We Are Death (26 page)

Haynes had never heard his voice sound so small.

‘It doesn’t really make sense, sir. She’d been away ten years. If this was her coming back to you, if she’d managed to track you down, it’s unlikely that she’d break into your house in the middle of the night. If she did, having come through that, she surely wouldn’t just turn and walk away with barely a word.’

‘You’re right,’ said Jericho, looking up and this time holding Haynes’s gaze. ‘But something must have happened to make these people start to focus on me last summer. Maybe it’s not that, in fact it’s probably not. But it’s all I’ve got.’

––––––––

‘Y
ou know how expensive everything is in Oslo?’

Dylan stared across her desk. She wasn’t at all annoyed at the turn of events, indeed the whole thing seemed to be taking on a dramatic and unusual narrative that she was already thinking could play just as exciting a part in her memoirs as the
Britain’s Got Justice
debacle. Nevertheless, she was hardly going to start fawning over her investigating officers. If anyone was going to get carried away with this story, it was her. The rest of them would know their place.

‘Never been,’ said Haynes. Jericho didn’t respond.

‘And what d’you suppose you’d do when you got there?’

Jericho had retreated back inside himself. He felt he’d said too much to Haynes, and the awkwardness of the conversation had given way to awkwardness at the thought that he’d given so much of himself away. And the current bizarre pendulum of his relationship with Dylan, where no two conversations seemed to be conducted with a spit of consistency, was currently on another downward swing.

Neither he nor Haynes had mentioned going to Oslo. He wasn’t sure he particularly wanted to go, as he wasn’t sure what was to be gained by helplessly chasing after Geyerson. That the people whom he blamed for Amanda’s disappearance also seemed to be after Geyerson and his team seemed almost irrelevant. They would give nothing away.

They had to chase them from some other angle, and he thought the approach Haynes had been taking was more likely to get them somewhere, even if it was only going where these people wanted them to be.

He tried not to think about the fact that Badstuber would be there. He didn’t want to think about her at all but as ever, when a woman got under his skin, he had trouble keeping her out of his tangled thoughts.

‘We need to try to get Geyerson to talk,’ said Haynes. ‘It’s clear that–’

‘And how d’you suppose to do that?’ snapped Dylan. ‘What exactly can you offer him?’

‘I don’t suppose we can offer him anything,’ said Haynes. ‘But his life is in danger, and the quicker someone works out why and from whom, the less chance there is he’ll get killed. Maybe a couple of days will have persuaded him that he needs help, and that he can’t keep running forever.’

The fingers started tapping. She glanced at Jericho, then looked away quickly.
Jesus
, she thought,
he’s shut down again
.
Fuck you, you pompous bastard
.

She knew Jericho understood her, which was why she was annoyed. This wasn’t about her men wanting to go off on another investigative excursion. They clearly didn’t care either way. This was about the potential to solve an international mystery. This was about the Swiss sending their people after Geyerson, and she didn’t want it to be them who ultimately solved a crime that had happened three miles outside Wells.

Her lips pursed, the intensity of the drilling fingers increased.

‘Honestly, Chief Inspector, do you think the sergeant would have a better chance of getting Geyerson to talk?’

Jericho looked up. Where had he been? Not paying attention, certainly. Mind running off elsewhere. After so long, so many years wondering about Amanda, now it was possible they were getting somewhere – or were being allowed a little more access – and he was having trouble concentrating.

Would he even know her anymore, he wondered. Recognise her, yes, but would he know the person she had become? They had been together for seven years in all. Now it was almost eleven since she’d gone. And what would she think of him, sullen and withdrawn, easily two stones heavier than when they’d parted?

There is no Amanda. There was no Amanda in his bedroom the previous summer, and even if what was happening now was connected to her, it didn’t mean she was still alive. In all that time, all those years, he would have heard something.

‘I didn’t catch that,’ he said.

She caught her breath; the muscles in her jaw tensed.

‘Is it possible that the Sergeant would have more luck with Geyerson? Your people skills are questionable, at best.’

