The Demon Code (9 page)
Kennedy nodded. ‘Yeah. That
would
be stupid.’
She got Rush to show her the two fixed cameras, and with his help she paced out the areas of the room that would be visible to each of them. The negative space, where the cameras couldn’t see, was where she began.
He watched her for a while, opening boxes and peering into them. He was perplexed. ‘Those ones are empty,’ he told her.
‘Yeah,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘And I bet nobody bothered to search them, right?’
‘I don’t know. There wouldn’t be much point, would there?’
‘Depends what you’re looking for.’
Rush waited for more, but Kennedy didn’t have any more to say. If she was wrong, she might as well be wrong off the record. There were hundreds of empty boxes on the endless shelves. The full ones were all the same size, since they all had the same contents: books from the British Library overspill. The empty boxes had just been put wherever there was space to put them, so they came in a variety of sizes to reflect the infinite variety of items in the museum’s collection.
Kennedy was only bothering to open the largest ones, and she struck gold before she’d gotten halfway along aisle D.
She beckoned Rush over and pointed into the open box. He stared down and his eyes widened. The box contained a black sweater and a pair of black leggings. Black boots. A black balaclava designed to cover the entire face. And a large quantity of what looked like ash.
‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed. ‘I don’t get it. Is that what the intruder was wearing?’
‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘It is.’
‘Then why is it still here? We saw him leave the room.’
‘No. We didn’t. We saw him climb up into the ceiling space. But we both know there’s no way out from up there. So whatever we saw, it wasn’t the great escape. It was something else.’ Kennedy was still piecing it all together in her mind, but the fact that she’d gotten this part right gave her confidence to pursue the other, more elusive aspects of the crime. If it even
was
a crime.
‘The room’s been locked and off-limits ever since the day after the break-in,’ she said – a statement rather than a question.
‘Yeah,’ Rush confirmed. ‘I already told you that.’
‘Clerical assistants did a tally of the contents, but they were watched the whole time. Nobody’s been allowed to come in here alone.’
‘Except the police.’
‘Except the police. Take a note of the box number, would you, Rush? And then close up here. Leave everything exactly as it is.’
‘Right.’
‘And don’t say a word to anyone.’
‘Right.’ He blinked rapidly, gave her a guarded look.
‘I’ll talk to the professor,’ Kennedy said. ‘And to Thornedyke. I’m not asking you to lie to your boss. Just don’t talk to anyone else on the staff here, okay? Word will spread around, our suspect will get to hear about it, and then we’ll be screwed. I think this is our chance to break this case.’
Rush seemed to like the word
our
, but he had to ask. ‘We’ve got a suspect? As of when?’
‘As of about five minutes ago. I won’t give you a name – not just yet. If you see this person, you’re going to need to behave absolutely normally, so as not to put them on their guard. But I promise you’ll be the first to know after the professor.’
Back in the boardroom, Kennedy picked out the two relevant files and took them down to Gassan’s office. She dropped them onto his desk and stood with arms folded while he read the names.
Gassan looked up at her, with blank amazement on his face. ‘You’re not saying these two had anything to do with the break-in?’
‘Actually, Professor, I’m saying they did it. And I believe I know how they did it. One inside, one outside – probably the only way it could be done. But I need your help for the next part.’
‘Which is?’
‘Figuring out what it was they did.’
Gassan rubbed his forehead, as though he had a slight headache. Clearly the news that the break-in might have been an inside job didn’t thrill him. He looked from one file to the other, then back to the first. ‘I hate to point out the flaw in your reasoning, Heather,’ he said at last, ‘but Mark Silver was already dead when the break-in occurred. You must be mistaken.’
‘Maybe,’ she allowed. ‘Get me the swipe records for that day and we’ll know. Because if I’m right, they’ll both have swiped out at the same time on the night of—’
Kennedy’s phone played a few bars of ersatz jazz – an incoming text, not a call – and she paused while she checked the message. It was from John Partridge and it was good news.
Swansea said yes. Kelvin probe plus operator. One day only. Tomorrow.
