We Are Death (20 page)

He tried calling Jericho again, and this time it went straight to answerphone. Either he’d turned the phone off, or the signal was lost somewhere in the mountains. Given that he hadn’t answered him the previous night, nor returned his calls, it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Leighton took out a small notebook and pencil, just as Haynes was putting his phone back in his pocket.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘This is... you know, I can read some of it, but there’s going to be so much I miss. I’m just going to take down a few passages and hope for the best. It’s all I can do. I mean, it’d be great if we could go and photocopy it, but, I mean, look at how delicate the spine is. We can’t be doing...’

She stopped, Haynes holding his phone up across the table.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I’ll take photographs of the pages,’ he said.

‘Can you do that?’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean, will it be clear enough?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, cool,’ she said.

She slid the book over the table towards him. Only then was she finally able to turn her attention to the cheese and ham pastry he’d put down in front of her several minutes earlier.

‘Good call,’ she said. ‘You know, I’m absolutely starving.’

Haynes started photographing the pages, checking the first two to make sure he had captured the entire page, then closing in on the photographs to ensure he had legibility. Thereafter, he quickly ran through the book, taking a photograph of each page.

‘Technology and I aren’t the greatest of friends,’ she said, ‘although I’m not like one of these old people. I do appreciate it.’

Haynes looked at his own half-eaten pastry but decided he’d better leave it while he had his phone in one hand and a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old book in the other.

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T
hey headed back to the library, an hour and seven minutes after leaving. Another warm afternoon, Leighton’s bare arms hanging loosely by her side, Haynes carrying his jacket over his shoulder, the book in his left hand.

‘Maybe we could come back here some time,’ she said. ‘When we’re not involved in a boy’s own detective story.’

He smiled.

‘Let’s hope that’s what it is. But yes, that’d be nice. Or Vienna. I’d like to go to Vienna.’

‘What else is it?’

‘Could be anything,’ he said. ‘International espionage thriller...’

‘Romantic comedy...’

‘Dour, serial killer, police procedural.’

‘You’re nice.’

They walked on, paying lip service to the conventions of a boy’s own detective story by not holding hands.

‘Vienna’s lovely,’ she said, as they turned the corner into Maxime Bossis.

‘You’ve been?’

‘Sure.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Very grand. Highest percentage of big impressive buildings in the whole of Europe. It’s like an explosion in an opera house factory.’

Haynes stopped for a moment, and she pulled up beside him. He nodded across the road at the library. The old green door was slightly ajar.

‘Crap,’ he said, as he started to cross the road. ‘Maybe you should wait out here.’

‘Don’t think so,’ she said at his back.

He stopped outside the door, trying to get a feel for the situation. There was nothing to see, but he hoped to get some sense of it. He held Leighton’s gaze, neither of them speaking, both intent on picking up what was going on around them.

The street was quiet, a few pedestrians, no cars currently on the road. There was a man approaching on a bike, middle-aged, bright yellow Lycra top. Haynes watched him for a moment, the only standout unusual thing on the road at that point. Then he was gone, spitting to the side as he went on his way, and was stopped at the top of the street, waiting to get out onto Gilles Berger.

Haynes opened the door and walked into the library. Down the short dark corridor and into the office. In his head he’d been picturing the two librarians slumped over their desk, blood leaking out into pools.

The office was empty. He stopped, turned and looked into the main body of the library. The books they’d left out on the table earlier had been put away. They stood in silence, trying again to get a sense of what had happened. It seemed inconceivable that the librarians would walk out, leaving the door open.

‘Hello?’ he said, his voice not particularly loud. It didn’t have to be. It was not a large area.

Footsteps from down one of the rows, and Haynes braced himself the only way he could. Placed the jacket and book on the desk, and ushered Leighton in behind him. She hardly moved, but Haynes didn’t have a gun, and there was nothing lying around that he could use as a weapon There was nothing else he could do.

