We Are Death (18 page)

‘If you’re sure, ma’am.’

She nodded.

‘I expect the DCI broke my confidence and told you I’m leaving?’

Haynes smiled in confirmation.

‘I thought he might. I’m in my last few weeks, Sergeant, I can afford to be nice. You’d better get going.’

Haynes got to his feet.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Would you like me to call the DCI?’

‘Yes,’ said Dylan straight away, having already been thinking about it. ‘I’m going to call him now. You can try it later, from the train. Once you’ve done what you have to do. Maybe one of us will get him. You’ll be in on Monday?’

‘Of course.’

Finger going, head bowed again in thought, she indicated the door. Haynes turned and quickly left.

––––––––

F
riday evening. The players were on the move, the opening was done, and they had settled into the complex middle, everything still in play.

Jericho lay in bed on a warm Marrakech night. He was wearing pyjama shorts, lying under a single sheet, watching the fan whir above him. Wide awake. Thinking about Amanda more now than at any time since he’d finally cracked and given up the investigation into her disappearance. Kicking himself for letting the Death card go the previous winter. For putting it in a drawer and forgetting about it. For thinking
out of sight, out of mind
.

He had waited eleven years for a link. Now it was here, and he hadn’t realised until the moment he’d heard the word Kangchenjunga. Indeed, the link had been waiting for him for the past seven months, and he’d put it away. He wasn’t to have known, but that didn’t matter. Regardless of who was behind the business in January, there was no way he should have let it go.

His phone had rung throughout the evening before he finally turned it off. Badstuber had looked at him curiously over dinner when he hadn’t answered. Haynes had rung four times, Dylan three. They must have worked it out, he thought. Haynes would have worked it out. He didn’t want to talk about it, though.

He watched the fan whirring round, every now and again concentrating on one blade and trying to follow it to achieve that fleeting second when the individual blades could be seen in amongst the blur.

Hands clasped behind his head, Jericho’s mind was not entirely unlike his view of the fan. A constant whir of motion, occasionally becoming clear, a millisecond or two at a time.

*

B
adstuber had the switch that facilitated a work/life balance. She devoted the required amount of time to the job, then when she had done all she could, or needed to devote time to her family, the switch was flicked and she put her work into a closed compartment, to be opened at the appropriate time.

She was sitting cross-legged in her bed, her iPad propped in front of her, talking to her daughters via Face Time. The children all used the verb facetiming, but she refused to treat it as an acceptable word in German, or even in English.

The girls took it in turn, usually starting with the eldest. The youngest, Heidi, always talked the longest.

She didn’t travel often, so usually the Internet chats happened in the early evening, when she would be stuck in the office and would flick the switch for fifteen minutes to speak to the children before bedtime. Now, however, she had the rest of the evening, and Heidi talked and talked until her father came, smiling into the screen, to whisk her away.

Badstuber laughed with her children in a way no one else saw.

*

H
aynes and Leighton sat on the last train to Paris, as darkness fell upon the south of England. They sat together in forward-facing seats, drinking wine, eating olives and cheese sticks.

She had waited for him at the ticket barrier, knowing he was on his way but not sure that he would get there in time. She had watched the clock; the clock had seemed to turn with unusual speed. And then he had come, running past the piano that Morlock had played earlier in the day, running past the thinning crowds of the evening, laughing and joking and slightly breathless as he arrived.

Now they sped through the tunnel, on into the French evening, sharing stories and starting the conversation that somehow they both imagined might last for the rest of their lives.

They were not followed into the night. There was no one sitting four rows away, keeping a careful eye, no one aiming a recording device in their direction, picking up every word. There was no need. The Pavilion knew which train they were on, they knew where they were staying in Paris, and they knew where they would be at nine o’clock the following morning.

*

M
orlock stood on a balcony overlooking a corner of le Jardin du Luxembourg, a cigarette between the index and middle finger of his right hand, a long glass of vodka and tonic tinkling with ice in his left. He wasn’t a smoker and neither did he drink often, but this was who he was on this occasion as he passed through Paris. The fact that no one would die at his hand that evening in the French capital was no reason for him to alter his working pattern.

Always leave a country as someone different from whom you entered. Live the identity when you are in the country. Never use the same identity twice.

The person he was for this evening wouldn’t be sleeping with anyone. He had work to do the following morning; that would be over soon enough, and he would be heading on to Morocco.

He took another draw of the cigarette, pinched the end between his thumb and forefinger, then slipped it into his pocket.

*

D
ylan did not leave the office until almost eleven. Her husband had a business dinner, so she had no particular reason to be home. There would not be their usual Friday evening wine and movie night that they tried to stick to as often as possible. It had been postponed until Saturday for the week, the usual argument about which film to watch still pending.

She wanted to know as much as possible about the disappearance of Amanda Raintree. It was fascinating, right enough, and there probably wasn’t a detective in the country who, presented with the opportunity, would not grab it with both hands. That she wasn’t a detective wasn’t going to deter her.

She also had no reason to lie to herself. She loved the idea of being the one who worked it out, who saw what DCI Jericho had been unable to see. There would be no glory moment in it, of course, even if she managed to achieve it. She could hardly stand before the DCI, slap a file down before him, and gloat about the fact she had proof that either his wife was dead, or that she’d run off with a rich financier to his twenty-seven bedroom beachfront property in Palm Beach.

Yet there would be satisfaction to be had. She would know it, and so would he. In itself, that would be enough.

Of course, she found nothing new that evening. There was nothing to be found on the files. Jericho might have been too close to the case, but he was still not going to have missed the obvious. And the lead investigating officers at the time had done everything they could.

The Kangchenjunga connection was all over the file. There was no way Jericho had missed it. Which meant that as soon as it had raised its head this time, he must have known.

