The Ingrid Skyberg Mystery Series: Books 1-4: The Ingrid Skyberg Series Boxset

by Eva Hudson

  He sighed heavily.

  “You’re more senior than me; your clearance level is higher than mine. Can you run a search for me on someone called Greg Brewster?”

  “You know I can’t do that.” He was such a stickler. Marshall Claybourne would never do anything that threatened to blemish his reputation and slow his progress up the Bureau’s greasy pole. “How would I explain it? What if it raises a flag?”

  You’d make something up. “Well then, can you do something else for me? Apparently my predecessor works in the DC office now. Dennis Mulroony.”

  “Never heard of him.” The FBI’s headquarters employed tens of thousands of people. Not even an uber-networker like Marshall could know everyone.

  “Well, could you keep an eye out, and an ear out, for him? I’d like to swap notes, but don’t want to alert anyone we’re in contact. Can you find him for me?”

  “Sure, but you’ve got to do something for me.”

  “Name it.”

  “Give me a date.”

  “We’ve been engaged for two years, Marshall. I think we’re a bit beyond dating.” She knew exactly what he’d meant, and she also knew how insincere she sounded.

  “I mean a date for the wedding. My mom keeps asking.”

  Ingrid sucked on her teeth. “We discussed all this when I took the job. You agreed the posting will help with my promotion prospects. We can’t all be highflyers like you.” Her voice echoed in the stark, empty stairwell.

  “Come on! Don’t give me a hard time for getting lucky.”

  “You get lucky every time there’s a vacancy.”

  “You don’t resent me for that?”

  Ingrid pulled the phone from her ear. You bet your ass I do. “Of course not! It’s not like we’re in a competition with one another.” They always had been. Ever since Quantico.

  “I want a date for our wedding. Can’t we at least be working toward it?”

  “We’ll have to talk about this later. I have an appointment.”

  “What should I tell my mom?”

  Tell her to butt the hell out of your business. “Tell her I was asking after her.” She’d reached the lobby and decided to walk the short distance from the embassy to the Shelbournes’ Mayfair hotel.

  “But I miss you,” Marshall said. “How about you come home for a couple of days? A long weekend?”

  “I’m in the middle of two very important investigations.”

  “But you always are.” An irritable whine had infected his tone, exaggerating his Southern drawl.

  “We had an agreement.”

  “Sure, but an agreement needs an end date.”

  “I can’t speak about this now. I’ll call you back.” She ended the call before he managed a rejoinder, then shoved her phone in a pocket. She puffed out her cheeks in frustration. He always made her feel this way. Always wound her up. Dating someone on the job had made so much sense in the beginning: a mutual understanding of the pressure of work, the sacrifices that had to be made, the last-minute cancelation of long-standing arrangements. They never needed to apologize, never needed to explain. Now that seemed all he ever wanted her to do. Her cell buzzed and she grabbed it, tempted to tell Marshall where he could shove his end date. But it wasn’t him. It was a UK cell number she didn’t recognize.

  “Hello?”

  “Ralph Mills here. I was wondering if you had a spare five minutes, maybe later today?”

  When she’d given Mills her card, she’d wondered just how long it would take him to call her. She thought he’d take a little longer. If it came to it, she’d just throw Marshall into the conversation. He could still be good for something.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Hi, yes, I’m here.”

  “Mutually beneficial cup of coffee or glass of wine, I was thinking,” Mills said, embarrassment detectable in his tone. Was he offering something on the Shelbourne investigation?

  “Do you want to speak to me about the case?”

  “Let’s talk about that when we meet up, shall we?”

  16

  When she approached the five-star hotel, Ingrid was sure the BMW pulling away on the other side of the road contained McKittrick and Mills. He hadn’t sounded like he’d been in a car when they’d spoken. Ingrid felt wrong-footed: if the Shelbournes had been briefed by the Met, they would know more about the case than she did, and she risked seeming a fool. Ingrid took the elevator up to the top floor with a certain amount of reticence. When she reached the family’s suite, she heard raised voices coming from inside. Anthony and Lisa Shelbourne were shouting at one another. Ingrid leaned a little closer to the door.

