Free The Dead Sea Deception by Adam Blake

they wouldn’t get sucked down when the big liner went under.
    Harper realised that Combes was still looking at him, waiting for a response to the cautionary tale.
    ‘She doesn’t seem like the easiest person in the world to work with,’ Harper said, throwing a sop to Cerberus.
    ‘You got that right,’ someone – Stanwick? – agreed.
    ‘But I guess she felt pretty strongly about how those other guys messed up the arrest.’
    The mood in the room turned a little colder. ‘What did the little bastard expect?’ Stanwick demanded. ‘He assaulted an officer, he went down. Good riddance.’
    ‘Fine,’ Harper said. ‘And they’ll all probably walk on that basis. So Kennedy’s not hurting anyone by sticking to her story.’
    ‘Fancy your chances, do you?’ Combes enquired, with a definite edge. ‘She’s a real looker, isn’t she?’
    Considered objectively, Kennedy had everything you’d need to merit that description: a figure that went in and out in the right places, striking acid-blonde hair that she wore pulled severely back in a way that suggested she could loosen it and shake it out as a prelude to sex, and that this would be something to see, and a face that – although maybe a little too emphatic at nose and chin – still had an intensity of expression you’d have to call attractive.
    But she was ten years older than Harper’s girlfriend, Tessa, and that relationship was new enough to skew his judgement on all other women. He shrugged non-committally.
    ‘He fancies his chances,’ Combes announced to the room. ‘Well, you can forget it, son. She’s a dyke.’
    ‘Yeah?’ Harper was interested now, but only as a detective. ‘How’d you know?’
    ‘We did a day-at-the-races thing last March, the whole department,’ Stanwick told him, as though he was talking to an idiot, ‘and she brought a bird with her.’
    ‘Wouldn’t that make half of you dykes as well?’ Harper asked, innocently. His tone was light and friendly, but the chill in the room grew: on some level, this was a test, and he wasn’t doing well.
    ‘Anyway, you’d better get your jollies while you can, mate,’ one of the other DCs summed up. ‘She’s not going to be around for much longer.’
    ‘No,’ Harper agreed. ‘Probably not.’
    The conversation turned to other things, and flowed around him, leaving him out. He let it. He had a lot of phone calls to make, and he might as well make a start while Kennedy was off interviewing Barlow’s sister.
    The London Historical Forum was a biannual event hosted by the university. He tracked down the relevant office, which was at Birkbeck, and after doing the phone-tag runaround with a job lot of receptionists and assistants, he was able to requisition a copy of the contact list from the last conference. It came through as an email attachment half an hour later – but instead of a word-processed document, they’d sent jpegs. Each page had been separately mounted on to the copier plate and scanned in, in some cases very sloppily, so that first letters of surnames were clipped off on the left, and the bottom two or three lines of each sheet appeared to have been missed out.
    Harper emailed back to ask if there was a Word version of the list somewhere in the system, then printed the scans out. He could work with what he’d been given for now.
    As he walked down the corridor to the printer, Harper thought about the conversation he’d just had. Why had he stood up for Kennedy, or at least refused to join in the general condemnation? She was far from likeable and she’d made it abundantly clear that she was happy to work the case solo.
    But it was Harper’s first case and some atavistic part of him rebelled against backing out of it: the angel who looked down on police work had to take a pretty dim view of officers recusing themselves for fear of rocking the boat. And Kennedy seemed to have good instincts, too: not flashy, but methodical and thorough. Harper had seen flash,