Jericho surprised her by looking as though this was not something he’d ever realised or thought about, and indeed, he had never wondered if Haynes was better at getting people to talk. His own demeanour and its impact on others had never been of interest to him.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said eventually.

She looked sceptical.

‘Go to Oslo. Both of you. Don’t take too long about it. And I mean, I want you back here by Wednesday evening.’ She looked at her watch as she said it. ‘Probably best if you leave in the morning, then you’ll only be spending one night. If you find out in the interim period that he’s moved on, we’ll reconsider the position.’

She looked between the two of them. Haynes was looking at his watch, Jericho staring at the floor.

‘You can go.’

*

P
rofessor Leighton had a certain amount of catching up to do. The weekend had been fun. Her mind was inexorably drawn to Haynes after the fashion of so many before her who had fallen in love, but the work of the library was still there, still not going anywhere until she did something about it. There was no one else on the same desk, no one else covering for her when she took time off, no one else filling in during unexpected absences.

Not that any of that was the case on this occasion anyway. She’d gone away for the weekend and had started a relationship. Hardly the stuff of passing your work onto colleagues.

She had a short passage to translate from the original, mediaeval French, she had three or four phone calls to make regarding the library’s purchase of a series of books from a private collection in Tuscany, she had to look over the latest cataloguing of the seventeenth and eighteenth century French history section, she had to write two staff reports, albeit one of them was almost complete, she had to build a funding case for another small project she wished to undertake, which would involve someone, although perhaps not her, spending around a week in Normandy, and she had to put together a programme for a visiting professor from Harvard for the middle of September. All of that, fitted in around the usual day-to-day firefighting of any public service department which had been cut back to within an inch of its existence.

She was sticking to the short piece of translation for the moment, as she was expecting a visitor and didn’t want to get bogged down in phone calls, or to start a task she would soon have to abandon. The other plus of the translation was that it seemed to be the task that was best suited to emptying her mind of Stuart Haynes and the peculiar mystery of Kangchenjunga.

There was a knock at the door, and Matt put his head round.

‘Your four o’clock’s here,’ he said.

Leighton nodded, not yet looking away from her monitor, before turning and smiling.

‘Thanks, Matt. Can you bring in some coffee, please?’

‘Of course.’

Matt started to close the door, when he caught Leighton’s eye, the professor looking slightly abashed.

‘What’s the guy’s name?’ said Leighton, almost mouthing the words rather than speaking them, in case he was right outside the door.

Matt smiled. There was something childish about the professor sometimes that made her the best boss he’d ever had to work for.

‘Develin,’ he said, with no attempt to lower his voice. ‘It’s all right, he’s in the waiting room.’

Leighton exhaled, not knowing the name.

‘Develin,’ she said, ‘right. Thanks!’

The door closed. Forty-three seconds later there was a knock, the door opened again, and Develin walked in.

Leighton’s eyes widened.

*

J
ericho lifted his head. Had he drifted off to sleep? He looked outside, the sun lower in the sky, the light dimmer than when he’d put his head in his hands, his elbows on his desk.

He licked his lips, checked the time. Almost nine o’clock. Haynes had said goodbye about half an hour earlier.

He rubbed his hands over his face, wearily got to his feet. He should have gone home when Haynes had left, when his sergeant had told him to leave. What exactly was he ever going to achieve, sitting here at this time of night, his mind completely distracted?

It wasn’t about achieving. It was about not going home. It was about not being alone in the house with Durrant, assuming he was going to be there.

He put on his jacket and stood at the window for a moment. The air was cooler, and finally the long burst of warm summer that had lasted through much of August was coming to an end. The gradual cooling would be replaced by rain and cloud, an early rush of autumn.

Time to go home. There would be bread in the house, at least. He could toast it, have some cheese, a glass of wine. It would do.

He opened the door to the outer office, and immediately stopped. At this time the office downstairs would be manned, but there wouldn’t usually be anyone up here. Except, there he was, the familiar figure, the shoulders hunched, head down.

‘Jesus,’ muttered Jericho.

