Kennedy nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘And I’ll let you know if I find out anything about the people who’ve been tailing me. Might be unconnected, like you said. Just unfinished business from my misspent youth. If it’s not, I’ll keep you in the loop.’
They said goodbye, but as Kennedy was walking away, he called out to her. ‘Heather.’
She turned.
‘Just like old times,’ he said.
Gassan’s exact words, Kennedy thought. At the time, she’d disagreed. ‘Yeah,’ she said glumly. ‘Pretty much.’
20
From Coram’s, Kennedy went on to Ryegate House. It was past 9.30 a.m., now, but the building was still closed to the world, with steel shutters down over the sliding doors of the front entrance and three police cars parked in a row outside. She rang the bell a few times without eliciting any response at all. Then she went around the back of the building, found the staff entrance that Rush had mentioned and hammered on the steel-plated door as loud as she could.
Eventually, the racket produced a result. There was a rattling of keys from inside the door. It swung open and a uniformed guard stared blankly at Kennedy from the inside. ‘This is the staff entrance,’ he said coldly.
She stepped in past him without giving him time to react. ‘I’m on staff,’ she said. ‘I work for Professor Gassan.’
‘ID, please,’ the guard demanded belatedly.
Kennedy showed her driver’s licence.
‘I mean, internal ID. Are you on our system? If not—’
‘I’ll vouch for her,’ Ben Rush said, walking up to join them in the narrow service corridor. ‘It’s all right, Cobbett. She’s investigating this.’
‘I thought the police were investigating,’ the other man said. Being sidestepped didn’t seem to have done much for his mood.
‘She’s private. Reports direct to the professor.’
Rush took possession of her and led her away. ‘Only that would be a neat trick right now,’ he muttered grimly.
‘Any word there?’ Kennedy asked him. She was ashamed that she hadn’t tried to call the hospital herself, but survival had had to be the first item on the day’s agenda.
‘Nothing good. Lorraine called ten times already. They won’t tell her much, because she’s not family, but it sounds as though they’re having a hard time getting him stable. Police are all over the place, but they won’t give us the time of day. Mr Thornedyke’s still under sedation, and Valerie Parminter is away on a course, so there’s nobody taking decisions about anything — there’s just the police and the headless chickens. Lorraine will fix you up with a day pass, and we’ll take it from there.’
He took Kennedy through a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells and finally through a double door into the foyer. Lorraine was standing at the reception desk with her fists clenched at her sides, hiccupping out huge, body-shaking sobs.
The receptionist seemed unable to formulate a complete sentence, but from the fragments she did manage to get out, Kennedy gathered that Emil Gassan was dead, from a combination of toxaemia and blood loss, both probably exacerbated by an unidentified alkaloid on the blade of Alex Wales’s knife. Valerie Parminter wasn’t answering her phone. Maybe she was dead, too, Lorraine wailed. Maybe everybody was dead.
Rush deadended the switchboard to a call again later message while Kennedy got the distraught woman calmed down a little. Dredging her memory of the staff interviews she’d done, she suggested that Lorraine go find Allan Scholl, the next in the pecking order, and tell him he was in the big chair for the day.
All of this displacement activity helped Kennedy to keep her own emotions at arm’s length until she felt a bit more ready to deal with them. She’d known this was possible from the moment when Gassan took the wound, so she felt little surprise. What she felt instead was a sickening sense of guilt and shame that she’d let it happen — that Gassan had died because she’d been so completely unprepared. Because she’d blithely and unthinkingly set a trap for a rabbit and had no game plan when she realised she’d caught a tiger.
Once Lorraine had left, Rush turned to Kennedy again. ‘We won’t get near Alex Wales’s desk,’ he told her. ‘The police bagged everything and took it away, then they went and bagged the desk, too. It’s wrapped up in that plastic they use at airports for busted suitcases, and police tape all on top of that.’
Kennedy forced herself to think about practicalities. ‘What about his computer?’ she asked.
‘They took that first.’
‘And his locker?’
‘Oh yeah. They’re way ahead of us.’
It would have been surprising and even mildly scandalous if they weren’t. They’d had the whole night to work in, after all, and this was their job. Kennedy had to remind herself that it wasn’t hers, any more. Not now that it had become a murder investigation. The only sane thing to do was to walk away.
And spend the rest of her life seeing Gassan take that knife in the chest, in endless action replay.
‘You still want in on this?’ she asked Rush.
‘Doesn’t matter what I want,’ he told her. ‘In is what I’ve got.’
Kennedy couldn’t fault the logic, especially now. With Gassan’s death, the stakes seemed a lot clearer than they had the night before. The Messengers were already trying to kill her, and they’d be coming for Rush the moment they figured out he was involved. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Do you know anyone in the IT department here?’
The boy thought long and hard. ‘I sort of know Matthew Jukes. I mean, we’ve had a few drinks now and again.’
Kennedy took out her wallet, drew two fifty-pound notes out of it and handed them over. ‘If your computer network has some kind of back-up storage, we may be able to get at Wales’s files that way. See if this Jukes guy will take a bribe.’
‘And if he won’t?’
‘Roll him and steal his passwords.’
Rush whistled. ‘Going down the slippery slope real fast here, aren’t we?’
‘See what a bribe will do, anyway,’ Kennedy told him. ‘We’ll come up with another way in later, if that doesn’t work. Call me when you’ve got anything to tell me, and we’ll meet up — somewhere else, not here.’
She left the way she’d come. The staff door was unattended, but the guard who’d challenged her on the way in was having a cigarette break in the courtyard just outside. Discipline was going to hell.
21
After Kennedy left him, Tillman went back to the Pantheon Café. Manolis’s wife Caitlin was at the counter. She gave him a nod that was on the ragged edge of civil and unlocked the door to the back room.
Tillman knew better than to ask her whether Manolis had called. Caitlin regarded Tillman as belonging to a disreputable past that her husband should have stepped away from long before now, and his recent reappearance in Manolis’s life had been the cause of more than one snarled and muttered argument that Tillman had tactfully pretended not to overhear.
But Manolis was one of the best covert surveillance men he knew. There certainly wasn’t his equal in London — or at least, not walking around free — so Tillman had approached him, with some qualms, and offered him a one-off payment for a short, probably risk-free job.
All of this pre-dated Kennedy’s call, but what she’d just told him fitted with disturbing neatness into his own ongoing problems — and that was the real reason why he hadn’t pressed her for further information. He already had some pertinent facts in his possession and was in the process of acquiring more.
In the back room, he sat at a fly-specked table and played patience with a deck of cards that was missing the two of clubs. It was pretty pointless as a game, but it had a certain value from the point of view of Zen meditation. After three hands, the door opened and Manolis entered, still in his bike leathers and helmet. He dumped a rucksack on the table in front of Tillman.