Free The Dead Sea Deception by Adam Blake Page A

preferred the core skill set intelligently applied. However far her mind was off the vertical as a result of the Dell shooting, the pending court case andhaving to live in exile within the department, she was still trying to do her job.
    So he was going to work with Kennedy and give her the benefit of the doubt – for now, at least. If she busted his balls too much, or if she turned out to be more unstable than he’d guessed, he still had the option of shouting up the ladder and pleading PD, as she’d suggested.
    In the meantime, being on the other side of an argument from the likes of Combes and Stanwick – who he had already identified as self-serving dicks – was single malt for the soul.
    He took the print-out back to his desk and started the arduous and unpleasant task of chasing up some eyewitness testimony that might not even exist.
    He was seven names into the list when he found the next dead body.

7
     
    Rosalind Barlow’s address was Stuart Barlow’s address. The brother and sister lived together –
had
lived together – in a cottage-style bungalow, just outside the M25 ring in the probably-used-to-be-a-village of Merstham. Like William and Caroline Herschel, or the Wordsworths, or Emily, Anne and Charlotte with Bramwell. Kennedy had a brother of her own and therefore had her doubts about these domestic arrangements. Live-in boyfriends were bad enough: having a brother hanging around the place was an even more cast-iron guarantee of arrested development and neurotic co-dependency.
    Ten minutes into the visit, she’d shifted that initial estimate a fair distance. Ros Barlow was a tough, confident woman, tall and solidly built, with a head of auburn hair designed to be sculpted into something big and heraldic – the kind of woman who gets called ‘handsome’ a lot. She was fifteen years younger than her brother, and the house was hers, inherited from their parents. Stuart Barlow had been living in it rent-free for years while Ros held down a job in the securities department of a New York bank. She’d moved back to London only recently, to take up a better position in the City, and so had ended up sharing with her brother for a few months while he sorted something else out. Now, though, she said, she was looking for somewhere else herself.
    ‘I’ve got a friend I can bunk in with, for a few nights. After that, I’ll try to find somewhere a bit closer to the centre. If there’s nothing on the market, I’ll rent for now. I’m certainly not staying here.’
    ‘Why not?’ Kennedy asked, surprised by the woman’s vehemence.
    ‘Why not? Because it’s Stu’s. Every single thing here is his, and it took him years to get it just the way he wanted. I’d rather sell it to someone else who likes this kind of thing than spend the next two years changing it over piecemeal to something that works for me. I’d feel like …’ she groped for a simile ‘… like he was still trying to hang on to me and I was breaking his fingers one by one. It would be horrible.’
    Ros had taken the news that the investigation had reopened very much in her stride. ‘Good,’ was all she’d said.
    They were sitting in the living room of the cottage, which had nineteenth-century Punch cartoons on the walls and a drinks cabinet that someone had retro-fitted from a Victorian roll-top desk. An open staircase in a modern design, with no risers, divided the room in two – not something you expected to see in a bungalow. Presumably Barlow had had some extension work done in the loft space and there was now a room up there.
    ‘You asked for the autopsy,’ Kennedy said, putting down the small but extremely potent cup of espresso that Ros had given her when she arrived. ‘Was that because you suspected that your brother’s death wasn’t an accident?’
    Ros clicked her teeth impatiently. ‘I knew it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘And I told the constable who came out here exactly why. But I could see he wasn’t listening, so I