The Dead Sea Deception (33 page)

Kennedy opened the package, reached inside. The tips of her fingers touched cool metal. She took out the key – an old, solid-looking Chubb whose brash golden sheen had faded to a dull mid-brown. Then she ripped off the address label, just to be sure, and put it in her jacket pocket before dropping the envelope into the waste bin.

There was one more thing she needed. She left the bear pit and went downstairs to the basement, where the evidence lockers were. The constable on duty was someone she didn’t know: a uniform whose name tag was obscured by the headphones draped around his neck. She’d seen the guy hastily pull the headphones into that neutral position as she came down the stairs. He was so fresh out of training he sat up straight as she approached, like a kid in school. A copy of
Empire
sat before him on the desk, open.

‘Sarah Opie,’ Kennedy said, writing it in the day book as she spoke. ‘Case number fourteen-triple-eight-seventy.’ She showed ID and the constable opened up the door in the counter to let her through, then took out the metal bootlocker box with the requisite number and put it on the big central table for her. For a while he watched her sifting through the contents of a dead woman’s pockets.

Kennedy got out her notebook, made some annotations. The desk constable’s attention moved gradually but inexorably back to a review of a Korean martial arts movie.

Fourteen-eight-seven-eight-sixty was Marcus Dell. Kennedy
could see the bootlocker on a lower shelf, at the same height as her knees. She eased it out a little way, peered in. This was where her life had begun to go off the rails. Like Pandora’s box, this one contained all the evils in Kennedy’s world. Or at least it was their source.

She opened it anyway. Doing so without signing the day book was a serious offence, carrying a mandatory written warning, but the desk constable was absorbed in his magazine and seemed to have forgotten her existence. She knelt down and stared in at Marcus Dell’s effects. She put her hand in and picked up the ruined phone that had brought about his death. Tagged and bagged, inviolate behind cold polythene, its relationship to the world was ended.

Kennedy reached a decision, an accommodation with herself.

‘Okay,’ she said, a few moments later. The clerk looked up and found that she had already put all the various envelopes and packages back into the bootlocker. He came over and counted them cursorily, then checked a little more carefully to make sure that all the numbers matched those on the docket. All present and correct. He nodded, locked the box and put it back in its place on the shelf.

‘Did you find what you wanted?’ he asked her. Kennedy nodded. ‘Yes. I did. Thanks.’

The clerk let Kennedy out again and she walked back to the stairs. Combes was leaning against the wall halfway up, waiting for her – at the turn so that she didn’t know he was there until she almost walked right into him. He gave her a hard, unfriendly look, and he didn’t bother with small talk.

‘Tell me what you’re up to, Sergeant,’ he said, with heavy and sarcastic emphasis. ‘Or I’ll make you wish you’d never been bloody born.’

Kennedy kept her face perfectly inexpressive as she came to a dead stop in front of Combes. In the narrow stairwell, he made a pretty effective roadblock. She decided to let him speak first. Maybe he’d run loose enough at the mouth to tell her what he already knew, and she could decide from that how much more – if anything – she needed to tell him.

Combes seemed more than happy to make the running. ‘You came down here to look through some logged evidence,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘So if it’s related to the Rotgut killings, I’m entitled to ask you what it is you’re looking at and why.’

‘The Rotgut killings?’ she repeated. ‘Is that what we’re calling them now?’

‘I’m serious. You’re meant to be working on the knife, and the message board stuff. If you’ve got new information, or a new angle on what we’ve already got, you should have logged it in the case file and copied it to the team.’

‘Nothing new,’ Kennedy said. ‘Nothing substantial anyway. I wanted to check through the Park Square stuff.’

‘Yeah?’ Combes didn’t even bother to hide his aggressive scepticism. ‘On a whim? Nothing to do with that package you just got?’

‘I don’t do anything on a whim, Combes. I’m not sure what package you’re talking about – or why you think it’s your business.’

Combes had been holding the FedEx envelope behind his back the whole time, she realised now. He brought it out and brandished it in front of her face. ‘I’m talking about this package,’ he said. ‘You remember it now?’

