‘Okay,’ said Kennedy. ‘Then I guess that’s where we go next.’
4
It was at this point that Gassan peeled off, with apologies, to deal with some other work he had to finish before he left for the evening. He asked Kennedy to drop in on him when she was done with her inspection — an injunction that Kennedy pretended not to hear.
On the way down to Room 37, she tried to get Rush talking about himself. Most of the security guards she’d met had been ex-cops, ex-army or occasionally ex-criminals working on the poacher-turned-gamekeeper ticket. She was curious as to why someone would go into the job straight from school. But Rush was shy and wouldn’t be drawn on that subject.
The room was just as unremarkable the second time around. Just row after row of wooden packing crates and cardboard boxes, with a stepladder leaning against one wall. There were none of the larger and more visually appealing items that had loomed above the shelf units in some of the other rooms.
Kennedy walked up and down the aisles. As she’d already been told, nothing appeared to have been touched. There were no tell-tale gaps on the shelves, no boxes out of place. Dust might have held fingerprints or indicated where something had been moved, but there was no dust. After three weeks of lockdown, the place was still spotless.
She returned to Rush, who was setting up the stepladder. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘That’s where he climbed up. Cobbett and me went up to check, while we were waiting for the police to get here. Then the police sent their own people up, so I can’t say nothing has been disturbed.’
He gave Kennedy an electric torch, which he’d brought with him from the CCTV room, and held the ladder steady while she ascended.
‘Mind how you go,’ he said.
Although Kennedy was wearing trousers, she noticed that the boy was keeping his face modestly averted from her ass — except for a sidelong glance as it bobbed past his eye level. Impeccable manners. Or more likely she was just too old for him.
The dropped ceiling was made of expanded polystyrene tiles in a rigid metal grid. She pressed her hands against the tile that Rush had indicated, pushing it up and then aside. From the top of the ladder, she was able to thrust her head and shoulders through into the narrow space above her. There was, she could see now, a gap of about three feet separating the drop ceiling from the real ceiling above.
She flashed the torch. It revealed an airless and featureless expanse only a couple of feet high but identical in its lateral dimensions, as far as she could tell by eye, with the room below. There were no vents, ducts, holes or grilles through which the intruder could have escaped.
‘Am I missing something?’ Kennedy called down to Rush. ‘It doesn’t look to me like there’s any exit from up here.’
‘We didn’t find one either,’ he shouted back. ‘Walls are solid. Ceiling is solid. If he found a hole up there, he pulled it in after him.’
Kennedy did one more circuit with the torch, looking not for the intruder’s escape route now but for anything even slightly out of place. There was nothing. She leaned forward to take a closer look at the nearest wall, which was just within her reach. She rapped her knuckles against it. Solid.
‘Is it brick all the way round?’ she called to Rush. ‘No plasterboard?’
‘No plasterboard. No voids. No hidden panels. Nothing but what you see, Sergeant.’
She looked down through the hole, meeting Rush’s curious, slightly nervous gaze. ‘It’s not “Sergeant”,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘Heather will do fine.’
‘Okay.’
There didn’t seem to be any more sights worth seeing up in the ceiling space, so she came back down. When she was back on terra firma, she asked Rush to talk her through the whole sequence of events from the moment when the break-in was discovered.
He thought about it. ‘There isn’t that much to tell, to be honest,’ he said. ‘We found the knife — you heard about the knife, right? — first thing on Tuesday morning. But the break-in was the night before. The time signature on that footage you saw is 11.58 p.m.’
‘How was the knife found?’ she asked him. ‘Do you check every room every day?’
‘Yeah, we do. The duty officer clocks on at 6 a.m., signs the rest of us off on the rota and briefs us about anything special. Then we do vee-twos — visual verifications — of every room. I don’t mean on the cameras, I mean we actually walk around the building. Steve Furness found the knife just lying on the floor there. Five- or six-inch blade. Really, really sharp. And it had been used. There was blood on it.’
‘Did they find out whose?’
Rush shook his head. ‘I suppose they tested it. But they didn’t tell us what they found. Obviously we looked for a body, but there wasn’t anything. Not even any more blood — only what was on the knife. Nobody was missing from our staff, or from the area — and you can see from the footage that the guy’s not carting a body along with him when he leaves.’
‘He doesn’t seem to be carrying anything much.’
‘No,’ Rush agreed. ‘And you know we didn’t find anything missing. But the thing is, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of items, maybe even millions, and some of them are really tiny. Something could go missing and not be spotted for a long time. The clericals checked that all the boxes were still there and that the access seals on the important stuff hadn’t been broken.’
‘Is everything sealed?’
‘No. Just the most valuable bits and pieces. Maybe ten, fifteen per cent of the collection. They did vee-twos on all of that stuff. But it’s still possible they could have missed something. It’s more than possible.’
Kennedy paced the room, looking from the shelf units to the ceiling and back again. ‘How many cameras are in here?’ she asked.
‘Two.’
‘Fixed?’
‘All our cameras are fixed, Sergeant … Heather. If they were on swivel mounts, they’d have to be out in the open.’
She knew that she was missing something, some anomaly that was nuzzling at the edge of her attention. She decided to leave it there for now and let it announce itself in its own sweet time, rather than risk scaring it away by lunging for it.
‘Did anything else happen on Monday or Tuesday?’ she asked.
‘Nothing that’s relevant.’
‘Forget relevance. What else was on your mind that day?’
Rush thought about that question for a moment or two. ‘Mark Silver,’ he said at last.
‘Who?’
‘One of the other security guys. He died on Sunday night, as it turned out. We found out about it on the Monday.’
‘Died how?’
‘Drunk driver hit him on a pelican crossing. Monday afternoon, some of the reception staff were going round taking up a collection. There was a pretty sombre mood. It was only a few weeks after Dr Leopold — he was the director before Professor Gassan — had his stroke. Everyone was talking about how bad news comes in threes. The break-in that night was number three.’
‘This guy Silver was a friend of yours?’
‘No. Not really. I knew him, but I never really talked to him much. I just felt bad that he died in such a stupid way.’
Kennedy asked a few more anodyne questions, steering the conversation back into emotionally neutral territory. None of this was coming together yet, but she could see that the boy found the topic distressing, and she didn’t see any reason to make him dwell on it. ‘Thanks for all your help,’ she said at last. ‘Tomorrow I’d like to look at the staff logs and staff profiles. I’m also going to do interviews with everyone who was on duty on that Monday. Could you drop into Professor Gassan’s office and tell him that?’