Wales had had his arms at his sides all this time. Now he folded them and bowed his head again with a sigh of what sounded like resignation.
‘It would be impossible to make you understand,’ he said.
‘Well, we’ll get to that,’ Kennedy said. ‘Anyway, there you were. Mission accomplished, but stuck in your box with no way of getting out again. Plan A had obviously gone up in smoke. Plan B was the knife, wasn’t it? The knife with blood on it. Interesting that you were carrying a knife in the first place — and I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that armed robbery is a whole different animal from breaking and entering. But anyway, the knife was what got you out of that room.
‘I couldn’t figure out, at first, how someone who obviously knew where the CCTV cameras were, and stayed out of their way the whole time he was in the room, would screw up so spectacularly right at the end. Screw up twice, in fact — letting the camera see him just that one time and leaving the knife behind.
‘But by now, making sure you were seen was the whole point. You waited until night. Then you cut yourself — on the arm or the leg, maybe. Somewhere that wouldn’t be too visible. You left the knife right out in the open where it would be certain to be found. And you walked into the eye-line of the camera, as you climbed up into the ceiling space. It was all improvised, but it was really good stuff. It looked like you were making your getaway.
‘In reality, you came down in a different part of the room, where you knew the cameras couldn’t see you. And all you had to do after that was to climb back into your box and wait until morning. In the morning the security team found the knife and raised the alarm, which was what you needed them to do. Because the only way you could walk out of Room 37 without Mark Silver’s help was if the normal swipe-in-swipe-out restrictions had been lifted. And they had to be lifted to let the police come in and search the room.’
Kennedy had been holding the box all this time. She let it fall now and it made a hollow, funereal thud as it hit the floor.
‘So that was why you weren’t there on Monday, or first-thing on Tuesday morning, but then suddenly you popped up again in the middle of the day. I don’t know how you picked your moment to climb out of the box. I’m guessing you just waited for silence and took a punt. Then you either walked on out before you could be challenged, or you stayed right there in the room as though you were part of the search. You had to leave your outfit in the box, but of course you’d brought a change of clothes in any case. It was just a shame that the room was sealed after that and you couldn’t get back inside, unsupervised, to grab your blacks and dispose of them. Am I close?’
Wales smiled — a smile that saw what was coming and welcomed it. ‘Very close,’ he admitted. ‘Very close indeed.’
Something was wrong.
Kennedy had questioned scores of suspects during her years in the Met, and had sat in on the questioning of many more. She’d honed her skills both at piling on the pressure and at reading the body language of the man or woman she was interrogating — because pretty much everything, in a good interrogation, comes down to the accuracy of that reading and how you let it shape the questions.
Alex Wales’s body language was flat-out wrong. Fear or arrogance would both have been fine, and there was a whole range in-between that Kennedy would have recognised and known what to do with. But what Wales was radiating, despite his best efforts to disguise it, was something else entirely. It was anticipation.
Every now and then, he would lift himself up very slightly onto the balls of his feet, just for a moment or two, and there was a residual tension in his posture even when he was pantomiming dismay or resignation. He was tense and excited about something that was coming, something that he knew would happen soon. But Kennedy had no idea what that something was, right up to the point where she mentioned Mark Silver’s death.
Then something happened to Alex Wales’s eyes and Kennedy felt a jolt of pure shock rush through her from the centre on out to the extremities, as though someone had just plugged her heart into a live socket.
Wales’s eyes reddened.
They became bloodshot with a suddenness that was almost surreal. It was as though blood were welling up in them like tears, waiting to be shed.
She had seen this before. Haemolacria. It was the side effect of kelalit, a very potent drug in the methamphetamine family. Three years earlier, back when she was still a cop, Kennedy had run across a group of people who all took the drug, and all displayed the same unsettling trait. They called themselves Elohim, or Messengers, and they were the holy assassins of a secret tribe of humanity — the Judas People. It occurred to Kennedy now that when Wales had seen the ashes in the box, when he’d murmured under his breath, his expression had changed — become for a moment much more serious, even solemn. He’d looked like a man in church, kneeling at the altar for holy communion. And she was sure that whatever it was he’d said, he’d been speaking to the ashes, rather than to anyone else in the room.
If Alex Wales was on kelalit, the reddening of his eyes indicated that his system was preparing for sudden, violent action. The drug would give him the speed and the strength to kill like a demon unleashed from hell.
She knew this because she had seen it happen. She had watched her own partner cut down by one of these monsters — had faced them herself, in a case where their conscienceless atrocities had been triggered by something as banal and trivial as the translation of a lost gospel. So if she and Gassan and Thornedyke and poor puppy-like Rush were going to survive past the next few seconds, Kennedy would have to pull something out of her ass real fast.
And in the meantime, she just kept talking. Because if Wales had wanted to kill them straight out, they’d be dead already. There had to be something else he wanted, too.
‘You had me guessing, at first,’ Kennedy said, improvising recklessly, ‘about the target. The book. What was so special about it. Why you’d gone to all that trouble to find it and acquire it. False identities. Breaking and entering. Camping out in a box. Then I realised that it might not be about the book at all.’
Wales scowled in slow motion. Obviously that guess had gone way wide. It was all about the book. But Wales was still listening.
You want to know what we know, Kennedy thought. You want to be absolutely sure we’re still blind before you pull the plug on this. Or else you want to know who else, besides us, has to be taken down.
And maybe it would slow you down a little if you thought that might be a long list.
‘So at this point,’ she said, pushing back her chair and standing up, ‘I started to call in some favours. People I still knew in the Met. Academics. Acquaintances in the intelligence community. I shared data with friends and gave them the whole story. Your name. Silver’s name. The title of the book, and my guesses as to who you really are under that nom de guerre.’
Gassan made an audible gasp. He was staring at Kennedy in horror. ‘Heather,’ he protested weakly. ‘We stipulated discretion.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You did.’ She was moving now, around the edge of the table, and Wales was turning his head to keep her in sight.
‘You have no idea who we are,’ he said. And his voice had changed. The humility had fallen away, the naked edge of something completely other showing through.
‘I know this much,’ Kennedy said, still ambling towards the head of the table — not even looking at the door, although it lay full in her path. ‘I know that you and Mark Silver don’t regard anything you did as a crime, and you don’t feel any sense of guilt for it. Even if you’d had to kill, as you more than half-expected you might, you’d have been ready for—’