The Demon Code by Adam Blake Page A

at Kennedy expectantly. Now that she’d brought off this miracle, his expectations of her were clearly running very high.
    ‘Very well, Heather,’ he said. ‘You’ve gathered your evidence. I presume you have a plan for how to use it?’
    ‘I think we’re ready to meet our suspect,’ Kennedy said. ‘We’ll need to use the boardroom again.’
    ‘The boardroom?’ Gassan frowned. ‘Perhaps my office would be more discreet?’
    ‘I bet it would,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But I don’t see any harm in having a little shock and awe on our side.’

11
     
    ‘You started here six months ago,’ Kennedy said.
    She’d positioned Alex Wales so he’d get the full court-of-the-star-chamber effect, his chair facing theirs across the intimidating rampart of the boardroom table. Kennedy herself, Emil Gassan and the security guy, Thornedyke, sat in a row more or less at the centre of the long table. On Kennedy’s orders, Rush stood off to one side, right at Wales’s shoulder, to ram home how serious and official this all was. But Wales didn’t seem troubled. There was nothing in his bearing that suggested he had anything to hide. He stood erect, ignoring the chair, arms at his sides and head slightly lowered, like an actor at an audition.
    ‘Yes,’ he confirmed.
    ‘And prior to that, you were working at the British Library.’ Rush thought the ‘prior’ was a nice touch. Kennedy was going for a forensic style.
    ‘Yes,’ Wales said again.
    ‘But you didn’t say so on your application. You hid that connection, even though it might have been considered relevant experience. Why was that?’
    ‘I wasn’t there for very long,’ Wales said, with a shrug. ‘And I left for private reasons. Reasons that were nothing to do with my conditions of employment. I didn’t really want to answer questions about that.’
    ‘Right,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘And what about your friend, Mark Silver? What was his reason for not saying that he’d worked there?’
    Wales looked to Professor Gassan, and then to Thornedyke, as though the question were unfair and he expected that one or other of them might step in to defend him. ‘Mark Silver wasn’t my friend,’ he said. The heavy emphasis on the last word left them to infer that there was a relationship there, but it wasn’t one he was going to elaborate on without being asked.
    ‘No?’ Kennedy’s tone was politely sceptical. ‘You arrived at the British Library together. You worked together. You left together. Then you both got jobs here within a few weeks of each other.’
    ‘Did we?’ Wales asked. ‘Mark must have worked in a different department from me.’
    ‘He was a security guard,’ Kennedy said. ‘It would have been hard to miss him.’
    Wales didn’t answer – but then, she hadn’t phrased it as a question.
    ‘There was actually a gap in time between the two of you resigning from your jobs at the library and the start of your employment here,’ Kennedy took up again.
    ‘I was out of work for seven weeks,’ Wales said.
    ‘And in that gap – back in February – there were a number of attempts to break into Ryegate House. Attempts that failed.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Really.’
    ‘There’s nothing to link me to those attempts,’ Wales said.
    ‘Maybe not,’ Kennedy allowed.
    She glanced at the file in front of her, flicked through its pages and checked them against another sheet on the desk: a yellow carbon copy from a multi-part document.
    ‘But I was curious about the timing,’ she said, ‘and I wondered whether either you or Mark Silver had any prior convictions for breaking and entering. I didn’t want to rely on something that might turn out to be complete coincidence. So I went back to the police background check that the Library ran on you when you started there. Do you know what I found?’
    ‘I’ve never been in any trouble with the police.’
    ‘Alex Wales has never been in any trouble with the police,’ Kennedy corrected him. ‘But