A tall, slender man in a grey suit appeared between the shelves of books, wiping his hands on a paper towel. He smiled as he approached them, and despite the white teeth and the obvious expense of his clothes, there was something genuine about his look. Develin could do genuine, just as he could do anything else.

‘Detective Sergeant Haynes and Professor Leighton,’ he said, ‘my men said you’d been in. I’m afraid we’re having to close up the library for the afternoon. It will, of course, be open again on Monday, if that’s of any use to you.’

Haynes wasn’t entirely sure what to say. He hadn’t come prepared for sophistry delivered by a man in a killer suit. Nothing, indeed, in the south-west had ever prepared him for that.

‘We just wanted a word with the librarian, if that’s possible,’ said Leighton. ‘We had a couple of questions for him.’

‘Like I said,’ said Develin, ‘they’ll be back on Monday.’

He glanced round Haynes and looked at the book lying on the desk.

‘You brought it back,’ he said. ‘Thank you. We’re not, of course a lending library. Tomasz probably ought not to have allowed you to take it in the first place. He will try to be so helpful sometimes.’

Develin lifted the book and slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket. The book disappeared; the cut of the jacket was not disturbed.

‘Thank you so much for coming by today,’ he said. ‘I’ll just show you to the door. Don’t forget your coat.’

He walked ahead of them to the door, and did not need to look back to make sure they did not touch anything. Develin, as ever, was in control.

They got to the door. Haynes and Leighton stepped outside onto the pavement, and as Haynes turned, the door was closed, the bolt thrown over and the lock clicked.

They stood in the shadow of the building on a warm Parisian afternoon, looking around at the street that was exactly as it had been a minute earlier. However, now it somehow looked a lot less threatening, even though they had been so summarily dismissed, and the whereabouts of the two librarians was unknown to them.

‘That was weird,’ said Leighton.

‘Fuck,’ muttered Haynes, and he stepped away from her, shaking his head.

‘What?’

‘I mean, what was that? He knows who we are, we have no idea who he is. He just tosses us out onto the street, and... I don’t know, we’re left standing here like a pair of muppets. What are we supposed to do with that? Really, if it was in Wells, I’d be back here with five constables and have that door down.’

She was smiling.

‘God, you police are so violent. On what grounds exactly?’

‘On the grounds that the two librarians we talked to earlier are probably both dead in a back room somewhere.’

‘Seriously?’

‘People have been getting murdered.’

‘This is a library, and one I decided we should come to. Why should they actually have anything to do with it? All we’ve got is a few symbols in an old book, that might not be at all related.’

‘Amanda came here,’ he said, his voice finally losing its urgency. ‘There’s not nothing going on.’

‘They gave you the cards with the images on them, so they want you to look. You think they wanted you to find that book?’

‘Who told you to come here?’ he asked.

‘A contact at the College of Arms.’

‘How well d’you know him?’

‘You’re being serious again?’ she said, then she nodded at the look on his face. He was being brusque, but inevitably she was finding it quite attractive seeing him in business mode, rather than slightly awkwardly romantic.

‘I don’t know him that well,’ she said. ‘He asked me for some background on a book he was writing... and we met at some function, God, can’t even remember what it was for, there are so many of–’

‘When was that?’

‘Which one?’

‘Both.’

‘This year, both this year. The book was, I don’t know, in March maybe. The function wasn’t that long ago. Earlier in the summer, I really should remember.’

‘So both were after you’d been helping me before.’

She nodded, a questioning look on her face.

‘You’re suggesting–’

‘I don’t know. These people, they’re completely in charge. They just played with the DCI in January, and now they’re playing with us.’

‘Dangerous route to go down,’ she said.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘When you start seeing conspiracy theory, everything looks suspicious.’

Hands on his hips, shake of the head, rueful look along the road.

‘And you know what they say about paranoia...,’ he said.

‘Just because you think everyone’s out to get you, doesn’t mean they’re not?’

‘Exactamundo.’

She laughed.

‘You say exactamundo?’

