‘No, probably not,’ Manolis protested. ‘Some things I might miss. I wouldn’t miss this bike.’
‘Sorry,’ Tillman said dryly. ‘I didn’t mean to question your professional expertise. Okay, Mano, let’s work out the clusters. I want an introduction to this girl. How close can you get me?’
‘I land you in her bedroom. Soft as thistledown.’
Which made Tillman wince a little, both because the girl was less than half his age and because he’d seen from the blood evidence what she was capable of in the bedroom.
‘I’ll settle for the front door,’ he said. ‘And I’ll wear hobnail boots so she hears me coming. I’m not in the mood for suicide.’
The phone rang and Manolis picked up. He said ‘Yes’ twice, then held the phone out to Tillman. ‘Your friend,’ he said.
‘Which friend?’ Tillman demanded.
‘The one my wife wouldn’t approve of.’
Tillman took the phone. ‘Hello, Heather.’
‘You said to tell you if I was moving.’
‘So where are you moving to?’
‘Avranches. Normandy. A day trip.’
‘Okay. Check in when you get back.’
‘Will do, Leo.’
Tillman rang off and gave the phone back. ‘Caitlin doesn’t have to worry,’ he told Manolis. ‘Heather has refined tastes.’
Manolis shook his head sorrowfully. ‘A pity. We would have been good together.’
‘Throw yourself into your work,’ Tillman suggested gravely.
Manolis did. And Tillman played fifty-one-card patience for three hours while his old comms sergeant worked through the endless data streams, eliminating and collating.
‘Here,’ he said at last. ‘I think I have it, Leo. This is the place where your girl has spent most of her time over the last three days — all of the time when she wasn’t watching you or the refined blonde.’
‘Where is it?’ Tillman asked, putting the cards away. ‘Where does she live?’
‘In a warehouse, apparently,’ Manolis said, with a good deal less confidence. ‘On an industrial estate in Hayes.’ He gave Tillman a doubtful look. ‘Perhaps this is her day job.’
26
Kennedy met with a lot more trouble than she expected in tracking down a copy of Johann Toller’s book to read. Borrowing a computer at the Charing Cross Library, and trying not to disturb the sleeping winos who used the reading room as a flophouse, she was able to find twenty-three copies of A Trumpet Speaking Judgment that had been listed at one time or another in the catalogues of the libraries of the world. That made it marginally less scarce than a Gutenberg Bible.
But actually it was a whole lot scarcer, because once Kennedy started calling around she discovered that every single one of those copies had been bought, burned, stolen or just plain mislaid in the space of the last few years. There wasn’t a copy of Toller’s book to be had for love or money.
Well, maybe for money. She called John Partridge, who grumbled that Kennedy was asking him to search for a needle in a haystack and that he’d get round to it when he could, and then called her back, less than an hour later, to report that he’d found a copy of the book. Or, he added, scrupulously, something almost as good.
‘What does that mean?’ Kennedy asked suspiciously.
‘Well, I tried the obvious,’ Partridge told her. ‘I thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to find either a scan of the book or an e-version. Most books that are out of copyright have been put through the OCR mincing machine and made available online. But I hit a brick wall. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. A lot of links that should have led to your book turned out to be dead-ends. The sites had been completely erased. Viral markers on the search engines, nothing at all at the URLs.’
‘So?’
‘Digital slash-and-burn, Heather, my love. Someone went after those sites with malice aforethought, tore them down and then sowed the ground with salt.’
‘Could be nothing to do with our text, of course,’ Kennedy thought aloud.
‘If it was one site, the odds would favour coincidence. After half a dozen, you pay your money and take your choice.’
‘And how many times did you come across this, John?’
‘A lot more than half a dozen. In the end, I got lucky — up to a point, anyway — by specifically targeting non-live data. In other words, old stored downloads of data sets from defunct sites or sites that don’t offer direct internet access. And that’s where we come to the good news.’
‘There’s good news?’
‘The place where I found the abstract was the Scriptorial at Avranches, in northern France. They haven’t got an actual copy of the book, but they’ve got a full typed transcript.’
‘And they can send it to me? That’s brilliant.’
‘Hold your horses, ex-sergeant. They absolutely refuse to make the transcript available online or to send it out in file form because they no longer have the original text to compare it with. They used to have a copy of the actual book, but it was ruined in an accident a few years ago. There’s no way of verifying the authenticity of the transcript and the curators don’t want to be responsible for bad scholarship. But they will let you examine the transcript, if you turn up in the flesh. The head of the preservation department there is a man named Gilles Bouchard. He’s a friend of a friend of a friend of someone I used to be very friendly with, once upon a time. For her sake, he’ll bend the rules a little for you.’
‘Did I just hear a subliminal love story, John?’ Kennedy asked. ‘No, I know, a gentleman never tells. Listen, this is great. Really. If I owed you a pint before, I owe you a brewery now.’
‘Distillery, please. My poison of choice is usquebaugh.’
‘Single malt or blended?’
‘Surprise me. But not too far north. The winters are murder on my arthritis.’
Kennedy hung up and made some more calls. The last of these was to Rush.
‘So now what?’ he asked her. ‘You’re going to France?’
‘Already booked. It’s a long haul. Eurostar to Paris, then regular train out to Rennes and another fifty miles from there in a rental car. I’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘You should take me along.’ Rush kept his tone light and sardonic, but she could hear the yearning. ‘You’ll need someone to stand on the running board and take potshots at them if they catch up with you again.’
‘Yeah,’ Kennedy told him, ‘but I can’t afford your fare.’ Or any more deaths on my conscience. ‘See what you can dig up about Johann Toller’s life,’ she suggested.
‘His life, Kennedy?’
‘Yeah. Think about it. I chase the work, you chase the man. We’re the horns of the buffalo, Ben.’
‘You’re the horns of the buffalo. I’m the swishing tail of the buffalo, swatting away a few flies. The horns of the buffalo don’t look stuff up on Wikipedia. Because that’s what you’re asking me to do.’
‘I’m serious,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think we can assume that Toller is important to the Judas People for some reason. If we knew who he was, we might have a chance of figuring out what that reason is.’
Rush still wasn’t happy, but he allowed himself to be persuaded. And Kennedy didn’t begrudge the time it took to persuade him because he was essentially right about her motives. She was sending him to do make-work while she got on with the investigation.
That was the plan, anyway.
27
As far as the internet was concerned, Johann Toller was an enigma. But buried in the search engine dross, Rush found a few nuggets of fact. One of these was an encyclopedia entry that appeared again and again, endlessly recycled from one site to another with no citation of the original author.