The Demon Code (7 page)

Kennedy waited until the man was halfway over the sill before she rushed him. She gave him a shot of the pepper spray right in the eyes, but a black mask covered his entire face and he didn’t even react. He just dropped and twisted, turning the movement into a surprisingly graceful roll, and then he was inside the room with her.

She aimed a blow at his stomach as he scrambled to his feet, but the punch didn’t connect. He leaned away from it with incredible speed, catching Kennedy’s arm above and below the elbow, pulling her forward right off her balance and throwing her. She came down hard on the floorboards, stunned.

Through blurred, tearing eyes, she saw the man standing over her. He took something from his belt and she knew from the way it flashed in the yellow-white glow from the street lamp – dull-bright-dull, inside of a second – that it was a knife. She raised a clumsy block, but she couldn’t protect her whole body, and stretched out on the floor as she was, she made an unmissable target. She was dead.

But the knife didn’t come down. The man was staggering, clawing at his mask. The pepper spray had soaked through at last. It was burning his eyes and cutting off his breath, and because it was in the fabric of the mask there was no way for him to get away from it.

Kennedy got her feet under her and stood, but even blinded and hurting, he heard her step back. He advanced in a step-shuffle gait into the space she vacated, pressing her hard until the wall was right up against her shoulder blades.

Then he kicked her through it.

His foot connected with Kennedy’s chest, with so much force behind it that it would probably have staved in her ribs if she’d been leaning against brick. But she was leaning against thin, stale, crumbly plaster pasted over wafer-thin laths. She went staggering and sprawling through into the next room, fell on her back and rolled aside, expecting him to follow through.

Nothing came through the wall. She got to her feet and staggered to the ragged-edged hole, cradling her chest and trying to suck in some air.

The man was gone. Kennedy pushed and stumbled her way back through to the room where they’d fought. Something lay on the floor, a dark and shapeless mass. Kennedy went to it and picked it up, then winced and held it far away from her face. Sodden, limp, sour with the stench of oleorosin, it was the man’s face-mask, and he’d torn it half to ribbons in his haste to get it off.

On the street, the innocent bystanders had mostly dispersed like ghosts at cock-crow, their civic duty done and their curiosity satisfied, but the small group of students who Kennedy had summarily deputised stood in a slightly sheepish defensive ring around Izzy, who was still unconscious. Kennedy thanked them and released them back into civilian life. Then there was nothing else to do but wait until the ambulance arrived.

Izzy revived before the ambulance got to them. After a few seconds of not knowing where she was or what the hell was going on, she sat up – ignoring Kennedy’s attempts to stop her – rubbed her eyes and looked around. She coughed, licked her lips and grimaced as she tasted the cement dust that had accreted on them.

‘If you’re trying to kill me for the insurance money, babe,’ she said hoarsely, ‘there isn’t any. Hard to believe, but I’m worth more alive.’

Kennedy hugged her close. ‘Shut up,’ she muttered.

They were like that for a long time, sitting on the edge of the pavement, Izzy leaning awkwardly into Kennedy’s embrace, as the dust settled all around them. A distant siren whooped and then was silent again, maybe their own ambulance, on its way.

‘I like this,’ Izzy murmured, her head pressed tight against Kennedy’s bruised and aching chest. ‘I like this a lot. I should have got the crap beaten out of me ages ago.’

6

Glyn Thornedyke, the security coordinator at Ryegate House, was a sort of corpulent wraith, badly overweight but pale and insubstantial and clearly very unwell. He seemed surprised that his approval was needed for a mass interrogation of the facility’s staff – and in retrospect, Kennedy was sorry that she’d taken the time to ask him. It was already almost ten and her eyes had that itchy feeling that comes with the more serious kinds of tiredness. Giving statements to the police had kept both her and Izzy up until long after midnight. Then other things had kept them up. As a result, Kennedy felt both exhausted and full of urgency – a feeling like she needed to catch a bus that had already left.

‘I’m going to want all the staff files,’ she told Thornedyke. ‘Hard copy or digital, whatever’s quicker.’

