But I digress. You remember we talked about the firebombing up in Yorkshire? It was a listed building — Nunappleton Hall. A convent, at one time, then a stately home, then empty and supposedly derelict. Empty right up to the time of the fire, in fact.
Local police are treating it as a terrorist attack, because the munitions that were used were extremely sophisticated. They called in the Met to assist with forensics, and a lot of the paperwork went across my desk — including the autopsy reports.
You might be wondering why there’d be any autopsy reports when the fire was in an abandoned building. Answer seems to be that the terrorists brought some hostages along with them and killed them on the spot. The method of execution — and I use the word advisedly — was with a knife, in each case. Severe damage to the eyes, too, possibly done with the same implement. But cause of death for all twelve was a single deeply incised wound to the throat. A very sharp knife drawn right across.
Prentice didn’t shy away from the grisly details of the post mortem examination, and hardened as she was Kennedy found the saliva drying in her mouth as she read. The victims had been gagged. Their hands and feet tied. Probably killed as they knelt, side by side, in a confined space — a stone larder behind the house’s main kitchen. Blinded and then slaughtered, most likely one at a time because some of the bodies had fallen so that limbs overlapped in ways that would be improbable if all twelve of these anonymous men and women had been killed at the same time.
They weren’t anonymous, though. All of the bodies had been identified either by DNA or by dentition. Kennedy scanned the names briefly, but they meant nothing to her, or at least, they meant far less than the terrible, indelible image of twelve people waiting in terrified, enforced silence as the butcher worked his way down the line.
She closed the email. Was this connected in some way with the theft of Toller’s book? Was there a single strand of insane logic connecting the Ryegate House break-in with this slaughter that had happened two hundred miles distant? Steal a book, then massacre a roomful of men and women? For most people, those crimes didn’t belong in the same paradigm — but for the Messengers of the Judas tribe, who’d been killing for centuries to protect the sanctity of their gospel, it could easily be possible.
A horrible suspicion came to her. She reached into her pocket again and brought out Ben Rush’s list: the names of British Library users who’d accessed Toller’s book and then vanished. She compared it to the casualties at Nunappleton Hall. Toller’s list of the disappeared was identical to Ralph Prentice’s list of the dead.
Kennedy had a strong stomach. It was her head that rebelled against this atrocity. Not kidnapping, then. It was mass murder, after all. And carried out with hideous care and precision. The Judas People, who saw their murders as sanctified rather than sinful, were loose in the world again.
No. They’d never left. She looked up Nunappleton Hall online. She wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to find that it had changed from being a convent to an estate right after the English Civil War, when one of Cromwell’s ex-generals had been looking for a place to settle down and grow roses up the door and when Johann Toller had begun preaching across England about Christ’s Second Coming.
She did one more thing. She searched for ‘rats with heads cut off’. She had had no idea what Prentice had been talking about, but the search engine showed it as a trending topic in the news and on social media. Someone had carpeted Whitehall, in London, with decapitated rats — about a thousand of them. The police were saying it was either an animal rights protest or some sick student prank. The rats had been carefully positioned in front of a building called the Banqueting House, which had been designed by Inigo Jones, some of the news reports noted, and completed in 1622.
It felt to Kennedy as though she were seeing pieces of a pattern, individual stones in a complex mosaic, but she was too close to it to see what was actually represented there. It meant something. She just had to find the vantage point from which the crazy little details coalesced into a face, a word, an answer. There was a level on which all of this made sense.
That thought, when she dragged it up into the light and looked at it, was the scariest thing of all.
29
Tillman lay in thick undergrowth and watched the warehouse through his field glasses. He lay on his stomach and kept himself as still as he could. The broken splotches of colour on his camouflage suit would hide him from a casual glance, but until the sky darkened completely, movement could still betray him.
The warehouse wasn’t exactly a ferment of activity, but people were moving in there. Twice during the day a truck had arrived and been allowed inside through a freight bay just left of centre in his line of sight. One of the two had emerged again, with a different man at the wheel, and driven away along the sliproad, passing within ten feet of Tillman. The other was still inside. Presumably it was being either loaded or unloaded, but the rolling door of the bay had been pulled down and locked, so it was impossible to tell which.
Throughout the day, people moved behind the windows, quickly and purposefully. In the forecourt, seven cars — all fairly new but nondescript — stood side by side. They had to belong to the warehouse staff or managers, since they’d been there the whole time that Tillman had been watching and nobody had approached them in that time.
This was where Manolis had traced the bike to, but there was no sign of it here — or the girl, for that matter. There was a margin of error, of course, and Mano had been keen to stress that this was only a best guess. The cameras hadn’t logged the place where the bike spent its nights. The warehouse was just the nexus of its last recorded positions for each day. Sometimes the girl had approached it from the west, more usually from the north or east, but she’d come here every day, towards midnight or a little after, and the bike hadn’t shown up on camera anywhere after that until six or seven the next morning. If she wasn’t at the warehouse, she was somewhere close enough to it that the building itself was worth more than a passing glance.
On paper, the warehouse belonged to a freight haulage company, High Energy Haulage. The name and logo of the firm were blazoned over the front and rear door of the building. The logo looked like one of the trilithons at Stonehenge: a broad horizontal bar, with two vertical bars of about equal length extending downwards. The bar on the right touched the top stroke, but there was a narrow gap at the top of the lefthand bar. Tillman wasn’t sure what it was meant to be, but it tugged annoyingly at his memory. He’d seen it, or something like it, before, and he hadn’t liked it then, either.
In fact, there wasn’t much he liked about this place. The fact that it was full of busy people, but with almost nothing coming in or going out, stank out loud. He had a hankering to see what they were up to, and he knew that his only chance was going to be at night. That was why he was still here, out in the long grass, with cramps in his legs and jagged-edged pebbles pressing into his chest.
He trained the field glasses on the rear door and the freight bay, the windows, the roof. There were security cameras, but he could see a couple of approaches that would take him safely through them. An alarm system, but it didn’t look like anything that would give him too much trouble. The external hub was labelled WESTMAN SECURITY SYSTEMS. Tillman knew pretty much what was inside that box and what it would do, and what it wouldn’t do. So long as it hadn’t been tweaked from base specs, it was going to be a dog that failed to bark.