  “I never wanted her to leave the country in the first place,” Mrs. Shelbourne said. “This would never have happened if you hadn’t insisted that—”

  The unmistakable trill of a cell phone cut her off.

  “For God’s sake. Ignore the goddamn phone for once, can’t you?”

  “I need to take this.”

  Ingrid stepped away from the door and raised her fist as if to knock, knowing from the loudness of his voice that Anthony Shelbourne was heading her way. The door swung open, Shelbourne took a moment to recognize her, then held up a silencing finger. His face was drawn, a dark shadow of stubble covered his chin, and his hair stuck out in cowlicks. He marched down the long, subtly lit hallway, shouting into his cell.

  Ingrid tapped on the already open door and stuck her head inside. “Mrs Shelbourne, Agent Skyberg from the embassy.”

  “We only met a few hours ago. I’m hardly likely to forget. Despite appearances, I do still have some control over my faculties.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “Let’s get this over with, shall we?” She ran a shaking hand through her hair. Her eye makeup had smudged beneath her eyes. Long dark trails of mascara slithered down her face.

  Ingrid glanced around the room. There was no sign of Alex. Lisa Shelbourne dabbed at her eyes, making them even more of a mess.

  “Please take a seat. I can order some fresh coffee if you’d like?”

  Ingrid raised a hand. “Not on my account.” There was a tray of dirty cups sitting on a low table between two formal chairs upholstered in maroon silk.

  “The police were just here,” Mrs. Shelbourne explained. “You’ve seen their report, I take it?”

  “I realize it’s been a very long day for you. I’ll take up as little of your time as possible.”

  “How long have you been working here in London?”

  Ingrid was taken aback by the change of subject. “Around four months, why?”

  “And are you aware of a serious drug problem in the city?”

  McKittrick must have disclosed the blood test results. No wonder Lisa Shelbourne looked so wrecked.

  “Not in the course of my duties.”

  “I’ve never thought of England in that way before.” She collapsed onto one of the silk-covered chairs, folding her stockinged feet beneath her. She grabbed a lilac angora sweater from the arm of the chair and clutched it to her breast. “I’m not naive. London is a major world city; I accept it must have a seedy side. But those aren’t the circles I expected Lauren to move in. You’ve been to the college?”

  Ingrid nodded.

  “It has a good reputation. If I’d thought for a moment Lauren would be at risk from… undesirable influences while she was there—” She looked past Ingrid toward the door, an admonishing expression on her face. Ingrid turned to see Anthony Shelbourne standing in the doorway, his face paler and damper than it had been only moments before. “—I would never have let her go.”

  He quietly closed the door behind him and slipped his cell back into the breast pocket of his shirt. “You couldn’t have stopped her,” he told his wife.

  “She may have listened to you. But you didn’t even try to dissuade her.”

  “How many more times? She wanted to come. The research program here is one of the best in the world. Didn’t she tell us that over and over?” He
turned to Ingrid. “She wanted to be part of something important. I remember her face when she found out she’d been accepted in the course. It was the happiest I’ve ever seen her.”

  “There are colleges just as good at home. You should have made her stay.” Lisa Shelbourne’s voice was brittle.

  Anthony Shelbourne started to speak but checked himself. His jaw muscles flexed. He began again. “We don’t know what Lauren might have gotten into wherever she’d gone to study. We’ll never know.”

  “Had Lauren…” Now it was Ingrid’s turn to check herself. “Do you know if your daughter might have… experimented with drugs at home?”

  “What?” Lisa Shelbourne leaped to her feet. “How dare you—”

  Her husband grabbed her arm to stop her before she barreled straight into Ingrid. “Calm down, Lisa, the kid’s just doing her job.”

  Kid?

  Lisa Shelbourne snatched her arm away.

