‘Which aren’t catalogued.’
‘Which were catalogued, but the catalogue is both massively out of date and not here. It’s at Euston Road, on completely separate premises. So yes, we think we dodged the bullet, and that’s our public position, as it were. But privately, I’m agnostic.’
Kennedy thought back to the CCTV image of the man in black, with the tiny shoulder bag. Whatever he’d come for, it wasn’t a bulky item. And he hadn’t been on a random shopping trip, either.
So her position went beyond agnosticism. She was pretty near certain that something had been taken. The intruder had been picked up on camera and had dropped a knife (after he’d used it, which was a piece that didn’t seem to fit anywhere in the puzzle), but he’d still got away clean, and she had no reason to assume that his mission was aborted.
What was the mission? And who was he? And how had he gotten in and out?
And in back of those questions: did he try to kill me last night?
As she went on through the morning, she got back into the rhythm of it. In her former life as a cop, she’d been good at this stuff. She’d understood, intuitively, that it wasn’t about the questions. Not at first. You kept them bland and general, and people told you what was on their mind. The questions were like Rorschach inkblots.
‘I got to work late that day,’ said a man with bleach-blond hair, a dancer’s narrow build and intense, over-large brown eyes.
Kennedy glanced at the corresponding file. Alex Wales. She made a connection in her mind. ‘So you’re Mr Scholl’s PA?’
The man nodded at some length, as though Kennedy had made a point he profoundly agreed with, but he said nothing. Maybe his eyes weren’t too big: they were just very much darker than his face, so that they drew your gaze.
‘You were away from work all day on the Monday,’ Kennedy said. ‘Then you got in around eleven on the Tuesday. Why was that?’
There was a silence that was long enough for her to register it as awkward. ‘I have pernicious anaemia,’ Wales said. ‘Every so often, I get fainting fits. I take pills to keep it under control — but even with the pills, the iron level in my blood fluctuates a lot. When it’s really low, I can’t even get out of bed.’
‘So you took the Monday off because you were ill.’
Another pause. ‘I just lay there all through Monday. And Tuesday morning, too. Then I got up.’
He seemed to be picking his words with care, as though afraid of being accused of something; faking a sickie, maybe.
‘What was happening when you arrived on Tuesday?’ Kennedy asked him.
‘You mean, what was the first thing I saw on Tuesday?’
‘Yes. Exactly.’
‘The police were all over the place. Going through the rooms.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I went to my desk. Logged onto my computer.’
‘Just like normal?’
Wales nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘You weren’t surprised to see that massive police presence? You didn’t stop to ask them what was happening?’
‘I thought they were probably investigating a break-in.’
‘You thought that? Right away?’
Kennedy got another long, hard look from those big, dark eyes. ‘Yes. Right away.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘Well, it seemed like the obvious explanation. But I suppose it could have been a lot of worse things.’
‘Such as?’
Silence. Stare. Wait for it.
‘Well,’ Alex Wales said, ‘it’s not like the police ever come with good news, is it?’
She was finished before she knew it.
She was expecting one more clerk or curator to step timidly across the threshold, but when the door opened it was Rush instead.
‘All done,’ he said.
Kennedy looked down at the remaining file, sitting by itself next to the stack of those pertaining to people she’d already seen. ‘What about Mark Silver?’ she asked, and memory stirred as soon as she spoke the name aloud. She answered her own question. ‘Mark Silver is dead.’
Rush nodded solemnly. ‘Yeah. The weekend before the break-in.’
‘Traffic accident.’
‘Is correct.’
‘So why did you give me his file?’
‘Sorry,’ Rush said. ‘You said to put the files in some kind of order, and you said it couldn’t be just alphabetical, so I went by start date. You know, when they came on-staff here. The people you saw first were the people who’d worked here the longest. So I was looking at the dates instead of the names. Otherwise I would have taken Mark out.’
There was a silence. Kennedy couldn’t think of anything to fill it with.
‘Do you want me to get you some more coffee?’ Rush asked her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. The truth was that she was too tired to move. As though she needed some excuse to go on sitting there, she opened up the cover of Silver’s file and scanned the details. Born in Birmingham, educated in Walsall and Smethwick, and then buggered off to join the British Army on the Rhine. Obviously Mark had felt the need to shake off the dust of his home town and get out into the big world. Couldn’t blame him for that.
As her gaze wandered across the page, Kennedy was struck by a mild sense of déjà vu. It was something recent, too. Dredging up the memory, she checked Silver’s file against one of the others she’d just been looking at. Not a perfect match, but close enough. In order of start date, Rush had said.
Kennedy looked up at him. He was giving her a slightly puzzled stare, watching the expressions chasing each other across her face. ‘Those break-ins,’ she said.
‘Break-in, you mean. Singular.’
‘No. The other ones. The abortive attempts.’
Rush frowned. ‘Oh, right. Those. That was a while ago now. We added some external cameras, up on the roof — you saw them yesterday. Whoever it was, they didn’t come back.’
‘Right.’
She almost had it now. Had some of it, anyway. Change the perspective, and the impossible becomes banal. Was that Columbo again, or Sherlock Holmes?
‘Get your keys out,’ she told Rush. ‘I want to take another look at the room.’
7
Eight parallel aisles of boxes. No empty spaces on the shelves, although Gassan had told her the room was only at one third of its capacity. That was the first thing.
‘So some of these boxes don’t have anything in them, right?’ Kennedy asked Rush.
‘All the ones from about the end of aisle C onwards,’ he confirmed. ‘The clericals normally fill the space up from the front. But there’s probably a few more empty boxes mixed in with the full ones — spaces that didn’t get filled or things that were moved to new locations and left a gap.’
‘So why bother to have boxes with nothing in them?’ Rush gave this question some thought. ‘I suppose it’s got some value as a smokescreen,’ he said at last.
‘You mean because it forces a burglar to open every box?’ ‘Yeah. But I think it was more about space, to be honest. The boxes are rigid, reinforced sides, high quality. They don’t come flat-packed. So where else would we stack them? It’d be stupid to have rooms set aside for empty boxes when we can just fill the shelves here and then have everything set up ready for new stuff as it comes in.’
Kennedy nodded. ‘Yeah. That would be stupid.’
She got Rush to show her the two fixed cameras, and with his help she paced out the areas of the room that would be visible to each of them. The negative space, where the cameras couldn’t see, was where she began.
He watched her for a while, opening boxes and peering into them. He was perplexed. ‘Those ones are empty,’ he told her.