by Eva Hudson
1. People have been calling my number for him
2. The following people have been killed to protect his identity. David Steiner. Saskia Cole…
Ingrid’s pen hovered over the paper before she continued.
… Jacob DeWalt.
She felt sure there were others. Mulroony would be added to the list if she didn’t find Skylark. Then she remembered another victim. One that Jen had told her about.
Mulroony’s assistant (coma)
She paused before continuing with her list.
3. Before Mulroony was extracted, Skylark was a codename for a suspected double agent inside MI5 or the Met.
Ingrid stopped. That felt significant in the light of what Sidney Baxter had said. In his interview with Saskia Cole, he’d said the approach often came from someone with a British accent.
4. Until his death, I thought it could have been DeWalt.
She paused again and attempted to recall all the reasons why she had thought it was DeWalt. There were the arrows in the photograph. There was the fact he had jammed the elevator. That his former address was 36 West Park. More importantly, Mulroony thought he was being framed by DeWalt. She made a note on another piece of paper.
Why would DeWalt frame Mulroony if he wasn’t Skylark?
She needed to look again at the photos. Ingrid crossed the office, tipped up her penholder, located the small steel key and opened her top drawer. The photos weren’t there. She bent down, pulled the drawer out further, pushed her hand in deeper.
Where were they?
Ingrid swallowed, her mouth painfully bone dry. She glanced over at Libby’s desk. Had she? Ingrid’s temperature spiked, her palms became moist. A droplet of sweat rolled down between her shoulder blades, making her shiver. Ingrid crouched down and looked inside the drawer. Exhale. The wallet of photos had slid to the back. She took a moment to center herself before standing. Calm down. Think straight.
Ingrid tipped out the images and scattered them on the spare desk next to her notes and Saskia Cole’s notebooks. She created a pile of the photographs she had figured out—the house where Andropov had been killed, Stephen Hawking, the Post-its, the file number, the skylark, David Steiner’s book, the cake and arrows—and looked again at the ones she had failed to identify. The map of Scotland, the diary, the word ‘sois’, the Google image search for yards––
“Oh, duh.” She slapped her palm into her forehead, then moved the photo of the map of Scotland next to the one of all the yards. Scotland Yard. “How the heck did I not make that connection?” She flamed with embarrassment as she shook her head in disbelief. “How stupid are you, Skyberg? I mean, seriously.”
Ingrid took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She nodded, her head movement affirming her thoughts. Skylark being in the Met made sense. It explained why Mulroony—the Met liaison agent—had been relatively easy to frame. And it explained why Paphides’ investigation had been shut down. Someone high up must have leaned on him. Ingrid rose powerfully to her feet and strode over to her own desk. She needed to examine the documents Paphides had sent through.
She clicked on the folder on her screen and saw a clutch of files. The initial 9-9-9 call, the report from the uniformed first responders, notes from door-to-door interviews with neighbors, CCTV logs, Paphides’ own report. She scanned the list again: no forensics. That wasn’t a surprise—DeWalt hadn’t yet been dead for a day—but she had hoped for a provisional assessment of the crime scene and working assumptions. There was nothing on DeWalt’s phone records.
Someone cleared their throat. Ingrid turned to see Penny standing in the doorway, her arms full of notebooks and folders.
“Hi,” Ingrid said. In the four months Ingrid had been the acting SSA, she had found Penny to be aloof, but also efficient, trustworthy and discreet. “We get to work together again. Come on in.”
Penny almost always wore the same clothes. Ingrid didn’t know if her librarian appearance—tweed skirts, pussy bow blouses, sensible shoes and tortoise-shell glasses—was archly retro, or genuine geek. The parting in her severe bob was a white chalk path between neatly plowed fields of dark brown soil, and her lips were always a shade redder than Ingrid remembered. It was hard to tell if Penny was closer to twenty or thirty, lending her a sense of mystery.
