We Are Death (3 page)

He glanced at her, wondering what was coming. She hadn’t spoken to him often in the previous few months, and she had surprised him somewhat by not pursuing any agenda against him since the
Britain’s Got Justice
disaster. Even so, her words were now bordering on sympathetic, which was peculiar. Of course, she had more or less just confirmed that she was leaving.

‘We’re both being moved on, Robert,’ she said.

‘Both?’

‘Yes. Too early for an announcement to the station, but hopefully I can make it by the end of next week.’

She continued to look out of the window as she talked, her right hand moving in rhythm with the words, as though conducting herself.

‘You know it’s been coming. Each area has to find savings of close to thirty per cent this year. Wells is perfect for it, it’s obvious. We don’t need a superintendent here. We don’t need a detective chief inspector. You and I? We’re an anomaly. We’re dinosaurs, a pair of diplodocuses living in a small garden.’

Jericho was following her gaze out of the window, but he caught her eye as she made the dinosaur analogy.

‘You know what I mean. Look, the station’s getting an overhaul. I’m out, you’re out. There will be an inspector put in charge, and Detective Sergeant Haynes will stay on to lead the investigative branch. He’s up to that, don’t you think?’

‘More than ready,’ said Jericho. ‘It’ll be good for him.’

‘Yes, it will. That replacement for Sergeant Light we’ve been waiting for won’t be coming but, as you know, Ed Loovens passed his sergeant’s exam, so we’re hoping he’ll stay on. His constable position will be lost, and that’s it.’

‘No redundancies or forced transfers?’

‘Just you and me,’ she said, her eyes dropping to look down into the carpark.

Here’s the rub, thought Jericho. Is the end going to come like this? So quickly? So unexpectedly? No wonder she was humming
All Things Must Pass
.

‘And what’s it to be?’

‘I’m off to Bristol,’ she said. ‘Would have preferred Bath, obviously, but what can you do? You... well, you don’t need to worry. There’s still a job for you – somewhere – if you want it. You’ll need to apply, of course. Then again, I’ve done what I can and there’s a package on the table, if you want to walk away. It’d be good for you. Set you up well. You could go off and do what you want.’

She laughed, another more exaggerated movement of the right hand.

‘God, you know what this organisation is like. I’m sure they’d pay you off, and then hire you back for more money to do some consultancy work. You can see what’s there and make a call.’

‘And if I don’t want to leave?’

‘You’ll need to apply for posts in other stations, same as everyone else. Likely you’ll go on gardening leave until something comes up.’

Jericho stared straight ahead, the countryside around Wells stretching away from him, fields and thick trees, the small hills just beyond the town. If he wanted to stay in the police, he would have to leave this city. He’d been here seven years, more or less. Was that what he wanted now?

Not for a moment. Perhaps he could stay in Wells and commute to Bath or Taunton or Bristol every day. Weston even.

‘So this is me getting my notice?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long?’

‘A month. Could have been less, but I figured you’d want to stay on and that gardening leave wouldn’t really suit you. I wanted to give you a few weeks to try to fix up something else.’

‘Thanks,’ he said automatically, even though he rarely thanked her for anything and was forever suspicious of her motives.

‘You will want to stay on?’ she asked.

Jericho put his hands in his pockets. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, his tie still neatly done to the collar.

Maybe he could ask for a demotion, lose the detective badge and be the inspector. The thought came and went more quickly, almost, than it was possible to have it in the first place, leaving behind a little smile.

Whatever he was going to do next, he certainly wasn’t going to be in charge of a station. No one would think that a good idea.

‘I’ll think about it and let you know,’ he said.

‘I’ll e-mail you details of the redundancy package.’

He was going to tell her not to bother, as he wouldn’t look at it, but stopped himself. Why not look at it?

‘OK, thanks.’

‘Right, Robert, I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing. And, for the moment, please don’t say anything to anyone. I just wanted to give you the heads up, as you were the only one directly affected.’

