Chasing the Dark

by Sam Hepburn

  ‘Is that Joe Slattery?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ralph Lincoln.’

  Weirdly, he pronounced it Rafe, like it rhymed with ‘safe’.

  ‘Oh, right . . . um, thanks for calling back. I’m . . . Sadie Slattery’s son. I don’t know if you remember me. We met . . . at the hospital.’

  ‘Of course I remember you, Joe. How are you bearing up?’ He sounded old and tired.

  ‘Um . . . OK.’

  ‘Still in London?’

  ‘No, Kent. With Mum’s sister.’

  ‘How’s that working out?’

  ‘Oh, you know. She and Mum weren’t exactly close.’

  ‘That must very difficult for all of you. So how can I help you, Joe?’

  ‘There’s been a mix-up with Mum and Ivo’s stuff.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘The bags in the car. The police sent me Ivo’s as well as Mum’s.’

  He made a faint sound, somewhere between a sob and a groan.

  ‘It’s got his laptop and a notebook in it and . . . ’

  ‘I’ll . . . organise a courier to pick them up.’

  ‘OK, but . . . um . . . before I get his laptop back to you I was wondering if you’d mind me taking a look through his files.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  I took a breath. ‘Have you ever wondered if there might be a link between the crash and a story he was investigating?’

  He went so quiet I thought the phone had gone dead.

  ‘Professor, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘Have you . . . ever wondered that?’

  ‘Listen to me, Joe. When someone young and healthy dies an untimely death, those left behind automatically search for answers to take away the senselessness of their loss. It’s a natural part of the grieving process.’ The hospital had obviously given him the same leaflet. ‘So yes, I did consider the possibility that Ivo’s death had not been accidental. In the end, however, I had to accept that what happened to my son was just a hideous and arbitrary case of hit and run.’

  ‘Well, sir’ – the ‘sir’ slipped out like I was talking to a teacher – ‘I’m still at the looking-for-answers stage, so would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?’

  He sighed. ‘Very well.’

  ‘What was Ivo working on?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Joe. A prolonged assignment in Afghanistan had left him so exhausted he’d taken a break. Ironic, isn’t it, that he survived the dangers of Helmand only to die on the streets of North London?’

  ‘How long was he off work?’

  ‘A month. I wanted him to take longer but there’s a big energy summit coming up and he’d been asked to profile some of the delegates.’

  ‘Did he go away anywhere?’

  ‘Yes. Kiev.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Ukraine. It’s the capital. He’d studied there for a while, got to know it pretty well.’

  ‘Ukraine . . . that’s in . . . Eastern Europe?’ I said, wishing I’d kicked the habit of nodding off in Geography.

  ‘Yes. Part of the former Soviet Union.’

  ‘So they speak what . . . Russian?’

  ‘For the most part. Some local dialects as well, I believe.’

  Was that Russian Yuri had been muttering in his sleep? Had Ivo met him in Ukraine? My heart punched my ribs so loudly I was sure the Prof could hear it down the phone. I needn’t have worried. He was too busy warbling on about Ivo getting a first class degree in Slavonic studies – whatever they were.

  I knew nothing about Ukraine except for this documentary me and Mum had watched about a macho undercover reporter on the trail of a huge money laundering operation. He’d ended up in Kiev and got beaten up by a gang of sleazy thugs who’d discovered his secret camera and didn’t fancy being on telly.

  ‘Aren’t journalists always on the lookout for stories, even when they’re on holiday?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t there masses of gangs over there?’ Cogs whirred in my brain. Gangs run by the kind of ‘bad people’ who were after Yuri.

  ‘Joe, I know you’re confused and unhappy, but think about it logically. If Ukrainian mobsters wanted to get rid of Ivo, why wait until he got back to England? And why pick a method as risky and uncertain as running his car off the road? It makes no sense.’

  ‘It would if they wanted to get rid of Ivo and Mum.’

  The words hung there, raw and shocking. I couldn’t believe I’d actually thought them, let alone said them out loud.

  ‘You’re not telling me your mother had links with the Ukrainian Mafia, are you?’