Ingrid’s private joke was that Penny was some kind of secret superhero. She was so demure, so reserved, so aloof, that Ingrid felt she must lead a double life, like Kate Kane or Diana Prince. And if Penny wasn’t secretly saving the world in her spare time, then Ingrid was convinced she was quietly writing a future Pulitzer Prize winner.
Ingrid installed Penny at Libby’s desk and pulled over the chair from her own. “How are you doing?”
“A bit shell-shocked, but okay I guess.” There was even less color in Penny’s face than usual.
“Did Marsha tell you why you’re swapping jobs with Libby today?”
“No, not really. Only that you needed me, and you needed all this.” Penny gestured to the documentation she had brought with her.
Ingrid nodded. “As you know, the FBI has a mandate to investigate the death of all federal employees, and that’s what we’re doing for DeWalt.”
“Without the Metropolitan Police?”
“Correct. They’ve sent over their initial findings, and I’m working my way through those just now.” Ingrid nodded in the direction of her monitor.
“What are those?” Penny asked, pointing at the spare desk.
“They’re research files we’ve, um, borrowed from an investigative journalist.”
“Okay.” Penny seemed to be taking it all in and computing everything Ingrid said. “What do you need from me?”
Ingrid paused for a second. “First off, you’re sure you’re okay to work?”
Penny closed her eyes briefly, revealing perfectly applied eyeliner on her top lids. “I’m good to go. How about you? I mean you actually saw him fall.”
Ingrid squirmed. “Also good. So, first things first, I want to ask you some questions.”
“Fire away.”
Ingrid leaned forward in her chair, placing her elbows on her knees. “Are you aware of any stresses DeWalt was under, bar the usual, in the past few weeks? I know he was recently divorced. Were things escalating with Lisa?”
Penny stared into the middle distance as she concentrated. “No, no, things with Lisa seemed okay. I usually spoke to her a couple of times a week. Childcare arrangements, mostly.”
“And how did DeWalt seem after he had spoken to his ex?”
“Maybe a bit snarky, talked a little quicker.” Penny shrugged one shoulder. “But actually, I think that’s me reading something into nothing just because you asked me about her. He was fine. Let’s just say he was fine.”
Ingrid nodded. “Okay. So, what about work? Was he still running any cases?”
Penny shook her head. “No, you did that job for long enough to know you don’t really get your hands dirty.”
It was true. Four months riding a desk had convinced Ingrid never to put in for promotion. “Pressure from above? Any contact with the Legat or the ambassador?”
Penny smiled. “Not the ambassador, no, but quite a lot with ‘Pete’” She made air quotes around the Legat’s first name. “You, and Marshall, always called him the Legat, or Munsden, but DeWalt called him Pete.”
Ingrid thought about what Libby had said about DeWalt being the kind of guy who did favors for other people.
“You think they knew each other socially?”
“Maybe they worked together way back when.”
“Okay,” Ingrid said. “Can you tell the Legat I need to speak to him. ASAP?”
“Of course.”
“Then I need you to pull up DeWalt’s diary. I want to know every meeting he had, every meal he ate, every taxi ride he took in the past week. Then call the doctors on the second floor and ask for his latest medical report. I want to know if he was on any medication, or had any diagnoses that could have impacted his heal
th.”
Penny scrutinized Ingrid. “That sounds like you think he might have killed himself?”
Ingrid tipped her head to one side. “For the record, until an hour ago, I thought he was pushed. But, now I’m investigating his death, I need an open mind. So, do you.”
“But he wasn’t the suicidal type.”
“You know that for sure?” Ingrid asked. “In my experience, it’s the jocks and the alpha males who suddenly do something out of character. They’re all action and no talking. They have no outlet for their feelings and—” she stopped herself. “And then they do something like this.” Ingrid swiveled in her chair, then turned back to Penny. “And presumably you’ve seen all his emails?”
“All his work ones. He has a Gmail.”
