We Are Death by Douglas Lindsay Page B

of the impressions we’ve been getting, which is that this thing is about the expedition to Kangchenjunga. Always possible, of course, that Connolly and Carter knew each other anyway and had some other business. That should be easy enough to check out. That aside, we really ought to be finding these other three.’
    ‘So, how do we tackle it?’ asked Dylan. ‘Who is it we should be speaking to?’
    ‘The Swiss, Interpol, probably the Met. The Foreign Office, I guess, and UK Borders to see if it’s possible to pick up someone who came from Switzerland and left again this afternoon. The chances of them doing that on the same passport you’d think would be nil, but let’s look.’
    ‘You haven’t spoken to the Swiss yet, Sergeant?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘How did you find the news?’
    ‘The local police in Cheltenham had been alerted to go and tell his family. His brother, I think, said that we’d been asking. I’d left my details. So Cheltenham called us. They’re obviously not involved, they just had messenger status.’
    ‘It is possible that they’ve already arrested someone and we’re looking at two different shooters? You’ll need to put–’
    ‘I looked online,’ said Haynes. ‘The reports indicated that the police are pretty clueless on the matter.’
    ‘All right.’ She looked at the clock on the wall. ‘So, it’s almost eight thirty in Switzerland. You never know. Give them a call, Robert. We should make contact. Our case impacts on them just as much as their case does on us.’
    Jericho nodded.
    ‘I’m going to speak to the Chief Constable. We may find by tomorrow morning that this has got away from us, but we need to keep running with it, so let’s see how it plays out.’
    ‘Right,’ said Jericho. ‘Anything else?’
    She looked down at the open file in front of her and made a small movement with her fingers.
    ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’
    Jericho and Haynes got to their feet, walked from the office and closed the door behind them. They both paused for a minute, facing the awfulness of stepping out of the air-conditioned fantasy world of the superintendent’s office and into the clammy discomfort of the open plan.
    ‘What’s with you two?’ asked Haynes, as they walked through the office.
    ‘What d’you mean?’
    ‘You’re usually like a pair of velociraptors fighting over the last nugget in McDonald’s.’
    Jericho walked on. He’d known full well what Haynes had meant. Not that he was entirely comfortable with this strange new state of affairs with his boss, it seemed so alien.
    ‘Maybe we’re more mature,’ he said.
    *
    J ericho opened the door and walked into his house at seventeen minutes past ten. Darkness had come and with it, at last, a slight chill in the air. Very slight.
    An unsatisfactory end to the day, struggling to get anywhere with the Swiss police, too many people not speaking English, or claiming not to understand. He’d finally given up and decided to try again in the morning.
    His house was warm and muggy, so the first thing he did was go into the sitting room and bedroom to open the windows. Wide, to let in as much of the night as possible.
    He stood at his bedroom window and looked out into the dark. The clouds were gone, clear skies, a slender, crescent moon. There had been stars aplenty as he’d walked home.
    He’d gone beyond hunger, having not eaten anything in such a long time, but he did feel like a drink. Gin and tonic, he thought. Lots of ice.
    As he walked back down the stairs he got that feeling again. Oddly, he hadn’t done so when he’d walked into the house a few minutes previously. Now he paused halfway down the staircase, trying to establish what it was.
    Someone was here. Someone was in the house. But it hadn’t felt like that earlier. Why now? Had they come in through the wide-open downstairs window? He stood still, in complete silence bar the noise of the few cars on the Shepton Road, trying to sense what was happening in the