‘Is that acceptable?’ Gassan asked.
‘Yes,’ she said bluntly. ‘Very. But I’d like a letter setting out the terms of my contract. No offence, but item three — finding your intruder — might turn out to be a tall order, if I can’t get any other leads on him. I don’t want to be working this case for ever. Or to have to give the money back.’
‘That’s perfectly reasonable. Marilyn indicated that this was a payment for four weeks of your time, on an exclusive basis insofar as that’s feasible. But if you have other cases—’
‘I don’t have any other cases. That was just bullshit.’
‘Oh. Well, you bullshit very well.’
‘Thank you. Who would I report to?’
‘You’ll report to me and I’ll report directly both to the museum board and to Validus. Their relationship to me is almost one of agency, in this respect — and the museum is very comfortable with that.
‘As to powers, I believe what I’m proposing to do is to deputise you. So you’ll be able to do anything that I could do. Talk to all of the staff. Have full run of the building. Full access to files and information.’
‘Consult other people outside the museum?’
The professor’s lips pursed slightly. ‘Where appropriate. And so long as absolute discretion is maintained. I think that’s a reasonable stipulation.’
‘Entirely. I’ll take the job.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it.’ Gassan threw his arms in the air and seemed almost to be about to lean over and hug her.
‘Okay,’ Kennedy said, forestalling that alarming possibility, ‘do you want to show me the scene of the crime?’
‘But of course.’
The professor stood and indicated with a sweep of his arm that Kennedy should follow him.
3
The picture of the museum’s storerooms that Kennedy had had in her mind was a very romantic one, she now realised. She’d imagined vast underground halls with Gothic arched ceilings but ultra-modern steel doors like the doors of bank vaults. Either that or the colossal warehouse of the first Indiana Jones movie, with endless wonders sealed and stacked in endless identical packing crates: an Aladdin’s Cave in camouflage colours.
The reality was much more mundane. The main storage facility wasn’t even on the museum site: it was an entirely separate building, Ryegate House, on St Peter’s Street in Islington, ten minutes away by cab. Kennedy wondered briefly why, in that case, Gassan had brought her to the British Museum at all, but the answer was obvious. He wanted to show off his good fortune, the prestige of his brand-new job, and he clearly felt that the Great Court made a better stage than the place they were now heading for.
He was right. The building in front of which the cab rolled to a stop was an anonymous brutalist block with a concrete façade only marginally enlivened by pebbledash. The effect might have been pleasant when the building was new: now, many of the rounded stones had fallen away, leaving recesses greened with moss. The effect was of a face pockmarked by disease.
Kennedy made some remark about the twelve-million-pound budget that Gassan had mentioned. It ought to run to a facelift, surely?
‘Oh, it does,’ the professor assured her earnestly. ‘But we don’t want to advertise what’s here. We’re very keen to be overlooked.’
He pointed to the sign beside the entrance. It simply read RYEGATE HOUSE, and it made no mention whatsoever of the British Museum. Yes, that had to count as effective camouflage.
Inside was a different story. The carpet in the foyer was deep and soft, and the doors were automatic, opening in front of them with a soft sigh of acquiescence. Kennedy could feel now how thick the concrete was under that erratic pebbledashing. It was there in the flatness of the acoustics, the instant deadening of all sounds both from within and from without.
The reception counter was the size of a small yacht. The woman on duty there was a stacked redhead whose white blouse was buttoned all the way up to the neck. She recognised Gassan and greeted him very civilly — even warmly — but she gave Kennedy a hesitant, searching look that bordered on open suspicion. Kennedy wondered whether the professor knew how big a hit he’d made in just one week. If the rest of the building was as keen on him as the reception desk was, he was sitting pretty.
Gassan introduced his guest with proprietorial pride. ‘This is Sergeant Kennedy, Lorraine. She’s here at the board’s request, to investigate the break-in. Could you please buzz Glyn Thornedyke and tell him we’ll need access to Room 37?’
They waited on the near side of a turnstile barrier. ‘Security falls to my brief,’ Gassan explained to Kennedy, ‘but Thornedyke coordinates the actual rota and superintends on a day-to-day basis, reporting directly to me.’ The speech seemed to Kennedy to be very much of a piece with Gassan introducing her as sergeant, despite the fact that she no longer had any rank at alclass="underline" he liked to use the people around him as ramparts to build up his ego.
A door opened off to one side of them and a uniformed security guard appeared. He seemed to be barely out of his teens, with the overstretched rangy look that in girls is called coltish and in boys (if they’re lucky) is politely overlooked. His fair hair was worn in a severe military crew cut, but his blue eyes had a baby-doll clarity of colour that undercut the effect. He all but saluted as he presented himself to Gassan.
‘Rush, sir,’ he said. ‘Mr Thornedyke said you need me to open some doors.’
‘Actually,’ Kennedy said, ‘I think what I really need before anything else is a tour of the building. Would that be okay, Professor?’
‘By all means,’ Gassan said.
The young man looked doubtful. ‘I should be on the staff door,’ he said. ‘I should probably check in with Mr Thornedyke before I—’
‘This is on my authority,’ Gassan huffed, dismissing the objection. ‘Sergeant Kennedy is a professional security consultant — an expert, with many years of police experience. We’re very lucky to have her and we need to facilitate her investigation in any way we can.’
The tour took a lot longer than Kennedy had expected. It seemed to cover all or most of the building, but it was hard to tell because the interior structure of Ryegate House was homogenous to the point of nightmare. It consisted of dozens of more or less identical rooms, high-ceilinged, cool, with energy-efficient lighting that came on as gradual as a sunrise; hundreds of yards of corridor with ID-swipe checkpoints at every turn and angle, and occasional fire doors that closed down the corridors into short stretches like narrower rooms. There was a subtle but pervasive smell that was hard to identify. It was a little like the passenger cabin of an aeroplane, Kennedy decided at last: like the air had been recycled many times, and was going to be recycled a few times more before being allowed to go about its business.
As they trekked through the storage facility, Rush extolled its wonders. Kennedy felt that he was trying for the casual assurance of an old hand, but it sounded as though he were parroting stuff from an orientation lecture. The security systems were really good, he said. In most respects, state-of-the-art. There were pressure and breach alarms on all external doors and windows, movement sensors in most rooms and at nodal points throughout the building, full electronic records of every key usage and every entry and exit.
‘CCTV?’ Kennedy asked — she hadn’t seen any cameras yet.
‘Oh yeah, everywhere,’ Rush assured her. ‘But if you’re looking for the cameras, you won’t see them. They’re built into corners, angles, mouldings and stuff. We use a system called CPTED, Sergeant Kennedy — Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. It’s like, you show people where your cameras are if you want to regulate behaviour in a big public space, right? In a shopping centre, say, or a multistorey car park. Big Brother is watching you, sort of thing. But we camouflage our cameras, because this is a sealed facility. Nobody unauthorised is going to come through here unless they’ve broken in. So the CCTV is meant to catch criminals in the act.’