Free The Demon Code by Adam Blake

you’d still be seeing all the people you normally see. Anyone who was halfway trying could find you inside of a day.’
    ‘But what about my work?’
    Kennedy picked up Izzy’s phone from the arm of the sofa and waved it briefly in her face before dropping it into her handbag. ‘That’s your work. You can do it just as well from two hundred miles away. Better, you won’t be tempted to invite a regular up for a face to face.’
    It was deliberately cruel – a pre-emptive bid to end the discussion. And it worked really well, as far as that went. Izzy absorbed the low blow without a word and took over the packing for herself. When she left, an hour later, they embraced, but it was clumsy and tentative.
    Just like their conversation now.
    ‘I had a thought,’ Izzy said.
    ‘What about?’
    ‘Sleeping around.’
    ‘Izzy—’
    ‘Hear me out, babe. I was thinking I could set you up with someone. Someone really cute. And you could, you know, be unfaithful right back. Get it out of your system. You wouldn’t even have to enjoy it. It would just relieve the tension, you know? So we could get back to being us again.’
    ‘Izzy, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.’
    ‘Okay.’ Izzy abandoned the notion quickly, got some distance from it. ‘I thought it was stupid. I just wanted to put it out there.’
    ‘I’ve got to go.’
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘I’ll call you tonight.’
    ‘I love you.’
    Kennedy hung up and grabbed the next file.
    Second Assistant Director Allan Scholl – a Boris Johnson lookalike with a mop of blond hair he obviously thought was a selling point – was a whole lot smoother than Parminter and a whole lot more courteous. But he had even less to say. He was keen to stress his pivotal role on the day the break-in was discovered. It had been him who called the police, told security to seal off the room and organised the preliminary trawl through the collection to find out what had been stolen. He’d overseen the process himself, because his PA had been away sick and although he returned that day, he got in late.
    ‘And you found that nothing was missing?’ Kennedy said.
    ‘Nothing that we could definitely verify,’ Scholl corrected her. ‘We’ve done a more detailed search since and everything appears to be where it belongs. But it’s hard to be categorical on that point.’
    ‘Why is that, Mr Scholl?’ Kennedy knew the answer, but it never hurt to seem more clueless than you actually were: the Columbo principle.
    ‘Because there are literally millions of items in the collection. To tick every one off the list would be hugely time-consuming. And visual verification might not be enough, in some cases. If you wanted to steal a very valuable artefact, and then to sell it on, one of the things you might do would be to replace the original with a copy so that its loss went undetected. Then there are the books …’
    ‘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,