by Eva Hudson
“You got a photo of him?” Ingrid asked.
Dell tapped the screen then showed her his iPad.
Ingrid took a large mouthful of beer. “Looks enough like Rennie, wouldn’t you say?” She passed the iPad to Cath.
“I never met Rennie, but from the photo I saw this afternoon, yes, mistaken identity is a possibility.”
Faulkner cleared her throat. “Is the Greek guy still in custody?”
“I’ll check,” Cath said. She picked up the phone on the table and asked to be put through to the duty sergeant.
“Let’s get him back in an interview suite pronto,” Faulkner said, raising her voice so Cath would hear. She turned to Ingrid and Dell. “So, we’ve got four murders, four murderers and four different methods. We need to be asking ourselves why we’re so sure they’re all connected. Let’s not look like idiots because we got carried away with a grand conspiracy. Agreed?”
Dell nodded.
Ingrid wasn’t so sure. “Okay, but can we also agree there is a prime suspect who had motive and the means to create any opportunity he likes?”
“I take it you’re talking about Igor Rybkin?” Faulkner said.
“The man’s brother and wife, his wife’s divorce lawyer, and the man who was getting close to bringing him to justice have been murdered. We need to find him, if only to eliminate him from our—your—enquiries.”
“Boss,” Cath said, still holding the phone, “released on bail.”
“You’re fucking kidding me?”
“Had to relinquish his passport.”
“Christ!” She smacked the table. “Right, better notify the border agencies.”
“Yes, boss.”
Faulkner rubbed her eyes. “It’ll be a fucking false passport, won’t it? Probably not even bloody Greek.”
Cath put the phone down. “They’re sending out uniforms to the address he gave. There’s a chance they’ll pick him up.” She didn’t sound hopeful.
“Can’t believe Transport let him go.”
“Me either,” Cath said. “So if you’ve been looking for Igor Rybkin with Rennie, you must have some leads?”
Ingrid was so tired she wasn’t sure if she could rejoin all the dots. “Were you serious when you said this room might be bugged?”
Faulkner pushed a gyoza into the dipping sauce. “No one knew we were having a meeting until an hour ago, which is the only reason SO15 isn’t here, and we didn’t even know which room we would use until two minutes before we walked in here, so I doubt it.” She popped the dumpling in her mouth. “You got something to confess?”
Ingrid was fearful she wasn’t thinking clearly and would say something out of turn, something that would come back to bite her. She pushed the fingers of both hands under her hair and squeezed her scalp. She took a deep, centering breath.
“I can’t remember the exact date, but June last year, I think, one of Igor Rybkin’s bank cards made an ATM withdrawal at a branch of Barclays in an Essex town called Burnham-on-Crouch.” She paused. “You ever been there?”
“No,” Faulkner said.
“It’s not big. A couple of thousand people live there. It’s basically a village with some nice pubs where people take their grandmother for Sunday lunch. The chances of a reclusive Russian oligarch stopping for cash there are remote.”
“Stolen card?” Cath asked.
Ingrid shook her head. “Maybe, but unlikely: it’s been used a handful of places around the world since his disappearance.” Her ribs expanded with another deep breath. “The reason why Rennie was in the country is that an email address used by one of the hackers he was investigating had been used at an internet café in Burnham. We’ve got CCTV.”
“When?”
“Two weeks ago. Seriously, the chances of the hacker and Rybkin both surfacing in the same small town are too remote to put it down to coincidence.”
“Wow,” Cath said.
Ingrid wiped a dribble of miso soup off her chin. “The last thing Rennie said to me before the car hit—” Ingrid’s voice unexpectedly cracked “—was that he had worked out who the hacker was.”
“And?”
“That’s when the car hit.”
They all fell silent.
Faulkner cleared her throat. “Have you got access to Rennie’s files? Can we see the CCTV images?”
Ingrid pictured the aluminum flight case with the barrel lock. “Let me make a call.” She picked up her phone and strode over to the window. “Jen, hi, it’s me.”
