Free The Demon Code by Adam Blake Page A

she’d been good at this stuff. She’d understood, intuitively, that it wasn’t about the questions. Not at first. You kept them bland and general, and people told you what was on their mind. The questions were like Rorschach inkblots.
    ‘I got to work late that day,’ said a man with bleach-blond hair, a dancer’s narrow build and intense, over-large brown eyes.
    Kennedy glanced at the corresponding file. Alex Wales. She made a connection in her mind. ‘So you’re Mr Scholl’s PA?’
    The man nodded at some length, as though Kennedy had made a point he profoundly agreed with, but he said nothing. Maybe his eyes weren’t too big: they were just very much darker than his face, so that they drew your gaze.
    ‘You were away from work all day on the Monday,’ Kennedy said. ‘Then you got in around eleven on the Tuesday. Why was that?’
    There was a silence that was long enough for her to register it as awkward. ‘I have pernicious anaemia,’ Wales said. ‘Every so often, I get fainting fits. I take pills to keep it under control – but even with the pills, the iron level in my blood fluctuates a lot. When it’s really low, I can’t even get out of bed.’
    ‘So you took the Monday off because you were ill.’
    Another pause. ‘I just lay there all through Monday. And Tuesday morning, too. Then I got up.’
    He seemed to be picking his words with care, as though afraid of being accused of something; faking a sickie, maybe.
    ‘What was happening when you arrived on Tuesday?’ Kennedy asked him.
    ‘You mean, what was the first thing I saw on Tuesday?’
    ‘Yes. Exactly.’
    ‘The police were all over the place. Going through the rooms.’
    ‘So what did you do?’
    ‘I went to my desk. Logged onto my computer.’
    ‘Just like normal?’
    Wales nodded. ‘Yes.’
    ‘You weren’t surprised to see that massive police presence? You didn’t stop to ask them what was happening?’
    ‘I thought they were probably investigating a break-in.’
    ‘You thought that? Right away?’
    Kennedy got another long, hard look from those big, dark eyes. ‘Yes. Right away.’
    ‘What made you think that?’
    ‘Well, it seemed like the obvious explanation. But I suppose it could have been a lot of worse things.’
    ‘Such as?’
    Silence. Stare. Wait for it.
    ‘Well,’ Alex Wales said, ‘it’s not like the police ever come with good news, is it?’
    She was finished before she knew it.
    She was expecting one more clerk or curator to step timidly across the threshold, but when the door opened it was Rush instead.
    ‘All done,’ he said.
    Kennedy looked down at the remaining file, sitting by itself next to the stack of those pertaining to people she’d already seen. ‘What about Mark Silver?’ she asked, and memory stirred as soon as she spoke the name aloud. She answered her own question. ‘Mark Silver is dead.’
    Rush nodded solemnly. ‘Yeah. The weekend before the break-in.’
    ‘Traffic accident.’
    ‘Is correct.’
    ‘So why did you give me his file?’
    ‘Sorry,’ Rush said. ‘You said to put the files in some kind of order, and you said it couldn’t be just alphabetical, so I went by start date. You know, when they came on-staff here. The people you saw first were the people who’d worked here the longest. So I was looking at the dates instead of the names. Otherwise I would have taken Mark out.’
    There was a silence. Kennedy couldn’t think of anything to fill it with.
    ‘Do you want me to get you some more coffee?’ Rush asked her.
    ‘I’m fine,’ she said. The truth was that she was too tired to move. As though she needed some excuse to go on sitting there, she opened up the cover of Silver’s file and scanned the details. Born in Birmingham, educated in Walsall and Smethwick, and then buggered off to join the British Army on the Rhine. Obviously Mark had felt the need to shake off the dust of his home town and get out into the big world. Couldn’t blame him for that.
    As her