The process by which they became lovers was anything but inevitable. It had started around the time Kennedy was kicked out of the Met on her ear, which meant she was around the flat a lot more when Izzy was there. The relationship had developed through the months that followed and it had seemed natural when Peter finally died for Kennedy to move in with Izzy. The flat she’d shared with her father felt like an exhibit in a museum, its associations permanently fixed. Moving out — even though she was only moving upstairs — felt like escaping from at least some of those associations.
But escape depended on a lot of things, and it had its own rules. One of them was that you can’t escape from stuff you’re still carrying with you. Exploitative and degrading though Izzy’s work was, she had never thought about quitting. She liked sex a lot, and when she wasn’t having it she liked to talk about it.
And, as it turned out, she liked having it even when Kennedy wasn’t around.
Their life together was now stalled: a perpetual tableau of the adulterers discovered, with Izzy scrambling to cover herself up, a sheepish young man trying to figure out what was going on, and Kennedy standing in the doorway, wide-eyed and reeling.
Izzy had never promised to be faithful, and in any case, she drew an absolute distinction between women and men. Women were lovers, partners, soul-mates. Men were an itch that she occasionally scratched. Kennedy had never thought that extorting promises was either necessary or desirable. In the patchy history of her sex life, one was the highest number of lovers she’d ever had on the boil at the same time, and it had generally felt like enough.
She ought to forgive Izzy. Or she ought to walk out with some cutting remark along the lines of ‘check out what you’re missing, babe’. She couldn’t do either. The passive aggression of guilt, reproach and sullen withdrawal was the horrendous unexcluded middle.
Kennedy’s phone rang. She glanced at the display, saw it was Emil Gassan again. She gave in and took the call, but only to tell him that this was a bad time.
Gassan got in first. ‘Heather, I’ve been playing phone tag with you all day. I’m so glad I finally caught up with you.’
She tried to head him off. ‘Professor—’
‘Emil,’ he countered. She ignored him. She didn’t want to be on first-name terms with Gassan: on some level, it felt wrong that the dry, spiky academic should even have a first name. ‘Professor, I really can’t talk right now. I’m in the middle of something.’
‘Oh.’
Gassan sounded more than usually cast down and Kennedy experienced a momentary compunction. She knew why he was calling and what it meant to him. It was all about that old case. The biggest find of his scholarly career was something that he could never discuss, on pain of death, except with her. Every so often, he had to vent. He had to tell her things that they both already knew and she had to listen — as a personal service. It gave her some sense of what Izzy must go through in the course of a working day.
‘It’s just … you know … pressure of work,’ she temporised. ‘I’ll call you later in the week.’
‘So your slate is full?’ Gassan said. ‘You wouldn’t be free to accept a commission?’
‘To accept …?’ Kennedy was baffled, and — in spite of her sour mood — amused. ‘What, you need a detective, Emil? You want me to track down a missing library book or something?’
‘Yes. More or less. If you’d been free, I was going to ask you to take on some work — very sensitive and very well paid — for my current employer.’
Kennedy hesitated. It felt hypocritical and ridiculous to make such a rapid and shameless turn-around: but she really needed the money. Even more, she needed to have something that would keep her out of the flat until she could figure out what she wanted to do about Izzy.
‘So who’s your current employer, Professor?’
He told her and her eyebrows rose. It was definitely a step up from city sleaze.
‘I’ll come right over,’ Kennedy said.
2
The Great Court of the British Museum was like a whispering gallery, magnifying sound from all around Kennedy so that she felt surrounded by and cocooned in other people’s conversations. At the same time, sounds from close by seemed to come to her muffled and distorted: perfectly dysfunctional acoustics.
Or maybe she just hated the Great Court because when she’d come here with her father, as a young girl, it had been an actual courtyard, open to the air. She remembered clutching tightly onto his hand as he took her across the sunlit piazza into the cathedral of the past — a place where he’d been animated, happy and at home, and where just for once there was something he actually wanted to share with her.
Now the Great Court had a roof of diamond panes, radiating outwards from what had once been the reading room. The light inside this huge but sealed-off space was grey, like a winter afternoon with a threat of drizzle. It was an impressive feat of engineering, but she couldn’t help thinking there was something perverse about it. Why hide the sky and then fake it?
Kennedy took a seat at one of the court’s three coffee bars and started counting diamonds while she waited for Gassan. Knowing her man, she’d dressed formally in a light-blue trouser suit and grey boots, and pinned her unruly blonde hair back as severely as she could manage. Formality and order were big on Emil Gassan’s list of cardinal virtues.
She saw him from a long way away, bustling across the huge space with the purposeful dignity of a head waiter. He was dressed a lot better than a waiter, though: his blue three-piece suit, with the unmistakable zigzag stitching of Enzo Tovare on the breast pocket, looked new and unashamedly expensive. Gassan thrust his hand out before he reached her, then kept it out so that it preceded him into the conversation.
‘Heather, so good of you to come. I’m delighted to see you again.’
He really looked like he meant it, and she was disarmed by his beaming smile. She offered her own hand, had it grasped and engulfed and effusively wrung. ‘Professor,’ she said, and then, surrendering the point, ‘Emil. It’s been a long time. I had no idea you were working in London.’
He threw out his arms in a search me gesture. ‘Neither did I. Until last week, I wasn’t. I was still up in St Andrews — lecturing in early medieval history. But I was head-hunted.’
‘In the space of a week?’ Kennedy was as incredulous as he seemed to want her to be.
‘In the space of a day. The museum board called and asked if I’d like to be in charge of the stored collection. Well, they didn’t call me directly. It was Marilyn Milton from the Validus Trust, an independent body which has been sponsoring my research for the last two years. Validus is also a major sponsor for the British Museum and British Library. You know they used to be the same institution, until the library was moved in 1997?’
Kennedy shrugged non-committally. She wasn’t sure if she’d known that or not, but in any case she didn’t want to slow Gassan down by inviting further explanation.
‘Anyway,’ he told her, ‘a position opened up — under somewhat tragic circumstances, I’m sorry to say. The previous incumbent, Karyl Leopold, had a serious stroke. And Marilyn contacted me to suggest that I apply — with a promise that she would let the appointments committee know I was Validus’s approved candidate.