The Dead Sea Deception (6 page)

All this time, Harper had been skirmishing around in the books and papers – a token effort, but maybe he felt that having missed the mark with Napoleon, he had nothing to lose by bobbing for insights a second time. This time he held up what looked like a picture, but turned out to be a news clipping, pasted neatly on to card and then framed. It had been leaning against one of the legs of the desk. The headline read, ‘Nag Hammadi Fraud: Two Arrested’. The man in the accompanying photo was recognisable as a much younger Stuart Barlow. His face wore an awkward, frosty smile.

‘Your man had a criminal record?’ Harper demanded.

Ellis actually laughed. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘not at all. That was his triumph – about fifteen years ago, now, perhaps longer. Stuart was called in as an expert witness in that case because his knowledge of the Nag Hammadi library was so extensive.’

‘What was the case?’ Kennedy asked. ‘And while we’re on the subject, what’s Nag Hammadi?’

‘Nag Hammadi was the most important palaeographical find of the twentieth century, inspector,’ Ellis told her. She didn’t bother to correct him on her rank, though out of the corner of her eye she saw Harper roll his eyes expressively. ‘In Upper Egypt, just after the end of the Second World War, near the town of Nag Hammadi, two brothers went digging in a limestone cave. They were only interested in finding guano – bat excrement – to use as
fertiliser for their fields. What they found, though, was a sealed jar containing a dozen bound codices.’

‘Bound what?’ Harper asked.

‘Codices. A codex is a number of pages sewn or fastened together. The first books, essentially. They began to be used in the early Christian era, where up to that time, the norm would have been to write on scrolls or single sheets of parchment. The codices in the Nag Hammadi find turned out to be texts from around the first and second century AD: gospels, letters, that sort of thing. Even a heavily rewritten translation of Plato’s
Republic
. An incredible treasure trove from a period just after Christ’s death, when the Christian church was still struggling to define its identity.’

‘How did that become a court case?’ Harper asked, cutting off the lecture just as the bursar took a deep breath for what looked like another, bigger info drop. Deflected, he looked both indignant and slightly at a loss.

‘The court case came much later. It concerned forged copies of Nag Hammadi documents, which were being sold online to dealers in antiquities. Stuart appeared as a witness for the prosecution. I think he was there mainly to give an opinion on the physical differences between the original documents and the forgeries. He knew every crease and ink stain on those pages.’

Harper put the article down and rummaged some more. Ellis’s face took on a pained expression. ‘Detective, if you’re planning to conduct an extensive search, can I please get on with my duties and come back later?’

Harper looked a question at Kennedy, who was still thinking about the court case. ‘What was the verdict?’ she asked the bursar.

‘Equivocal,’ Ellis said, a little sullenly. ‘The dealers – a husband and wife, I think – were found guilty of handling the
fraudulent items, and of some technical infringements relating to proper documentation, but innocent on the forgery charge, which was the main one. They had to pay a fine and some of the court’s costs.’

‘As a result of Professor Barlow’s testimony?’

Ellis made an ‘oh!’ face, finally seeing where she was going. ‘Stuart wasn’t that big a part of the case,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘To be honest, everybody thought it was funny that he set so much store by it. I think most of the relevant evidence came from the people who’d bought the forged documents. And as I said, it only resulted in a fine. I don’t really think …’

Kennedy didn’t either, but she filed the point away for later. It would be worth following up if they drew a blank on everything else. Not that everything else amounted to very much, so far. ‘Why hasn’t Professor Barlow’s sister collected all this?’ she asked. ‘She’s the only surviving relative, isn’t she?’

‘Rosalind. Rosalind Barlow. She’s in our files as next of kin,’ Ellis agreed. ‘And we’ve corresponded with her. She said she wasn’t interested in any of Stuart’s things. Her exact words: “Take what you want for the college library and give the rest to charity.” That’s probably what we’ll do, eventually, but it will take some time to sort through it all.’

