The Demon Code (2 page)

Kennedy wrenched her thoughts forcibly off that track, but not before she saw all over again the mental image she’d been trying to avoid and was hit by the same feelings that it always inspired: bitter rage superimposed on terrifying emptiness like cheap whisky laid over ice.

So she didn’t go home. She went to a bar – a characterless chain place with a faux-whimsical name that had firkins in it – and took that whisky straight instead of metaphorical. She nursed it gloomily, wondering what came next. The job at Sandhurst Ballantyne was meant to be the start of something good, but laying violent hands on your boss greatly reduces the chances of him recommending you to friends. So here she was, with a zero-calorie client list, an empty appointment book and an unfaithful (maybe serially unfaithful) girlfriend. The future looked bright.

Kennedy’s statuesque good looks and long blonde hair attracted a fair amount of attention from the other daytime drinkers. Either that or it was the usual tedious business of a woman in a uniform. Hers was severe in the extreme – crisp police-blue security coveralls, black military boots – but for some men the fact of a uniform is enough.

She was just polishing off the whisky when her phone rang. She fished it out with a momentary flare of hope: sometimes one door opened right when another one closed.

But it was Emil Gassan. He was an academic, a historian at a Scottish university who she’d got to know in the course of an old case – and that was the only thing he ever wanted to talk to her about. Kennedy refused the call and tossed the phone back into her bag.

She considered spending the day drifting around London: doing a gallery, taking in a film. But that would be ridiculous. She wasn’t bunking school, she was out of work, and there was no point in putting things off. She squared her shoulders and headed for home.

Home was Pimlico – a short, elbowed hop by Tube, but then a fairly long walk up Vauxhall Bridge Road; long enough, anyway, that by the time Kennedy got to the front door of her flat, she’d revised that earlier rhetorical question. Where exactly
was
the bottom, these days? And did she really want to find out?

She made a lot of noise with the key in the lock, shuffled her feet on the floor and closed the door too loudly. When she was halfway up the hall, Izzy came out to greet her – from the lounge, not the bedroom, to Kennedy’s relief.

Shorter and darker than Kennedy, Izzy was at the same time considerably more concentrated: a louche and limber ball of sex appeal, from which her fairly broad hips didn’t detract in the slightest. Radiating both surprise and suspicion as she faced Kennedy down the length of the hall, she flicked a strand of hair from her chocolate-brown eyes.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘So you say,’ Kennedy riposted.

‘Do I get a kiss?’

It was a good question, but Kennedy didn’t have a good answer – or a good evasion. Hangdog, she advanced down the hall, kissed Izzy on the cheek, then carried on past her.

Izzy turned to watch her go. ‘You’re home early,’ she pointed out. ‘What, are you checking up on me now?’

‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘Why, should I be?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, then.’

They seemed to have reached the end of that conversational avenue. Kennedy went into the lounge, with a detour into the kitchen to put some ice in a glass. But when she opened the drinks cabinet and found herself meeting her own gaze in its mirrored back, she lost some of her enthusiasm. She already had one drink inside her. Getting smashed at eleven in the morning would feel a lot like a cry for help.

Izzy had followed her into the room. ‘Is something the matter?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you meant to be at Shithouse Brigadoon this morning?’

‘It’s Sandhurst Ballantyne.’

‘Yeah. Them.’

‘I was.’ Kennedy turned to face her, bottle in hand.

‘And you gave in your report?’

‘I tried to.’

Izzy cocked her head on one side and looked comically puzzled, which in another mood Kennedy would have found appealing. Right now it just irritated her.

‘The client refused to be briefed. He told me not to submit the report. He offered to pay me a performance bonus if I binned it and gave his ratty little department a clean bill of health.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Izzy said.

Kennedy shoved the whisky bottle back into the cabinet, then got it out again and poured herself a shot after all. ‘Plausible deniability,’ she muttered, as she did these things. ‘The report says there’s at least one and probably two people in the firm doing insider trading in client shares. If Kenwood knows about it, he’s got to do something about it. And since one of the two crooks – the definite one, not the probable one – is his boss, he decided he’d rather not know.’

