We Are Death Page 8

  Seeing them on their arrival, Jericho had driven round the corner, then made the unavoidable walk to the front door. He hoped there would be a back door they could use without having to climb over a garden fence.

  ‘John’s your husband?’

  ‘Yes... He’s... He’s hardly been here since we got the news. Just... he’s out with Jasper.’

  Another pause. She started to reach for her cup of tea, which sat on the carpet, then stopped. She looked pale and thin. Jericho wondered if this was his last time. The last time speaking to a parent, a partner, a best friend. The worst part of the job. He’d always thought it, ever since that first case. Durrant. All those interviews. All those families torn apart.

  I’m just like you.

  Durrant’s words were back in his head again. Why was that? Why was Durrant back in his head?

  He knew the answer to that question, he just didn’t want to think about it. Certainly not now.

  ‘I don’t blame him. It sounds like I’m blaming him. What did we expect? Ian was forever going up these mountains. He’d always loved it. He loved adventure. Climbing and parachuting and surfing. He did all those things. He even started base jumping. The first time he told me, I didn’t even know what it was. So I looked it up, watched a video...’

  Her voice broke now, and she put her hand to her mouth. Jericho gave her the space. He needed to get past this, he needed to get to the part where he asked about the Kangchenjunga climb, about his relationships with Geyerson and the others.

  This time she took some tea, swallowed loudly, kept the mug in her hands, comforted by the warmth.

  ‘But... if we’d just hung on to him for another two days. Another day. We’ll always have–’

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ came the stiff Swiss voice from the window.

  Eileen Connolly looked up, blinking, as though coming into strong light.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Jericho kept his eyes on her. He hadn’t wanted Badstuber to say anything. He didn’t think for a moment that he himself was in the top ten of police officers you’d want in your house just after your son had been murdered, but having felt the full blunt force of Badstuber’s character, he doubted that she would be in the top ten million.

  ‘Your son was murdered for a reason unrelated to his location. If he had been in... Where are we?’

  ‘Cheltenham,’ muttered Jericho, making sure not to sigh heavily.

  ‘He would also have been murdered,’ continued Badstuber smoothly, as though she had said Cheltenham as part of the original sentence.

  Connolly’s mother held her gaze for a moment, then looked at Jericho for confirmation. As though she needed to hear the words from someone with an English accent. Or from someone who was speaking to her in the manner and with the tone she’d been expecting.

  ‘We believe his murder might be connected to the expedition he made in the spring to climb Kangchenjunga.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘One of the other five climbers who reached the summit was killed yesterday in Somerset.’

  ‘Oh. I might have seen something on the news. I hadn’t–’

  ‘We hadn’t given out his name yet, you couldn’t have known. And we have other information that implies the two are directly connected, and that the five men are being targeted.’

  She took a moment, processing the information. Looked at Badstuber, then quickly back at Jericho.

  ‘You mean...?’ and she shook her head. ‘It would have happened anywhere. It could have happened here?’

  ‘It happened yesterday to Evan Carter on the Somerset Levels, so yes,’ said Jericho nodding.

  ‘Evan Carter?’

  Her hand went to her mouth again.

  ‘You knew him?’

  She shook her head. Took another swig of tea, as though it was laced with alcohol.

  ‘Ian talked about him. He was the good one. The decent one. He was the only one of the others he really liked.’

  ‘Did he talk about the climb? Anything will help.’

  She laughed, a strange ejaculation, then shook her head and once more put the mug up to her lips, both hands clutching it.

  ‘All the time. He talked about it all the time. But then, that was John again. He wanted to hear about it. Every detail. See all the pictures, look at every video. John loved it all. He was living the dream through his son, that’s what he was doing. We all knew it. Ian knew it too.’

  ‘Was there anything unusual about this climb? Anything different that might have caused fights between the climbers? Anything different about Ian himself?’

  She took a deep breath, looked vacantly across the room, painfully recalling the previous two weeks.

  ‘There was... There was the usual kind of tensions on the climbs. These things... with men in these situations, he said there was always something. Ian could be quite difficult himself of course. And he never liked that man Mr Geyerson. Right from the start. We just happened to be Skyping the first night they’d met, and he didn’t have a good word to say about him. But he wanted to go on the expedition.’

  She paused and lowered the tea she’d been holding in front of her face.

  ‘You don’t think... that this man Geyerson might have had something to do–’

  ‘We’re nowhere near there yet,’ said Jericho quickly. ‘We need to speak to him. As far as we know, he could be next. We’re in the very early stages, so don’t be jumping to any conclusions.’

  ‘Of course...’ she said, and the cup was brought once more defensively up towards her face.

  ‘Did he talk about reaching the summit?’ asked Jericho.

  She shook her head, her expression becoming a little vague. Jericho wondered if he was losing her.

  ‘That was... I noticed it, although John thought I was being over-analytical. John was just too excited about the whole thing. But Ian barely mentioned the summit. It was odd. Didn’t have a photograph, which seemed strange.’

  She looked up.