  ‘Not that she was letting on.’

  He made a grunty noise, like he almost laughed, and his voice relaxed a bit.

  ‘As far as I know, Ivo wasn’t working on anything at all in Ukraine. So you see: no sinister investigations on the go, no forays into the criminal underworld.’

  I wasn’t buying that but I’d sworn to Yuri I wouldn’t betray him so I trod carefully,

  ‘I . . . er . . . still wouldn’t mind having a look in his laptop.’

  I heard a sigh and then a scratchy sound like he was rubbing his chin. ‘Oh, very well. If it will set your mind at rest.’

  Yes! I jabbed the air but tried to keep my voice calm. ‘Do you know his password?’

  ‘I think he used Bitsy241 for pretty much everything. It was a family joke, you see. Bitsy’s his twin, two for one.’

  Why did posh people have such weird names?

  I pulled Ivo’s laptop towards me. It was top of the range, even had built in mobile broadband. I typed in Bitsy241, pressed Enter and felt a nervous buzz as his desktop flashed on to the screen. ‘Brilliant. Thanks.’ My fingers brushed the keyboard, itching to get into his files.

  ‘When did he go to Ukraine?’

  ‘The beginning of February.’

  ‘When did he get back?’

  ‘The day before the crash, which meant I hadn’t seen him for over a month before he died. And that was just for a quick coffee on a fleeting visit to town. You never think, do you, that it might be the last time?’

  A stab of pain snatched my breath. The last I’d seen of Mum was the edge of her coat whisking through the door as she’d rushed off to the Trafalgar Arms. On her way out she’d kissed the top of my head and told me not to stay up too late, but I’d been so engrossed in Doctor Who I hadn’t looked up. Don’t go there, Joe. I leant my head against the wall and swallowed hard.

  ‘So this courier . . . when are you sending him?’ I said.

  ‘Whenever suits . . . unless . . . well, if you had time to bring Ivo’s things to Cambridge I’d be delighted to give you lunch in college. I’d pay your travel costs, of course.’ His voice was getting gruffer and I knew what was coming. ‘It might help you to talk to someone who understands what you’re going through.’

  No, it wouldn’t. No way. But if I went to Cambridge I could go on picking his brain about Ivo.

  ‘OK. Yeah. Thanks. How about tomorrow?’

  ‘Unfortunately I’m teaching all day. How are you fixed for the day after?’

  My breathing got calmer as we discussed normal stuff like train times. But my brain was still playing up – flooding one minute, stalling the next.

  ‘Excellent, that’s settled then. But Joe …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘The sooner you forget these crazy notions, the sooner you’ll begin to move on.’

  He rang off. I tapped into Ivo Lincoln’s files.

  What? That couldn’t be right.

  Lincoln had only got six saved documents. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and opened the first one. It was an insurance claim form, downloaded on 4 March, the morning of the crash, for stuff he’d had stolen the day before. I scrolled through it.

  Name: Ivo Horatio (you’re kidding me) Lincoln

  Place of theft: Oselya Guest House, Strizhavka, Ukraine

  Items stolen: Apple Mac laptop, Samsung camera, lea
ther bag, books

  I was gutted. Everything he’d written in Ukraine would be on the stolen laptop. He must have bought this one as soon as he got back. The other documents were all letters to banks, building societies and credit card companies, trying to sort out his money. Not a whiff of any heavy-duty investigations. Not a mention of Mum or Yuri.

  I tried the Bitsy password on his emails, felt my heart speed up when it worked and started scrolling through his messages. Now I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead but Jes-us this guy was boring – and so were his mates. No jokes, no funny YouTube clips, just dreary press releases about nuclear energy and the ‘struggle for justice’ in places I couldn’t pronounce.

  Maybe I was crazy. Maybe Mum getting killed in Ivo Lincoln’s car and Yuri having Lincoln’s number was just one of those wacky coincidences you read about on the internet, you know – random man answers public phone on crowded station and it’s his long-lost brother calling. For all I knew, Yuri could turn out to be Polish, Hungarian or Swedish, which would blast the Ukrainian connection to rubble. I picked up the scrap of newspaper with Ivo’s phone number on it. There was a tiny line of print above the scribble. I squinted hard, trying to make it out.