She took the files back from Gassan. ‘You don’t have to believe me,’ she said. ‘Just let me run with it. We’ll know a lot more tomorrow. Because tomorrow, we’ll be able to go where they went. See what they looked at, what they touched. Find out what they took, if they took anything.’
Gassan looked at her with a very patrician scepticism, as though she’d just tried to sell him a timeshare. ‘And how will we do that? By magic?’
‘Pretty much,’ Kennedy said.
‘Isobel and Heather aren’t here right now, but if you’ve got a message, go ahead and leave it after the beep. We’ll be right back at you.’
Nobody had a message. There was no red light on the phone’s base unit. Kennedy had only pressed the playback key so that she could hear Izzy’s voice. The flat was haunted by her absence – an anti-poltergeist of inimical stillness.
She wandered from the living room into the bedroom, back out into the hall. None of these places felt as though they wanted her.
Ever since she first found out what gypsies were, back when she was about seven, Kennedy had nursed a secret fantasy that involved ditching everything except the clothes she stood up in and going on the road. When she was down, she tended to see rooms as prisons. That feeling came back to her now, stronger than it had ever been.
She took out her phone, looked at it as though expecting it to ring, or else defying it to. It didn’t, but she noticed another text that she hadn’t registered when she read Partridge’s. It was from Ralph Prentice.
Might have something for you on the knife wounds. Just checking it out now. Probably be in touch tomorrow.
She keyed in Izzy’s number, let her thumb hover over the call button for a good long while.
But in the end, she just put it back in her pocket.
The evening was a mausoleum. Kennedy tried – in quick, futile succession – to watch TV, read a book and tidy the flat. Her mind refused to focus down on anything. She ate supper – a defrosted lasagne and two stiff whiskies – then lay on the bed fully clothed, staring up at the plaster ceiling rose. The insane events of the night before sat undigested in her mind. Now that she’d seen it up close, the resemblance between the outfit modelled by the Ryegate House burglar and the one her own attacker had worn was even closer than she’d thought at first. Black is black, but the design of the balaclava was identical to the one she’d held in her hands after the attack on her and Izzy.
She had to face the possibility that someone wanted to halt her investigation – at a time when she barely had one. And wanted it badly enough to kill her. That thought shook loose a very disturbing memory. She’d met some people once who thought nothing of killing for a book. She really, really didn’t want to meet them again.
The heat was oppressive. Kennedy went through into the living room and fixed herself another drink, then sat in front of the open window to feel the breeze. A thick bank of cloud hid the moon, but there were a few stars visible high up near the zenith of the sky. She imagined she was looking down from there – a psychological technique taught her by a crisis counsellor after the incident that had cost her the licence to carry. The exercise was meant to encourage a healthy decentring, putting your own problems in perspective. Kennedy found it useless in that respect, but it did give her a pleasant, mild sense of vertigo.
While she was still sitting there, trying to get lost in inconsequential thoughts as a defence against the scary ones, the end of the cloud bank unrolled with slow theatricality from the face of the moon. In its sudden spotlight, Kennedy saw something move on the roof of the building opposite. It was only for a second. Probably a cat, or nothing at all, a piece of garbage light enough to be lifted on the wind. Except that it was moving against the wind.
As casually as she could manage, Kennedy took another sip of her drink, set the glass aside and ambled away from the window, out of the door of the room into the hallway that ran the length of Izzy’s flat. As soon as she was through the door and out of any possible line of sight from the roof, she sprinted down the hallway, took the stairs three at a time and got to the street door inside of twenty seconds.
Then she slowed and walked out onto the street at a casual pace, her head down, trusting to the darkness to cover her. She strolled away down the street, turned the corner, quickly crossed the road and took an alley that led behind the buildings on the opposite side.
The building directly facing Izzy’s was another residential block. Kennedy was in luck: a teenaged boy and girl walked out of the back door as she approached it, and the girl obligingly held it open for her.
