We Are Death (13 page)

He lifted the suitcase and walked quickly downstairs. Paused in the hallway. Set the suitcase down by the front door, then walked towards the kitchen. Another hesitation. Did it feel colder down here?

‘For God’s sake,’ he muttered, then he pushed the door open and entered the kitchen.

Durrant was there, sitting where he had been the night before. Durrant. Who had died beneath the knife of Haynes, whose body had been cremated, and whose ashes had been swept up and put in a bin. Where they’d belonged.

He was sitting, again, with his head bowed, his strong forearms resting on the kitchen table.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Jericho.

For a moment Durrant didn’t move, then slowly he lifted his head, and finally his eyes were on Jericho’s. Eyes that were empty and unfeeling. Miserable. Dead.

Jericho swallowed. Muscles tensed, stomach churning, the feeling of insects crawling over his skin. Hair standing on end. Yes, fear. This was fear. Durrant was dead. He shouldn’t be here. He couldn’t be here.

‘I don’t know,’ said Durrant finally.

The words sounded scrambled.

‘You’re dead,’ said Jericho. ‘You’re dead. Why are you here?’

Durrant held Jericho’s gaze, seemed to be imploring him. What on earth could the dead Durrant want him to do?

‘I’m not dead,’ said Durrant. ‘Do I look dead? Would I be sitting here if I was dead?’

‘You’re just in my head, right?’ said Jericho.

‘What?’ snapped Durrant. ‘Look at me. Look at me! How can I be just in your head, when we’re in your kitchen having a conversation?’

Jesus. Time for some backbone.

‘Is it possible then,’ said Jericho, ‘that you could just get up and get the fuck out of my kitchen?’

The fear was beginning to go, which was no more rational than the fear he’d had in the first place. Durrant seemed tetchy and distracted, rather than here for revenge, which didn’t necessarily make any more sense but was at least bizarre and unlikely as opposed to terrifying.

‘Where do you want me to go?’ asked Durrant angrily, which surprised Jericho.

He found himself looking at the clock, then at his watch. He needed to leave. Badstuber would be standing outside the Swan waiting for him, bang on time, and he didn’t want to be late.

‘I don’t understand why you’re here,’ said Jericho.

‘Hello! I don’t fucking know. I don’t know. I’m fucking here, and I don’t understand it. Are you happy?’

‘Of course I’m not happy.’

‘Hey, we have something else in common.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We both know, Detective. You and I...

Maybe Durrant was smiling now. There was a slight movement of his hands.

‘Brothers. We’re brothers. We like the same shit. Music and words, feelings, misanthropy, the same melancholic sea... We know things, we view the world through the same discoloured lens... We both fucked Sergeant Light.’

He definitely smiled after the last one, but his heart wasn’t in the smile. Jericho, too, was disorientated.

‘You and me, Detective. We’re the same.’

Jericho leant forward on the kitchen table, his face only a few feet from Durrant.

‘No, we’re fucking not,’ he said harshly.

Durrant smiled.

‘Whatever you say, boss, whatever you say.’

Jericho straightened up. He looked at the clock again. His fear had completely evaporated. It was always the unknown, wasn’t it? Fear of the unknown. Now that he knew, even if he didn’t remotely understand, all he felt was anger.

‘I need to leave,’ he said.

Jesus! Did I really just say
that
?

He was talking to Durrant. Talking to him, like he was a visitor in his home. Like he was someone who had to be updated on what was happening.

Jericho closed his eyes, expected Durrant to be gone when he opened them again, but it wasn’t that easy. Durrant was still there, head bowed, shaking slightly from side to side.

‘Fuck,’ muttered Jericho. ‘Will you still be here when I get back?’

There I go again!

‘I don’t know,’ said Durrant.

‘You’re not Durrant.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not Durrant. Durrant never spoke, or if he did, it was one line every three hours, something calculated and cold. And he never answered any question I asked him, not even to say that he didn’t know. Not once. Who the fuck are you?’

Durant almost laughed, which was something else he’d never seen before, but the look on his face was doleful. His shoulders were slightly hunched.

