The Demon Code (22 page)

Tillman put the cards back in his pocket.

‘Well?’ he asked.

Manolis nodded.

‘She had a tail?’

Manolis held up his hand, the thumb and forefinger a halfinch apart. ‘A little one,’ he said. ‘Cottontail, like a rabbit. Pretty much definite, Leo. Was the same girl that was following you two nights ago. I didn’t get a clear shot of her face, but the height, the build – identical. Let me show you.’

He took off his gloves and then his helmet. From inside the helmet he removed, with great care, a small lozenge of black plastic that had been affixed there by two steel brackets clipped to the helmet’s inside rim. At one end of the device, the only break in its smooth surface, there was a tiny glass bulb: the micro-camera’s lens.

From the lozenge, Manolis detached the even smaller plastic wafer that was the memory card. He booted up the computer in the corner of the tiny room, and slid the card into a reader built into the front fascia.

A window opened and began to fill with thumbnails. Manolis leaned close to the screen, squinting at the tiny images with furious concentration. ‘Here,’ he said at last. He clicked the mouse and one of the images expanded. It showed the part of Hunter Street that ran behind Coram’s Fields. The image was tilted slightly, which wasn’t surprising, since it had been taken from a moving motorcycle. What was surprising was that there was no motion blur of any kind, only a little fish-eye distortion, because of the curvature of the lens. Manolis knew his kit and what it was capable of.

He zoomed in on a corner of the image. A woman – Heather Kennedy – was walking away from the camera, her face turned in profile. Fifty yards behind her was a shorter figure, a girl, very slight in build, wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt. She had her back to the camera, her face not visible at all.

Manolis tapped the mouse and the screen flickered, one image replacing another so that the figures moved forward in jerky freeze-frame. At the same time, the angles and relationships shifted. Manolis had overtaken the girl and continued to take pictures as he passed her. The image tilted even further, but the focus stayed pin-sharp even when he zoomed in to the point where her head filled the screen.

Her head, but not her face. As though she could sense the camera, she turned away from it, so Manolis had got only the back of her neck, the curve of her cheek.

‘I would have gone back for another pass,’ he said to Tillman apologetically. ‘But I didn’t think I’d get away with it. You know, you can just tell, sometimes, if someone’s got their radar out, and it felt like she did. I didn’t want to scare her off. But she looks like the same one to me.’

‘Same one,’ Tillman said. ‘Definitely. And she hasn’t let me get a clear look at her face, either. So she was tailing me and now she’s tailing Heather. Did you manage to follow her back to source?’

Manolis clenched and unclenched his fists, and bowed his bullet head. ‘Sorry, Leo. I lost her. I don’t think she saw me, I think she just has good tradecraft. She zigs and zags a lot, and I was in traffic. She went down Onslow Street. There are steps down from the main road. Steep. I can’t drive down there. And if I ditch the bike and follow, she sees me, she knows why I come. I had to let her go. So then I go round by Saffron Hill, but there’s no sign. She’s already gone.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Mano. What you’ve got is good. Very good. But stay free. I may need you to do one more thing for me.’

‘It’s all in the price. You’ve got me for three more days.’

‘You’ve given me everything I asked for. If you do this, I’ll pay you a bonus. But I’m absolutely fine if you say no, because the risk profile just changed radically.’

‘I never said I wanted to keep my head down, Leo. Only way to avoid
all
the risks is to be dead. What do you want me to do?’

‘Nothing, just yet,’ Tillman said. ‘Heather said she was attacked last night, and this girl pulled her irons out of the fire. I want to go look over that ground. Might pick up something that we can use. Because what I really want to do, right now, is to meet this kid and ask her what it is she thinks she’s doing.’

Manolis shrugged. ‘I’m here when you need me,’ he said. ‘But one thing, Leo. If you need to see your friend again, better make it somewhere else.’

Tillman was surprised. ‘Why’s that, Mano? I’d have thought Heather would be just your type.’

‘Yeah, exactly,’ Manolis agreed. ‘Caitlin thinks so, too.’

22

Matthew Jukes caved in very quickly once money was mentioned, but the list of Alex Wales’s files that he handed to Rush furtively in the alcove that housed the coffee machine ran to over fifty pages, and the file names mostly gave no clue at all as to their contents.

