We Are Death (27 page)

Jericho pushed his chair back and got to his feet.

‘I’m going home. You can give this some thought. That is, if you can think when I’m not in the room.’

He pushed the chair under the desk and started to walk away.

‘See you in Oslo,’ he threw over his shoulder.

And he meant it, because somehow he knew that Durrant wouldn’t be there when he got home.

––––––––

L
ate Monday evening. The players had begun to converge on Oslo, although few of them yet realised this would be for the endgame, it often being hard in the middle of a narrative to know how near the end you are.

Harrow was already there, having travelled from Syria, via Sochi. He had found talking to the Russians not unlike his experience of dealing with the Syrians, in that he had felt completely out of his depth. He did not understand these people, what motivated them, or what their ends might be. He also had to uncomfortably admit to himself that he genuinely had no idea what they were capable of.

It’s a line from a movie, he’d thought.
You have no idea what I’m capable of
. That’s the kind of thing people said as a threat, and usually when you hear that line, you think everyone knows what you’re capable of. Everyone!

And yet, he could not comprehend them. He had spoken to the Americans and the Australians. Those people he understood. However, the Chinese, the Arabs and the Russians were completely alien to him. Yes, it all came down to money and power, but Westerners came at it from an entirely different angle. That’s what he thought. That’s what he presumed. He understood, of course, that he just had no idea what angle the others came at it from.

He was staying at the Radisson Blu, seeking international chain hotel comfort. Not the all-out luxury he had been accustomed to on his world trip, but he’d decided at last that it was time to keep a lower profile. Sitting alone at a table for four, with his rice and his chicken and his salad and his €117 bottle of white wine, Harrow felt one thing more than any other. Relief.

He would be meeting Geyerson soon. He could pass the responsibility back to him, and he could walk away. He would get his share, hopefully, and then he would be able to disappear. The money would be nice, of course, but really, he’d got this far without too much of it, and the last few months of being pampered and courted now seemed in the past. Strange and surreal, and over.

He may not have understood the motives of the people with whom he’d been negotiating over the summer, but he knew his own motives well enough. He didn’t want to die, that was all, and while he’d moved in those circles, death had always seemed a possibility.

Two tables behind him, Baschkin sat with a cup of green tea and a plate of soup, the single man tasked with the unlikely job of keeping Harrow alive.

*

D
evelin was on a late flight to Oslo from Heathrow. British Airways, first class. Sitting in the front row, plenty of legroom, Leighton beside him for company. In truth he had kidnapped her, but Develin and the people he worked for never had to do anything with guns or knives or intimidation. Develin did everything with softly spoken words.

Leighton had left her office willingly, the long list of things to do left undone. She had told Matt she would be back in on Wednesday morning. She ought to have been worried, as she well understood the things of which Develin was capable, yet his polite manner, the matter of fact way in which he had abducted her, seemed only to enhance the adventure of it all. She had spent so many years in academia, so much time sitting in an office, poring over books and looking at history. She still hadn’t been able to shake off the excitement of being drawn into something real.

The worry of it – that she would be used against Haynes, that she could be threatened, that she could die – played its part somewhere in the background, but it was overruled by some general sense of well-being. That everything would be all right. Even if she tried to force herself to be anxious, the concern refused to stick. Despite everything, Professor Leighton was having fun.

‘So, are you going to tell me about The Pavilion then?’ she asked.

She was drinking orange juice, eating peanuts. Develin had a glass of champagne, with the same snack. He had spent the entire journey scrolling through the inbox in his phone, and had barely spoken to her since leaving her office.

‘This
is
related to The Pavilion?’

He still didn’t answer. His silence was so complete that she almost felt as though she hadn’t spoken. As though she wasn’t there.

‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me anything, are you?’

She tipped some peanuts into her mouth.

‘I mean, fair enough. You’re a secret society. It’s not like you even
can
talk about it.’

She glanced at him, but he wasn’t biting. She knew he wouldn’t, Develin giving off such a presence of complete control.

‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Can you talk about yourself? Where did you go to school, for example?’

Develin took a sip of champagne, his thumb working the screen of his phone.

‘Maybe you never went to school,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’re all raised by monks in the Himalayas, and then when you come of age, you’re unleashed out into the world to do your secret society thing–’

‘It’s not one hundred per cent definite that at the end of this you and Sergeant Haynes will be dead. The more you know, however, the greater the chance that we decide you need to be. I don’t know you Professor, and neither do I wish to, but you seem on the face of it to be a decent enough person. There are enough dead decent people on earth. Spare us the trouble. Stay as ignorant as you can for as long as possible, and perhaps you really will be walking back into your office on Wednesday morning, as you predicted, however slim the chances of that actually are.’

Leighton put the glass up to her face and took another drink. Develin wasn’t looking at her, indeed hadn’t done so while he had spoken to her, but it was all she could do to hide from him. She hadn’t thought he’d be able to get under her skin, to prick the protective bubble of anticipation, but of course she had pushed him far enough, and he had quietly, harshly, in his way, exploded the bubble and exposed the real fear within.

*

J
ericho lay in bed and did not think about The Pavilion. Nor about the tarot cards, nor Badstuber nor Geyerson nor the ghost, Durrant. He allowed himself a fantasy of his retirement. A small cottage on the edge of nowhere. On the west coast of one of the outer Hebridean islands, near a golden beach, the waters in the small bay turquoise and freezing. A quiet life, uncluttered and detached. He wouldn’t have to listen to the news, he wouldn’t have to hear about war in eastern Europe, or war in the Middle East, terrorism and fear. He wouldn’t have to watch television or hear about celebrities. Maybe he would run on the beach. Maybe he would go swimming every day.

