The Invisible Code (39 page)

The accountant would not be interrupted. ‘Kasavian buried the story, but it resurfaced.’

‘I’m afraid we’re ahead of you, Mr Almon,’ said May coldly. ‘We’re going to give you a chance to do the right thing. We need evidence that your boss was directly involved. Did he send you there?’

‘I never said that,’ said Almon, trying to buy enough time to think.

‘We’re going to find proof that he is a murderer. The documents you burned can be reconstituted.’ May had no idea if they could be or not, but it was worth a try.

Almon was shocked by the bluntness of May’s words. The language of the Civil Service was tapestried with euphemism and allusion. ‘Oskar never gets his hands dirty. Nothing sticks to him. He commissions the services of others. I can’t imagine for one moment that he’d leave a trail that could be followed back to him.’

‘Well, he’s having to act spontaneously now. He can’t have thought of everything.’

‘You still don’t understand who you’re dealing with,’ said Almon. ‘He has all the resources he needs to cover his traces, and they’re not accessible to you except through official government channels. Your unit is answerable to him. He’s made sure that it’s impossible to bring him down. Why else would he have come to you in the first place? He knew you were incompetent.’

Renfield had never hit a civilian before but came close to it now. ‘You were never going to give us what we needed,’ he said. ‘You were just trying to keep your own career from tanking. Well, it’s over now. After this you won’t be able to get a job cleaning toilets.’

‘You still have nothing on Kasavian,’ said Almon simply. ‘And you won’t find it, because there’s nothing
to find. He’s wiped his prints from everything. You talk about my career being over? You’re screwed, all of you. You’ve been played. You’re floating corpses. Your unit is dead in the water, just how he planned it would be from the very beginning.’

That was when Renfield jumped at him.

46

SHADOW IMAGE

AFTER STUART ALMON
signed a statement negotiated to the satisfaction of all parties, he was charged with arson and reluctantly released on bail.

A sickly grey and yellow dawn broke over King’s Cross. The clouds looked as if they had fallen down a flight of stairs and badly bruised themselves. The news reports promised heavy rain as the capital’s traditional summer weather – squalls of disappointment with intermittent outbursts of gloom – returned.

The PCU team had worked through the night, but the atmosphere was one of defeat.

They knew they had nothing and would find nothing. As each lead was followed and came to a dead-end, the detectives saw just how carefully the web of their downfall had been constructed. Kasavian had clearly been testing them to see what could be uncovered, secure in the knowledge that even if his original crime was known, there was no way of connecting it back to him.

Colin and Meera had returned to tell of the night’s events. ‘They’re ex-military lads, these bikers,’ Colin told them. ‘Freelancers, up for anything. I can tell the type.
Guys like that used to come to our boxing club. They were lousy at playing by the rules but they were tough as nails, the kind of men who trained out in the snow in shorts and vests. Kasavian probably found them through his old MOD connections. They’re taught to keep their mouths shut no matter what happens. They’re as solid as railway sleepers. I checked to see if they had a shared base here, somewhere they might meet or train together, but they’re real loners.’

‘I’m getting a warrant to turn the Rakes’ Club inside out,’ said Banbury, ‘but the chances of finding anything there now are unlikely.’

‘What time is Kasavian heading to the station?’ asked Land.

‘He’s got a car coming at four thirty p.m.,’ Longbright told him. ‘I’m sending out for breakfasts.’ She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and rose from her desk, where a tundra of reports had spread in the last dark hours.

‘Arthur, can I get you something?’ she offered, looking in on Bryant’s office.

‘Just a cup of tea. I’m not hungry.’

‘Perhaps you should try and get some rest.’

‘If I fall asleep now I may not wake up again.’ Bryant peered blearily over a stack of books and rubbed at his wrinkles. ‘Why is it that we always run to the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour? Just once, I’d like to close an investigation a few days earlier than expected.’

‘You still think we’re going to wrap it up?’

‘Yesterday I felt sure we’d arrest Kasavian before his departure. But there’s something wrong here. I keep asking myself: Why is there no evidence?’

‘You know the answer: everything was pre-planned.’

‘No, Janice. He didn’t know that Jukes had left something for his girlfriend to find. Nobody did. Fancy leaving it in a bloody crypt!’

May passed Longbright as she was leaving. ‘I hope she just convinced you to eat.’

‘Food makes me sleepy. I’ve got a quarter of pineapple cubes here.’ Arthur rattled a paper bag. ‘The sugar will keep me going. Tell me, John, you’re absolutely sure there’s nothing on that flash drive that can convict Kasavian?’

‘No. There are some classified reports on Scarlet Thread and the inquiry findings on the research scientists’ deaths. Jukes was more concerned with damning the science behind the project. There’s nothing to indict Kasavian because Jukes didn’t know he was going to die and leave us with no bloody proof.’

‘We still have a few hours left to find something. But we won’t, and I’m beginning to think I know why.’

May seated himself and waited patiently, but could finally bear the suspense no longer. ‘Do you want to tell me?’

