the British Knife Collectors’ Guild and the US Office of Strategic Services, which included knife procurement for the American army in its online boast-list, but neither was of any help.

Discouraged, she turned to her other job for the day: the old message board threads of the Ravellers, which other people had trawled before her without result. Kennedy logged on to the forum and used the access code to get into the archived directories. Immediately she saw the scale of the task and realised that – however categorical Combes had sounded – he hadn’t been through this stuff. There were seven thousand pages of it, or rather seven thousand threads, each of which just ran on until it stopped. There had to be tens of thousands of posts. Probably a couple of months’ work just to read through it all once.

Maybe you could sort it in some way. The site had no search engine, but she knew how to make the department’s bespoke engine, which had been written by MoD wonks, search a specific domain. Barlow’s nom de forum was written on the file under the access codes:
BARLOW PRCL
, his surname and his college ident.
Evidently the Ravellers didn’t have so many members that they needed to get tricky and postmodern with their IDs.

A first pass showed her that Barlow had posted comments on two hundred and eighteen threads, seventy one of them threads he’d started. She directed her attention to those, first of all.

Immediately she ran into the same problem that Harper had complained about. The subject headers, which in theory stated the theme of each thread, were so arcane that in most cases they provided no clue at all to their possible contents.

AWMC Catal-Hyuk omit/revise?

Medial sigma misallocations by period stat 905

Greensmith 2B won’t fly

Proposed sub-fold matches for Branche Codex in M1102

She clicked on a few threads at random. In the older ones, as she might have expected, the Dead Sea Scrolls got a lot of mentions. Barlow picked fights with existing readings, proposed counter-readings of his own, was shouted down or applauded or condescended to.

Then the Scrolls faded out of the picture by degrees, and other things trickled in, the focus still on translation and textual interpretation, but the texts now mostly New Testament – odd fragments of gospels identified by strings of letters and numbers. Barlow’s views often seemed to be controversial, but Kennedy couldn’t tell why because the arguments were too abstruse and the in-jokes too thick on the ground.

Eventually, she found the thread she was looking for. The header, as Opie had already told her, was:
Does anyone have any appetite for a new look at the Rotgut?
Under that heading, a couple of terse sentences:
I’m thinking of coming at the Rotgut Codex from a new angle – for fun, and for a book I’m writing, not for funding. Hard slog, endless data crunching, possible fame and fortune. Anyone interested?

It sparked a short chain of comments, most of them pugnacious or derisive. Why go back to the Rotgut? And without funding? Barlow couldn’t be serious. There was nothing new to find there, and the codex probably wasn’t even a translation, just a mash-up. The positive responses came from
HURT LDM
and
DEVANI
[field left blank]. Nothing from Sarah Opie. Barlow promised to get in touch with his collaborators by phone, and the thread petered out after a few more unsympathetic heckles from other forum members. Then, much later – almost two years later, according to the header, and only three months before Barlow’s death – another reply appeared, from
BRAND UAS
.
Very excited by what you’ve achieved so far. Would love to talk, and maybe get you over a hump
.

After that, nothing.

After that, fatal falls down darkened stairwells, electrified computers, hit-and-run drivers and daggers drawn in daylight.

So how did Barlow reply to Brand? Kennedy wondered. He didn’t respond on the thread itself, even to ask for a contact number. Maybe he accessed Brand’s profile and picked up his contact information from there. She tried and found there was none. Brand’s profile was just a name, nothing else.

UAS
, she discovered in an on-site registry, meant University of Asturias, Spain. But if Barlow had gone by that route, he’d have found out at once that Brand was a fraud. Presumably, trusting that nobody would be on a historical forum except historians, he hadn’t bothered to do that.

A private message, then. Private messages had a different access code, but the moderator of the Ravellers board had provided that, too. Kennedy opened the archive in a different window, found that the data was stored by member ID. Under Barlow’s name, a couple of dozen messages, but not to any member of the project team.

There was a message to Sarah Opie, a little later than the correspondence with the other three team members:
Sarah, you remember the conversation we had at the Founders’ dinner? Do you think it would be possible to do what I was asking for, using your own system, or your work machines? Call me, and let’s discuss
.

And one message to Michael Brand, dated on the same day as his forum post:
Mr Brand, you intrigue me. I know Devani talked to you at FBF, but I also know he didn’t tell you anything. How did you hear about us? Please don’t reply through the forum. I’d rather dampen speculation on this than inflame it. My college extension is 3274
.

Nothing after that. Nothing that seemed to relate to the ongoing project anyway. On an impulse, she searched through the other Ravellers’ private messages to see if anyone mentioned the Rotgut Codex there. Probably she was in technical breach of the search warrant, but it would only matter if she turned anything up, and she didn’t. The Rotgut wasn’t a hot topic. Nobody was gossiping about Barlow’s big project or speculating about what it was for. Nobody seemed to give a damn. Of the message headers she could actually understand, most seemed to relate to money – research grants, departmental budgets, per diems, bursaries, bids to the Lottery fund, capital allocations, loose change found behind sofa cushions. Nobody had enough and nobody knew where the next pay cheque was coming from.

It was tough all over, except for Stuart Barlow and his little band of irregulars: they’d been doing it for fun. And they were dead.

The day passed in this almost directionless searching, grindingly slow and inert. One of the breaks in routine occurred when Kennedy went over to Harper’s desk to clear it of any case-related paperwork that might still be there. Underneath a
stack of unrelated intra-departmental rubbish, she found the Interpol data requests he’d filled in on Michael Brand. These were the originals, kept because what had been sent out were faxes. Looking them over, Kennedy found that Harper had made an elementary mistake. He’d only asked to be copied on cases in which Michael Brand had been linked as a suspect or listed as a potential witness. There was a huge middle ground in which Brand’s name might have come up in other people’s testimony, and she wanted to see those listings too. She sent an amended request – the same form, with a few boxes ticked. Because it was the same form, she didn’t need to bounce it back up to Summerhill for authorisation, but she added her own signature and ID at the bottom and – with a brief ache of unhappiness – crossed out Harper’s.