  “The truth is we don’t know,” her husband admitted. “We’ve both been a little distracted the past couple of years. My business, Lisa’s charity work. I can’t say for sure what Lauren may or may not have done, even when she was still living at home.”

  “Don’t you dare lay any of the blame at my door.” Their daughter’s death had blown apart the cracks in their marriage. “I only started my work because I saw nothing of you.”

  A door opened behind Ingrid. She turned to see Alex Shelbourne hesitate on the threshold of the adjoining room. “I need some air,” she announced.

  “Don’t stray too far,” her mother told her.

  Alex made a point of walking past Ingrid, rolling her eyes as she did, like a truculent teenager. Which, Ingrid supposed, was exactly what she was.

  When the girl had left the room, Anthony Shelbourne cleared some space on an antique wooden bureau pushed up against the wall that divided the two rooms of the suite. “Let’s just get this paperwork finalized, shall we?”

  “Paperwork?”

  “The inspector explained earlier—we need to complete the forms for the repatriation of… of…” He let out a long faltering sob.

  “We can’t do that yet,” Ingrid said. “Then there’s the inquest. And then the final coroner’s report.”

  “Yes, I know. But the detective said the matter could be expedited. Fast-tracked somehow.”

  “I want to take my baby home,” Lisa Shelbourne said. “She’s lying in the morgue. In the dark and the cold.”

  “I can complete the appropriate forms with you when the time comes.”

  “If you don’t have the paperwork now, why are you here?” Mr Shelbourne asked.

  Ingrid looked from Anthony to Lisa Shelbourne. She cleared her throat. “In addition to the police investigation, the embassy has to complete its own report. I’m here to gather a little background information—”

  “Why? Is there some doubt about what happened?” Mrs. Shelbourne got to her feet.

  “It’s just standard procedure, ma’am.”

  A phone rang. This time it was Lisa Shelbourne’s. She answered and disappeared into the bedroom.

  “That’s her mother,” Mr Shelbourne explained. “She’ll be on that call for hours.”

  “They have a lot to discuss,” Ingrid said.

  His cell phone lit up in his pocket. “Excuse me,” he said on his way out to the corridor.

  Talking to grief-stricken parents was something Ingrid had plenty of experience with. In her four years in the Violent Crimes Against Children unit, she’d seen relatives behave in all sorts of ways from denial, to anger, to wailing and ululations: the Shelbournes’ reaction to tragedy was not unusual. They were still trying to carry on with life as normal, not yet accepting that their lives would never be the same again.

  She sat on the couch for a few minutes. When it was clear neither would be talking to her soon, Ingrid went in search of Alex. She passed Anthony Shelbourne in the corridor and said she would make contact to rearrange for a more convenient time, then opted for a swift jog down the twenty or so flights of stairs to ground level to shake some of the tension from her muscles. Her best guess was sixteen-year-old Alex would be walking in the direction of Oxford Street, but she found Alex Shelbourne standing by the main entrance, waiting for her.

  The girl stubbed out her cigarette on the sidewalk, choosing to ignore the metal trash can right beside her. “You know it’s bullshit, right?” Alex said, folding her arms across her chest.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How can they swallow all that? Everything the policewoman said. They listened like a pair of morons, believing every line they were being fed.”

  “I’m not sure I understand—”

  “The drugs? The drugs they say they found?”

  “I’ve seen the toxicology report myself. I realize it must have come as a shock for you all, but the drugs were in your sister’s bloodstream.”

  “Oh, cut the crap. Someone, somewhere is spinning you a line.” She reached into her pocket and retrieved her pack of cigarettes. She waved them at Ingrid. “Lauren didn’t even smoke. Not even a joint now and then, like any normal person. There is absolutely no way she would ever willingly take drugs.”

  17

  Ingrid looked at Google Maps on her phone and selected a green space at random for her morning run. Twenty minutes later, she found herself on Hampstead Heath, breathing in the crisp spring air. From Parliament Hill, she looked down across the city and picked out all the landmarks she recognized, trying to assign a date and time she’d visited them.

