‘Is it?’ Kennedy asked. ‘How?’
‘Well, the lack of a physical address means we’ve achieved a level of security for those books that goes beyond anything we’ve got for the other artefacts. And yet the books — at least the ones that were left with us after the move — are the least valuable part of the collection.’
‘I’m not sure that counts as irony, exactly,’ Kennedy said. ‘But I take your point. Ms Parminter, what do you think the intruder was after?’
‘Whatever he could get his hands on.’ The answer sounded flip, but it was spoken with a definite emphasis.
‘What, you don’t think he had a plan? A specific target?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Why is that?’
Parminter almost sneered. ‘Well, let’s just say that if he did, and if he ended up in that wing, in that room, he must have taken a wrong turning.’ She stood up, without asking Kennedy if the interview was over, and headed for the door.
‘He’d have had better luck going through our rubbish,’ she said over her shoulder.
Before Kennedy could get to interviewee number two, Izzy called. She was still on the train.
‘Hey, you,’ Izzy said, trying to sound jaunty through the misery and the hurt. ‘What you up to right now? Smiting evildoers?’
‘Interviewing witnesses,’ Kennedy said. ‘Smiting comes later. I thought you’d be there by now.’
‘Train got held up outside Leicester. We’ll be pulling in soon.’
There was a pregnant silence. ‘Give them my love,’ Kennedy said, for want of anything else to say that actually had any kind of a meaning attached.
‘Obviously,’ Izzy said. They were Izzy’s brother Simon, his homophobic wife Caroline, who crossed her legs whenever Kennedy entered the room as though she feared her vagina was under direct threat, and their weirdly quiet but otherwise okay kids Hayley and Richard. They lived in a well-to-do suburb of Leicester, kept rabbits, and — considered as a family unit — had a Stepford kind of serenity that Kennedy observed with perplexity and mild suspicion. Caroline was something in the City, but at long-distance, making crazy money in a locked room at the top of the house that contained only a desk, a computer and three phones. Simon looked after the kids, the rabbits, the house and pretty much everything else.
It had been Kennedy’s idea that Izzy should spend some time with her only sibling and his family — or at least, that she should get some distance from Kennedy until Kennedy was able to establish which chicken from her former life was coming home to roost. It had to be that. There was no conceivable way that the attack could have anything to do with her work at Ryegate House, which had barely begun. It was only the timing — and the unsettling visual echo of the black stealth-suit, so like the one she’d seen in the CCTV footage. But even if the Ryegate House intruder was crazy enough, and desperate enough, to commit a murder in order to hide a theft, there was no way that Kennedy presented a credible enough threat to motivate an attack like that. She knew nothing, had no leads and no ideas.
Izzy had been full of indignation and derision at the suggestion that she needed to be protected; but she thought it was hot as hell that Kennedy wanted to protect her, be her knight in shining armour. Once they were back in the comfort and privacy of Izzy’s flat, the sex they’d had on the back of that particular conversation had reached heights and depths that surprised both of them.
But when it was over, and they were lying across each other in a snarl of knotted sheets like the victims of some very localised tornado, both of the elephants — the relationship one and the near-death-experience one — were still in the room. One hour of sweaty apotheosis didn’t mean they were safely over the dead ground. And the fresh bandage on Izzy’s forehead was a potent reminder that someone had just tried to cement their fate with actual cement.
Kennedy came up with the idea of a trial separation — partly so they could figure out how they felt about each other, partly so that Izzy could get out of harm’s way while Kennedy tried to find out where the harm was coming from and shut it down.
It was a hard sell for Izzy. The great sex, and Kennedy’s protectiveness, had completely changed her prognosis for the relationship. Now she wanted to capitalise on these gamechanging events and get Kennedy to tell her that she was forgiven. ‘Don’t ask me to go to bloody Leicester!’ she pleaded. ‘I can stay out of trouble right here. I’ll go and stay with Pauline and Kes, down in Brixton.’
‘Too close, too current,’ Kennedy told her bluntly. ‘And you’d still be seeing all the people you normally see. Anyone who was halfway trying could find you inside of a day.’
‘But what about my work?’
Kennedy picked up Izzy’s phone from the arm of the sofa and waved it briefly in her face before dropping it into her handbag. ‘That’s your work. You can do it just as well from two hundred miles away. Better, you won’t be tempted to invite a regular up for a face to face.’
It was deliberately cruel — a pre-emptive bid to end the discussion. And it worked really well, as far as that went. Izzy absorbed the low blow without a word and took over the packing for herself. When she left, an hour later, they embraced, but it was clumsy and tentative.
Just like their conversation now.
‘I had a thought,’ Izzy said.
‘What about?’
‘Sleeping around.’
‘Izzy—’
‘Hear me out, babe. I was thinking I could set you up with someone. Someone really cute. And you could, you know, be unfaithful right back. Get it out of your system. You wouldn’t even have to enjoy it. It would just relieve the tension, you know? So we could get back to being us again.’
‘Izzy, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.’
‘Okay.’ Izzy abandoned the notion quickly, got some distance from it. ‘I thought it was stupid. I just wanted to put it out there.’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll call you tonight.’
‘I love you.’
Kennedy hung up and grabbed the next file.
Second Assistant Director Allan Scholl — a Boris Johnson lookalike with a mop of blond hair he obviously thought was a selling point — was a whole lot smoother than Parminter and a whole lot more courteous. But he had even less to say. He was keen to stress his pivotal role on the day the break-in was discovered. It had been him who called the police, told security to seal off the room and organised the preliminary trawl through the collection to find out what had been stolen. He’d overseen the process himself, because his PA had been away sick and although he returned that day, he got in late.
‘And you found that nothing was missing?’ Kennedy said.
‘Nothing that we could definitely verify,’ Scholl corrected her. ‘We’ve done a more detailed search since and everything appears to be where it belongs. But it’s hard to be categorical on that point.’
‘Why is that, Mr Scholl?’ Kennedy knew the answer, but it never hurt to seem more clueless than you actually were: the Columbo principle.
‘Because there are literally millions of items in the collection. To tick every one off the list would be hugely time-consuming. And visual verification might not be enough, in some cases. If you wanted to steal a very valuable artefact, and then to sell it on, one of the things you might do would be to replace the original with a copy so that its loss went undetected. Then there are the books …’