‘Who?’ he said. ‘I don’t think that was ever a question for me. I was never someone. There was never any ego. There was never a
me
. An
I
.’

Jericho held his gaze, but now he was the only one who was angry.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered again.

He turned, stopped at the door. Was he really just going to walk out of his house and leave this guy here? Durrant was dead, so it literally couldn’t be Durrant, and true enough, he wasn’t talking like Durrant. It made complete sense that somehow this was someone else who looked like Durrant, and sounded like Durrant. And he couldn’t just walk out his house and leave a complete stranger sitting in the kitchen.

Yet he knew. Every sense in his body – every sense that didn’t actually make sense and couldn’t be explained – told him this was Durrant. From the hairs on the back of his neck to the crawling feeling in the pit of his stomach.

‘If you’re Durrant, tell me who you were working for?’

He turned back.

And now, sure enough, Durrant was gone. The kitchen was empty. There was a door from the kitchen that led into a small porch area and into the back garden, but there had been no sound, Durrant had not exited the room in any sort of conventional manner. He was gone, that was all.

And every one of those senses that didn’t make sense told Jericho he was gone.

He looked at the empty kitchen table, standing in the sudden regular, familiar, warm silence of the kitchen, and was suddenly embraced by a rush of melancholy, a great well of sadness rising within him. He swallowed it back, as through the physical response might be enough to get rid of the feeling, and then turned away, closed the door and headed on out the house.

––––––––

F
ifteen hours later, Jericho was standing at an office window, looking down on a large lake, made dreary by low cloud and early morning rain. The warmth of an English August heatwave had been left behind, and now they were in the mountains, the day grim and grey, suggesting a premature end to summer and hinting at an autumn that had still seemed a long way away in Somerset.

In fact, it had seemed a long way away two days earlier in Grindelwald, the morning Ian Connolly had been shot in the head, but this was the mountains, the weather ever-changing.

Jericho hadn’t spoken much since he’d left his house the previous afternoon. Badstuber had already been checked in on the flight, so they did not need to observe the formality of sitting next to each other on the plane. She had stated in the most matter-of-fact fashion, on arriving in Zurich, that he would come with her in the car that was picking her up. And then she had sat in the front and talked throughout the journey to the driver in German. Jericho had switched off, watching Switzerland roll by as the darkness of night deepened.

He’d checked into his hotel and lain awake for at least two hours, hoping that sleep would come. What had his overactive brain been waiting for? Durrant’s arrival? Or was it afraid to go to sleep, in case Durrant should return in his dreams?

Now he was with Badstuber, waiting in her superintendent’s office for a nine o’clock meeting. Jericho had his back turned to her, hands in his pockets.

He couldn’t get Durrant out of his head. That was just wrong. He needed to be concentrating on this. Taking away the fact that someone somewhere had dragged him personally into all of this, and was now potentially dragging Haynes into it as well, the case itself was the most interesting he’d had in years. And not just because the Kangchenjunga aspect had made it even more personal than it already had been.

If it was to be his last case – his final bow – then it was a damned good one to go out on. Intriguing, and completely different from anything he’d been involved with in the past.

And yet, Durrant was still there. Still in his head, after all these years. His career had begun, really begun, with cracking the Durrant case. The man had got under his skin, there was no question. Somewhere along the way, when he’d had Amanda, and then when he’d been consumed by Amanda’s disappearance, Durrant had faded out of his memory and obsession, but now he was back. Back in his head.

That was the only connection between Amanda and Durrant, wasn’t it?

‘Your superintendent is an asshole,’ said Badstuber from behind.

Jericho turned, his thoughts having been so distracted that he had to pick the words out of the air and listen to them again.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She has her moments.’

‘Hopefully we will be able to conduct the remainder of this investigation without her involvement.’

She smiled, almost formally, at him. He nodded in response.

He didn’t want to be here, and he certainly didn’t want to be going walking into the Moroccan mountains, but on the plus side, if it kept him away from Dylan for some of his remaining time at the station, it might be no bad thing.

Nevertheless, he’d packed to be away for three days at the most.