‘Then why hire you in the first place?’ Izzy demanded. ‘That’s stupid.’

Kennedy nodded, and took a swig of the harsh, blended whisky. She grimaced. Izzy’s taste in booze was reliably horrendous. But she went ahead and drained the glass anyway. ‘Compliance is part of his job. He had to look like he was doing something – but he was hoping I’d come back empty. Then when I didn’t …’

She lapsed into silence.

‘So did you take it?’ Izzy asked.

‘Did I take what?’

‘The performance bonus?’

Kennedy sighed and put down the empty glass. ‘No, Izzy, I didn’t take it. He was getting himself off the hook by sticking me onto it. If I take the bribe, and then a year or so from now there’s an internal inquiry or an FSA investigation, he can say I withheld information. Then he’s in the clear and the fraud department comes after me.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ Izzy’s expression changed. ‘So?’

Kennedy showed her knuckles, covered in her own congealed blood. Izzy took the hand and kissed it. ‘Good for you, babe,’ she said. ‘Unless he sues. Is he going to sue?’

‘I don’t think so. Whenever I’m in a one-to-one, I make voice-tapes. So I’ve got him making that indecent proposal on the record. And I’m sending the report in anyway, to him and his boss and the CEO. Unfortunately, he still owed me half my fee. And when I left, he wasn’t reaching for his cheque book.’

‘Any other clients in the pipeline?’

‘The pipeline is dry all the way to the Caucasus, Izzy. This was meant to get me a lot of referrals to other city companies with security needs they couldn’t meet in-house. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen now.’

Izzy seemed perversely cheered by the bad news. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘so you can be a kept woman for a while. Live off my immoral earnings.’

She was joking, but Kennedy couldn’t laugh, didn’t feel able to cut Izzy the smallest amount of slack. ‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘that sounds like one of the lower circles of hell.’

She realised at this point that what she’d come home for was an argument – a stand-up row about fidelity and responsibility that would probably feel really cathartic for the first five minutes and then after that would feel like she was force-feeding both herself and the woman she was supposed to love handfuls of broken glass. She had to get out of there. Nowhere to go, really, but she had to get out.

‘I’m going downstairs,’ she muttered. ‘To box up some more of my dad’s stuff. If I hang around here, I’ll just put you off your stride.’

‘Or inspire me,’ Izzy said, but Kennedy was already heading for the door. ‘Heather …’

‘I’m good.’

‘I don’t have to clock on just yet. We could …’

‘I said I’m good.’

She was aware of another sound that Izzy made. A sigh maybe, or just a catch in her breath. She didn’t look back.

Downstairs, in her own flat, she threw random objects into boxes, opened wardrobe doors and slammed them shut again, walked from room to room in a futile pantomime of bustle and purpose.

Moving in with Izzy had seemed like the logical thing to do, after Kennedy’s father died. In the last year or so of his life, Izzy had been Peter Kennedy’s de facto nurse, or maybe babysitter, or maybe both. That was what had brought them together. Kennedy was a rising star in the detective division of the Met: her hours were long and unpredictable, and she needed someone close at hand who could come in and pinch-hit at a moment’s notice. Izzy was perfect, because although she already had a job, it was on a phone-sex line. Acting as a cheerleader for other people’s masturbation was light work you could do from pretty much anywhere. All the equipment she needed was a mobile phone and a dirty mind, and she had both.

The process by which they became lovers was anything but inevitable. It had started around the time Kennedy was kicked out of the Met on her ear, which meant she was around the flat a lot more when Izzy was there. The relationship had developed through the months that followed and it had seemed natural when Peter finally died for Kennedy to move in with Izzy. The flat she’d shared with her father felt like an exhibit in a museum, its associations permanently fixed. Moving out – even though she was only moving upstairs – felt like escaping from at least some of those associations.

But escape depended on a lot of things, and it had its own rules. One of them was that you can’t escape from stuff you’re still carrying with you. Exploitative and degrading though Izzy’s work was, she had never thought about quitting. She liked sex a lot, and when she wasn’t having it she liked to talk about it.

And, as it turned out, she liked having it even when Kennedy wasn’t around.

