We Are Death (12 page)

Jericho held her gaze for a moment, then turned and quickly walked out of her office. He knew it was petty, but he couldn’t help himself: he left the door open.

––––––––

H
aynes sat down at his desk, looking across at Leighton. Silence for a moment, then Leighton smiled.

‘She’s an interesting character.’

Haynes nodded, couldn’t bring himself to smile back yet. Didn’t feel like smiling at all. Felt impotent and stupid, the way anyone does when spoken to in such a manner by their boss. Or, in this case, his boss’s boss.

Should Jericho have stepped in and said something? Perhaps he had done so after Haynes had closed the door. All the more awkward and uncomfortable with Badstuber in the room. Of course, it was Dylan who looked bad, it was Dylan who came across as a boorish, insecure bully. Nevertheless, no one wants to be spoken to like that, especially when there was really no way to respond in kind.

‘When I write my dinosaur book,’ said Haynes, his voice flat, ‘she’s getting bitten the fuck in half on the first page.’

‘I had a boss like that once.’

‘How did you handle it?’ asked Haynes. His voice was dead, trying to control the anger.

‘Don’t remember exactly. I think she might have been the one whose liver I ate with some chocolate beans and a nice chardonnay. Or was that someone else?’

Finally Haynes cracked and he laughed.

The door to Dylan’s office opened and Jericho emerged. He looked over at Haynes and was going to summon him in his usual way, which would probably have been a thumb jerked in the direction of his office. Unusually for Jericho, however, he was aware that there was something between his sergeant and the professor, and that there had been enough stupid management thrown at him in the previous ten minutes. He approached the desk.

‘Professor,’ he said, nodding at Leighton.

‘Detective Chief Inspector.’

‘Thanks for coming down to help.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘I just need Stuart for a few moments alone, if you don’t mind waiting here. We won’t be long.’

‘Of course.’

‘Sergeant,’ said Jericho, and he walked towards his office.

*

‘S
o you didn’t kill her before you left her office?’

Jericho looked dully across the desk. He wanted to smile, but he had that grim sense of utter defeat in the pit of his stomach.

‘You all right?’ asked Haynes, which surprised Jericho.

‘I’m afraid the limit of my defiance was, as you’ll have noticed, to leave the door open on her precious air conditioning.’

Haynes started smiling, and finally Jericho found himself laughing.

‘Jesus...’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You know the problem, Sergeant?’

‘What’s that, sir?’

‘I should never have slept with her.’

Haynes wasn’t sure what to say to that, eyes widening slightly.

‘Too much information. I know.’

Jericho sighed heavily, looking around at his desk. Searching for something to actually look at. Something to hold onto, something to do. There was nothing. There were a few pieces of paperwork, but it was all trivial. Yet, what did he want? If he wanted something interesting, it was being offered to him on a plate, and all he aspired to was walking away.

‘She’s sending me to Switzerland tonight,’ he said.

Haynes wasn’t sure what to say. Had been wondering if he might get to go to Switzerland, and had rather liked the thought, but it didn’t sound like it was happening.

‘And then, if no one from higher up intervenes, it looks like I’ll be going on to Morocco.’ He shook his head at the thought. ‘Right, Stuart. You have your orders. You’ve got to attempt to track down who these people are and I’m just going to have to leave you to it. If they are.... Jesus, if they turn out to be as seemingly omnipotent as they appear to be, I’m not sure you’re going to get very far.’

‘Need to give it a go, sir,’ said Haynes.

‘Yes, you do. So, good luck, and be careful. Really, I know that’s casually thrown around, but they’re not messing about. They have killed at will, and obviously they’re continuing to do so. Try to make sure it’s not you. Or...’ he indicated the closed door, ‘your professor out there. I would say...’ he hesitated, then waved away what he was going to say.

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Given that it sounded as though it was going to relate to Leighton, Haynes wasn’t letting it go.

‘I’d appreciate if you said what you were thinking, sir,’ he said.

Jericho nodded.

‘All right. I stopped myself, because really, I’m hardly one to say this, but just be careful with her. Remember she’s a civilian. Whoever they are, they’ve turned their attention on you. Now might not be the greatest time to get too close to someone. I know you need her help, but just be wary of her getting sucked into this mess.’