Kennedy’s gaze flicked from the crumpled FedEx envelope to Combes’s eager-beaver face. ‘Very curious behaviour,’ she said. ‘Going through my rubbish.’

Combes was unabashed. ‘Berryman Sumpter,’ he said. ‘The brokerage firm where Ros Barlow works. I had to go see her at the office, Kennedy. You didn’t think I’d remember two days later?’

‘I didn’t think it was your business,’ Kennedy told him. ‘I still don’t.’

‘You didn’t log this in the case file.’

‘Which might be taken to imply that it’s not relevant to the case.’

‘But you did tear the label off, so nobody could search through your waste bin and make the connection.’

He had her there. ‘I’m entitled to do whatever I want with private correspondence,’ she temporised.

‘And what you did was to come charging straight down here to collect something from stored evidence. That’s a hell of a coincidence.’

‘No, Combes. That’s one thing following another thing. And since the second thing was me working, and this is where I work, it’s not that big a coincidence at all, is it?’

He didn’t rise to the bait, and his expression was still a gloating half-smile. ‘You’re on to something, and whatever Ros Barlow sent you plays right into it.’

‘You mean, what Berryman Sumpter sent me.’

‘Oh yeah,’ he sneered. ‘Sorry. That was just a message from your brokers, then? New investment portfolio, something like that?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Except it wasn’t a portfolio at all. It wasn’t papers. It was something small and solid, like a flash drive.’

‘Right,’ Kennedy said. ‘But we’re not playing twenty questions, are we? You want to let me past?’

Combes didn’t move. ‘Nah, not yet. What did you look at in the evidence? And if you tell me it’s none of my business, I’m walking straight to the DCI’s office.’

Kennedy really didn’t want that to happen. The truth – or selected extracts – seemed the best bet, seeing as Combes could just go on down and check the day book. ‘I was looking at the things we got out of Opie’s pockets,’ she told him.

‘Yeah? Why, exactly?’

‘In case there was anything we missed. Anything that might give us a clue to what she was doing on Barlow’s team.’

‘Just going through her pockets. At random. That’s bravura police work.’

‘Well, I aspire to be as good as you some day.’

‘I read what you put into the file after you met with Barlow’s sister,’ Combes growled, more or less ignoring what she’d said. ‘It didn’t say anything about her sending you a package.’

‘No,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘It didn’t.’ She could see no point in trying to conceal any longer the fact that Ros was the sender. It would be ridiculously easy to check. ‘Barlow remembered something she hadn’t said, sent me a note.’

‘By courier? Through a third party?’ Combes’s voice dripped with scorn. ‘Piss off, Kennedy. I’m not an idiot. And I already told you, I was watching you open that thing: there was no note
in there. So come clean or I’ll go to the DCI and tell him you’re playing fast and loose with the reporting rules. Maybe the evidence rules, too, since you’re down here. You want to tell me what you got out of the lockers?’

Kennedy showed him instead. She opened her notebook to the page and held it out to him. He took it from her and read: three lines of butchered poetry.

Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms

Alone and palely loitering the sedge has withered

From the lake and no birds are singing
.

‘I don’t get it,’ Combes said, giving it back. ‘What the hell is it?’

‘When we told Opie we were taking her into protective custody, she took a sheet of paper from her desk. It was the last thing she did as we were leaving. She said it contained a mnemonic for her password – a password that protected her files. And that was what she had written on it.’

Combes shook his head. ‘The stuff on the college network wasn’t locked,’ he said. ‘We didn’t need a password to get to it.’

‘Then she must have been referring to some other files, mustn’t she?’

‘We checked all her—’ Combes stopped abruptly as Kennedy held up the key.

‘Barlow inherited a farmhouse from his parents,’ she said. ‘It’s called Dovecote. Dovecote Farm. Opie’s dying words weren’t “a dove got”. They were “at Dovecote”.’

