We Are Death Read online

  We

  Are

  Death

  by

  Douglas Lindsay

  Published by Blasted Heath, 2016

  copyright © 2016 Douglas Lindsay

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author.

  Douglas Lindsay has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  Visit Blasted Heath at:

  www.blastedheath.com

  ISBN: 9781908688835

  Version 2-1-3

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About This Book

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

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  55

  Also by Douglas Lindsay

  About Blasted Heath

  About This Book

  Morlock is coming. Death will follow.

  DCI Jericho may have evaded the Hanged Man, but he knew there was something missing. He knew there was still someone out there. He knew there would be more death...

  A man is murdered on the Somerset Levels, a bullet in the head from three feet. Jericho soon learns there was a connected killing the previous day in the Swiss Alps.

  Death comes in the post, and quickly strands from the past become entangled: the hunted mountaineers, a long lost secret, the mystery of Jericho’s wife, and the covert organisation, working in the shadows, always in control.

  Joined by DI Badstuber of the Swiss police, Jericho travels across Europe to North Africa, chasing an invisible killer. But Death is always one step ahead, while his past, sinister and terrifying, is closing in.

  Prologue

  Geyerson leaned forward across the table. His voice was low but the words clear and distinct, even in the loud, ambient noise of the restaurant. There was music playing. Springsteen. One of the old songs, from Tunnel of Love.

  Outside the day was bright, the promenade was busy, and the affluence of Oslo on a summer’s afternoon was evident. Two men in suits stood conspicuously, either side of the entrance, another couple split away to the right, a further two sat inside, not eating, at a table a few feet away from them.

  ‘I was in court one time.’

  Geyerson hadn’t shaved in several weeks. There was a small breadcrumb, clinging on just below his bottom lip, which his last sweep with the napkin had missed. It blended in with the various colours of his beard.

  ‘It was the kind of lawsuit you Brits don’t care for. I was suing this energy giant for building a plant across the road from my hotel, and...’

  He waved away the rest of the details as unimportant.

  ‘I was getting under their skin, they were getting their asses handed to them. So they bring in their big LA guy. Walks in with his ten-thousand-dollar suit and his asshole Louis Vuitton shoes. He comes to speak to me. The courtroom ain’t busy, but there are people around, so he leans over to talk in my ear. He says, “I literally wish your father had been burned in a Nazi oven, and you’d never been born, you Jewish fuck. I am going to fucking crucify you. And when I’m finished, I’m going to leave your body out for the rats and maggots, and when they’re done I’m going to sweep up what’s left and burn it in an oven made of Nazi fucking gold.”’

  Geyerson let the words linger over the table. Took another spoonful of chowder without taking his eyes off Jericho, then dabbed once again at his mouth. When he lowered the napkin, the breadcrumb was gone. Badstuber might as well not have been there, she was of so little interest to him.

  ‘And that was it. Right there. He pulled away from me, held my gaze as though I was supposed to be intimidated, and I thought, that’s it, you Jew-hating piece of shit. You and everyone like you. You’re all finished.

  ‘I won the case, but that was me done with hotels. Bigger fish to fry. Five years later when I owned that law firm, I set the guy up with a hooker. He got an STD. I got photographs. Kicked him out the company, killed his marriage, kept on kicking him when he was down. Couple years after that, when he’d suffered a series of bizarre misfortunes, he hung himself in a lousy motel room in North Dakota. They won’t end up in the same place, but if he does ever see him, I hope my granddaddy, who was burned in a Nazi oven, continues to kick the shit out the bastard in the afterlife.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll find a way to charge you with his murder,’ said Badstuber.

  Geyerson glanced at her and smirked.

  ‘Good luck.’

  He turned back to Jericho. Kept his eyes on him as he took two more mouthfuls of soup, then tore off a small piece of bread, dunked it and put it in his mouth. Again the napkin swept across his lips.

  ‘At some point I heard talk. Talk of something remarkable. The world is full of rumours. Conspiracy theories, hypotheses and lies, and the Internet has multiplied it a hundred-fold. But I liked the sound of this one. It felt right.’

  ‘And did you find your something remarkable?’ asked Jericho.

  Geyerson held the soupspoon an inch or two beneath his lips, his mouth slightly open. His eyes were disdainful, something Jericho recognised from looking in the mirror. He held himself in the same contempt as Geyerson had obviously decided to.

  ‘That, Detective Chief Inspector,’ he said, ‘is none of your fucking business.’

  1

  Eleven-thirty in the morning. A warm room. High ceiling, ornate coving around the top of the wall, the walls hung with a series of large portraits, mostly eighteenth and nineteenth century, although the biggest of them all, directly opposite the door, was a new portrait of the current Police Commissioner for Bath & North East Somerset.

