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.’