Combes stared hard at the key. Kennedy could see him making mental connections. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So you’re thinking what, that Barlow was using the farm as a spare office? That the files on his Rotgut project might be down there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Leaving aside Opie’s famous last words? Because they weren’t anywhere else, Combes. And because the killers did system wipes on Barlow’s computer, but they were still ready and waiting – and watching – when we went to Opie. There’s something they don’t want us to see and they can’t be sure we won’t find it. So maybe it’s still out there, and maybe Barlow stashed it at Dovecote Farm. Or Opie did.’

Combes shot her a look of open contempt. ‘And you thought you’d sneak off and find it by yourself, yeah?’ he said. ‘Blindside the team and grab the glory?’

Kennedy lost her patience. ‘Sarah Opie died for talking to us, you idiot,’ she yelled. ‘I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to Ros Barlow. And as far as the rest of the team goes, you drove me into a damned lay-by and parked me. I didn’t have any other choice – except to sit upstairs at that desk and watch the sodding world go by.’

She’d leaned forward as she spoke, without particularly meaning to: her face was an inch from Combes’s, and he blinked rapidly a few times in the face of her point-blank fury. Then there was a pause for what must have been thought. Finally he nodded.

‘Something in that,’ he admitted. ‘A lay-by is exactly where you are. But it’s what you asked for. Even before you got Harper killed, it’s what you were asking for.’

Kennedy didn’t bother to argue the point.

‘Look, it’s just a drive down to Surrey,’ she said. ‘And I’m not asking you to go with me. If I’m wrong, what do we lose?’

‘I don’t lose anything,’ Combes said, holding his hand out, palm up. ‘Give me the key.’

‘What?’ Kennedy really hadn’t seen this coming, although knowing Combes as she did, she probably ought to have done.

‘How we’re going to work it,’ Combes said, ‘is like this. I’m
going to go down there and check this out. You’re going to go back upstairs and write up that package from Ros Barlow. Your log entry from yesterday is already in the system, yeah? Okay, so you’ll have to say that Barlow thought about the farm after she got home last night, and sent the key over unsolicited – to Division, I mean. Don’t mention it was to you.

‘The fact is, Kennedy, this does look like a solid lead – only it’s me that’s going to run with it. I’m screwing you over the same way you screwed over John Gates and Hal Leakey. If you don’t like it, complain to Summerhill. Only bear in mind that if you do, he’ll probably want to know what you were doing going out to see Barlow in the first place after he’d told you to keep clear.’

Since she didn’t offer him the key, he tried to take it from between her fingers. She slapped his hand away, hard.

‘It’s not negotiable, Kennedy.’

She folded her arms, putting the key well out of reach. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t. I promised Ros I’d keep this low profile. I’m happy to cut you in, if that’s what it takes. But we go under the radar. If we find something, fine. Then we come back, we open it to the team, and we decide how we’re going to play it. Until then, nobody hears word one about this. Nobody else dies on my watch, Combes.’

He let out a loud, pissed-off sigh, rubbing the back of his neck as he stared at her hard: a stare that said, ‘What the hell am I going to do with you?’ Kennedy felt a strong urge to bring her knee up into his crotch, but realised with regret that this might not be the best time. Particularly as they were now deep into a mutually incriminating discussion as to the best way to falsify the case file. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Then we do this. We go down there together – but we tell Stanwick before we go. He doesn’t write it up, but he knows where we are in case this goes tits-up on us.’

Kennedy pondered this – particularly the ‘we’ and the ‘together’. It stuck in her throat like a fishbone, but there seemed no way of cutting Combes out now that he knew about the farmhouse and the key. And it seemed as though, in his own patronising way, he was trying to do the right thing. The plural pronoun couldn’t have been any easier for him than it was for her.

‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘I agree. But Stanwick has to keep it quiet. If he goes to Summerhill as soon as we’re out the door, he gets a brownie point, we get to stand in the corner and Ros Barlow maybe gets her throat cut or a bullet in the head. Are you sure you can get him to keep his mouth shut?’