  ‘That’s strange, isn’t it? You’d think they’d have a photograph from the summit. After all that effort.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘Said the weather was bad. The cloud had closed in. But... there was something. I could tell he was lying. I mean, even in cloud, you can take a photograph from five feet away, can’t you? No, there was something.’

  ‘What d’you think it might have been?’

  Another shake of the head. She looked at the carpet, the mug of tea blocking Jericho’s view of the lower part of her face.

  ‘I don’t know. All I know... he wasn’t telling us something. That’s all. John will probably say different, when he comes home...’

  Her voice drifted away again.

  ‘We understand that his attitude in Grindelwald was quite changed from his previous visits,’ said the voice from the window. ‘He was more out-going, brasher, more interested in women and drinking and drugs. Was there any sign of that in Cheltenham?’

  Mrs Connolly looked up at Badstuber, surprised at the sharp, clipped tone as much as at the words. Jericho lowered his head and thought that that might be the end of the useful part of the interview.

  17

  ‘I want to write fiction,’ said Haynes. ‘Something about dinosaurs.’

  Haynes and Leighton were on the thirteen fifty First Great Western, Paddington to Exeter St David’s. Coach C, front-facing airline seats. They had discussed the case briefly, but what they had discovered from a closer examination of the cards had far too much impact for them to get very far. He needed to get them back down to Jericho, and then formulate a plan.

  He had wondered, as he’d sat on the train in a brief moment of silence, if this was him deferring to his chief inspector because he wasn’t up to the job of making his own decisions. He had quickly accepted, however, that for the moment they weren’t his decisions to take. Jericho was the one who could pick something up and run with it. That wasn’t yet Haynes’s place.

  ‘Nice,’ said
Leighton. ‘Dinosaur fiction.’

  ‘Yep.’

  There was no real need for her to be there, but she had been taken by the chase the previous time Haynes had come to call, even though that time the chase had not taken her out her office. She also had her dinner invitation acceptance to fulfil, so she had more or less invited herself along, something with which they were equally happy.

  ‘Any particular reason?’ she asked.

  ‘I like dinosaurs.’

  ‘You know much about dinosaurs?’

  Haynes looked past her out of the window.

  ‘You know, same as most people. I can tell the difference between a triceratops and a stegosaurus.’

  ‘Well, that’s a start. What’s your idea?’

  ‘Not sure,’ he said.

  ‘Is there a lot of dinosaur fiction out there?’

  ‘More than you’d think,’ said Haynes. ‘I mean, it’s not just Michael Crichton.’

  ‘So do you want to have people in your book? People and dinosaurs thrown together?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You need people. If you don’t have people, you’ve more or less got a Disney film. And even then, you might still have a Disney film, but I’m not writing a book with dinosaurs talking to each other. That’d be stupid.’

  She laughed. Approaching Newbury. They both looked across the carriage at the racecourse, as the train began to slow. The grass green and lush in the warm afternoon sun, a couple of horses sprinting in the far distance, a few other people around, the rest of the course deserted.

  ‘What are you thinking? Time travel?’

  ‘I want to avoid time travel. Don’t like time travel in fiction and films. Just messes with everything. Every time travel, you know, every time travel thing, film or book or whatever, there’s always some incongruity. There’s always something that has you thinking, hang on a second, if that happened then...’

  ‘Does that apply to dinosaur fiction? I mean, to people getting sent back sixty-five million years?’

  ‘OK, not so much. Even so, I want to set it now. Present day.’

  ‘Cool. Have you thought about some sort of big dinosaur park? It could be on an island, just off the coast of Costa Rica?’

  He smiled. ‘That was certainly my initial idea, but then it turns out...’

  ‘It’s been done already.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What a bitch.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Any other ideas?’

  ‘I think it’s going to have to be more of a lost world type of thing. Because then it’s more about choosing your location, and choosing your reason for the world to have been lost in the first place.’

  ‘That’s reasonable. And you’ve got the shoo-in now,’ she said, ‘of global warming.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, as ice melts, glaciers and mountain tops and Antarctic shelves and Arctic ice floes, and most of Greenland, and God knows what else, there are all sorts of things being revealed that have been covered up for millennia. So you could have some sort of dinosaur, frozen for millions of years, coming back to life. Or something.’

  ‘You can have that,’ she added, a few moments later.

  Haynes thought about it, looking blankly out on Newbury station as the train came to a halt.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Mind you, must have been done before.’

  ‘Everything’s been done before,’ she said. ‘Literally everything. You just have to do it in your own way. That’s all the originality you need.’

  He glanced at her, smiled, realised he felt a little uncomfortable with the level of attraction, this close, in public, and looked back out at the station.

  ‘I’d have thought you’d have written a police procedural,’ she said.

  ‘I hate police procedurals,’ replied Haynes.

  ‘Yes, me too.’

  *

  ‘What did you mean, you have other evidence that the five men are directly connected?’

  ‘Have you spoken to anyone about Geyerson?’ asked Jericho. ‘I mean, does he have people, apart from this assistant he takes with him to the tops of mountains? Have we established how long he’s going to be in Morocco? There’s no point in anyone going out there if by the time they arrive he’s in Indonesia or Iceland.’