Their life together was now stalled: a perpetual tableau of
the adulterers discovered
, with Izzy scrambling to cover herself up, a sheepish young man trying to figure out what was going on, and Kennedy standing in the doorway, wide-eyed and reeling.

Izzy had never promised to be faithful, and in any case, she drew an absolute distinction between women and men. Women were lovers, partners, soul-mates. Men were an itch that she occasionally scratched. Kennedy had never thought that extorting promises was either necessary or desirable. In the patchy history of her sex life,
one
was the highest number of lovers she’d ever had on the boil at the same time, and it had generally felt like enough.

She ought to forgive Izzy. Or she ought to walk out with some cutting remark along the lines of ‘check out what you’re missing, babe’. She couldn’t do either. The passive aggression of guilt, reproach and sullen withdrawal was the horrendous unexcluded middle.

Kennedy’s phone rang. She glanced at the display, saw it was Emil Gassan again. She gave in and took the call, but only to tell him that this was a bad time.

Gassan got in first. ‘Heather, I’ve been playing phone tag with you all day. I’m so glad I finally caught up with you.’

She tried to head him off. ‘Professor—’

‘Emil,’ he countered. She ignored him. She didn’t want to be on first-name terms with Gassan: on some level, it felt wrong that the dry, spiky academic should even have a first name. ‘Professor, I really can’t talk right now. I’m in the middle of something.’

‘Oh.’

Gassan sounded more than usually cast down and Kennedy experienced a momentary compunction. She knew why he was calling and what it meant to him. It was all about that old case. The biggest find of his scholarly career was something that he could never discuss, on pain of death, except with her. Every so often, he had to vent. He had to tell her things that they both already knew and she had to listen – as a personal service. It gave her some sense of what Izzy must go through in the course of a working day.

‘It’s just … you know … pressure of work,’ she temporised. ‘I’ll call you later in the week.’

‘So your slate is full?’ Gassan said. ‘You wouldn’t be free to accept a commission?’

‘To accept … ?’ Kennedy was baffled, and – in spite of her sour mood – amused. ‘What, you need a detective, Emil? You want me to track down a missing library book or something?’

‘Yes. More or less. If you’d been free, I was going to ask you to take on some work – very sensitive and very well paid – for my current employer.’

Kennedy hesitated. It felt hypocritical and ridiculous to make such a rapid and shameless turn-around: but she really needed the money. Even more, she needed to have something that would keep her out of the flat until she could figure out what she wanted to do about Izzy.

‘So who’s your current employer, Professor?’

He told her and her eyebrows rose. It was definitely a step up from city sleaze.

‘I’ll come right over,’ Kennedy said.

2

The Great Court of the British Museum was like a whispering gallery, magnifying sound from all around Kennedy so that she felt surrounded by and cocooned in other people’s conversations. At the same time, sounds from close by seemed to come to her muffled and distorted: perfectly dysfunctional acoustics.

Or maybe she just hated the Great Court because when she’d come here with her father, as a young girl, it had been an actual courtyard, open to the air. She remembered clutching tightly onto his hand as he took her across the sunlit piazza into the cathedral of the past – a place where he’d been animated, happy and at home, and where just for once there was something he actually wanted to share with her.

Now the Great Court had a roof of diamond panes, radiating outwards from what had once been the reading room. The light inside this huge but sealed-off space was grey, like a winter afternoon with a threat of drizzle. It was an impressive feat of engineering, but she couldn’t help thinking there was something perverse about it. Why hide the sky and then fake it?

Kennedy took a seat at one of the court’s three coffee bars and started counting diamonds while she waited for Gassan. Knowing her man, she’d dressed formally in a light-blue trouser suit and grey boots, and pinned her unruly blonde hair back as severely as she could manage. Formality and order were big on Emil Gassan’s list of cardinal virtues.

She saw him from a long way away, bustling across the huge space with the purposeful dignity of a head waiter. He was dressed a lot better than a waiter, though: his blue three-piece suit, with the unmistakable zigzag stitching of Enzo Tovare on the breast pocket, looked new and unashamedly expensive. Gassan thrust his hand out before he reached her, then kept it out so that it preceded him into the conversation.