“Know the password?”
“Nope.”
“Can you guess it?”
“I’ll try.”
Ingrid wondered if Libby would know it. “And let’s put in a request for his bank statements.”
Ingrid wheeled back to her own desk feeling a surge of energy. She returned to the paperwork Paphides had sent. As she had been there when DeWalt fell, she skipped the initial reports from the uniformed responders and opened the file on the door-to-door inquiries. Most of the neighbors hadn’t been in, so only three interviews had been recorded. There was an unwritten rule in investigations: the bigger the city, the fewer the witnesses.
The first interview was with a woman whose front door was directly opposite DeWalt’s apartment. The staccato notes revealed the neighbors had spoken precisely three times, once when the fire alarm had gone off, once when she had complained to him about muddy golf gear left in the hallway, and a third time in the sauna in the gym in the basement. The constable who conducted the interview wrote:
Had radio on, did not hear anything, did not see anyone. Sound insulation good between flats.
The next interview was with someone else on the fifth floor who only knew DeWalt as the ‘guy with the golf clubs’. The third interviewee had heard the body fall but had thought someone was throwing out a bag of clothes.
Useless.
Ingrid flipped through to find eye-witness interviews from the people in the parking lot, but of the people who had gathered around DeWalt’s body, none had actually seen him fall. She was about to turn to the CCTV report when she stopped. Something in one of the eye-witness accounts made her look twice.
Witness heard scream (she doesn’t know from which balcony/flat). Did not see body fall. Two other people approached the body (interviews 6-11 and 6-12) and together they called triple 9. Witness reports black Nissan 4x4 leaving the car park at speed.
Ingrid stared at the report. A black Nissan 4x4? The British term for an SUV. Ingrid immediately turned to the CCTV dossier and found a list of license plates and models. GA07 PPL. Black Nissan Qashqai. The same car that had been in West Park.
34
Ingrid tore over to Penny’s desk and grabbed the folder with the Met access codes.
“What’s happening?” Penny asked.
“Think I’ve got a lead.” Ingrid snatched up the phone and went through the automated system, pressing the relevant code, saying her name for the database and finally being put through to an actual human. “Could you please give me the ownership details of a Nissan Qashqai, license plate Golf Alpha Zero Seven Papa Papa Lima.”
“One moment, please.”
Ingrid drummed her fingers on the desk as she waited.
“Could you repeat that, please?”
Ingrid did.
“Ah, okay, here it is. Black Nissan Qashqai, registration GA07 PPL, is registered to Wayne John Burridge. You got a pen for the address?”
Ingrid wrote down the details and hung up. She put the location into Google and looked at Burridge’s home on Street View. It was an apartment over a chicken shop on Uxbridge Road, one of the major thoroughfares heading west out of London. His car was a lot nicer than his residence.
Without the power of arrest on UK soil, Ingrid needed Met assistance to take Burridge in for questioning. She didn’t like the chances of Paphides playing ball, so she decided to call Cath Murray, a friend who was also a detective sergeant at Belgravia police station. The phone rang before she could dial.
“Skyberg.”
“This Immigration Services on the second floor.”
“Hi.”
“We need the interview room and your friend is still asleep.”
“Ah.” Ingrid checked her watch. McAvenny had been under for over ninety minutes. “Okay. Can you keep him there for, like, fifteen minutes? I’ll send someone down to escort him.”
“We need the room at one p.m.”
“Understood.”
Ingrid stood and turned to Penny.
“Yes?”
“Slight change of plan,” Ingrid said. “Those documents on that desk over there?”
Penny pointed to McAvenny’s cache.
“Yep, those. I need them scanned.”
“Okay.”
“Right now, and really, really quickly.”
Penny’s mouth crumpled. “All of them?”
Ingrid thought for a second. “Start with the blue folder and everything in that pile.” She paused. “If you can, keep everything in the piles they’re in.”