‘Is there any way to get these files back up on another computer?’ Rush asked Jukes.

‘Anywhere you like,’ Jukes said. He was a sour-faced bugger, normally, but the combination of money and an opportunity to show off had rendered him magically cordial. ‘All this stuff is in the mainframe. Even if you save to your own C or D drive, there’s a hundred per cent back-up at the end of the day. That’s standard policy.’

‘So you can set me up with Wales’s files, on my own machine?’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

In fact, Jukes went one better than that. He faked a temporary administrator ID for Rush, which gave him full access not just to Alex Wales’s files but also to his usage stats. That meant Rush could see what he’d done and when he’d done it, which files he’d kept open for longest, even which ones he’d printed out.

And the results were surprising. As Allan Scholl’s PA, most of Wales’s time should have been divided between Scholl’s diary and Scholl’s inbox. In fact, Wales seemed to have gotten that bread-and-butter stuff out of the way right at the start of each day, logging on as early as 7 a.m. After that, he let the emails lie wherever they fell, while he trawled through pages and pages of what looked like gibberish – random screeds of numbers and letters separated by occasional backslashes.

‘Database logs,’ Jukes said carelessly. ‘They look like that unless you go in through the client server. You can’t open them up as files like you can with Word docs and stuff like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of the architecture. It’s event-driven.’

‘Jukes, I have no idea what you just said.’

‘That’s obvious,’ Jukes sneered, his natural obnoxiousness bobbing briefly to the surface. ‘All right. Say you ask a question like how many people are there in the world?’

‘Okay. Say I do.’

‘So what’s the answer?’

‘There isn’t any answer,’ Rush said. ‘It’s changing all the time. It’s changed in the time it takes you to ask me the question.’

‘Exactly. Same with this stuff. Event-driven architecture just means that the system keeps adjusting itself in real time. External events trigger updates. So every time you ask the question, you get a different answer. You can’t open the file because there isn’t a file. There’s a data set that keeps changing.’

Rush scrolled through pages and pages of the same kind of nonsense. Occasionally he saw something that looked like a surname with initials attached. MILTONTF. LUBINSKIJJ. SPEEDWELLNM. The rest was impenetrable, just alphanumeric vomit.

‘So what question was he asking?’ Rush demanded. ‘Is there any way we can tell?’

‘Maybe.’ Jukes waved him up out of the seat and took his place. For a few minutes, he opened windows on the screen and watched while white-on-black text scrolled through them. Occasionally he typed strings of letters in response to cursor prompts.

What he ended up with was another array of random symbols, but he nodded as though it made sense. ‘There,’ he said, pointing.

The tip of his finger touched the word USERS?, followed by a dozen or so numbers. Rush could see now that it recurred all the way down the screen, at least once in every two or three lines.

‘Users of what?’ he asked.

Jukes tapped some more, leaning close in to the screen as though he stood a better chance of prising loose its secrets if he cut down the distance.

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted at last. ‘Wait. No. Yeah, I do. This is old data. Like, completely defunct. No wonder Alex was able to get into it so easy.’

‘This was easy?’

‘Try getting at the live stuff. You’ll see. This is … yeah, it’s part of the British Library database.’

Rush’s heart did something surprising and alarming inside his chest. ‘Which part?’ he asked.

Jukes threw him a curious glance. ‘Getting excited now, are we?’

‘Which part, Jukes?’

Tap. Tap. Tap. ‘Users,’ he said.

‘Shit, I got that much.’

‘Keep your hair on, will you? It means people who called a book up, from the stacks. Wales was trying to generate a complete list, but the system wouldn’t let him because the data wasn’t live any more. It had been disaggregated, taken out of the data set that you can use to populate a form. Anyone in IT admin could have just changed the flag and brought them back again, but Wales didn’t have the pass codes.’

‘So? I’m getting about a third of this, by the way.’

‘So he had to dive down into the data set and do it low-tech. He looked for the identifying code for that one book and then wherever it cropped up he trawled the user stats until he found out who requisitioned it.’ Jukes looked up at Rush, blinking rapidly and arrhythmically – his tell when he was thinking hard. ‘I mean, back when it was in the stacks. Before they closed the reading room at the British Museum and took the circus down the road. There would have been a handwritten form that the user took to the desk. Then whoever was on the desk would scan their ID and—’

‘No,’ Rush said. ‘No, Jukes. Don’t try to talk me through your whole system. Just tell me if I’m right. Wales was trying to make a list of the names of everyone who’d ever read a particular book.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘He was trying to make a list of everyone who ever even filled in a form so they could see it. They wouldn’t have had to read it.’

