‘Okay,’ Rush said. ‘Sure. Or I could take you over there and you could tell him yourself.’
‘No need,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m happy for you to pass the word along.’
As Kennedy left Ryegate House, three people watched her.
The first two were sitting in a silver Ford Mondeo — the most popular colour of a hugely popular car — fifty yards down from the building’s front entrance. They were inconspicuously, even drably dressed, but there was a quiet intensity about them that compelled a second glance.
They waited while Kennedy flagged down a cab, and while the cab accelerated past them back towards the city centre. Then the man in the driver’s seat started up the engine and eased in behind the taxi, with elaborate casualness. The man beside him checked the street, with a practised eye, to see if they were watched.
They were, but he didn’t perceive that they were. Much further away, Diema stared down from the roof of a lock-up garage, through foliage that hid her from stray glances but gave her a more or less unimpeded view of the part of the street that concerned her.
She didn’t follow. She was there to monitor for now, and to assess risk. Her current assessment was that there was very little. Neither Kennedy herself nor the people watching her were aware of Diema’s presence, or that their own surveillance had been enfolded into something much larger.
When the time came to act, Diema would act. Those upon whom she acted would not see her coming.
5
When Kennedy got back to Izzy’s apartment, let herself in and walked through to the living room, it was to the sound of these words: ‘Oh God, I want you. I want you inside me, right now. Would you like that, baby? Would you like to fill me up? I bet I could take you, all the way …’
This would have been alarming if Izzy hadn’t been sitting right there in front of her, alone, watching Coronation Street with the sound turned down. She held her mobile in one hand, a mug of strong Yorkshire tea in the other, and though her face was screwed up into a grimace of arousal and urgency, she was draped over the chair in a very relaxed pose.
She was at work, in other words. Coaxing a stranger over the edge of the orgasmic precipice at the bargain rate of 80p a minute plus VAT. Since both of her hands were occupied, she waved to Kennedy with her left leg. Tea in the pot, she mouthed, raising the cup and nodding at it.
Kennedy didn’t feel like tea. She fixed herself a whisky and water — in full stealth mode, making no sound that the phone might pick up. She took it through into the bedroom, shrugged her bag from her shoulder and let it fall onto the bed. She slumped down beside it, kicked off her shoes and stretched out full-length, resting her head against the annoying wrought-iron scrollwork of Izzy’s headboard.
There was a TV in the bedroom, too. Automatically, she turned it on, just for the comfort of the sound. But it was set to ITV, like the one in the lounge, and the seventeenth retelling of how Frank Foster raped Carla Connor on the night before their wedding grated slightly on her soul. She surfed channels, bounced off a nature documentary and a stultifying studio quiz show before settling on the news.
As she lay there, she realised it was the knife that intrigued her most. Without that, the break-in was just a locked room puzzle — and most locked room puzzles had fairly mundane explanations once you cut away the dross. But the knife meant something else. There could be another, more serious crime dangling off the end of this investigation. She just didn’t know what it could possibly be yet.
The TV news seemed to be all bad. A fire at a country house in the north of England had left a dozen people dead, even though the place was meant to be derelict. The police suspected arson. A terrorist group had planted a bomb in a German church and set it off during a Sunday mass. And a ground-to-air missile, accidentally launched from an IDF battery outside of Jerusalem, had sailed straight over the Dome of the Rock before it exploded in mid-air — and had therefore come within about a hangnail’s width of starting the bloodiest religious war since the Third Crusade.
Too much. Too much craziness. She turned the box off again and focused her mind on Ryegate House. She would do the obvious things first, just so she could cross them off. Most obvious of all was Ralph Prentice.
Prentice picked up on the third ring, but he was brusque. ‘I’m elbow deep in work, Heather. Short and sweet, or I’m hanging up.’
Since he worked in the police morgue attached to New Scotland Yard’s forensics annexe on Dean Farrar Street, Kennedy tried not to think about what exactly it was that his elbows were deep in.
‘Last month, Ralph. Night of Monday the twenty-fourth, into the Tuesday morning. Did you see any corpses presenting with knife wounds?’
A chair scraped and there was a barrage of rhythmical clicks at the other end of the line.
‘No,’ he said. ‘According to the big book of everything, that was a pretty quiet night. Last quiet night I can remember. It’s been apocalyptic since.’
‘It has? Why?’ Kennedy was interested in spite of herself. It was an unusual word for Prentice, normally a master of understatement, to use.
‘Car bomb in Surrey Street. Aggravated shooting in Richmond. And then that fire in Yorkshire. You heard about that, right? Incendiary bombs — very professional kit, by all accounts. Anything with possible terrorist links, we’ve got a reciprocal arrangement. So a lot of our people are stuck up there, helping the local plod to count footprints.’
‘But no knives.’
‘Not for a while, to be honest. Plenty of random unpleasantness, but a bit of a lull in incised wounds.’
‘Can you do me a favour, Ralph?’
‘You mean, besides talking to you? Given how high they bounced you, Heather, this right here is already a favour.’
‘I know. And I’m grateful. Really. But I’m trying to pin something down here and there’s nobody else I can ask.’
Prentice sniffed. ‘No, I should imagine not.’ He didn’t bother to say ‘because you don’t have any friends left in your own department’: it was too obvious to need saying. Kennedy had given evidence against two Met colleagues involved in an unlawful shooting, then lost two partners in quick succession in appalling bloodbaths. The bloodbaths were none of her fault, but in most people’s eyes she was a snitch and a jinx. By the time they’d forced her out, it was a formality. Nobody would have agreed to work with her in any case.
She waited Prentice out. They’d had a really good relationship back when she was in the Met, and Kennedy had been careful not to presume on it too much since. By her own estimation, she still had plenty of emotional capital to draw on.
‘Go on, then,’ the forensics officer muttered at last. ‘What do you need, Heather?’
‘See if anything’s come in from any of the hospitals,’ she said. ‘Malicious wounding, with a bladed weapon.’
‘Same time frame?’
‘Same time frame. Last Monday, or a day or so later.’
‘Just London?’
‘If you can pull the regionals, too, that would be great.’
‘What did your last slave die of, Heather?’
‘Sexual ecstasy, Ralph. That’s what does for them all, in the end.’
Prentice sighed. ‘I think it’ll be cholesterol with me,’ he said glumly. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
The other easy call was to a man Kennedy knew by the name of Jonathan Partridge. He was an engineer who’d studied materials science at MIT. He was also a polymath who liked puzzles and he’d helped Kennedy out on a number of occasions with odd insights and esoteric connections. But Partridge wasn’t home. All she could do was leave a message, after the Thatcher-esque matronly voice of the voicemail loop invited her to do so.