“Okay. What about the stuff from DeWalt’s diary?”
“Come back to it when this is done.”
Penny bundled up a pile of documents and was just at the threshold when Ingrid thought of something else.
“When you get a moment—”
Penny threw her a look.
“Well, if you do, can you ask HR about a guy called Zeke McDaniel? I kind of think he was screwed out of a job here and we ought to make it up to him.” Ingrid saw the affront on Penny’s face. “God no, I didn’t mean it like that! It’s just, well, we need as many hands on deck as possible.”
“You’re lucky I know you like me.” Penny smirked. “I’ll get on to it.”
Ingrid followed Penny out into the bullpen and looked out at a sea of heads bowed over keyboards and phones clamped to ears. “Hi,” she said. “Hey.” She raised her voice. A few of the admin assistants looked up. “I need a couple of volunteers. This is super urgent and super important. If you can spare me half an hour, I need it.”
No one looked enthusiastic.
“Okay, your country needs it. Come on, one of you must have thirty minutes of slack in your day.”
One of the assistants on the CI team stuck his hand up. “I’ll bite.”
“Jackson, you little star. Get over here.”
The clerks and analysts watched Jackson Brady as he weaved his way between their desks. Ingrid had never seen him in anything other than chinos and plaid shirts. He wore neither garment well. Either the fit or the size was wrong, with the pants stretching unflatteringly over chubby thighs and a too-large shirt failing to disguise a premature paunch. He was one of those men who would look exactly the same at fifty as he did at thirty.
“Reporting for duty,” he said, a boyish smile emerging from his pink face.
Ingrid tore off Burridge’s details from her notepad and handed them to him. “I need everything you can get on this guy, and I need it fast. I want to know who he banks with, who he works for, who he lives with, owes money to, drinks with, who his landlord is and when he last left the country.”
Brady blinked behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. “So not a lot then.”
“I like your style. Seriously, set a timer, run every search you can and give me everything you’ve got in half an hour.”
“Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”
Ingrid pressed her lips between her teeth as she thought. “Russia. I don’t suppose you’ll find anything, but any possible link to Russia would be…” She searched for the right word. “…interesting. Ditto the Metropolitan Police. Even if it’s just being arrested for possession when he was a teenager.”
“I’m on it.”
Ingrid picked up the phone and dialed Cath Murray.
“Mate, how are you?”
Fine, apart from the fact one of your colleagues tried to shoot me the other night. “Good. Busy. And in desperate need of a favor.”
“What does that involve?” There were sirens in the background.
“Are you on a call?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not driving. Safely strapped in at the back.”
“I need you to arrest a suspect for me.”
“What’s he done?” Cath sounded remarkably calm for someone in a patrol car traveling at high speed.
Ah. What had he done, exactly? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time? “Stalking,” Ingrid said. “I really need him brought in for questioning.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. I’m kinda busy.”
“Later?”
“If this goes the way we plan, we’ll have seven suspects to interview and process. Sorry mate. You’ll have to do it through official channels.”
It wasn’t unexpected. “Okay. Worth a try.”
“Always.”
Cath hung up before Ingrid could wish her good luck with the arrests. She dropped her head into her hands and slowly scratched her scalp, as if it would order her thoughts more clearly.
There was no way Burridge being at West Park and Century Mills was a coincidence, especially given the photograph of her on the passenger seat. That meant two things: one, Burridge was her top priority; and two, she couldn’t be the one to approach him because he had probably been hired to kill her.
Ingrid wrinkled her nose. She had spotted a contradiction. Why would Skylark, or the Russian state, hire a man like Wayne Burridge to kill her? When they wanted to silence Saskia Cole, they sent in professional assassins. Ingrid pictured the look of panic on Burridge’s face when she approached his car at West Park. It wasn’t the response of a calm, calculating killer. If he wanted me dead, wouldn’t he have killed me already? Something wasn’t adding up.