‘Yes. Very well.’ Thornedyke cast his eye across the files and papers on his desk as though he suspected that what Kennedy was asking for might turn out to be right there in front of him. She wondered what kind of turf wars he’d already fought with Gassan – the professor had been very keen to claim the overview of site security as part of his own brief. ‘I can certainly provide physical copies. Will you need anything else?’

The tone was balanced between hope and trepidation. Clearly, Thornedyke wanted her to say no and go away.

Kennedy had to disappoint him. ‘Yes, Mr Thornedyke. I’ll also want an office to conduct the interviews in. And someone to feed people through to me. I don’t know anyone’s face or where they work.’

‘I can’t allocate you a room,’ Thornedyke said plaintively. ‘Rooms are booked through the front desk. And if you take someone from my staff, I’ll have a hole in the rota.’

‘Well, how about if I take Ben Rush?’ Kennedy said.

‘The probationer?’

‘Yeah. Him. Would that be a hole you can live with?’

Thornedyke thought about it. ‘I suppose so. Yes. So long as it’s just for one day.’

‘Great. He’ll come and collect the files from you as soon as I’m ready.’

The security coordinator still didn’t look all that happy, but Kennedy left before he could raise any more objections.

Professor Gassan, only too eager to be of assistance – and maybe to demonstrate the size of his new empire – gave her the main boardroom to work out of. The space was about as big as a football field, with a conference table so long and wide it had obviously had to be brought up from the street in sections and assembled like a jigsaw. It was a vanity table, designed to make museum executives feel like they were wheeling and dealing in a serious, corporate world. The deep-pile carpet and thick, pleated curtains were identical shades of oatmeal.

Gassan also approved Kennedy’s loan of Rush for the day, and the gangly boy turned up about fifteen minutes later with an armload of manila folders. He dumped them down on the table and mopped his brow, miming exhaustion.

‘Thanks, Rush. Okay, you’re seconded to me for the day. I hope that’s okay. It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting.’

Rush nodded equably. ‘A change is as good as a rest.’

‘Okay, then. I’m going to take an hour or so to go through these files and make notes. After that, I’ll ask you to bring people in, one at a time, and act as chaperone while I interview them. In the meantime, did you get breakfast yet?’

Rush shrugged. ‘Cup of tea. Round of toast.’

‘Most important meal of the day, Rush. Is there anywhere around here that does coffee and bagels?’

Rush nodded. ‘Sam Widge’s, on Gerrard Road.’

‘Lox and cream cheese and double espresso for me. Dealer’s choice for you.’

She gave him a twenty pound note, and he was off.

The personnel files were as bare and banal as she expected them to be, and Kennedy was able to get through them easily inside the hour she’d allowed. The coffee helped. The flaccid bridge roll – ‘no bagels left, sorry’ – not so much.

All of Ryegate House’s staff, both full-time and part-time, had impeccable employment records. None of them had any spent convictions or debt problems, or at least, any that had showed up at the fairly superficial level of investigation that the museum deployed. Most had been here since before the flood, and almost everyone above the entry level had been promoted internally.

On the face of it, a closet with no skeletons.

So Kennedy narrowed her search, looking for repeating patterns. It was standard police procedure with any possibility of conspiracy – or where you wanted to eliminate that possibility – to look for the common ground in which it could have grown: if two or more of the Ryegate House staffers had attended the same school or college, had worked together in another context, or were members of the same club or society, it would have been worth following up. But they didn’t, hadn’t, weren’t. The only thing they had in common was Ryegate House itself.

Kennedy took a different tack, looking for hobbies or work experience that might translate into burglary skills. Not much there: two of the security team were ex-army, but their background – Royal Corps of Transport and Household Guard – didn’t suggest that either had seen much in the way of special ops training.

Finally, without much more sense of direction than she’d had when she started out, she pushed the stack of files across the table at Rush. ‘Shuffle and deal,’ she said. ‘Put them into some sort of order that makes sense to you and then feed them through to me one at a time.’

He seemed nervous with that much responsibility. ‘Is alphabetical okay?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Kennedy, on an impulse. ‘Surprise me.’