  The Police Commissioner also happened to be in the centre of the panel of five, who sat in a stern row, their backs to the window, four of the five with a pen in hand, all five unsmiling.

  DCI Jericho had a strange, uneasy feeling he couldn’t quite place. It had started more or less when he’d awoken at five forty-five, and it had nothing to do with him sitting in front of such an august panel, there to rake over the coals of his career, and in particular the events of earlier in the year, which had turned so very bloody and so very newsworthy.

  Behind Jericho, and slightly to his right, sat his lawyer, Randall Graves. The only other person in the room was the stenographer, a young woman, her long straight black hair halfway down her back. Jericho had barely noticed her.

  Why did he feel like there was someone else in the room?

  He glanced up at the ceiling, noticing the coving for the first
time. His eyesight wasn’t quite what it had been, but he could see that the painting job around the elaborate fleur-de-lis had been rushed.

  There was a moment’s silence and he looked back at the panellist, the woman on the end who’d been speaking most recently. The look on his face was rather vacant. Distracted.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘can you repeat the question?’

  She looked unimpressed. ‘What? All of it?’

  ‘Just the part where you asked a question,’ he replied, knowing at least that she had preceded her inquiry with a minute or so of superfluous words. Of course, to Jericho, that usually applied to most words.

  She pursed her lips briefly, paused while she considered whether she was being made fun of, and then said, ‘Are we to suppose that you gave half the money to charity and kept the rest for necessary expenses, including a home by the sea and a much-needed holiday in the Caribbean?’

  Jericho did not take his eyes off her. He was still distracted, so his hesitation was nothing to do with any awkwardness over the question.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector?’ said the Police Commissioner. The man in the middle.

  ‘Robert.’

  Jericho turned. There weren’t many people who called him Robert.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Graves.

  He nodded.

  ‘Yes, sorry, just got some things...’

  ‘You should answer the question.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He turned back, seemed in an instant to switch off the distraction.

  ‘Sorry, the money,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, the money.’

  ‘The estate in France was recently sold for twenty-three million euros, and after–’

  ‘I just said that,’ she said, the words clipped and slightly frustrated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We know how much money you received. We’re asking what you did with it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He coughed, then took a drink of water. His eyes drifted up to the coving again, and he wondered if the original decoration of the coving would have been as elaborate as the plasterwork. Now it was shabbily painted the same colour as the walls.

  ‘Police Benevolent Fund,’ he said.

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘I’ve given what I can at the moment. I need to keep some aside for tax purposes... obviously, that would be a lot for tax, but I’ve engaged an accountant to take care of it. And I’ve allowed for a certain amount in order to pay for Mr Graves’s services. Once the tax, accountant and legal fees have all been covered, any money left over will then be passed on to the PBF.’

  They stared down sternly at him.

  ‘We are to believe that there’s no Caribbean cruise in sight?’ said one of the men. Jericho didn’t even notice which one.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even a Tesco Finest fillet steak?’ said the man next to him, smiling at his own line.

  Jericho held his gaze for a moment. He could feel his distraction being completely quelled by contempt. The smile on the face of his inquisitor slowly diminished.

  ‘I prefer to shop in Morrisons,’ said Jericho.

  ‘This isn’t a game, Chief Inspector,’ said the other woman, the one who hadn’t spoken yet.

  There was no internal voice in Jericho’s head which said, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’

  But he was.

  2

  Jericho took the bus back to Wells. Graves had insisted on picking him up on the way to the hearing so they could go over everything beforehand. Every meeting they’d attempted to arrange in the previous month had been cancelled, with a fairly even split between them on ducking out.

  Graves had instructed Jericho to say as little as possible, which was not usually an instruction Jericho needed to be given. However, on this occasion, since he had absolutely nothing to hide, he had gone along to the hearing more inclined to talk than normal. Ultimately, of course, what he had seen as the piousness of the panel had shut him up far more quickly that anything Graves had had to say.

  He got off the bus in Wells on a warm August afternoon. He took a few paces, and then stopped for a second, as other passengers streamed around him. He’d been thinking about going straight to the station, but he was hungry, and the smell in the warm summer air made him want to stay outside a while longer. His office, with its large windows looking straight at the early afternoon sun, would be hot and stifling.

  He quickly ran through the places he’d want to go and sit, couldn’t think of anything within walking distance that really suited his mood and the weather, and finally settled on the small courtyard at the rear of Good Earth. He started walking, taking his phone out of his pocket as he went.

  Fifteen minutes later he was sitting with Detective Sergeant Haynes, a glass of water each and two plates of salad and elaborate quiche. Haynes wasn’t looking terribly impressed.

  ‘Couldn’t we have gone somewhere they had chips?’ he said, after they’d been eating in silence for a minute or two.