Bryant dug out a grubby hanky and blew his nose. ‘No, because you’ll really hate the answer.’

‘You always say that. It’s an incredibly annoying habit.’

‘I know, isn’t it? Let me at least try to elucidate. Come and sit beside me.’

May pulled a chair up next to his partner. ‘What’s that funny smell?’

‘I got kebab juice down my vest last night, so I sprayed it with air freshener from the toilet.’ He turned back to an immense sheet of paper covered in scribbled names. ‘You have a rough idea of how my brain works.’

‘Sort of. Yes. But not always,’ May admitted.

‘You know how much I trust your instincts and working methods.’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, we differ on one major point. You believe that from the outset of every investigation the most obvious facts point to the right solution. Occam’s razor. I don’t. Fair?’

‘Fair enough,’ agreed May.

‘In this case, what did our instincts tell us?’

‘That Kasavian wasn’t to be trusted.’

‘Exactly. Whether we were conscious of it or not, that was the agenda we were pursuing. And we got the result we wanted. We proved his guilt to ourselves. We’ve followed the line all the way from the sanctioned death of Peter Jukes, right through to poor, dim Stuart Almon setting fire to the evidence.’

‘Except that we still can’t make an arrest.’

‘Indeed. I’ve been over the timeline from beginning to end and it’s solid – and yet there’s a shadow image behind it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Another theme, as it were. An undertone that contradicts everything we know.’ His words hung ominously in the still air of the office.

‘But the one thing we know is that Kasavian is guilty.’

‘Yes, nothing can change that fact. He’s implicated in a murder dating back to his time at Porton Down.’ Bryant rubbed his forehead wearily. ‘But suppose there was something we missed right from the start? Not a direct fact – something foggier and more obscuring.’

‘You’re losing me.’

‘I know. What I’m trying to say is that there’s another agenda at work here. I think it may have something to do with class. Perhaps this whole thing is really only about class.’

‘Arthur, I’ve seen you reach this point many times before, and I still don’t quite understand the journey you take. And I don’t know what you’re trying to say.’

‘You know that at heart I’m an academic, not a criminologist. I’m out of my depth when it comes to the construction of empirical data. That’s your speciality. But when I look at the victims and the suspects, you know what I see? Two entirely separate classes. Anna
Marquand, living in a run-down council house with her mother. Amy O’Connor, working in an East End bar. Jeff Waters, a barrow boy turned photographer. Sabira Kasavian, a disadvantaged Albanian kid whose parents worked in a smelting plant. Then there are the attacks on Edona Lescowitz and even on you and me. The ruling elite consider everyone here to be several classes below them, and therefore thrashable. But they’re wrong. They’ve misjudged us.’

May was anxious to return the conversation to more solid ground. ‘Do you think you can get something concrete on Kasavian before his delegation heads off?’

‘I honestly don’t know. We’re trying to indict our own supervisor for murder, John. If it doesn’t stick, it won’t be just you and I who’ll be thrown to the wolves.’

‘But if we get him, we’ll be exonerated once and for all. There will have to be a new regime.’

‘I wish I had your faith, but I know nothing will change. My parents always obeyed the instructions of the authorities, from town-hall officials to railway clerks. It was a working-class habit I was determined not to take into my life.’

‘Kasavian doesn’t intimidate you, does he?’

Bryant blew a raspberry of defiance. ‘No, of course not. At my age the only thing that still commands respect is death. But Kasavian makes me fearful for others with more to lose. I have no right to risk their careers.’

‘They already gave you their vote. If we let him off the hook now, we’ll be bowing to authority once more.’

‘All right. There’s something else that’s been troubling me. Kasavian was involved in an illegal programme of research that resulted in sickness and suicide. But he couldn’t have been alone in this; I imagine the whole thing was government sanctioned. His wife saw some papers that proved she was married to a man who was, at best, morally deficient. Why should he have cared?
I mean, really? Nobody was going to listen to her. She could tell a couple of friends, and nobody would listen to them, either. She had no solid proof. So why would he still go to the trouble of killing her?’

‘Arthur, you cannot be this full of doubt at this late stage.’

‘I’m afraid I am.’

‘Well, I’m going to stop Kasavian from leaving the country, whether you give me reason to or not. So you’d better get back into those books and find whatever it is you’re looking for, before it’s too late. Find me your assassin’s shadow image, or whatever you call it. And you’d better get a bloody move on because I’m leaving soon.’

Bryant watched his partner blast out of the office and felt suddenly alone. May was right to force his hand, but he had no idea how to give his partner the evidence he needed.

47

MR MERRY

JOHN MAY STOOD
on the corner of Euston Road with Banbury and Longbright, trying to shield his watch from a light drizzle of sooty rain. He felt as if he could hear the seconds ticking by in his heart.
Of course you’re anxious
, he told himself.
Who wouldn’t be? You’re heading off to commit career suicide
.

‘We can’t leave it any longer,’ he said finally. ‘Let’s go and do it discreetly, without any fuss.’