  ФaKTЫ И KOMMeHTapИИ.

  Letter by letter, I checked the words against a site listing foreign alphabets. It was Russian all right. Spelled out in English it said Fakty i Kommentarii – which, according to Wikipedia, was the biggest-selling tabloid in Ukraine. I was right. Yuri was Ukrainian! It might not sound like much of a breakthrough but I felt like I’d bought a winning scratch card.

  Tyres crunched on the drive. Doreen was home. I logged off, scooped up Lincoln’s stuff and bolted to my room. Halfway there I realised I’d left his notebook behind and I was heading back to get it when the phone rang. I heard Doreen come in the back door and pick up in the kitchen. I’d thought it might be the Professor calling back but it was obviously someone for Doreen. She was putting on her poshest voice and letting out chirps of fake laughter between comments like, ‘Yes, indeed, Mr Pritchard . . .’, ‘What an honour . . .’, ‘Such a remarkable woman . . .’

  I hung back, watching her through the bannister, waiting for her to finish. She was smiling and patting her hairdo, though as usual there wasn’t one single hair out of place.

  ‘Oh, of course. In my line of work, discretion is everything. I like to think my regular clients regard me as a trusted personal friend.’ Suddenly the smile froze. ‘I don’t understand. That really wouldn’t be . . .’

  The caller interrupted and she changed her tune pretty quick.

  ‘No. No, Mr Pritchard, that won’t be necessary. I always try to accommodate my client’s wishes, however unorthodox they may be. If you send me a list of her dietary requirements, I’ll prepare some menus. But there may be a problem with that arrangement longer term, you see . . .’

  I missed the next bit because, for once, she lowered her voice and I had to edge a bit nearer to hear more. ‘. . . in fact, given my nephew’s situation I wonder if I might ask you for a little professional advice . . .’

  Hang on. Why was she talking about me?

  I leant even closer and got my answer. ‘. . . it’s only natural that the boy should want to be with his father now he’s lost his mother and I . . . that is . . . my husband and I were wondering how best to go about finding him.’

  Well, good luck with that, Doreen. Mum had been trying to track down my dad for fourteen years but Adam Okampo was slicker than the Invisible Man when it came to disappearing. Still, I s’pose I couldn’t blame Doreen for giving it a go. And getting dumped with a dad who’d never wanted me couldn’t be any worse than living with an aunt who thought I was scum.

  Doreen went on listening for a couple of minutes but there was no laughter, fake or otherwise, when she said goodbye. From the way she rammed the handset down it seemed like this Pritchard guy had rubbed her right up the wrong way.

  CHAPTER 7

  For dinner that night Doreen heated up a couple of portions of her latest creation, fish tagine with minted couscous – don’t ask – and we’d been sitting at opposite ends of the table silently pushing it round our plates for at least five minutes when she sniffed and said, ‘Norma Craig’s lawyer contacted me earlier.’

  My skin went prickly. So that’s who she’d been talking to.

  ‘Miss Craig has heard about my reputation for high-quality cuisine and total discretion, and she’s decided that once she moves back to Elysium she wants me to supply her with an evening meal two or three times a week.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said, though Doreen didn’t seem too thrilled about it. In fact, from the way she was screwing up her lips you’d have thought she’d just spotted a dead rat in her couscous.

  ‘Of course, I couldn’t say no but I’m far too busy to do the deliveries myself. I told him . . . you’d have to do them.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, no reason. It’s just that . . . you know, with someone famous like Norma Craig I thought you’d want to do the face-to-face yourself.’

  Now what had I said? She was fuming.

  ‘I can’t just abandon my regular clients because some washed-up old celebrity wants my services. Who does she think she is anyway? She might have married a lord but everyone knows her father was a crook. If he hadn’t dropped dead of a heart attack he’d have ended up in jail with the rest of his gangster cronies.’

  Calm down, Doreen. What’s Norma Craig ever done to you?