He didn’t move immediately. Perhaps he was clinging on to the moment when his police career ended. Perhaps he was pleasantly surprised to be in this room and not find his hate curled in an angry, snarling ball in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps it was just cool, and he knew the moment he stepped out the door, he was going to melt in the heat.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

He lowered his eyes for a moment, then glanced at her.

‘Thanks, Sarah,’ he said.

He turned and left the room, stepping out into the incinerator, the death knell on his career having been sounded.

*

M
orlock had taken the train from Grindelwald to Interlaken, from Interlaken to Geneva. In Geneva he had caught the easyJet flight to Bristol. He sat down in window seat 6A and was asleep before the plane took off. He woke up as it was taxiing to a standstill.

Flights were wasted time for men like him. His work took a lot of preparation, planning down to the minutest detail. It was not the kind of work, however, that you did sitting on a plane next to a non-combatant.

In Morlock’s world, virtually everyone was a non-combatant. There was Develin, who gave him his orders, there were the people he had to kill, and there was Morlock himself. Everyone else fitted into the non-combatant role. It was the most basic and sensible rule, however, to make sure that he remained utterly anonymous, even to those unlikely to have any interest in what he did for a living.

He arrived in Bristol at six thirty-three in the evening, the weather much warmer than he’d been expecting. He had a job to do the following morning, and then he was due to meet with Develin in the afternoon in the centre of London. Beyond that, his diary was currently empty, although that was nothing new.

He was booked into the Premier Inn in Glastonbury, having established that there would be no manned desk in the middle of the night, therefore allowing him to leave the premises, unseen, at four and return before six. If, sometime later, someone clocked his movement on CCTV footage, it would be of little concern. The man who was staying overnight at the Glastonbury Premier Inn would no longer exist.

––––––––

J
ericho worked until after seven, the first day of a month of putting things in order. He rarely looked at his inbox, invariably passing paperwork onto Haynes or one of the constables. However, there was enough of it that he had never touched for there to be an amount of work outstanding. None of it, he was pleased to note as he slowly went through it, of any importance whatsoever.

Still, he thought, it wouldn’t be fair on Haynes to suddenly find himself the senior detective in the city with all this trivial crap to take on. And so, for the first time that Haynes could recall, he walked into Jericho’s office late in the working day only to find his chief inspector hunched over his computer, seemingly reading e-mails.

‘Can I take a selfie?’ said Haynes.

Jericho looked round. He’d been at this for a few hours and, naturally, the life was being sucked from him.

‘What?’

‘You’re reading e-mails. It’s like the eighth wonder of the world. Thought I could get a picture with you in the background.’

‘You’re hilarious, Sergeant.’

Haynes smiled, pulled up the seat the other side of Jericho’s desk.

‘So, really, sir, what’s got into you? The guys said you’ve been on your computer for, like, four hours or something.’

Jericho indicated the screen, then shook his head, straightened his shoulders and sat back.

‘Not much else going on, thought I’d try to get on top of this stuff.’

‘Wow. Who are you and what have you done wi–’

‘Enough.’

Haynes laughed. Top button undone, tie loose, no jacket. No one was wearing a jacket.

‘Just about to hit the road. Anything else need doing?’

Jericho stared across the desk. Had been thinking about something while he worked his way through the mindless junk of his inbox. The thing he should have shown to Haynes seven months earlier, while he lay in hospital.

He’d been waiting for something to happen all that time, some other unexpected event in his life. He hadn’t anticipated anything in particular. How could he? The previous events, the strange occurrences around
Britain’s Got Justice
, had been so random, so out of the ordinary, there had been no way to see them coming. He presumed it would be the same the next time. If there was to be a next time.

He’d wondered whether he should just let it go or whether to include Haynes. Now that he had a sense of things coming to an end, he had decided to pass it on. Maybe, when they came back for more – whoever
they
were – it would be the station they would come for. Not just him. Not just the formerly famous detective.

He opened the drawer to his right, took out the small white envelope, hesitated for a moment and then tossed it across the desk to Haynes.