‘Right. You’re right. Okay, so now tell me if he succeeded. Is the finished list in here somewhere?’

Jukes blinked some more. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose we could input some of these user names as strings and search the rest of Wales’s files to see if they turn up anywhere else.’

‘So do it.’

Jukes did it. ‘Nope. Nothing. Maybe he wrote it up by hand. Or maybe … wait. Let me look at his deleted files.’

‘You can do that?’

Jukes chuckled evilly. ‘Oh yeah. Unless you use a shredder program like Eraser, hitting delete is just hitting “save for later”. And nobody here is allowed to put non-authorised software on their machines, so usually everything just ends up … Okay, here.’

A pop-up farm of windows opened on the screen. Jukes culled them back again methodically, until there was only one left.

‘There’s your list,’ he said.

Rush could tell one thing at a glance:
A Trumpet Speaking Judgment
had never been a smoking bestseller. There were only about twenty names on the list, and if the dates next to them were the dates when they’d accessed the book, the time span he was looking at covered more than fifty years. The earliest name, FOSSMANH, was listed against the date 17/4/46; the latest, DECLERKJO, against 2/9/98.

‘Is there any way we can get addresses and telephone numbers for these people?’ Rush asked.

‘Oh yeah,’ Jukes said. ‘Two ways, actually.’

Rush waited. ‘Well? What are they?’

‘A telephone book, or another ton. Your credit just expired, mate.’

23

The street door of number 276 Vincent Square, Pimlico, was controlled by a buzzer system, but someone – presumably the two killers who’d stopped by the night before – had disabled it so that it hung an inch open in the frame, refusing to latch.
Should have spotted that, Heather
, Tillman thought.
You’re slipping
.

Isobel James’s flat, he knew, was number 11, which was on the third floor. The lock here had been picked, rather than forced, and Tillman was prepared to use his own lock-picks, but he didn’t have to. He found a spare key underneath a potted palm that stood in the window recess next to the door: the third most likely place after the mat and the door sill.

Inside, silence and stillness and a penumbral gloom. The flat’s hallway had no windows and didn’t look onto the world outside at any point. Tillman took out a flashlight and clicked it on, casting it around the confined space. Nothing moved, and there was nothing to see that wasn’t bland and obvious. Bookcase. Hall table with a nude sculpture based on Klimt’s
The Kiss
. A few coats hanging on hooks on the wall.

The still air had a slightly stale, trapped smell. All the same, once Tillman had closed the door, he did a quick preliminary search, moving down the hall with a stealth that belied his sheer bulk to peer into each room and around each angle. He was checking for ambushes, but the air hadn’t lied. He was alone in the flat.

Tillman was reasonably confident now that he wouldn’t be disturbed, but he still kept to the agenda he’d decided on beforehand: start at the scene of the crime and work outwards. He went straight to the bedroom and stepped inside.

There were no bodies there, alive or dead. Again, this was only confirming what his nose had already told him. If Kennedy’s attackers had died here, and their bodies hadn’t been removed, the complex aromas of decay would already have been detectable.

But they could still have died and been carried away by someone else. Tillman surveyed the ruck and debris in the room and began to read it. The blood on the sheets he assumed was Kennedy’s. There was a large, dark stain about a third of the way down from headboard to foot, consistent with a wide, shallow wound to the upper body. She’d seemed to favour her left side a little when they’d met. Now he knew why.

More blood on the carpet, in two areas. Right beside him, between the bed and the door, and over on the far side of the room next to the wall.

Nearest first. He knelt to look at the dark dots and stipples on the beige carpet: the discreet Morse code of spectacular violence. Tillman saw several distinct clusters of dark spots and one extended spray of clotted streaks that widened from a point near to the bedside table. Someone had been hit repeatedly on this spot, probably with more than one weapon and from more than one angle. Wide variation in the area and angle of scatter suggested that the victim had been standing when the assault began, but that it had gone on – maybe for some time – after he’d fallen.