  ‘You can have chips tonight when I’m not watching,’ said Jericho. ‘It’s time you started eating properly before it’s too late.’

  ‘You’re going to start monitoring what I’m eating? Is that in your job description?’

  Jericho smiled and shook his head. Took a look around at the small, enclosed yard. They were sitting beneath the warm sun, and he was already thinking that he’d made a pretty poor choice. He’d be wanting to head inside soon enough.

  ‘So, how’d it go?’ asked Haynes. ‘You still got a job? Or is this you looking after me and getting me to eat properly because you got your arse handed to you and I’m in charge?’

  ‘No, there was no arse handing. They asked questions. I obviously answered them at some length. At some point I expect they’ll decide something and... well, I don’t know what they’ll do. Normally, when they think they need to look like they’re doing something but can’t find anything wrong, there’ll be some fudge or whatever. A reprimand, a demotion, a whatever...’ He waved a half-hearted hand. ‘But really, they know I had nothing to do with all those deaths. If anyone thought otherwise, I wouldn’t be before them, I’d be in court. I had nothing to do with someone dying and leaving me twenty million, and I’m gifting the money to the police. They’re going to reprimand me for that?’

  He shook his head, then added, ‘I don’t know what, but I expect they’ll conjure up something from nowhere that I won’t have seen coming.’

  Jericho could feel the sun on the top of his head, the heat of it making him aware of his thinning hair. The bald patch just around the corner.

  ‘Have I missed anything?’

  Haynes put a large piece of quiche in his mouth and ran his thoughts over what had passed for crime in Wells since the previous evening. In any case, Jericho had asked the question with the minimum of expectation. You could go away for a month and not miss anything.

  ‘There was a guy tried to break into the Natwest cash machine with a kitchen knife. We got a report while the crime was in progress, and Sam caught him in the act.’

  ‘How much progress had he actually made?’

  ‘He’d stabbed himself in the finger, lost some blood... Hadn’t done any damage to the cash point.’

  ‘Do we know him?’

  The police in Wells generally knew everyone. It was a ‘round up the usual suspects’ kind of a town.

  ‘Ade Winger,’ said Haynes. ‘Sam knows him, but I hadn’t seen him before.’

  Jericho thought about it for a moment, then shook his head.

  ‘How’d you get on in Bath last night?’

  Haynes looked at Jericho for a moment, slightly surprised. Jericho never asked about what he did in his spare time.

  ‘Seriously?’ he found himself saying.

  Jericho paused, fork halfway to his mouth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You really want to hear about what I did in Bath?’

  Jericho’s brow crinkled slightly as his for
k completed its journey.

  Haynes had arrived in Wells three years previously to be Jericho’s new detective sergeant. His fifth in seven years. Up until that point, Jericho had held a fairly dim view of the people working with him, and Haynes has been appropriately warned.

  On his first week on the job, Haynes had screwed up. Had it been an act of carelessness, or thuggery, or police entitlement, if he’d screwed up because he had used his position inappropriately, Jericho would likely have shown him the door. At the very least, their association would likely have been brief and ill-humoured. However, his mistake had been because of a woman. Older, very attractive; the kind of woman Jericho would easily have fallen for, except he would have been experienced enough to see through her, had he been involved from the start. Haynes had allowed himself to be manipulated.

  Jericho remembered the woman better than he remembered the details of how Haynes had let her wriggle free. It had been a neighbourhood dispute leading to a single incident of botched pet poisoning. Ultimately insignificant – unless you’d been the pet – but Dylan had been furious. Sitting in her office, on a cold Tuesday afternoon in May, Jericho had found himself coming to Haynes’s defence, and not just because he was happy at any time to stand up to Dylan.

  Perhaps he’d recognised something of his younger self in Haynes. A basic decency, coupled with susceptibility, that needed to be tempered by experience. His own had come quickly, in those early London days, with the Durrant case. He hoped for Haynes’s sake that he would never have a Durrant.

  He’d had Haynes’s back in the meeting with Dylan, and nothing had changed since. Haynes did not know that Jericho treated him differently to his predecessors, but he appreciated the boss’s confidence and support. Yet, there were times when Jericho’s demeanour bordered on cordiality and it still surprised him.

  Jericho shrugged, indicating for Haynes to keep talking.

  Haynes smiled and thought he might as well share the story he’d promised not to tell. Jericho was a fairly safe repository for guilty secrets.

  ‘Was really just in bookshops, that kind of thing, looking for a present for Mum’s birthday. Anyway, funny thing... I’m in a café having coffee and cake, won’t tell you where. I think I kind of recognise the waitress, and I can’t think where from. I’m trying not to look at her, but I can see she’s noticed. And it was a bit weird. Then I realised.’