‘A lot of time,’ Harper agreed, adding after a beat, ‘All good here, Inspector?’

She shot him a warning look, but his expression was as bland as runny custard. ‘All good,’ she said, ‘Detective Constable. Let’s go.’

She was heading for the door as she spoke, but she hesitated. Something had registered on her inner eye, without her realising it, and was now clamouring to be admitted to her conscious attention. Kennedy knew better than to ignore that fish-hook tug. She slowed to a halt and looked around once more.

She almost had it, when Ellis jangled his keys and broke the slender thread by which she was pulling the thought up into the daylight. She shot him a glare, which made him falter slightly.

‘There are other things I need to do,’ he said, with no conviction at all.

Kennedy breathed out deeply. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Ellis,’ she said. ‘We may have to ask you some further questions later, but we won’t need to take up any more of your time today.’

They headed back to the car, Kennedy turning over in her mind the little they knew about this already badly mangled case. She needed to talk to the dead man’s sister. That was priority number one. Maybe Barlow really did have a nemesis in the palaeographical arena; or a student he’d gotten pregnant, or a younger brother he’d stiffed in some way that might have left a festering grudge. You were about ten times more likely to catch a killer by having his name given to you directly than you ever were by climbing a ladder of clues. And they didn’t have a ladder as yet. They didn’t even have a rung.

Yes, they did. The stalker, the guy who Barlow had said was following him. That was the other way into this. Harper was going to hate her, because she was determined to talk to the sister herself, so most of the grunt work in all of this would fall on him.

In the car, she laid it on the line for him, forwards and backwards.

‘When Barlow said he was being followed,’ she said, reading from the file notes, ‘he was at some kind of an academic conference.’

‘The London Historical Forum,’ Harper said. He had been flicking through the file at odd moments in the course of their
visit, evidently to some effect. ‘Yeah. He said the guy was hanging around in the lobby and then he saw him again in the car park.’

‘I’m wondering if anyone else saw him. Barlow didn’t give us much of a description, but maybe we could fill in the gaps. Maybe someone even knew the guy. There would have been dozens of people there after all. Maybe hundreds. The organisers would have a contact list. Phone numbers. Email addresses.’

Harper gave her a wary look.

‘We share the cold-calling, right?’

‘Of course we do. But I’m going to see Barlow’s sister first. You’ll have to chase it by yourself until I get back.’

Harper didn’t look happy, but he nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What else?’

Kennedy was mildly impressed. He’d read her expression accurately, knew there was more to come. ‘You’re going to take a lot of shit for working with me,’ she said. ‘That’s just the way it is right now.’

‘So?’

‘So you can get out of it really easily. Go to Summerhill and say we’ve got personal differences.’

There was a pause.

‘Do we?’ Harper asked.

‘I don’t even know you, Harper. I’m just doing you a favour. Maybe doing myself one, too, because if you’re in with those monkeys, I’d rather have you outside the tent than inside – and you’d rather be there, because I’ll sure as hell pass the pain along when it comes.’

Harper tapped the steering wheel idly with a thumbnail, blowing out first one cheek and then the other. ‘This is my first case as a detective,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘Two hours in and you’re already trying to kick me off it.’

‘I’m giving you the option.’

Harper turned the key and the engine of the antiquated Astra roared gamely – an old house cat pretending to be a tiger.

‘I’ll keep it open,’ he said.

As he’d planned to do, Tillman drove the rental car to the outskirts of Erzurum, where he left it way off the road hidden under a few tree branches and armloads of scrub. He’d hired it using a false name, which was different from the false name on the passport he’d shown at the Georgian and Turkish borders.

From a bar on Sultan Mehmet Boulevard, he placed a call – untraceable as far as local law enforcement was concerned – to the police in Magas, making sure they knew about the body. They’d find the bound and gagged guards, if someone else hadn’t already, and nobody would die except Kartoyev. Not mercy, obviously: just a habit of mind that Tillman put down to neatness or professional pride.