He pictured the idyll, and he fell asleep before he got to the part where he thought about what he would actually do with himself all day, living beside a beach on the edge of nowhere.

*

B
adstuber put her kids to bed, read them stories – a different one for each girl – and then sat downstairs with her husband, drinking wine. They talked about the case; she told him about Emerick dying right in front of her, something she hadn’t mentioned over the phone; she told him about Jericho, pulling her down below the level of the table.

He expressed his gratitude that Jericho had been there, but he also knew his wife well. He recognised the tone in her voice. He recognised that in the two days since he’d seen her last, she had discovered some affection for Jericho that hadn’t been there before.

He didn’t want to ask about it though. He didn’t want to ask if Jericho would also be in Oslo. He didn’t want to think about the two of them being alone in a hotel the next night. The thought of it made him a little scared, a little forlorn. She knew her husband well enough to know what he was thinking, but she couldn’t put his mind at ease. How could she, without lying? She went instead for the lie of omission.

There was little to omit at this stage anyway. Nothing had happened in Morocco, and it was possible she might never see him again. Her strange affection for the misanthropic detective would wither and die, and her husband would soon enough be all alone in her head.

Nevertheless, the thought of the words unspoken affected them both. When they went to bed and made love, his hands gripping her buttocks as he slowly slid inside her, their heads pressed together, the sex was strangely melancholic, as though they both imagined this might be the last time.

*

H
aynes tossed his phone onto the bed. Leighton’s phone still appeared to be turned off. He wasn’t counting how often he’d called since he’d received her message. He would be embarrassed if her phone was on and she was blocking him, aware of how often he was calling.

She’d said she had some urgent family business to attend to in Lancaster, and would be gone for a couple of days. It might have been true. They hadn’t talked much about family yet, and he really didn’t know enough about her life to know if suddenly dashing off to Lancaster sounded plausible.

However, there was no escaping the likelihood of one of two uncomfortable truths. That either she’d suddenly had enough of him, that he had completely misread the signs, and that she was intent on avoiding him until he got the message. Or, the more likely option, the one that was quite apparent once he had managed to expel the basic doubts that made him feel like some sort of lovesick teenager. They were involved in a murder investigation, and they seemed to have found themselves in the midst of a great international conspiracy. He knew that if he’d been looking at this from the outside, there would be no question that she’d been taken out of the game.

On top of that, there were the two death cards that had been delivered to Haynes personally. Perhaps the cards were related to the deaths of Carter and then Emerick, but how could he tell? How could they ever tell? Why had there not been one for Connolly?

At least she had sent the message, which suggested that rather than being killed, someone had wanted to keep her away from Haynes. It was bad but could have been a lot worse.

He nearly called Jericho, a few times over, but stopped himself every time. He’d leave it until the morning, then he could call Leighton’s office. Kicking himself for not having done it before close of play, but that was another call he’d stopped himself from making, just in case. Hadn’t wanted to seem desperate.

And so, eventually, he went to bed, but it was a long time before his troubled, agitated mind allowed him to get to sleep.

*

M
orlock, as usual, was way ahead of everyone. He spent the night in the Thon Hotel, a top-floor suite looking out on Oslo Opera House, having checked in earlier in the evening as Abel Connors, a businessman from Cleveland.

Abel Connors enjoyed a meal of prawns and salad, then spent a couple of hours with a couple of women in his room, before dispatching them into the evening, taking a quick shower and getting a relatively early night.

––––––––

J
ericho and Haynes were on a flight from Heathrow, by chance the same plane Develin and Leighton had taken the previous day. Jericho and Haynes were in economy.

The sky above the North Sea was restless, even though it was blue and cloudless. The sea shimmered far below them, but the journey had barely been smooth from the take-off.

Haynes was uncomfortable, edgy. Worried. They’d had the conversation about Leighton that morning while heading up to the airport. Haynes had called her office after nine and been given a general description of the man with whom Leighton had left the office.

It sounded like the man they’d seen in the shop in Paris, but of course he couldn’t be sure, and he had neither a photograph nor an identikit picture to send through to the office.

The one ray of light he’d been given was that she’d seemed happy, excited almost at having to leave, her PA had said. But it felt wrong, that was all, and she clearly hadn’t been called away by the guy from Paris to go and visit her family. She’d been swallowed up in it all, when she’d had no reason to be involved, other than the fact that Haynes had brought her into it.

Jericho had hardly been able to put his mind at rest. There was no hiding the seriousness of it, no denying that she was only involved because Haynes had invited her in. All they could do was work their way through the investigation as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. No mistakes.

Jericho was thinking the same thing Haynes was thinking, though. If these were the same people who had taken Amanda, it was quite possible he would never see Leighton again.

Jericho gripped the seat in front of him, as the plane juddered suddenly, dropped sharply, before falling into smoother air. Someone a couple of rows behind cried out at the drop.

‘Shit,’ muttered Haynes.

Jericho swallowed, stared at the seat in front. If the plane crashed, he thought, if he died sometime in the next ten minutes, would Durrant be waiting for him? Would they be tied together for all eternity?

Perhaps they were anyway.

Haynes was reading a book on Kangchenjunga, which he’d picked up at Waterstones in town the previous lunchtime.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d read an actual book, with a spine and a cover and pages printed on paper. When he read, it was on an iPad. Virtually every single piece of research he did was on the Internet.

The plane had settled down, as though it had needed to fall through the air for a short period in order to find a smoother ride. As though it had ignored the pilots and searched it out for itself. Jericho released his grip on the seat in front, Haynes finally found himself able to concentrate.

‘Wonder how they decided which mountain was the highest back in those days,’ he said, coming to the description in the book of Kangchenjunga in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘Just by looking at it, maybe.’