The next few hours were gruelling. With no steer from her, Rush sent in the top brass first. The topmost brass – excluding Emil Gassan – was a Valerie Parminter, who bore the title of Assistant Director. She was in her fifties and austerely attractive, with a well-maintained figure and pink-tinted hair that made a virtue of its unnaturalness. To judge from her face, she saw this interview as a huge affront to her dignity.

Parminter’s responses to Kennedy’s questions began as sparse sentences, but quickly degenerated into monosyllables. Her face said: I have to endure this, but I don’t have to hide my contempt for it.

Kennedy went for the jugular without a qualm.

‘So,’ she said, ‘this happened on your watch, so to speak. In the period between the departure of the old director and the arrival of Professor Gassan.’

Parminter stared at her, a cold, indignant stare. ‘I don’t think the timing is relevant to anything,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ Kennedy said.

Those who live by the monosyllable shall die by the monosyllable. Parminter waited for more, and when it wasn’t forthcoming she voided her hurt feelings into the accusing silence. ‘For the record,’ she said acidly, ‘I suggested a full security review nine months ago. Dr Leopold said he’d take that under advisement. Which of course meant he’d sweep it under the carpet and forget it.’

‘You had concerns about the adequacy of the security arrangements,’ Kennedy summarised, scribbling notes as she spoke.

Parminter shifted in her seat. ‘Yes.’

‘But you only raised them on that one occasion. A pity, given the way things turned out.’

‘I was ignored! You can only beat your head against a brick wall so many times.’

Kennedy pursed her lips. ‘And these concerns. You voiced them in an email? A memo?’

‘No.’

‘At a minuted meeting, then.’

‘No.’ Parminter looked exasperated. ‘It was a private conversation.’

‘Which Dr Leopold will corroborate?’

The older woman laughed, astonished, indignant, faux-amused, but with a nervous edge underneath these things. ‘Dr Leopold suffered a massive stroke. He can’t even talk. But I’m not on trial here. Security is the Director’s remit.’

‘Of course,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘Nobody is on trial here. It’s just that I was asked to submit a report on staff awareness and efficiency, in addition to the case-specific inquiry. I want to make sure I do you full justice.’

So start talking.

‘This is absurd,’ Parminter protested.

Kennedy shrugged sympathetically. ‘I know.’

‘We had a spate of attempted break-ins,’ Parminter said. ‘A cluster, all together, around seven months ago.’

‘Attempted?’

‘Yes.’

‘No actual loss or damage?’

‘No. But it made us all aware that in some ways we were falling short of best practice. I’d been on a course the year before where there were talks on how you should go about protecting very small and very valuable items.

‘I pointed out to Dr Leopold that some museums and archives use a double-blind system for storage. When an item has to be brought out of the stacks into any other part of the building, a requisition form has to be filled in first. Assistants use the item code to generate a physical address from the computer and the box is brought up from the stacks, sealed. The curator who requested the box knows what’s in it, but not where it is. The assistant knows where it is, but not what’s in it.’

‘Which has the effect of …’

‘It makes targeted theft impossible. Our system, by contrast, depends on physical barriers and deterrents. Which are fine until somebody figures out a way to bypass them. And when they do, they know exactly where to look. Well, except for the books, of course.’

‘The books?’

‘The legacy collection from the old British Library. That’s what Room 37 is full of, isn’t it?’

Kennedy’s interest quickened, despite the woman’s lecturing delivery. Gassan had said that the British Library and the British Museum used to share the same premises. At the time, she’d wondered where that random factoid had come from. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What makes the books different?’

‘Well, we don’t have an extant catalogue for them,’ Parminter said, as though stating the blindingly obvious. ‘The catalogue and all the access codes went to the new library building on Euston Road. If they wanted to find a specific book, they’d have to give us a physical location – room, rack, position, box number. The only alternative would be to search every box until you found it.’ The older woman smiled. ‘It’s ironic, really.’

‘Is it?’ Kennedy asked. ‘How?’

‘Well, the lack of a physical address means we’ve achieved a level of security for those books that goes beyond anything we’ve got for the other artefacts. And yet the books – at least the ones that were left with us after the move – are the least valuable part of the collection.’