The Dead Sea Deception (28 page)

She made a few more knife-related calls, with nothing more to show for it, and walked out of Division on the dot of five – the first time in seven years that she’d done so.

Izzy was amazed to see her turn up at the flat before six: almost indignant. ‘You’re never back this early,’ she said, gathering up her things. ‘What, weren’t there any crimes today?’

‘I’m Serious Crimes,’ Kennedy said. ‘There were crimes today, but they were funny ones.’

As always, they walked to the door together. ‘Well, he’s in a rotten mood,’ Izzy reported. ‘He was crying earlier and listening to that bloody awful twang-twang-twang music. He was talking about your mum.’

Kennedy was surprised and disconcerted. ‘What did he say about her?’

‘He said he was sorry. “Sorry, Caroline. Sorry I ever hurt you.” Stuff like that.’

Kennedy would have said she was beyond feeling anything for her father now beyond the mixture of pained affection and
half-healed-over resentment that she was so used to. This hurt: it came right on the heels of too much other stuff that made the wound feel raw. She drew in her breath and Izzy realised that she’d somehow put her foot in it.

‘What?’ she said, distressed. ‘I’m sorry, Heather. What did I say?’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just …’ But there was too much to explain from a standing start. ‘My mother’s name was Janet,’ she muttered.

‘Yeah? So who was Caroline? His bit on the side?’

‘No. Just a woman he killed. Goodnight, Izzy.’

She closed the door.

They had no shout the next morning. Summerhill was in the building but kept to himself, and the other detectives scattered early and without consultation. Kennedy was left to cool her heels in the bear pit, and service her knife experts once again – without any joy.

Nothing had come in from Interpol, but she could access their online archives and see if there was anything among the older, written-off cases where no interdepartmental clearances would be necessary.

Interpol’s digital records service had an overly complicated user interface that required you to fill out a whole raft of often irrelevant data parameters before you could start to interrogate the system. But Kennedy had plenty of time on her hands and was feeling bloody-minded enough to hack her way through the digital deadwood to get to the sap within.

And there was some sap, once she got there. Michael Brands had been involved in petty larceny and date rape, but their ages and descriptions were worlds away from the Michael Brand she was looking for. But ten years ago, in Upstate New York, and then seven years ago, in New Zealand, South Island, there were missing persons cases that tripped the Michael Brand search field.

Kennedy drew down what was available on both cases, and was amazed and appalled by what she found.

The New York case: a woman, Tamara Kelly, and her three children, all reported missing by the woman’s husband, Arthur Shawcross, a sales rep for a stationery company. He came home from a week on the road to find the house stripped, his wife and kids vanished into thin air. The day before, a call had been made to the house from a number Shawcross didn’t recognise. It turned out to be registered to a Michael Brand, but subsequent investigation failed to turn up the man himself.

New Zealand: Erwin Gaskell, a carpenter and cabinet-maker, had been away from home for two days, visiting his mother, who was recovering from a heart op. He came home to find the house a burned-out shell. His wife, Salome, and their three children, were gone. Because of the fire, and the suspicion of arson, residents at a nearby motel had been questioned. One of them, Michael Brand, had not been questioned because he had never returned to his room to retrieve the few belongings he had left there. He’d been seen talking to Salome Gaskell on the day she disappeared – or at least, someone answering to his description had been seen. It was a pretty circumstantial description, too: the bald head and the dark eyes stayed in people’s minds.

Woman and three kids, every time. What the hell did that mean? For one thing, that Tillman might be less crazy than he looked. For another, that Michael Brand was in the women and kids business on a hitherto unsuspected scale.

Sex slavery? But why go for whole families, in every case? And why always for families with that exact configuration? Also, why would the women agree to see and talk to Brand, as Rebecca Tillman had and as it seemed each of the other women had, too? What line was he selling them?

Serial murder? Was Brand a psychopath, recreating some
primal moment in his own past? That sounded ridiculous, if he was the same Brand who was able to call up a phalanx of assassins to take out Stuart Barlow and his luckless team.

At that point, momentarily out of ideas and suffering badly from cabin fever, Kennedy just started to improvise wildly. She did a repeat of her knife trawl, calling up museums and archives and reading down the phone to them the strings of letters and numbers from Barlow’s carefully hidden photograph.

P52

P75

NH II-1, III-1, IV-1

Eg2

B66, 75

C45

Nobody admitted to any knowledge as to what they might mean.

Kennedy switched tack, using online search engines. But it was useless because random alphanumeric strings turned up everywhere – in the serial numbers of products and components, the identifying plates of cars and trains, the makes and model numbers of everything under the sun. There was just no viable way to narrow down the search.

She decided, while she was at it, to check everybody else’s case notes on the departmental database, to see what if anything had been added to the sum total of their knowledge. Her log-in didn’t work.

She looked around. None of the other case officers had returned yet, but McAliskey had left his machine switched on and logged in – a disciplinary offence, if anyone had cared to report it. Kennedy crossed to his desk and opened the file from there.

What she saw made her swear at the screen, eyes wide with amazement.

She wasn’t given to storming but her progress from the bear pit to the DCI’s office could fairly be called a serious squall. Rawl seemed amazed to see her.

‘He’s … he’s not taking any—’ she began.

‘I’ll just be a moment,’ Kennedy said, already striding past her.

Summerhill was on the phone. He looked up as she entered, but made no other response. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir. I’m aware of that. We’ll do our best. Thank you. You too.’

He put down the phone and looked across the desk at her, shrugging with his eyebrows to invite her to speak.

‘You cut me out of the case file,’ she said.

‘Not exactly.’