Haynes had already had that thought, but he’d largely ignored it. He knew Jericho was right, however.

‘Yes, you’re right, sir. Bit of a buzzkill, but I’ll do my best. She does seem–’

‘You just used the word buzzkill, if that’s even a word.’

‘It has been for some years now...’

There was a knock, the door opened and Badstuber stood in the doorway, not crossing the threshold into the office. She looked at Jericho for a few moments, barely seemed to notice that Haynes was present.

‘I’m sorry I upset you in the car, Chief Inspector.’

Jericho was surprised enough that he wasn’t sure what to say. That he said nothing was not as unusual.

‘I am going back to my hotel,’ said Badstuber. ‘In ninety minutes I will be taking a taxi to the airport, would you like to join me?’

‘You’re at the Swan?’

‘Yes.’

‘A taxi’ll cost you more than the plane ticket. I’ll pick you up.’

‘Are you sure?’

Jericho answered with a nod.

‘Sergeant,’ said Badstuber, then she turned, closed the door, and was gone.

The two men looked at the closed door for a few moments, then Haynes turned back to Jericho.

‘She’s warm, I’ll give her that. You two should get along well. There’s something of the... I mean, I’m not saying she looks like a thirty-five-year-old Diana Rigg, but if there was a movie, a thirty-five-year-old Diana Rigg would be perfect for her.’

‘Thanks, Sergeant, I’ll keep that in mind for central casting. Right, on you go, speak to your professor and work out what you’re going to do. And keep in touch.’

Haynes got to his feet, started to walk from the office, then turned back.

‘Seems a bit weird to be working without you, sir. I mean, on something that’s your case.’

‘You’ll have to get used to it.’

‘I know. Just feels like, I don’t know, like the bit at the end of
Fellowship Of The Ring
where they all split up.’

Jericho looked deadpan across the desk.

‘Try and keep it together, Stuart.’

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T
he two cards were placed together, side by side, on the desk. For the moment they had dispensed with the blown-up images. Taking a closer look had allowed them to see the faces of the dead, or the very possibly soon to be dead, but little else.

The first card, skeletal Death riding on a horse, the reins in one hand, carrying a standard in the other. Around him, scores of dead, beyond counting. On the other, what seemed to be exactly the same image of Death, this time riding past a wood, and on the edge of the wood the five men hanging by the neck, three of them still alive.

They were focused on the standard, as Leighton had been since she’d first seen the card. The emblem it showed was something she could not immediately place. Everything about it was familiar, and yet the combination was not.

They’d been studying them for a few minutes in silence. Haynes was giving Leighton space to think. He himself had quickly realised that he could look at them all day and likely come up empty, and had started to flick through a series of e-mails. As usual, there wasn’t a lot doing down in the West Country, the murder of the previous day notwithstanding. The Wells Journal, at least, would have something to put on its front page that week, rather than charity fundraisers and someone else’s outrage over the Bishop’s Palace or the latest fracking enquiry.

Adams approached and placed a report in Haynes’s tray.

‘Just need you to sign that off, sir. As and when.’

‘I’ll look at it before I leave.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Adams stopped as he was about to turn away, standing next to Leighton, and looked at the cards. Haynes looked up, studied Adams’s face as he looked down, trying to work out what he was looking at.

Leighton glanced up at him, then looked back at the cards.

‘We’re trying to work out the emblem on the standard,’ she said.

‘What’s that? A hedgehog?’ asked Adams.

‘Two-headed eagle,’ said Leighton.

‘Oh.’

The flag was white and fully extended, so the emblem was clearly visible. It showed an elaborate gold cross, with an animal in each corner.

‘A lion?’

‘Goat.’

‘Rhinoceros?’

‘Unicorn.’

Adams paused, squinting his head slightly to the side.

‘Can’t make out the last one,’ he said.

‘You haven’t been able to make out any of them,’ said Haynes with irritation.

Adams smiled.

‘It’s a griffin,’ said Leighton.

‘Like a dragon?’

