‘So is it her?’ the man asked Tillman. ‘The one you’re looking for?’
‘Does it zoom?’ Tillman asked Kevin, ignoring the question.
‘A little,’ the boy muttered. He held down a button and the central part of the image swelled until the girl’s face, seen from above and off to one side, filled the screen.
It was a reasonably attractive face, as far as Tillman could tell from this soup of pixels, heart-shaped, with large dark eyes, framed by a barbed wire tangle of short, spiked hair. She was too pale, though — pale enough that you might think she was anaemic, or recovering from a recent illness. Or that she grew up underground, Tillman thought, in a city that was never open to the sun and saw nothing unnatural in that deprivation.
So what do you make of the outside world, princess? Not a whole lot, probably, since they only let you out to hunt.
He rewound and watched again, but he went too far, past the point where the girl entered the shop. Outside the front window, in shot but barely visible, horizontal blurs were succeeded by vertical blurs. Then the door opened and the girl stepped inside, quick, methodical, racing against time — on her way to save Heather Kennedy’s life.
What had he just seen?
He rewound again and pondered those blurs. Something moving on the pavement or on the road. Moving sidelong into sight. Then a bob, or a dip: the sense of a quick, downward movement, ended as soon as it was begun.
Then the door opening.
Again. He still couldn’t make sense of it. Again. He turned the sound up, hoping for another contextual clue, and heard a rumble like a slowed-down road drill. It stopped before the girl came into the shop. In fact, it stopped just before that quick dip.
Of course it did.
Tillman turned to the shopkeeper. ‘She was on a motorbike when she arrived,’ he said. ‘Yes?’
The man’s face lit up with sudden animation. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘She was. I remember that, because she didn’t have a helmet on. That was what I said to her. I said, you’ll come a cropper one of these days, riding without a helmet. And she just give me a look, like I didn’t have the right to even talk to her.’
‘Do you remember anything about the bike?’
The man shrugged. ‘Sorry. I don’t know nothing about them things.’
‘Anything at all? The colour? Decorative trim? One exhaust or two?’
The man shrugged again. ‘It was just a bike.’
‘Actually,’ Kevin said, ‘it was a Ducati Multistrada 1200. The Sport version, in red and silver, with a hybrid frame. Pirelli Scorpion Trail tyres, front and back. And she had the side panniers, too.’
There was a pause while both older men stared at him, the shopkeeper in blank astonishment and Tillman with something like respect.
Kevin blushed furiously under this close surveillance. ‘But she’d taken the windshield off,’ he mumbled.
24
H. Fossman. N.O. DeClerk. P. Giuliani. S. Rake. J. Leavis. D. Wednesbury. A. Davies. And so on.
Rush didn’t have much to go on, at first, but he reasoned that most of the people who went looking for A Trumpet Speaking Judgment would do so for professional rather than recreational purposes. Camped out in Emil Gassan’s office, where he figured he was unlikely to be disturbed, he started off by typing each of the names into a meta-search engine along with a number of additional terms such as ‘Civil War’, ‘English history’ and ‘seventeenth century’.
A fair few of them turned out to fit right into that framework. They were historians with published works including a biography of Oliver Cromwell (Nigel DeClerk), a history of religious dissenters in northern Europe (Phyllida Giuliani) and a racy study of the British interregnum called The Headless Kingdom (Stephen Rake). The rest didn’t appear to be famous in any field that Google cared about. They were stubborn enigmas until Rush remembered that they had to have taken other books out of the British Library, too, and would probably still be on the main user database. That gave him full names and contact details, and opened up a lot of other options.
Most of which then closed again, pretty quickly.
When Rush saw the pattern emerging, he swore under his breath. He called Kennedy in a state of barely suppressed hysteria and told her that he had something he needed to talk over with her right then. She told him to meet her at the Union Chapel, so he grabbed his coat and sprinted most of the way there.
She was sitting right under the pulpit, with her backside on the back of one pew and her feet on the seat of the pew behind. Even in a deconsecrated church, that felt slightly shocking to Rush, whose Catholic upbringing furnished him with enough devils and guilt for any three ordinary people.
She was talking on the phone, and judging by the half of the conversation he could hear, it was to a boyfriend.
‘No, of course I miss you. It’s just that I’m still … if I could get up to see you, I would. You know I would.’
Squeak and rattle of the boyfriend’s voice. He sounded shrill.
‘I get that, babe. But I don’t know and I can’t promise.’
Squeak. Rattle rattle squeak. ‘Izzy,’ Kennedy said, interrupting the flow. ‘Isobel. Stop. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.’ Rattle. ‘Yeah. Love you, too. Well, hold that thought and we’ll work on it soon.’
She snapped the phone shut and put it away. Rush stared at her. He’d registered that the boyfriend was a girlfriend and was trying to process the information.
‘What?’ Kennedy said.
He pulled himself together and handed her the sheaf of printouts he was carrying. ‘Wales was obsessed with that book,’ he said. ‘God’s Plan Revealed, and the talking trumpet, and all the rest of it. He was trying to work up a list of everyone who’d read it or even taken it out of the stacks. So then I tried to find out who these people were. Some of them are dead, but that’s—’
‘Recently?’ Kennedy broke in quickly.
She was instantly alert, in a way that told Rush this news wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not recently. Why?’
‘Never mind. Go on.’
‘Well, these were people who took the book out back in the forties and fifties. It would be a bit surprising if they were still around. But here’s the weird thing. Some of the names kept coming up in archived news reports. I ignored them, at first — thought they were probably just coincidence. But I started noticing that all the news items were about people going missing. Around about a dozen of the people who were on Wales’s list have disappeared. And you see the dates? They’re all this year, within a couple of months of each other. That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.’
‘No. It sounds like a conspiracy. But mass kidnapping?’
‘A minute ago, you looked like you were ready to buy mass murder,’ Rush said. ‘What’s the difference?’
Kennedy shrugged. ‘Mass murder is part of the Judas People’s regular MO,’ she said. ‘But usually they cover their tracks and make it look like an accident. People going missing means other people going looking for them.’
Rush gave her a bewildered and slightly scandalised stare. ‘You’re telling me they’d kill people just because they happened to read a particular book?’
‘It’s fair to say, even on my limited experience, that that’s the core of their remit,’ Kennedy told him.
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. Rush, I told you what you were getting into. If you want to back out, now’s a really good time. They came after me last night and I was lucky to get away in one piece.’