Haynes glanced down at the envelope for a moment before picking it up. He didn’t have to look inside to know what it contained. It had been seven months since the last warning card had arrived, but he’d known as well as Jericho that it wasn’t over. They’d never really got an answer to who had been sending the cards, and although they had written in their report that it had been the work of Durrant and his confederate, Sergeant Light, they’d known that the hand of something much bigger had been at work.

Haynes reached down, opened the envelope and took out the small tarot card. He’d been expecting another hanged man, like the ones that had dominated their previous investigation. This, however, was a death card. Death himself sitting on a black horse, bearing a white standard in his right hand, a curious emblem on the standard, riding through fields of the dead, bodies strewn far and wide, too great in number to be counted.

‘Jesus,’ he said, as he looked up at Jericho. ‘When did this come?’

‘Someone left it beside my hospital bed.’

‘When?’

Jericho looked slightly annoyed at the question. He was destined to be defensive during the discussion, knowing that he was at fault for not having told Haynes about it already.

‘When I was in hospital, obviously.’

‘In January?’

‘Yes, Sergeant.’

‘You’ve had this for seven months?’

‘Seven and a half, if you’re being pedantic.’

‘Seriously, sir, why didn’t you say?’

Jericho held his gaze across the table, before slowly letting his eyes drop.

He was tired. Tired after a long afternoon looking at trivia on his computer. Tired after the police had told him he was welcome to leave. They didn’t want him anymore. Hadn’t he been waiting for that for the last seven and a half months?

‘We knew... we knew that there was someone else behind this. That there was some big thing, some, I don’t know, some bigger conspiracy. I made the call. This card, I didn’t think it was another warning of what was to come. I took it as a victory note. I took is as someone saying, look at all the dead. And look at us, still sitting on our high horse, riding through the bodies of everyone who tries to cross us. In fact, does it even matter if they crossed us? They’re dead anyway. We have dominion. We’ve won. We always win.’

He wasn’t looking at Haynes as he spoke. His words were soft, swathed in defeat in a way Haynes did not recognise from him.

‘I thought they were just letting me know who was in charge. And so...’

He lifted his eyes, flicked a desultory hand as though waving away the whole business.

‘And there’ve been no more?’ asked Haynes. ‘No more cards?’

He shook his head.

Haynes looked back at the card. The detail of the dead bodies was incredible, and yet the image of Death, skeletal head the only thing visible from beneath the black cloak, dominated the image.

‘So, why are you showing it to me now?’

Jericho held his gaze for a moment, then looked away to his left, out of the window to the warm August evening. The warmest evening of the year so far, destined to be warmer still the following day.

‘I thought about showing you the card every day. Today I decided it was time.’

‘You want me to check it out?’ asked Haynes. Expecting the same old answer.

Jericho turned back and shrugged.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just be discreet.’

Haynes was surprised again, and immediately he was wary. The Chief Inspector was clearing out his inbox, he’d given him something that had been in his possession for over seven months, and he was happy with Haynes investigating it.

‘Everything all right, sir?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ said Jericho.

He glanced at the clock beside the door.

‘You should go home.’

‘I’ll maybe look into this first,’ said Haynes, putting the card back inside the envelope and tapping it.

‘Do it tomorrow.’

Haynes nodded. Jericho said goodbye with a slight movement of his eyebrows, and turned back to his monitor. Haynes watched him briefly, took a moment to look out at the dying of the day, and then left the office, a new sense of unease resting on his shoulders.

––––––––

T
here had been five westerners who had completed the climb of all five summits of Kangchenjunga the previous April. Connolly, Carter, Harrow, Geyerson and Emerick.

One down, four to go.

The money for the expedition had come from Geyerson. He had made that money on Wall Street, employing a legendary skill to buy and sell at the right time. That was it, that was all he had. And it had worked.

Thirty years of that had left him a billionaire. The billionaire who no one knew. He was charitable to an extent, but never in his own name. He didn’t want people knowing him. He didn’t want to be on television giving people advice. He didn’t want to run for office. All he wanted to do was climb mountains, so when he took a break that August, he took even that walking in the High Atlas.