  Her ankle seemed completely healed, so she picked up her pace and focused on the Shelbourne investigation, attempting to untangle fact from fiction. She ran flat out for a solid forty minutes, which was enough to clear her lungs but not her mind. Too much about Lauren Shelbourne’s death wasn’t adding up. She thought about something Faber had said. When Ingrid had told her about losing her friend when she was fourteen, Faber had talked about the cops at the time leaving no stone unturned. Ingrid had been unable then, or since, to get closure for Megan and her family, but she could make amends by making sure Lauren’s death was properly investigated.

  When she arrived at Madison Faber’s building later that morning, the student met her at the front door, grabbed Ingrid’s hand and physically dragged her over the threshold. “Thank God! I thought you’d abandoned me.” She led Ingrid into a wide hall then straight through an internal door and up a steep, narrow flight of stairs. The house was very similar to the one where Lauren had lived, though with slightly grander proportions. At the top, Faber guided her through another door into a bright, cheerful apartment.

  “Did you see anyone on the street outside when you arrived? Anyone waiting?”

  “Waiting? For what?”

  “For me to come out.” Faber scratched her arm. “I don’t feel safe. Not even here.”

  Ingrid walked Faber to a chair and pushed her gently into it. “Has something else happened? Have you been threatened again?”

  Faber bit her lip. “Every time I close my eyes, I see that fucking dead mouse.”

  Ingrid crouched down in front of her, choosing submissive body language to help soothe Faber’s anxiety. “Have you figured out who left it there?”

  “It has to be someone in the psychology department. Someone with access to the laboratory.” She paused, then locked her imposing stare onto Ingrid. “You were going to look into it for me.”

  “I plan to. I will. But you must have an idea who’s threatening you?”

  Faber pressed her lips together; her eyes darted left and right. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “There is someone…”

  “Then tell me.”

  Her eyes widened. “I can’t give you a name.” She sounded manic, unhinged. “What if they find out I’ve spoken to you?”

  Ingrid pulled a footstool over in front of the armchair and sat down. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “Tell me exactly what you know. Everything.”

  Faber slumped back into the
chair, putting distance between her and Ingrid. “I can’t believe the police are saying it was an accident.”

  The pathologist’s findings had been reported in the press. The official line was accidental death caused by a fall while under the influence of drugs.

  “The pathologist’s conclusions were reasonable, given the drugs in Lauren’s system. You know I share some of your concerns about what’s been going on at Loriners, so if you want me to continue looking into things, you have to tell me why you think Lauren was killed.” Ingrid grabbed a blanket from a couch and wrapped it across Faber’s shaking shoulders. “Why would someone want to hurt Lauren?”

  Faber rattled her head from side to side. “I’m so scared.” Slowly, the movement changed and the girl began nodding.

  “I want to get answers for you, Madison, but you have to give me more information.”

  A cell phone rang and Faber froze. “Every time it rings, my heart stops.”

  “Please, Madison. Tell me what you know.”

  “You promise you can protect me?” The girl was terrified.

  Ingrid couldn’t promise anything. The Met weren’t treating it as a priority, the Shelbournes wanted things wrapped up so they could take their daughter home, and as far as Louden was concerned, Ingrid should be concentrating on finding Brewster’s laptop.

  “What I can promise you is that no one will ever find out where I got my information from. Whatever you tell me will never be repeated. Understand?”

  For the first time, a tiny smile crept onto Faber’s lips. “It’s making sense to me now.”

  “What is?”

  “Why Lauren moved out. That must have been when she started using drugs. She knew I would disapprove, so she had to hide it from me.”

  Ingrid thought about Alex Shelbourne’s comments: she didn’t know which young woman knew Lauren best. “Why is this making you scared, Madison? I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you see?” Faber’s voice was getting stronger.

  “Join the dots for me.”