He shook his head.

‘I meant not to do that in front of you.’

‘Now we get to the real you.’

He looked back at the green door, shook his head again, then started to walk away.

‘Come on. All we’ve got are these photographed pages. You know someone who can translate them for us.’

‘Sure.’

‘If we get back to London now, would they be–’

‘I’ll give him a call.’

She was laughing, following behind her police sergeant, her new boyfriend who’d been sucked into a case. She didn’t yet know whether it was a boy’s own adventure, or a grand conspiracy theory where the villains were untouchable and everybody else died, but at that moment she was enjoying herself.

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J
ericho’s eyes were fixed on a large black spider.

There were six people sitting at one end of a long dining table, space for as many as ten more. They had arrived in Aroumd and were staying at a guest house in the valley, the mountains of the High Atlas around them.

Jericho had requested that they walk on a little further, but they had reached their destination for the night, the guide had said, and would set off at first light.

In front of them, plates of couscous, spicy vegetables, goat meat. On the wall to the right, the biggest spider Jericho had ever seen in real life. They would be sleeping, all together, on the floor in the next room, or up on the roof if they preferred. Beneath the stars.

The guide was eating with the owners of the house, Jericho and Badstuber sitting with four other walkers, who all seemed unhappy, grumbling in low voices to each other in French.

‘You don’t like spiders?’ asked Badstuber.

Jericho absentmindedly ate his dinner, looking at the spider, one of its thick black legs moving as it contemplated scurrying away across the wall.

‘They’re fascinating,’ he said. ‘Funny how they inspire such fear.’

‘I do not like them,’ she said. ‘It is the movement of the legs. The thought of it crawling over one’s skin.’

‘You’re going to sleep well tonight, with that in the house,’ he said.

‘I intend sleeping outside,’ she said.

‘I think you probably get spiders outside as well.’

‘Somehow it feels less claustrophobic. The thought of being inside, enclosed in a room with such a thing...’

She shivered.

‘I was going to sleep outside too,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Not sure.’

He hated the thought of sleeping in a small room with a group of strangers, but he wasn’t going to say it out loud. Spiders he could take, but humans...

‘You can protect me,’ she said, and she touched his arm.

He watched the movement of her fingers, surprised by the slight touch. Tried to smile in return.

They both looked back at the large black spider on the wall. It was gone.

DI Badstuber shivered again.

*

M
orlock arrived in Marrakech in the early evening. Taxi to the hotel, checked in under the name Maurice Evans. He had dark hair and a regulation dark moustache, a pair of five-euro sunglasses. There was little exceptional about him.

He stayed in a hotel on the other side of town from Badstuber and Jericho. He drank a single drink in the bar, ate dinner in the hotel restaurant. He did not pay to have any women return to his hotel bedroom.

Morlock had killed one man in Paris, as per Develin’s instructions. He’d been there as an insurance policy, and his presence had proved necessary. Develin had been relieved that he’d made the decision. It was several years since he himself had had to kill anyone, and it wasn’t something he enjoyed. Why put yourself in a position like that when you had someone like Morlock more or less under contract?

Develin did not like it when things went off-script, even if the script was fairly loose. Haynes and Leighton had been following the script written for them, almost to the letter. Develin, however, had not wanted it revealed to them that they were in the footsteps of Amanda Raintree. It was a small matter, but these things were best tidied up quickly.

The librarian who had been present in the room but hadn’t given Haynes the information, was made to watch as Morlock had stood in front of his colleague, put his hands around his throat, and executed a bloodless kill. He was then sent home to think over his future in the library, and told to come back on Monday morning if he could guarantee his future discretion. This was something Develin seemed to take for granted, as there was no discussion about what he should do if he thought he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Morlock’s work was then complete, and he was able to leave for Charles de Gaulle. The matter of body disposal was in the hands of a completely different section of the organisation. They had someone in every major town and city in the world for this, and neither Morlock nor Develin – once he’d set it up – had to concern themselves with it.