She found the stairs and climbed them, quickly but quietly. At the very top, there was an emergency door that led out onto the roof. Conveniently close to hand, a fire extinguisher sat in a niche on the wall. It was of the black CO
type, small enough and solid enough to make a reasonably good weapon. Kennedy snatched it up and slammed the door open.
And found she was facing the wrong way. The door opened towards the rear of the building, not its front. In the echo of the door’s slamming, there were some other sounds – a scrape of stone or gravel, and then a rustling insinuation that died away quickly.
She ran out onto the roof and around the low housing in which the fire door was set. There was nothing else obstructing her view and no sign of anyone or anything that shouldn’t be there.
Still wired, still suspicious, she patrolled the length of the roof, looking across directly at the windows of Izzy’s flat. She could see where she’d been sitting, her empty glass still on the sill, and she tried to work out from that where the movement would have been.
She found it, in the end. The surface of the roof was gravel laid on green mineral felt and a small area of it bore both the scuff of footprints and the indentations of someone sitting or kneeling there for a long time.
Not paranoia. She was being watched.
And it seemed like the watcher must have wings, because there was no other way off the roof that she could see.
Partridge was waiting outside Ryegate House’s main entrance when Kennedy arrived the next morning, with the smallest dog-end she had ever seen wedged between his index and forefinger. He had two companions, both standing nervously upwind of Partridge’s cigarette: a shy, slightly fey-looking young man and a serious, bespectacled woman, both in their early twenties and dressed in what looked like their Sunday best. Partridge himself wore a shabby donkey jacket over a plain white T-shirt and dark-blue trousers with more pockets than anyone could actually need. He took Kennedy’s hand and greeted her with old-world civility.
Then he introduced the other two: ‘Kathleen Sturdy and William Price, of the University of Swansea’s School of Engineering.’ They were standing to either side of a solid-looking steel box with rows of handles bolted to its sides and foam-rubber chocks affixed to each corner.
‘This is the Kelvin probe?’ Kennedy asked.
‘This is just the scanning head,’ Partridge said. ‘There are a lot more components. They’re parked in a van three streets away – closest we could get. My God, I hate this city.’
‘That just makes you a bigger hero, John.’ Kennedy turned to the young man and woman. ‘And I assume you two are the operators. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this.’
‘Actually, we’re graduate students,’ the woman – Kathleen – answered. Her voice had a Welsh accent so delicate and musical that it sounded as though she were reciting a poem. ‘But we’re qualified to use the probe. We’re both doing research in force microscopy.’
‘And the university couldn’t spare anyone from the faculty,’ Partridge summed up. ‘So William and Kathy kindly agreed to come down to the Smoke for the day and help you out. In exchange for their travelling expenses and a small per diem.’
‘Of course,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m grateful to you both. Really. This is just wonderful.’ She didn’t think Emil Gassan would object to the extra expense, but if he did, she would meet it herself out of the money she’d already been paid.
‘Let’s go in,’ she suggested. ‘I’ll see about getting you some coffee, and then I’ll explain what it is I need.’
‘We might just as well skip the coffee,’ Partridge suggested, as the two students hefted the steel case by its evenly spaced handles and raised it between them like pallbearers raising a coffin, ‘and get straight down to business.’
But they couldn’t do that without explaining to Gassan, and he was rattled all over again when he realised what he was signing up to. ‘Are we sure that this is legal, Heather?’ he asked, drawing Kennedy aside. ‘It sounds as though it might raise issues of privacy and freedom of information.’
‘These are your premises,’ she explained. ‘All we’re doing is examining them for evidence of unauthorised access. We’re not assuming criminality, only trespass. We’re going to look around Room 37 and find out what was done there. Then when we brace our suspect, we’ll have some ammunition. This was a professional job, Emil. He won’t cave, he’ll stonewall you to the last inch. If you want to have any chance of finding out what happened that night, you’ll need to have a good part of the answer before you ask the question.’
She waited while Gassan thought it through, but she knew she was right and she didn’t have any doubt as to what he’d eventually decide. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Let’s do this.’