He was tempted to walk past, straight by behind him, down the stairs, have a word with Loovens or whoever was on the front desk. Yet he knew there was no point. There was nothing to be gained from continually running. Whatever was causing Durrant to still be here needed to be addressed.

He was sitting at Adams’s desk. Jericho walked round, pulled out the seat at the desk opposite and sat down. He looked across the narrow width of the two desks, little between them except some stationery and two phones, waiting for Durrant to lift his head. He realised that the instant burst of fear had gone. Whatever he’d felt in Morocco wasn’t there tonight. Too encased in gloom to feel anything.

Slowly Durrant lifted his head, the same dead eyes Jericho had always known. The two men stared across the desks, their eyes locked.

Like looking in a mirror, thought Jericho. Those eyes. This man, this animal, had the same eyes. The same look, the same sociopathy, the same misanthropy. The same innate dislike, distrust and disinterest in human life.

Had they been separated at birth?

Too unlikely. Too absurd. Too convenient almost.

‘What are we going to do?’ said Jericho finally, finding his voice.

This wasn’t talking to some superior officer, who wasn’t in fact superior at all. This was talking to a brutal killer, that was all. He didn’t have to be reticent; this was no time for his familiar diffidence.

Durrant didn’t respond.

‘You want to come back to my house? You can sleep in the spare room.’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Durrant.

‘What can you do?’

He didn’t answer. Jericho, at last, found that he was able to ignore the fact he was talking to a dead man. It didn’t make sense, but ultimately he had to believe that this Durrant was no different from the old Durrant. Frightening, brutal and dangerous, certainly, but not someone from whom he’d ever backed away. Quite the reverse.

‘Are you speaking to anyone else?’

There was a slight twitch in Durrant’s mouth, a look of resentment, then finally his eyes dropped. Jericho kept his eyes on him, then sat back slightly, feeling the tension go. Durrant, whatever this manifestation of his being actually was, had as much understanding of why he was here as Jericho had. If he was going to do something, if he was capable of doing something, surely it would have happened by now.

Was that all he was? The person that the resentful look on the face implied? A pointless, toothless ghost, with no control over who he was or what he did?

Jericho smiled, out of relief as much as at the thought of an impotent Durrant. He’d been scared of him the previous night. And now, what had it taken? A day of melancholy, tiredness, the look of hopeless resentment on Durrant’s face, that was all, and the fear was gone.

‘Can you talk to other people?’ asked Jericho.

Durrant’s shoulders seemed to move a little lower. Whatever fight there was in him, seemed to be draining slowly away.

‘If I ask you to go downstairs and speak to whoever’s on the front desk, could you do it?’

‘You can’t ask me to do anything,’ growled Durrant, although he did not look up.

‘Is this all you’ve got? You’re in a room before I enter it, that’s all? Can you go anywhere else, see other people? The Inspector in Morocco, she heard you, when she was standing outside the room. So presumably, you could have spoken to–’

‘What does your head tell you I can do, Detective?’ said Durrant, his voice sounding hopeless.

Jericho leant forward, his forearms on the desk. He’d never seen Durrant like this. This was what it was supposed to have been like thirty years ago, all the way back. Back when he’d been arrested. Durrant was supposed to have been at a loss, dismayed at his arrest, contrite perhaps, defensive, desperate, a little lost. He was supposed to have talked. Instead, he was the coolest, most elusive character Jericho had ever come across.

Now, however, whichever version of Durrant this actually was, had lost it all. The cool was gone.

‘Have you thought that maybe you’re in Hell?’ asked Jericho.

Durrant didn’t look up.

‘Maybe this is your own personal Hell. Cursed for all time to hang out with the one who put you in prison for thirty years. The one who killed you. Sitting there, sullen and broken, at my call.’

‘I am not–’

‘Perhaps that’s it. Bound to this earth until you’ve made some amends for everything you did wrong.’

Durrant’s fists tensed, relaxed, tensed again, the hostility pulsing through him. Jericho watched him, so close across the desks that he could reach out and touch him if he wanted. And he did wonder; could he touch Durrant, or would a hand pass right through him?