Free The Dead Sea Deception by Adam Blake Page B

had to demand an autopsy, too. I’ve been around overworked people long enough to know the signs. You have to make a noise – make yourself reallybloody loud and obvious – or else they file you under business as usual and sod all gets done.’
    Kennedy agreed, as far as that went, but didn’t say so. She wasn’t here to play ‘ain’t it awful’. ‘That was a local officer, I’m assuming?’ she said. ‘In uniform?’
    ‘In uniform, yes.’ Ros frowned, remembering. ‘And I called him a constable, but actually I didn’t ask his rank. He had a number – a number and letters – on his shoulder, but no pips or stripes or stars. I’ve been abroad for a fair few years, but I think that makes him a constable unless they’ve changed the uniform regs.’
    ‘Yes,’ Kennedy said, ‘it does.’ She liked that Ros could call those details to mind after two weeks. It meant she might remember other things with the same clarity.
    ‘So what did you think had happened to Stuart?’ she asked.
    Ros’s expression hardened. ‘He was murdered.’
    ‘All right. Why do you say that?’
    ‘He told me.’ Kennedy’s surprise must have shown through her professional poker face because Ros went on more emphatically, as though she’d been contradicted. ‘He did. He told me three days before it happened.’
    ‘That he was going to be murdered?’
    ‘That someone might attack him. That he felt under threat and didn’t know what to do.’
    Ros was becoming more strident. In the face of her heightened emotion, Kennedy became deliberately emollient. ‘That must have been terrible for both of you,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you contact the police?’
    ‘Stu had already done that, when he realised he was being followed.’
    ‘At the conference.’
    ‘Yes. Then.’
    ‘But if he was actually threatened …’ Kennedy was tentative. She could see that the other woman disliked being interrogated, was likely to see any question as a challenge unless it was phrased as neutrally as possible. ‘Did he explain all this at the time?’ she asked. ‘I mean, when he called the police and told them that he was being followed?’ Or was there something more? Something he kept to himself? I’m asking because I’ve read the case file now and there was no mention of any actual threats.’
    Ros shook her head, frowning. ‘I said he felt threatened, not that he’d actually
been
threatened. He told the police everything he could tell them, everything that was verifiable. The rest was … impressions, I suppose. But I know that he was afraid. Not generally afraid. Afraid of something specific. Sergeant Kennedy, my brother wasn’t a level-headed sort of man. When we were kids, he was always the one who’d have the sudden enthusiasms – the collecting crazes, the addictions to comics or cult TV shows, all that sort of thing. And emotionally, too, he was always … just all over the place. So I had every reason to think he was exaggerating, making something out of nothing. But that’s not how it was. This time was different.’
    ‘How was it different?’
    ‘Someone broke in here, late at night, and went through all of Stuart’s things. That wasn’t imaginary.’
    Kennedy’s response was automatic. ‘Did you report it?’ Meaning, is there an evidence trail? Is this documented anywhere?
    ‘Of course we reported it. We couldn’t claim on the insurance otherwise.’
    ‘So things were stolen?’
    ‘No. Nothing, as far as we could see. But we needed new locks and the back door had to be repaired. That’s how he got in, whoever he was.’
    ‘Was this before or after Professor Barlow noticed he was being followed?’
    ‘After. And that was when I started to take the whole thing seriously. But you evidently didn’t.’
    Because nobody put the case-work together, Kennedy thought, even after Barlow turned up dead. Barlow’s reporting a stalker had only come to light after the autopsy results came in – and any file entries for