  They were heading back down the M5, on their way to the station in Wells. Jericho had already spoken to Dylan to make sure she’d be around. It seemed unavoidable to him that someone would have to go into the Atlas Mountains to make contact with Geyerson, and he wasn’t sure if his willingness to leave it to Badstuber was down to him not wanting to make the trip himself. There was, of course, absolutely no point anyway if Geyerson wasn’t going to be there.

  ‘I asked first,’ she said.

  Jericho looked round to see if she was joking, but her face was quite serious, eyes staring straight ahead. She wasn’t being at all childish. She’d asked him a question, and she wasn’t answering his until he answered hers.

  He looked back at the road. Middle lane, overtaking a blue Corsa; checked in the mirror, a saloon of a make he didn’t recognise quickly approaching in the outside lane. Must have been hitting well over ninety.

  He contemplated lying, saying that he had no more information, that it was something he’d fabricated on the spot, but he knew she would see through him. For all her brusqueness, he realised that she was good, that she had a good feel for the case, and for people.

  He also knew himself well enough to know that he was uncomfortable talking about the tarot cards because there was something so childish about them. Everything that had unfolded at the start of the year would have done so anyway, regardless of the cards. They had played no part whatsoever, other than to taunt him. But even as that, as a taunting mechanism, it had been lightweight, and hardly designed to instil fear in him, regardless of how sinister the drawings of the hanged man had been.

  ‘You know about the tarot cards from the previous case?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘As a means of intimidation, or however they were intended. Did you think it was childish, did you–’

  ‘I thought it was rather sophisticated, and much beyond the wit of the people who were ultimately blamed. Although, this man, Durrant, clearly had his own remarkable qualities. The woman, not so much.’

  ‘Sophisticated,’ muttered Jericho.

  ‘What about the tarot cards?’ she asked, ignoring him.

  ‘We’ve had another one. Another two... The first one was left beside my hospital bed. In January.’

  ‘That wasn’t in the report.’

  ‘I never put it in the report.’

  ‘Surely it impacted on who was responsible?’

  Jericho didn’t look at her. Eyes on the road. She was right. And now, having said this, he was going to have to ask her not to mention it in front of Dylan. This, he thought, is a perfect example of why you should always keep your mouth shut. Never say anything at all, and you’ll never say anything you regret.

  ‘I took it as a bookend, a full stop. I didn’t think we were going to find...’

  He stopped. It sounded weak. Right there, being challenged by someone who wasn’t his subordinate, being asked a straight question on why he hadn’t followed it up, and it sounded weak. He didn’t have an explanation, other than the fact that there were people out there who had had complete control, and he hadn’t wanted to know about it. That was all.

  ‘And the second card?’

  ‘It was sent to my sergeant yesterday. The cards, these two, aren’t hanged man cards like before. They are death cards. The first one is, I think, a typical death card, with Death riding on a horse through fields of the dead. The one Sergeant Haynes received yesterday, was of Death riding past a scene of five men, hung by the neck. Two of them were already dead, the other three still alive, and seemingly–’

  ‘And you think this represents our five
climbers, two of whom we now know to be dead?’

  ‘The card arrived the day of the murder near our home town.’

  ‘Unlikely to be a coincidence,’ she said. ‘You mentioned your sergeant received the card, not you?’

  ‘Yes, and I don’t know why.’

  ‘So, what do we know about the people sending the cards?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jericho.

  How much time had he spent thinking about it? In truth, perhaps not that much. He had, for the most part, blanked it out. He had given it some thought, and had decided that there was nowhere for his thoughts to go. He knew nothing, so he had pushed it out his mind. Winter had become spring, spring summer, and he hadn’t given it any consideration.

  And now Kangchenjunga had been dumped, horribly, almost inevitably into the mix, and the regret he’d felt about not grasping the case was multiplied by fear and dread.

  ‘We know they had the power to order a vintner in France to commit suicide,’ she said. ‘We know they had the power to arrange for a dangerous criminal to be released from prison. They had the power to manipulate and control your actions. They made intricately beautiful, bespoke tarot cards, and delivered them without trace. You had a guard on your hospital room?’

  Jericho didn’t answer.

  ‘You had a guard on your hospital room, yet they managed to place this card by your bed. We know they are concerned with a group of men who climbed to the summit of Kangchenjunga, and that they have the wherewithal to carry out assassinations in Switzerland and England on consecutive days. Therefore they have more than one assassin, or they have someone who can move unseen across borders. Taking it–’

  ‘All right,’ said Jericho. It wasn’t so much that he wanted her to stop making her point. He just wanted a return to silence. He wanted to think about the case, not have this voice in his ear, constantly demanding answers.

  She paused for a moment, not entirely sure what he’d meant, then continued talking.

  ‘We can conclude that they are an organisation of broad international concern and reach. Well funded, of course, probably well connected–’

  ‘Yes, but who the fuck are they?’ snapped Jericho.