“Where are you?”
“Grabbing another coffee.”
“Marshall’s been looking for you.”
He hadn’t called her. It couldn’t be that urgent. “Tell him I won’t be back in the office today. Abel get anywhere with the phone?”
“Still trying. Says he can stay till nine.”
“Tell him the donuts are on me tomorrow. Listen, can you ping me over the CCTV shots of beardy man?”
“Okay,” she said, stringing out the syllables.
Ingrid could hear Jen’s fingers bothering her keyboard. “Won’t be a second,” she said to Faulkner.
“Um, Ingrid,” Jen said.
“Yep.”
“I can’t access the server.”
“What do you mean?”
“The files are locked. Everything to do with Rybkin is grayed out.”
Shit. “Really?”
“Maybe you need to try, with your authorization, but it looks like Marshall has shut everything down. I can’t access any of it.”
Ingrid rubbed her face. “You’re sure?”
“Yep.”
“Okay.”
“Need anything else?”
“Not right now. It’s getting late, Jen. You should go home.”
Ingrid hung up and returned her attention to the room. “Some kind of glitch. Might be the morning before I can get you the images.”
“Okay,” Faulkner said, writing something down. “We can pick that up tomorrow. But for now, the way I see it, we’ve got two leads. A door-to-door operation in small-town Essex, and the probably-not-Greek-at-all tourist. Let’s look at all the other CCTV from Holborn station in the lead-up, shall we?”
“Yes, boss,” Dell said.
Before he left the room, Ingrid’s phone rang. A London number she didn’t recognize. She swiped to answer.
“Is that Mrs Skyberg?” the woman’s voice asked.
She wasn’t going to correct her. “Yes. Who’s this, please?”
“Oh hello, I’m staff nurse Gorman. At the major trauma ward at St Mary’s.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Hello.” The hospital felt like a lifetime ago, not a day. Ingrid wandered back to the window.
“I thought you’d like to know that the gentleman you were brought in with—”
“Yes?”
“He’s now conscious.”
Ingrid tried to picture the man lying like a deflated balloon in the hallway of her apartment building, his nose and lips black with soot. Her memory was patchy, with broad brush strokes of amnesia obscuring parts of the image.
“The doctor says he’s ready for visitors.”
The room swayed. She closed her eyes and felt she might stumble. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’ll come in.”
Ingrid took a seat back at the table, but she couldn’t tune in to whatever Cath and Faulkner were discussing. A knot tightened in her stomach. Shame seeped into her bloodstream. And then the memory of Rennie standing in her doorway surfaced. How gentle he’d been. How practical he’d been. Taking her shopping, getting her to his hotel to change. Then the snapshot of them both wearing their sheepskin coats popped into her head. His work wife. She was going to make Rybkin pay.
“Ingrid, wakey-wakey,” Cath said.
“I’m awake.”
“You drifted.”
“I was thinking.”
“You got another way to find Rybkin?”
She did. But did she dare share it with the Met? If Marshall or Usher h
ad locked the files on the server, the order to shut down the investigation had come from high up. What she was about to do was riskier than jumping off a bridge and hoping you landed on a passing laundry truck. She took a very deep breath and held it.
“You going to tell us?” Cath asked.
Ingrid exhaled.
Faulkner put down her pen.
“There is a very real chance,” Ingrid said, “that if we find the hacker in Essex, and we rearrest the Greek guy, neither of them will give up Rybkin, agreed?”
Cath nodded. “That’s what’s happened with Tarlev.”
“What if I told you the FBI has a plan to lure the man himself into the light. If you provide the backup, the infrastructure, I reckon I can bring our plans forward.”
Faulkner leaned in. “This sounds interesting.”
“It’s also high risk,” Ingrid said. She looked down at her hands, not wanting to see their eyes as she revealed the next nugget of information. “This is strictly, strictly confidential.”
Faulkner inhaled audibly. Cath’s eyes bored into her.
“Remember the Picasso Rybkin missed out on at auction?”
