‘Maybe.’ Jukes waved him up out of the seat and took his place. For a few minutes, he opened windows on the screen and watched while white-on-black text scrolled through them. Occasionally he typed strings of letters in response to cursor prompts.
What he ended up with was another array of random symbols, but he nodded as though it made sense. ‘There,’ he said, pointing.
The tip of his finger touched the word USERS? followed by a dozen or so numbers. Rush could see now that it recurred all the way down the screen, at least once in every two or three lines.
‘Users of what?’ he asked.
Jukes tapped some more, leaning close in to the screen as though he stood a better chance of prising loose its secrets if he cut down the distance.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted at last. ‘Wait. No. Yeah, I do. This is old data. Like, completely defunct. No wonder Alex was able to get into it so easy.’
‘This was easy?’
‘Try getting at the live stuff. You’ll see. This is … yeah, it’s part of the British Library database.’
Rush’s heart did something surprising and alarming inside his chest. ‘Which part?’ he asked.
Jukes threw him a curious glance. ‘Getting excited now, are we?’
‘Which part, Jukes?’
Tap. Tap. Tap. ‘Users,’ he said.
‘Shit, I got that much.’
‘Keep your hair on, will you? It means people who called a book up, from the stacks. Wales was trying to generate a complete list, but the system wouldn’t let him because the data wasn’t live any more. It had been disaggregated, taken out of the data set that you can use to populate a form. Anyone in IT admin could have just changed the flag and brought them back again, but Wales didn’t have the pass codes.’
‘So? I’m getting about a third of this, by the way.’
‘So he had to dive down into the data set and do it low-tech. He looked for the identifying code for that one book and then wherever it cropped up he trawled the user stats until he found out who requisitioned it.’ Jukes looked up at Rush, blinking rapidly and arrhythmically — his tell when he was thinking hard. ‘I mean, back when it was in the stacks. Before they closed the reading room at the British Museum and took the circus down the road. There would have been a handwritten form that the user took to the desk. Then whoever was on the desk would scan their ID and—’
‘No,’ Rush said. ‘No, Jukes. Don’t try to talk me through your whole system. Just tell me if I’m right. Wales was trying to make a list of the names of everyone who’d ever read a particular book.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘He was trying to make a list of everyone who ever even filled in a form so they could see it. They wouldn’t have had to read it.’
‘Right. You’re right. Okay, so now tell me if he succeeded. Is the finished list in here somewhere?’
Jukes blinked some more. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose we could input some of these user names as strings and search the rest of Wales’s files to see if they turn up anywhere else.’
‘So do it.’
Jukes did it. ‘Nope. Nothing. Maybe he wrote it up by hand. Or maybe … wait. Let me look at his deleted files.’
‘You can do that?’
Jukes chuckled evilly. ‘Oh yeah. Unless you use a shredder program like Eraser, hitting delete is just hitting “save for later”. And nobody here is allowed to put non-authorised software on their machines, so usually everything just ends up … Okay, here.’
A pop-up farm of windows opened on the screen. Jukes culled them back again methodically, until there was only one left.
‘There’s your list,’ he said.
Rush could tell one thing at a glance: A Trumpet Speaking Judgment had never been a smoking bestseller. There were only about twenty names on the list, and if the dates next to them were the dates when they’d accessed the book, the time span he was looking at covered more than fifty years. The earliest name, FOSSMANH, was listed against the date 17/4/46; the latest, DECLERKJO, against 2/9/98.
‘Is there any way we can get addresses and telephone numbers for these people?’ Rush asked.
‘Oh yeah,’ Jukes said. ‘Two ways, actually.’
Rush waited. ‘Well? What are they?’
‘A telephone book, or another ton. Your credit just expired, mate.’
23
The street door of number 276 Vincent Square, Pimlico, was controlled by a buzzer system, but someone — presumably the two killers who’d stopped by the night before — had disabled it so that it hung an inch open in the frame, refusing to latch. Should have spotted that, Heather, Tillman thought. You’re slipping.
Isobel James’s flat, he knew, was number 11, which was on the third floor. The lock here had been picked, rather than forced, and Tillman was prepared to use his own lock-picks, but he didn’t have to. He found a spare key underneath a potted palm that stood in the window recess next to the door: the third most likely place after the mat and the door sill.
Inside, silence and stillness and a penumbral gloom. The flat’s hallway had no windows and didn’t look onto the world outside at any point. Tillman took out a flashlight and clicked it on, casting it around the confined space. Nothing moved, and there was nothing to see that wasn’t bland and obvious. Bookcase. Hall table with a nude sculpture based on Klimt’s The Kiss. A few coats hanging on hooks on the wall.
The still air had a slightly stale, trapped smell. All the same, once Tillman had closed the door, he did a quick preliminary search, moving down the hall with a stealth that belied his sheer bulk to peer into each room and around each angle. He was checking for ambushes, but the air hadn’t lied. He was alone in the flat.
Tillman was reasonably confident now that he wouldn’t be disturbed, but he still kept to the agenda he’d decided on beforehand: start at the scene of the crime and work outwards. He went straight to the bedroom and stepped inside.
There were no bodies there, alive or dead. Again, this was only confirming what his nose had already told him. If Kennedy’s attackers had died here, and their bodies hadn’t been removed, the complex aromas of decay would already have been detectable.
But they could still have died and been carried away by someone else. Tillman surveyed the ruck and debris in the room and began to read it. The blood on the sheets he assumed was Kennedy’s. There was a large, dark stain about a third of the way down from headboard to foot, consistent with a wide, shallow wound to the upper body. She’d seemed to favour her left side a little when they’d met. Now he knew why.
More blood on the carpet, in two areas. Right beside him, between the bed and the door, and over on the far side of the room next to the wall.
Nearest first. He knelt to look at the dark dots and stipples on the beige carpet: the discreet Morse code of spectacular violence. Tillman saw several distinct clusters of dark spots and one extended spray of clotted streaks that widened from a point near to the bedside table. Someone had been hit repeatedly on this spot, probably with more than one weapon and from more than one angle. Wide variation in the area and angle of scatter suggested that the victim had been standing when the assault began, but that it had gone on — maybe for some time — after he’d fallen.
Tillman crossed the room to examine the other bloodstains. There were fewer of them and they told a different story. A wide sprinkle of near-invisibly small flecks, irregularly distributed with wide gaps: a blow to upper body or more likely to the head, in a space where objects — objects no longer present — occluded the blood spatter. He saw a fast, furious fight, a lucky or well-aimed blow breaking the septum of one fighter’s nose, or else a cut to the cheek or forehead.