‘Exactly.’

Adams nodded.

‘So you’ve got the obvious Christian symbol of the cross, surrounded by a two-headed eagle, a goat, a unicorn and a griffin,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘They all probably mean something.’

She looked up at him.

‘You think?’

Adams continued to stare down at the cards for a few moments, then said, ‘That’s all I’ve got.’

‘Well, thanks for pointing out that the cross is a Christian symbol, Constable,’ said Haynes. ‘We’d been looking at it, thinking,
what is that thing?
’

Adams walked away, shaking his head and smiling.

Haynes watched him go, then looked at Leighton as she raised her head. She had a slightly resigned look on her face and smiled ruefully. Glanced back down at the cards as she spoke.

‘We need to get on here, Sergeant, so I’m just going to be honest with you.’

‘OK,’ said Haynes, warily.

She looked up again.

‘You know, I thought you might call after that whole business in January, and then you didn’t, and I thought... well, you know what I thought.’

‘I’m sorry, I should–’

She stopped him with a quickly raised hand.

‘Then you turn up this morning, and it was lovely to see you, and I completely get the vibe. There’s a thing. I mean, now, I
really
don’t know why you didn’t call. And you ask me out to dinner, and of course I said yes, and then I came down here because it seemed like a fun thing to do. But really, I wasn’t thinking logically. These cards... we’re into the world of heraldic symbolism and meaning. I’m out of my depth. You’re going to need another expert. Or, if you want, I can take them back to London and see if I can make any headway.’

‘Now?’ he said, and immediately felt rather desperate.

She smiled.

‘Don’t worry. Not now. We’ll have our dinner tonight, I’ll spend the night at your place, then we need to get up early and you can drop me down at the station. Earliest train.’

‘That’s at, like, five thirty.’

‘Then that’s how early we need to get up.’

‘OK,’ said Haynes.

‘Sound like a plan?’

‘Yep.’

‘Good. Where are we having dinner?’

*

J
ericho packed a small case. He didn’t travel often. This was the first time he’d used the case since he’d been up to London that January, and he hadn’t used it in several years prior to that.

It was grey and had a wonderful old, battered look to it, as though it had spent many years on boats and trains travelling the world. Amanda had bought it for him, second-hand, for his fortieth birthday. He’d never taken the time to think about it, but the manner of his departure from his hotel in London, coupled with the fact that he’d ended up in hospital, could have meant that his suitcase was lost along the way, perhaps secured into Metropolitan Police evidence, never to be recovered. However, when it came time for him to get out of his hospital bed and go home, he found that Haynes had recovered all his things, and the suitcase had been waiting for him.

It was packed, toilet bag and all, and he was standing at his bedroom window looking out on the day, the warm afternoon sun bright on the trees and the fields, when he realised he was here again. Back in the kitchen.

There had been no noise. He obviously couldn’t see anything. But he could feel it. He could feel him. He was back, just as he had been the previous evening, before Haynes had arrived.

Jericho leant forward on the window ledge. He could feel the hairs standing on the back of his neck.

Was he scared? He shouldn’t be scared. He thought he was past being scared.

What he was feeling now, and what he knew was waiting for him in the kitchen, didn’t make sense. But that didn’t mean he had to be frightened of it. He didn’t have to fear the unknown, he just had to question it.

Amanda came to him, didn’t she, and Amanda was dead. At least he assumed she was dead. Perhaps she wasn’t, but that made even less sense. If she’d just run off somewhere and was living another life, it made no sense that she would turn up in the middle of the night, while he was sleeping, a strange apparition.

He was sure she was dead, and presumably her occasional appearance was all the work of his subconscious. Now, however, it was the middle of a warm, sunny, summer’s afternoon. The window was open slightly. He could hear the cars on the distant road, he could hear birds singing and the sound of an insect just outside the window. He could smell summer, from the leaves and the grass and the warmth in the air. Yet there was a cold, dead chill coming from the kitchen, which he could sense rather than feel on his skin.

He turned, half-expecting him to be standing right behind him, in best horror movie tradition, but the bedroom looked back at him, bed unmade, dust particles hanging in the air.