‘I’m sorry I shouted at you in the car,’ he said. ‘That was unprofessional.’

‘There is no need to apologise. I find people shout at me often. My husband says I have a way about me.’

‘Does he?’

‘Yes. He says... in English, it would translate... he says I have a fuck-off face. That I can annoy people just by looking at them. That my manner can be brusque.’

‘We may have that in common.’

‘I believe so.’

‘We should get along just fine,’ said Jericho, and she smiled again, this time a little more naturally.

The door opened and a ruddy man in his fifties walked in, a large belly, his body all movement, clean-shaven, a mass of dark, curly hair, a thin file in his right hand. Superintendent Emminger.

‘Hello, hello, sorry I’m late,’ he said.

He approached Jericho, shook his hand with a strong, cool grip, turned, indicated for Badstuber not to rise, bent down to kiss her on the cheek, and then sat down behind his desk.

Jericho automatically pulled up a seat, already thinking that this couldn’t be any further from what it was like sitting in his own superintendent’s office.

‘You’re ready to go to Morocco, Chief Inspector?’ asked Emminger.

‘Ready, certainly,’ he said. If not exactly willing.

‘Good, good. I’ve spoken to your chief. She seems... of a certain substance. We’re taking care of the arrangements and then your station will settle up. You’re booked on the flight from Zurich to Marrakech this afternoon at sixteen forty.’

He lifted his eyebrows to see if that was acceptable, and they both nodded.

‘That should give you a chance to get up to Grindelwald to take a look.’

‘Has Koch managed to find any–’

Emminger cut her off with a somewhat dramatic wave, indicating that the matter had already gone up in smoke.

‘There is nothing. This man, the man with the gun, he is a ghost. I presume you have found the same thing in England.’

Jericho nodded.

‘I fear you might have to catch him in the act, if such a thing were possible. Our information is that Geyerson left Marrakech two days ago, with his companion Emerick. They travelled by bus to the village of Imlil and from there walked to the village of Aroumd, where they spent the night. Yesterday they walked into the hills, without the use of a guide. The walking area is, naturally, extensive, but we will spend the day tracking him down. Hopefully we should have more specific information by the time you arrive.’

‘And Harrow?’ asked Badstuber.

Emminger opened the file.

‘Harrow is an interesting case,’ he said. ‘He has travelled extensively, and we have been quite unable to get a complete picture of his movements. He has visited Paris, London, and Berlin. Washington and Ottowa. Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Macau. Delhi. Moscow. There are some gaps.’

‘Where is he now’? asked Jericho.

‘That is one of the gaps,’ said Emminger, smiling. ‘We last had him in London, twelve days ago. From there he took a flight from Gatwick airport to Rome, and there we lost him.’

‘It’s possible he’s dead?’

‘Anything’s possible, Chief Inspector. However, we have been unable to find any record of his murder. And, being a British citizen, hopefully your Foreign Office would have heard by now.’

Haynes had checked with the Foreign Office, and he’d hoped that his sergeant had kept up a contact that would report back to him if any information came in through their consular division, but he wasn’t entirely sure of the latest position.

‘They haven’t been in touch with any update,’ he said.

‘Good. Let us assume for a moment that he still lives. The information, such as we have, is in this file.’

He closed the file and pushed it a couple of inches across the desk towards Badstuber.

‘There is not much more to be said,’ he continued. ‘Your booking details and tickets are at the desk, of course. This is not a big station, Chief Inspector, and while it is not good for the town to have had a murder in the middle of the summer season, its particular nature is such that it need not weigh heavily upon us. It seems apparent that Mr Connolly would have been murdered wherever he’d been. So, we need to investigate this crime, but Inspector Badstuber will not be spending too much time on it. It is a British national, murdered by someone of unknown nationality, who very likely came and disappeared within the same day. I’m not saying it’s not our problem, but we must all prioritise.’

‘Of course,’ said Jericho.

He would have been happier had Emminger been explaining why Badstuber wasn’t accompanying him in this investigation at all, but he would take having her along for a short while.

Emminger looked at them both, then indicated the file.