“Sure,” Cath said.
“Well, I have it—”
“How?”
Ingrid didn’t answer. “I also have a buyer for it. And that buyer is a very good friend and known business associate of Igor Rybkin.”
Silence.
“I have a bunch of reasons why I think it will lead us to Rybkin. Or rather lure him to us. I want you to help me set up a handover.” She stared at Cath and then at Faulkner. “What do you say?”
39
Ingrid left Belgravia police station shortly after ten, but it was only when she was on the sidewalk in the rain she realized she had nowhere to stay. She plunged her gloveless hands in her pockets and felt a credit-card-sized rectangle of plastic. David Rennie’s room key. Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting on the edge of his bed, pulling off her new boots that had soaked through to her socks. Ten minutes after that, she was asleep.
In the morning, she took several seconds to work out where she was. She checked her phone. Nine forty-five. Six missed calls. Seven percent battery. Shit. She searched round for Natalya’s phone. Nineteen percent battery. Fuck.
Panicked, she sat up and scanned the room. She exhaled when she saw a white lightning cable snaking out of a USB socket above the dressing table. She pressed the voicemail icon and pushed back the bedcovers.
The first message was from Carolyn asking if she’d like to go with her to a fringe theater play in a room above a pub. It sounded like she was making a deliberate attempt to appear grown up so Ingrid would catalog her drunken fall from grace as a one-off. Ingrid pressed two to save and moved on.
Marshall wanting to know what time he could expect her in today.
Marshall again, same question, only more irritated.
McKittrick, just checking in. A friend was going on vacation and she wondered if Ingrid wanted to house-sit while her place was redecorated. Thoughtful.
Jen, letting her know Abel had gotten nowhere with the passcode.
An hour later, washed but wearing the same clothes as the day before, Ingrid took a taxi to St Mary’s hospital in Paddington. She followed the signs but soon got lost in the warren of walkways. Ingrid pushed open another set of double doors and was certain she’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. A woman with a lanyard and name badge came toward her.
“Excuse me, is this the right way for the major trauma ward?”
She nodded. “Down there on the left.”
“Really?”
“Quite.”
“Thank you.” Her phone buzzed in her right pocket. Cath Murray. “Hi, mate, I’m in a hurry.”
“Pretty sure I’ve got some news you’ll want to hear.”
Ingrid slowed to a halt, and an orderly pushing a patient in a wheelchair nearly ran into the back of her. “Okay. I’m all ears.”
“We’ve just brought in the hit-and-run driver.”
Ingrid fist-pumped the air. “Yes, brilliant.”
“Told you we would.”
“That’s great news, well done.”
“Thought you’d like to sit in on the questioning.”
“Love to.”
“And the truth is we’d like you there anyway. You were a witness to the incident, and you’ll know if he’s lying about certain things.”
“What time do you want me?”
“We’re going to kick things off in about an hour.”
“I’ll be there.”
The nurses’ station in the major trauma unit was positioned at the neck of three connecting wards. Three people in scrubs and a male junior doctor in the requisite chinos and plaid shirt were examining scan results on a computer screen.
“Hi,” Ingrid said. “Sorry to interrupt. I’m here to see a patient. He was brought in the night before last. Smoke inhalation. He woke up this morning and got transferred here from the ICU.”
“Ah, yes. Bed fourteen. Are you his friend?”
Ingrid nodded.
“You speak Russian?”
A chill ran through her. “Um, yes,” she said. “Why?”
“Maybe you could help with translation?”
“Sure. Of course.” Ingrid swallowed hard.
“If you give us a couple of minutes, I’ll be right with you.”
Ingrid nodded and moved slowly towards the ward. Russian? Her right hand started to tremble. She didn’t remember anything about her date speaking Russian.
She checked the bay numbers and approached with caution. He was propped up on an articulated bed, asleep with his jaw slack and his mouth open. She stood a good distance away and observed him.