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘No probs. I’ll do the deliveries.’

  ‘That dog of yours has been digging up my roses.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  I forced down a couple more mouthfuls and scarpered upstairs, trying to work out what was going on. Doreen snapping at me was nothing unusual but after all that ‘What an honour, she’s a remarkable woman’ stuff she’d been giving Pritchard on the phone, the sudden downer on Norma Craig was more than weird. Still, I’d got bigger things to worry about.

  I pulled Lincoln’s laptop on to my knees and went back to his emails, checking for messages to or from newspapers, sent around the time he was in Ukraine. I waded through loads from girls with names like Chloe, Emma, Zara and Abbie, all badgering him with invites to dinners and parties. I don’t know why they bothered; half the time he never even replied.

  I kept going and nearly missed a message he’d sent to a man called Stephen Dawes at The Times. It was dated 12 Feb – three weeks before the crash.

  Stephen,

  What would you say to a piece on Kiev’s latest tourist attraction – the recently opened KGB Archive? I’d like to follow up some of the human dramas documented in the files, interview survivors and/or their families and compare their take on events with the official government version. I could do a bit of groundwork while I’m here and come back after the energy summit.

  Ivo

  The KGB archive? That didn’t sound like much of a tourist attraction. Though I s’pose Mum might have been tempted. She’d always loved spy thrillers, ’specially those old black and white ones with blokes in hats and trench coats lurking under lamp posts. Personally I prefer movies with a bit less hanging around and a bit more action. But even Mum might have been put off by the photo Ivo had attached of the grim-looking KGB headquarters, not to mention the caption that came with it:

  ‘The secret service of the Soviet Union, the KGB, was responsible for terrible crimes against humanity. The Soviet Union is no more; and the KGB sank into oblivion with it. But it has left behind an enormous amount of archive material which the government of Ukraine has now made accessible to the general public.’

  But it looked like this Stephen Dawes had been up for an article.

  Sounds good. See what you come up with and we’ll talk when you’re back in UK.

  S

  My heart speeded up. So Ivo had been working on a story in Ukraine, or at least thinking about it. A search for Stephen Dawes turned up about twenty more me
ssages but they were all at least three months old and didn’t even mention Ukraine.

  I Googled KGB archive Kiev and got a news clip of a reporter walking down a long row of neatly numbered cardboard boxes, pulling out yellowing files and chatting away to a smiley, clean-cut curator who’d got his answers all prepared.

  ‘Opening the archive is part of the healing process,’ he said in bumpy English. ‘It is a way of coming to terms with difficult aspects of our country’s Soviet past.’

  ‘I understand there’s been some resistance to a complete declassification of the material,’ the reporter said.

  ‘Yes, and I admit we have had to be somewhat selective about declassifying more recent files, given that some of the agents involved may still be alive. However, I am confident that, with time, all such obstacles will be removed.’

  Yeah, right. Whatever the government was saying about openness it didn’t look like they’d be leaving any real secrets lying around for just anyone to look at. Even so, when the final shot froze on a close-up of one of the boxes, identical to the millions of others stacked on the shelves, I got a burning urge to know which ones Ivo Lincoln had opened and exactly what he’d found inside.

  Given the atmosphere at Laurel Cottage I reckoned it would suit Doreen best if I skipped breakfast and kept well out of her way till dinner time. So you can guess what a surprise I got when I was slinking past the kitchen next morning and she called out a sharp, ‘Come here!’

  I doubled back, slowly.

  ‘You’ve got post,’ she said.

  She put down her coffee cup and slid two letters across the table, using the tip of her red-painted nail, like the envelopes might be infected or something. But I could tell she was dying to know what was in them.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said, picking up a white one with the St Saviour’s crest on the front. ‘This’ll be a train ticket from Professor Lincoln.’ She looked impressed. ‘He’s invited me to lunch.’

  It was the thick brown envelope, addressed in funny spidery writing – Jo Slatery, Lorel Cotage, Saxted, Kent – that was bothering me.

  She was watching me, tapping the table with her nail.

  ‘. . . and this one’ll be . . . from my mate Bailey.’