‘My password doesn’t work. What counts as exactly?’

‘It’s an administrative hiccup, Heather. Nothing more. When you’re the subject of a committee of inquiry, all your operational files have to be scrutinised by HR and the IPCC. That inevitably means your security is compromised. All passwords are deactivated and all access codes are revised. You’ll get a new password in a day or so.’

‘And in the meantime, you turn me into the lady who comes round with the goddamned tea.’

‘I don’t know what you—’

Kennedy slapped the print-out down on his desk and he looked at it for a moment before realising what it was: a page from Combes’s notes from the day before, added into the file with a date stamp of 7.30 p.m.

‘Combes saw Ros Barlow yesterday afternoon and she told him to go piss over a five-bar gate,’ Kennedy summarised.

Summerhill nodded. ‘Yes. Well. Your suggestion of asking her if her brother had ever talked about his work was worth following up. But she proved less than cooperative.’

‘Jimmy, she asked for
me
.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘She refused to talk to Combes and she specifically asked for me. When were you thinking of telling me?’

He met her stare, unapologetic. ‘If you read the rest of Sergeant Combes’s notes, you’ll see that he didn’t feel Rosalind Barlow had anything further to add to the testimony she’d already given. He recommended against a follow-up visit.’

‘Screw that!’ Kennedy exploded. ‘She asked for me. Do you think that meant she had nothing to say or do you think it meant she thought Combes was a jumped-up little cartoon prick-and-balls with a squeaky voice and she preferred to talk to a human being?’

‘Kennedy, I’d advise you to moderate your language. I’m not prepared to overlook outbursts against fellow officers.’

Kennedy shrugged helplessly. ‘For the love of Christ,’ she said, her voice strained, ‘am I on this case or am I in the toilet? If you refuse to give me anything substantial to do, Jimmy, what’s the point of my being here?’

Summerhill seemed to perk up at this, as though he’d seen it coming a long way out and felt glad it was finally here. ‘Are you requesting a transfer?’ he asked. He pushed his chair away from the desk back towards the filing cabinet behind it – which Kennedy knew contained run-off copies of all divisional paperwork, including the PD-012 form that she’d advised Harper to fill in with respect to herself.
Officer requesting transfer because of personal factors affecting work effectiveness
.

She laughed.

‘No,’ she said, and Summerhill’s hand, half-lifted, fell into his lap. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Jimmy. I’m not asking for a transfer. I thought we already had this discussion, and I thought we understood each other, but that was just me being naive, wasn’t
it? No, you carry on. And in the meantime, get Rawl to cut me a temporary password. You can keep me on a leash if you like, but do not try to hood me as well.’

She stood, and he shot her a look full of suspicion and dislike. ‘You’re not to speak to Ros Barlow, Heather,’ he told her. ‘That’s not a productive use of your time, and her hostility to this office and this investigation makes her an unreliable witness.’

‘I think it makes her a soulmate, but you’re the boss.’

‘Try to remember that.’

‘If I forget, I’m sure you’ll remind me.’

She left quickly, so that if the urge to punch something overwhelmed her self-control, Summerhill’s face wouldn’t be so temptingly close to hand.

At her desk again, she thought it through.

Summerhill was determined to keep her at the margins of things. Probably, in his own way, he felt absolutely at ease about doing so: she’d had her chance with the case and proved at Park Square that she couldn’t handle it, leaving an officer dead on the ground. Her last-ditch play after the incident committee met had got her back on to the team, but the DCI was telling her in his own charmless way that this was as far as she was going to get.

That left her with three options.

She could shut up and watch the world go by from the comfort of her desk. In which case, she might as well be dead.

She could dust off her earlier ultimatum and try to twist Summerhill’s arm a little further. But she hadn’t been bluffing the first time around, and this time she would be. She had just that little bit more to lose now that she had her job back.

Or …

She took out her mobile, slid it open and thumbed through the call log. She found Tillman’s number easily enough: it was
the only one she didn’t recognise at once. She keyed
CALL BACK
.

‘Hello?’

‘Tillman.’

‘Sergeant Kennedy.’ He didn’t sound surprised, but there was an edge of anticipation in his voice; an implied question.

‘This isn’t an all-or-nothing deal, is it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean. We pool information, that’s all. I’m not asking you to work with me – just to tell me what you know. Let’s agree on one rule, though: no lies, even by omission. No holding things back to get an edge.’

‘And you’ll do the same for me?’

‘You’ve got my word.’

‘Okay.’ She shifted to McAliskey’s desk, where the case file was still open. ‘I’ve got something for you, first off. A freebie because I feel like I owe you one.’ She told him about the other two women – names, places, dates and times. She could hear him scribbling the details down, probably so he could check them with his own contacts. He didn’t react to the news, though, or not in any way that she could read over the phone.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Got all that?’

‘Yes,’ Tillman said. ‘What now?’

‘Twenty questions. You go first.’

For an hour, he grilled her about the case. She started with Stuart Barlow, went on to the other known victims: cause of death, the Ravellers connection, Barlow’s secret project (which as a pretext for multiple homicides sounded just as ridiculous as it always had), the unknown stalker and the shape of the investigation so far. Tillman asked focused and circumstantial questions at every stage. The sort of questions a cop would ask. What had made them decide that Barlow’s death was murder? Had the killers left any fingerprints or DNA traces at any of the
crime scenes? Failing that, had they found any physical evidence at all that proved the link, or were they just working from the fact of a suspicious cluster of deaths? Kennedy gave him what answers she could, and admitted her ignorance wherever she had nothing to offer. When Tillman had run out of questions – or at least, had fallen silent – she interjected some additional points of her own.