At three minutes after eleven she received a text from her husband, and only then did she close the files, turn off her computer and leave the station for the night.

*

G
eyerson and Emerick slept beneath the stars. There were always others staying at the huts at which they pitched up, high in the mountains. Others like them, and tour groups from Explore and Exodus. The floors of the bedrooms were usually packed, fifteen people sleeping noisily together.

Geyerson preferred to sleep outside, the universe above him. No light pollution, stars beyond counting. Emerick hated the idea, and would have been happy to have a look at the sky before retreating inside – it’s not as though you can see the stars while you’re sleeping anyway, he’d tried to point out – but as ever, he did what Geyerson told him to do.

*

H
arrow was weak. That was his fundamental trouble. Weakness. He had a capacity for brutality; he could display strength when confronted with the frailty of others. He came across well in company when psychological strength was not necessary. However, deep down, underneath every other affectation of his personality, he was weak. He knew it, and so did those who dealt with him.

There was likely nothing that could ever have given Harrow strength. He imagined he’d found it on Kangchenjunga. He told himself. He lived the lie. He was blind to the obvious. Nothing had changed. The old Harrow was still there. He was fearless on mountains, yet he feared people.

He shouldn’t have come to Syria. The old Harrow would never have done so. The new Harrow, the one who had walked off that mountain, had felt confident. It had taken coming to Syria for him to realise what he had known all along.

Sitting around the table with seven men he didn’t know, each of them talking loudly, he had no idea what language they were even speaking. He did not know if any of them, other than the man directly across from him at the table, spoke English.

He was trying not to catch the eye of Baschkin at the door. He wondered if Baschkin felt similarly out of his depth but very much doubted it, even if he was hardly in a position to do his job. There were at least eleven men with guns dotted around the room, and Baschkin was the only one on Harrow’s side.

He wondered where Carter and Connolly were now. He could have been them. Rather than being greedy, he could have had the carefree life they would have enjoyed since the expedition. Instead, he’d taken on this burden. He’d persuaded Geyerson to give him the burden.

The chatter stopped suddenly, and he looked up. Some of them were looking at him, others had let their eyes drop. The man across the table, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, silk tie knotted at the neck, grey Brooks Brothers suit, wrapped his long fingers around each other, his forearms resting on the table.

‘My friends want to know why you would even think to bring such a thing as this to an Islamic country?’

Syria is not defined by being an Islamic country
, thought Harrow.
It’s defined by being a war zone. That’s why I’m here.

He stared silently across the table, too pusillanimous to let the words ever cross his lips.

*

L
ate in the evening, Badstuber’s phone pinged, the funny little jingle she had set for messages from her family. It was a photo of her husband, lying in bed, his erection in his hands, asking her to call.

She smiled. She was already lying naked in bed. She positioned the iPad so that it could film her body, then put the Face Time call through. He answered straight away. He smiled. They didn’t say much.

She watched the movement of his foreskin, the end of his penis already glistening. She licked the middle three fingers of her right hand and ran them over the lips of her pussy, moaning already at the first touch.

––––––––

U
p early, Haynes and Leighton ate breakfast in a small café near Parc de la Planchette. Croissant, coffee, orange juice. Haynes had an extra pain au raisin, as though he was making sure they didn’t eat exactly the same thing, like that would be one step away from wearing matching pullovers.

Haynes had been to Paris on a school trip, fifteen years previously. He felt like he remembered much about it, but perhaps it was just because the city was so familiar from film and television. When it came to moving around, he realised that Leighton had true comfort and familiarity. She spoke the language far better than she’d indicated, and seemed at every point to know where she was going, and how to get there.

They arrived at the door of number 127 Rue Maxime Bossis at three minutes to nine. A simple wooden door, painted blue, a small plaque on the wall beneath the number.
La Bibliothèque de Paris de l'Héraldique
. She tried the door handle and, finding it locked, rang the bell.

She smiled at Haynes, then turned and together they took a moment to look at their surroundings. A quiet street, nothing to see. Two lanes of traffic, parked cars on either side of the road. Grey Haussmann apartment blocks, a few shops, a couple of cafés, an art gallery along the bottom. A few more shop windows boarded up than she had ever noticed before.

One end of the street was a T-junction, a similar building staring straight back at them from a hundred yards away. The other end opened out onto Rue Gilles Berger, with large summer oaks in the park across the road, the other side of four lanes of traffic.

The day was already warm. Haynes in an open-necked shirt, mustard trousers, Leighton in a light blue dress, her hair tied back but not pulled off her forehead.

‘Too bad we have to work,’ said Haynes, staring at the trees at the far end.

She smiled, didn’t reply. She knew they were both looking forward to the work.

Then, to her delight, as she was rather enjoying this detective story she’d found herself part of, a slat was pulled back in the door and a pair of suspicious eyes looked out at them.

‘Oui?’

‘Bonjour! Je suis Professor Leighton, le professeur de la British Library.’

She smiled brightly, and got nothing in return.

‘I have an appointment,’ she said boldly.

The eyes regarded her almost grudgingly, acknowledging that she did indeed have an appointment, then turned to Haynes.

‘
Et, qui?
’

‘My colleague, Mr Haynes.’

The thrill of lying about his profession!

There was another pause, the eyes moving slowly back towards Leighton, and then the man seemed to give up. There was the sound of a bolt being pulled back, the key turning in the lock, and then the door opened.

*

‘H
ow long have you been married?’

They had been walking for over an hour, their guide slightly ahead of them, on the path between Imlil and Aroumd. They were making decent time, although they didn’t know it. They were just following the man they’d hired, each of them with a backpack on their shoulder. Badstuber had hers resting fully on her back, Jericho had his over his right shoulder, his arm bent, the strap hooked round his thumb. Neither of them had spoken since the basic introductions with the guide.