He was fortyish, dark hair, olive skin, two days of hospital stubble and a powerful, athletic build. There was something about him—a ruggedness, a muscularity—that suggested a military background. The ward started to spin: it definitely wasn’t the architect from Camberwell.
So then why did she recognize him?
Who the hell are you? And if you’re not Tim, why hasn’t he called since our date?
She tried to claw back memories of the night of the fire. She remembered sitting at the bar, watching the bartender mix mojitos in jars. She could picture Tim taking the bottle of wine over to a table, the condensation dribbling over its curves. She remembered his check shirt, she could recall them talking about their fathers, and there was a vague memory of buying the burger she’d stupidly tried to reheat in her oven. None of her recollections featured the man in front of her. And there were no good reasons why a Russian man she didn’t know had been inside her apartment.
She felt sick: Rybkin. He had sent someone to kill Rennie, and he had also sent someone to kill her. The man in the bed had started the fire deliberately. She began to shake.
Ingrid took a step closer and peered at him. He had a black eye and a raw steak bruise across one cheek. Despite the wounds, she definitely recognized him from somewhere. She chewed the inside of her lip, trying to figure why, if he had gone to her apartment to kill her, he had been the one to end up in intensive care. None of it made sense.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Startled, Ingrid turned and smiled at the nurse.
“I’m Laura, and I’m taking care of… sorry, we still don’t know his name.” Laura was late twenties, blonde, bespectacled and soft-spoken. “It’s so good you could come in. We’ve had trouble communicating.”
“That’s fine,” Ingrid said.
“He’s still very groggy, and he hasn’t said much. To be honest, it’s a guess he’s Russian, but we’ve not been able to get a translator in yet.”
“How is he?” Ingrid asked.
“Lucky,” she said with a nod. “He’d been without oxygen for several minutes. Any longer and the consultant said he’d be looking at brain damage.”
“And the bruises on his face?”
“We’re not sure how he got those. I imagine getting hau
led out of a burning building comes with a few bumps and knocks.”
More like a bar fight, Ingrid thought.
“Will he make a full recovery?” she asked.
The nurse shrugged. “At the moment, we’re keeping him lightly sedated. He was showing signs of alcohol withdrawal in the ICU, so he was prescribed a low dose of chlordiazepoxide to see him through the jitters.”
Ingrid stared at him. Her nostrils flared with hostility. You fucker.
“He’s also fitted a few times since he was transferred. Do you know if he has a history of epilepsy?”
Ingrid avoided eye contact.
“It’s a lot to take in,” Laura said, placing a hand on Ingrid’s forearm. “Are you okay to give us a few details? He didn’t have any ID on him, and we’ve not got any sense out of him.”
Ingrid looked her in the eye. “To be honest, I don’t really know him.”
“Ah.” Laura blinked behind her glasses. “I see. You’re the one whose flat he was in?”
“Correct.” Ingrid smiled awkwardly.
“Got it.” She clutched some case notes to her torso with both arms. “You’re still the best chance we’ve got of finding out who we should call, who his next of kin is. Shall we wake him up, then, while you’re here, and see what he’s got to say?”
Ingrid sniffed sharply. “Sure.”
Laura placed her hand on his shoulder. “How are you doing?” she asked tenderly. “I’ve got someone here to see you.”
His eyes flickered, not seeing anything for a second. He focused on the nurse before turning his gaze to Ingrid. His features stiffened.
“Hi,” Ingrid said in Russian. “Do you know who I am?”
He nodded slowly. “Vesnina. Natalya Vesnina.”
Ingrid thought she might fall to the floor.
40
Ingrid stood outside the doors of St Mary’s hospital, surrounded by patients on drips lighting up cigarettes. She scrolled through her contacts until she reached Marshall’s number. Her thumb hovered over the dial icon and she braced herself for the onslaught.
“Agent Skyberg, at last.”
“Good morning, Marshall.”
“Where the heck have you been?”
She pushed a finger in one ear to muffle the endless moan of the streets. “Helping the Metropolitan Police,” she said, “as part of my role as the Bureau’s Met liaison officer.”
