The Dead Sea Deception (32 page)

The one area where she did make a little progress was in cross-checking the witness statements from Park Square, as taken down and collated by Stanwick and McAliskey. The first time around, she’d missed the account they’d obtained from Phyllis Church, a desk clerk at the car rental agency who had rented the white Bedford van to Sarah Opie’s killers. (That had been yet another promising lead that went nowhere: the men had used extremely good fake ID, identifying them as Portuguese wine merchants in London for a trade show.)

Church’s description of the two men was broadly in keeping with everybody else’s. She remembered their tightly curled black hair and pale complexions, had wondered if they were related, since they shared these striking features. But she also said that one of them must have been injured because he’d been bleeding.

Kennedy read the account three times, absently highlighting different words as she chewed it over.

It was the younger one. He wiped his eye. Then, when I was photocopying his passport for the file, I looked at him and I thought he was crying. But it was blood. He had blood coming
out of his eye. Only a little bit. As though he was crying, like I said, but blood instead of tears. It was a bit creepy, really. Then he saw me looking at him and he turned round, so I couldn’t see any more. And the other one said something to him in Spanish. Well, I suppose it was Spanish anyway. I don’t speak it. And the younger one went outside to wait. I didn’t see him again after that
.

The words stirred an echo, made Kennedy’s memory dredge up an image of the man who had killed Harper. It was true: there had been red tears running down his cheeks. In the chaos and horror of that moment, she’d forgotten it until now. It could so easily have been a trick of the light. But no. When the other man turned to face her, to aim at her, his eyes had been bloodshot too. The pale face and reddened orbs had given him the look of a dissipated saint, drunk on communion wine.

She did some research on congenital conditions and drug side effects.
Bloodshot eyes; bleeding eyes; bleeding tear ducts; weeping blood; ocular lesions
. These and many variations on them told her nothing beyond the obvious. Almost anything could rupture the tiny capillaries in the eye, from a strong cough or sneeze to high blood pressure, diabetes or blunt force trauma. Changes in external air pressure could do it, too, but any physical exertion would be enough in itself, even in people who had good overall fitness.

Weeping blood was something else again. It had a name, haemolacria, but that just described the symptom. The actual phenomenon seemed to be much rarer – and more often associated with statues of Christ or the Virgin Mary than with medical conditions. A cancerous tumour in the tear duct could bring it on. So could certain rare forms of conjunctivitis. Kennedy decided to rule out for the moment the possibility that the Park Square killers could both simultaneously have been suffering from one of those conditions.

A long article on a fringe medical website discussed the spontaneous occurrence of blood-enriched tears in the adherents of ecstatic religions during rituals where gods were called down into them. It turned out, though, that there were no authenticated instances. The article leaned heavily on anecdotal sources from the Caribbean in the nineteenth century: voodoo bokors claiming to have Baron Samedi or Maître Carrefour riding them, and producing bloody tears and bloody sweat by way of a clinching argument. Stage magic, most likely. Another dead end.

She called Ralph Prentice in the police morgue, an old not-quite-friend with whom she hadn’t spoken since the shooting of Marcus Dell and the subsequent loss of her ARU licence. He made no reference to either of those things, though he must certainly have heard.

‘I was looking for your help on something,’ Kennedy said.

‘Go for it,’ Prentice invited her. ‘You know I’m a goldmine of useless information. And the three stiffs on my table this morning are all a good deal less attractive than you.’

‘I got lucky, huh?’ Kennedy said.

‘Oh yeah. I had a real looker in yesterday.’

‘Leaving your sex life out of this, Prentice, do you know anything that could make people weep tears with blood in them?’

‘Oestrus,’ Prentice said, promptly.

It was completely irrelevant, but momentarily stopped Kennedy in her tracks. ‘What?’

‘Oestrus. Ovulation. Some women do it every month. If you’re aiming to get pregnant, it’s sometimes a pretty reliable marker.’

‘“Some women”?’

‘It’s pretty damn rare. Maybe two or three in a million.’