He wasn’t planning to stick around long, but he wanted to make a couple more calls before he went off the radar again. The first was to Benard Vermeulens – a cop, but a cop who, like Tillman, had done both regular military and mercenary service before coming back into civilian life. Now he worked for the UN mission in Sudan, and he had access to all kinds of unlikely but topical information, which he was sometimes prepared to share.

‘
Hoe gaat het met jou
, Benny?’ Leo asked, the one Flemish phrase that Vermeulens had ever succeeded in teaching him.

‘Mother of god. Twister!’ Vermeulens’ hoarse, burring voice made the phone vibrate in Tillman’s hand. ‘
Met mij is alles goed!
What about yourself, Leo? What can I do for you? And don’t bother saying nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing,’ Tillman admitted. ‘It’s the usual thing.’

‘Michael Brand.’

‘I heard he was in London. Could still be there. Can you turn over the usual stones? I want to know if his name turns up on anything official. Or anything at all, for that matter.’

‘
Joak
. I’ll do that, Leo.’

‘And the other usual thing?’

‘Now there, I have bad news.’

‘Somebody’s looking for me?’

‘Somebody is looking for you very hard. For two weeks now. Lots of searches, lots of questions. Mostly three or four elbows in the chain, each time, so I can’t get a glimpse of who’s asking. But they’re asking like they mean it.’

‘Okay. Thanks, man. I owe you.’

‘This is for friendship. If you owe me, we’re not friends.’

‘Then I owe you nothing.’

‘That’s better.’

Leo hung up and dialled Insurance. But Insurance just laughed when she heard his voice. ‘Leo, you’re not a risk that anyone’s willing to take any more,’ she told him, with what sounded like genuine fondness in her voice.

‘No? Why is that, Suzie?’ he asked. It did no harm to remind her that he was one of the three or four people still around who’d known her when she had a real name.

‘If you kill someone on a side street in Nowhere-on-Sea, honey, that’s one thing. But killing someone at a major intersection in the big city where we all live … well, that’s different.’

Tillman said nothing, but he covered the mouthpiece with his
hand for a moment anyway, afraid that he might swear or just suck in his breath. Hours. Just a few hours. How could the news have run ahead of him? How could anyone have tied his name to a death that had only just been discovered?

‘I thought the world was a village,’ was all he said.

‘You wish. In a village, it would just be MacTeale’s big brother you had to worry about. As it is, it’s everyone on his Rolodex.’

‘MacTeale?’ For a second Tillman had trouble even placing the name. Then he remembered the big, angry Scot who’d headed up his squad for the last year of his stint at Xe. ‘Somebody killed MacTeale?’

‘You did, apparently. At least, that’s the word that’s going around.’

‘The word’s wrong, Suzie.’

‘So you say.’

‘I didn’t kill MacTeale. I killed some no-account Russian middle-man who thought he had friends in high places, but I reckon they were the kind of friendships you rent on a short lease. Listen, all I want is another passport, in case this one got a stain on it. I can pay up front, if that will make things easier.’

‘You can make things as easy as you like, Leo. Nobody is going to sell to you, employ you or share intel with you. The community has closed its doors.’

‘And that includes you?’

‘Leo, of course that includes me. If I start offending the sensibilities of my clients, I’ll have a lonely, impoverished old age. Which will still put me ahead of you, sweetheart, because from what I hear, you’re on borrowed time now. No hard feelings.’

‘Maybe a few,’ Tillman said.

‘Good luck.’ Insurance sounded as though she meant it, but she hung up without waiting for him to answer.

Tillman snapped the phone shut and put it away. He nodded to the barman, who came and brought him another Scotch and water. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to shut him down, and whoever it was, they’d achieved miracles in a very short time. He tipped back the whisky in a silent toast to his unseen adversary. Your first mistake, Mr Brand, he thought, was letting me find out your name. Now here we are, just thirteen years later, and you slipped up again.