‘Okay, what about men?’

‘Not so much. I’d imagine you could get an infection of the
tear duct itself that would lacerate the inner surface and cause a little blood leakage. In fact, I’m sure conjunctivitis can bring it on – although just plain old bloodshot eyes are the more usual symptom there.’

‘Two men at the same time. The two men who killed Chris Harper last week.’

‘Ah.’ A long silence on the other end of the line. ‘Well,’ Prentice said at last, ‘leaving aside the scenario where one of them gets an eye infection and passes it on to the other by reckless, close-up winking, two possibilities spring to mind.’

‘Which are?’

‘Drugs. Stress. Possibly some combination of the two.’

‘What drugs, exactly?’

‘No drugs I’ve ever heard of,’ the pathologist admitted. ‘But that doesn’t mean it ain’t so, Kennedy. I’ve got a formulary sitting behind me on the shelf that lists twenty-three thousand pharmaceutical delights – with a good thousand of them coming online in the last twelve months.’

‘Is there a list of possible side effects?’

‘Always. That’s one of the things the book is for. It lets doctors see if there are any contra-indications for a particular patient. Like you wouldn’t prescribe venlafaxine to someone who already had high blood pressure because it would make their heart explode.’

‘Got you. Well, could you do a search for me, Prentice? See which drugs list haemolacria as a—’

‘Twenty-three thousand different compounds, Heather. I already told you that, remember? Sorry, but there aren’t enough hours in the day, or days in the week. And I have my own job to do here.’

She adopted a tone of contrition. ‘Understood. I’m sorry, Ralph, I wasn’t thinking. But there’d be online formularies,
right? Places where you could just run this stuff through a search engine?’

‘Bound to be,’ Prentice admitted. ‘But you have to understand, those lists of side effects run to three or four pages sometimes. Any condition that manifested in the trials, even if it only showed up in one patient, has to be put in there. So you’re probably going to find that you get a hundred or so drugs where the literature cites blood in bodily secretions as a possible concomitant. I honestly wouldn’t bother, unless you’ve got some other way of narrowing it down.’

Kennedy thanked him and hung up. She went online anyway, found an internet drugs database run by a hospital trust in New York State as a service to local hypochondriacs, and did the search. But Prentice had overestimated: only seventeen drugs listed haemolacria as a rare but known side effect. All were derivatives of methamphetamine, apparently designed to treat either attention-deficit disorder or exogenous obesity.

Around about this time, Stanwick walked into the bear pit, followed a few seconds later by Combes. Kennedy had no real enthusiasm for their company, and they clearly felt the same about her, but as she was waiting for Izzy to come by with the key to Dovecote Farm, she didn’t want to leave her desk. She saved the drug list and closed the file, devoted some time to updating the case file with what she’d found out from John Partridge about the knife.

Her phone rang, and she picked up.

‘Hey.’ Tillman’s voice.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Can we talk later?’

‘I’d rather we talked now. Before you leave.’

‘What about?’

‘That perennial David Bowie favourite,
The Thin White Duke
.’

She hesitated, torn. ‘Where are you?’

‘St James’s Park. Your side.’

‘I’ll see you there.’

She grabbed her coat and walked.

She strode the length of Birdcage Walk without seeing Tillman; and the only birds she saw were pigeons working the tourists there. The mayor’s office considered the birds enemies of the state and hired Harris hawks from private aviaries to chase them from Trafalgar Square, where their excrement caused an estimated eight million pounds of damage every year. The pigeons just moved a mile or so south and waited for the heat to die down.

But the heat was on full force right then. The sunlight hit the ground, the trees in the park, the back of Kennedy’s neck, like a rain of tiny hammers. Bright sunlight always seemed somehow out of place in London: something the mayor’s office would no doubt control if it could.

When she got to the corner of Great George Street, and the massive grey fascia of the Churchill Museum, Kennedy stopped. There were a lot more people here, and it occurred to her that any one of them could be someone assigned to her as a watcher: a friend or associate of the men who had killed Chris Harper. She realised then that she had been unconsciously scanning every face that passed her, looking for that tell-tale combination of features – the pale skin and black hair – that the Park Square killers had shared. A young couple walked by, their heads leaning inward, the man murmuring something into the woman’s ear, too low for anyone outside their charmed circle to overhear.
Target acquired
, perhaps. A hawk-faced man in shirtsleeves who moved purposefully towards her turned out to be clearing a way for a crocodile of children heading towards the museum.

Kennedy stood at the junction of the two roads, hemmed in by towering neo-classical arcades like the barred sides of a sheep
pen. The sunlight on her back felt like a hand pushing her, herding her. She thought of Opie, dancing jerkily as her body absorbed the kinetic energy of three bullets; Harper bleeding out in her lap; the moment of her fatal hesitation as the gun was pointed at her.

This was no way to live. No way to think. She saw her future foreshadowed in the poisoned filaments of fear and uncertainty that turned inside her mind, in the subtle shadow that had come between her and the world: a possible future anyway. She could see herself declining into a more profound uselessness even than her father’s, a paralysis like death.

She turned around. Tillman stood leaning against a lamp post a few feet away, watching her with bleak patience. She crossed to him.

‘Okay,’ he said, without preamble. ‘Two nights ago, I check into a fleabag B&B in Queen’s Park. It looked clean enough, but last night I go back there and it’s already picked up an infestation.’

‘Wait. You mean there were—’

‘Two charming young men, scarily close to identical, waiting for me to come home. Pale skin, black hair. The same two I met on the ferry, I think. They almost killed me back then, and they’d definitely have killed me last night if I’d walked into their line of sight. And when I tried to double around behind them instead, they melted like snow in the Sahara.’

Kennedy absorbed this news in silence, while Tillman stared at her, waiting for a response.

‘The identical features,’ she said at last. ‘I think it’s kind of an optical illusion. They’ve got a way of moving, and a cast of expression, that’s sort of a signature. It makes you ignore obvious differences of age and build.’

‘Screw the family resemblance,’ Tillman said, without heat but with a grim emphasis. ‘Sergeant, they’re up on my comms.
That means they’re up on yours, too. If you’ve told anyone about this farmhouse, or put it into your case file, or taken a call from Ros Barlow where she told you the key was coming, I’d lay a pound to a punch in the throat they know where the place is by now and they’re there before you.’

‘I haven’t told anybody,’ Kennedy said.

‘Or written it, anywhere? Don’t you have to do that when there’s a break in the case?’

‘Yeah, but I haven’t. Nobody knows except us, Leo. And I’m keeping it that way.’

‘I want to come with you.’

‘No. We’ve been over this. First pass is just me. Then I’ll leak you the address.’

‘Okay.’ He said it with huge reluctance. ‘You’ll need my new number. I switched, just in case.’

He gave it to her and she wrote it on the inside of her wrist. ‘You could be getting in over your head, Kennedy,’ he told her.

She walked away without answering. She’d been in over her head ever since Harper died, and she knew that Tillman had been in far deeper, for a whole lot longer. The question now was whether either of them would make it back to the surface before their lungs gave out.

In the bear pit, a FedEx package was sitting dead centre on Kennedy’s desk. Izzy had arrived in her absence and handed it in at the street desk with a note for her. It read,
GOT A PACKAGE FOR YOU, BABE. GOT A BIG, BIG PACKAGE. YOU WANT TO FEEL IT? DO YOU? DO YOU? – LOTS OF LOVE
, I
. Kennedy blushed furiously – partly at the thought of Combes or one of the other assholes around her reading the note, but mostly at the thought of calling up the sex line that Izzy worked on and talking dirty to her.

She pulled her mind out of the gutter with an effort. Combes and Stanwick, still working on something together off in the far corner, didn’t look towards Kennedy or seem to notice her. But even if they’d sneaked a look at the package, they wouldn’t have found any mention of Ros Barlow on the address label. It identified the sender as Berryman Sumpter, Investment Consultants.