by Eva Hudson
5
It was still raining hard, and the windshield wipers left a smear in the middle of her vision with every swipe. The satnav directed Ingrid west out of London, passing several turnoffs for Heathrow. She shook her head at each one. This was not the day she had planned.
The steel gray sky deepened into charcoal as she reached the outskirts of the city, and she scanned the dash of her rental for the light controls. She tried one button after another and inadvertently turned on the radio and caught the evening news. The announcer sounded so sober compared to the bulletins she’d listened to back home. Her ears tuned in at the mention of Heathrow.
“The American Airlines flight 3046 was forced to divert to Shannon Airport in Ireland when a disruptive passenger attempted to open the emergency exit mid-flight…”
Ingrid pictured the man in the Miami Dolphins cap.
“The man, a Florida resident in his forties, was arrested by the Garda. It is not thought to be terrorist related. Passengers have been further inconvenienced by bad weather as Storm Tanya has grounded all flights from Shannon for the time being.”
Ingrid managed a smile. Her day wouldn’t have gone the way she planned anyway. She switched over to a music station and found herself singing along enthusiastically to an anthem about swinging from a chandelier.
It took an hour and ten minutes to reach Burnt Oak, a village sixty miles west of London. It was big enough to have a high street with two banks and a collection of upmarket boutiques. A cook shop sold premium kitchen wares, a florist offered gifts for gardeners, an old-fashioned menswear store displayed tweed caps and silk handkerchiefs in the window, while several clothing stores served women in the market for floaty garments with elasticized waists. It was the epitome of middle-aged and middle class. There was probably a tennis club and a rugby club and an annual beautiful gardens competition. Even in the pouring rain, Burnt Oak looked pleased with itself.
London was encircled with towns and villages just like it where—even in 2016—ninety percent of travelers on the early morning trains were men in suits commuting to well-paid jobs. Their wives practiced yoga and made batches of soup from home-grown vegetables between the school runs. Ingrid had a name for places like Burnt Oak: Stepford.
She drove straight through the village and out the other side, following the directions to Greenacre Lane, a long road that curved through sodden fields. A small herd of cows sheltered under a large, bare oak, its branches reaching out to the rumbling clouds as if inviting lightning to strike.
A heap of tattered and decaying bouquets of flowers marked the place where Matthew Harding lost his life. It was at a curve in the road, so Ingrid drove on a little way and found a safe spot to pull over. She looked through the rear window at the floral shrine, the rain blurring her view before a sharp swipe of the rear wiper brought it back into focus. Ingrid was one hundred percent certain she had never been there before.
Ingrid switched off the engine and pulled up the hood of her jacket. She stepped out onto a gravel verge and scanned Greenacre Lane, squinting against the rain. Harding had been killed at a long curve in the road. It was a classic spot for an accident on two wheels; just when you think you can straighten up you veer into the gulley. Especially if the weather was this bad.
Ingrid jogged through the puddles to the fallen regiment of bouquets and crouched down. Some of them were a month old, were well on their way to becoming more trash than tribute. Rain and grime slicked the cellophane wrappings, and handwritten notes of condolence were pulpy and smudged. A couple of cards had been laminated, including one from the local tennis club that read, ‘You cannot be serious’. The only other legible card simply said ‘Semper Fidelis’, a Latin inscription equally beloved by college fraternities and tattoo parlors. From what she knew about Matthew Harding, she’d be surprised if he had set foot in either.
The light was fading. Ingrid wiped the rain from her face and hurried back to the car. The windows started to steam the moment she closed the door. She opened Google maps on her phone and waited for the app to pinpoint her location. Apart from a golf course and a farm, her screen was entirely green save the bisecting white line of Greenacre Lane. There was almost nothing there, which explained why no cars had passed since she’d parked.
With no traffic, and the encroaching gloom, Ingrid wasn’t going to find what she needed if she hung around. Her priority had to be finding a witness, someone who could give a description of whoever had been riding on the morning of the nineteenth. She turned the car around and headed back toward the village. She slowed when she saw a pub.
The Barley Mow was more down-market than she expected. It was about a mile out of Burnt Oak, nestled between a gas station and a sign-maker’s workshop. Six cars were parked outside. That seemed like a brisk trade for an isolated establishment in the middle of the afternoon.
Inside, slot machines blinked and flashed while two large flat screen TVs showed an Italian soccer match. It wasn’t a surprise to find she was the only woman in the place. What was a surprise was that the food smelled good.
“Are you still serving lunch?” she asked. She was suddenly famished.
“For you, of course.” The bartender was tall, slim and intense, reminding her of Novak Djokovic. He wore track pants and a hoodie with the logo of an Australian surf club. He handed her a laminated menu. “Anything to drink?”
Ingrid peered over the bar at the glass refrigerators behind him. “Is that an orange juice?”
“Orange and mango. Ice?”
“Thanks.”
He opened the bottle and poured the viscous orange liquid into a glass. The menu was not inspiring. Burgers, breaded fish and lasagna. A burger seemed safest.
“You want chips with it?”
“Sure.” If the burger was inedible, at least she’d have eaten something. They couldn’t screw up fries, could they? Chips was the British national dish, wasn’t it?
“Where are you from?” Below his right ear he had a word tattooed in such a cursive script Ingrid couldn’t read it. Probably his girlfriend’s name.
“The States.”
“You on holiday then?”
She took a sip. It wasn’t too bad. “No. House-hunting.” It seemed as good a lie as any.
“Oh, right.”
“Anywhere you’d recommend?”
He peered over her shoulder and Ingrid shifted on the bar stool to see a man look up from his newspaper. “Johnnie’s yer man. Got his finger’s in everyone’s pies.” He gave her a wink. “Johnnie?”
“Yes, mate?”
“This lady here would like your advice.”
Johnnie smiled at her but didn’t get up. He was severely overweight and standing was something only to be attempted if entirely necessary. He gestured to an empty seat at his table and Ingrid sat down opposite him.
“Hi, I’m Ingrid.”
They shook hands, and he folded his paper. He’d been looking at the racing pages and marking up his picks. Ingrid pumped him for general information about the area and maintained her cover story by asking about schools, commute times and road safety. Johnnie didn’t mention the hit and run. Instead, he pointed to the map on her phone and told her the pros and cons of buying in each fold of the valley.
“You know your stuff,” Ingrid said.
He was a local boy whose business, he said, was ‘buying and selling’. He owned garages and parcels of amenity land, and when he got planning permission, he sold them on to the highest bidder.
“What about this area here,” Ingrid asked, pointing to the point on the map where Harding had been killed.
“All around there,” he said, “are estates that I think are owned by the Duke of Westminster, one of them big land owners, anyway. Not a good idea to go wandering about there looking for a plot. They’ve got guard dogs and electric fences.” He took a mouthful of beer and tapped his nose. “Probably men with guns and all.”
Ingrid must have looked shocked.
“It’s fox hu
nting territory.”
“Ah.”
“And if you don’t get hit by a bullet, you want to look out for golf balls.”
“I do?”
“Swanbury’s over that hill.” He nodded in the direction of the fireplace.
“Swanbury?”
“They had the Ryder Cup there last year. Second greatest golf course in the world.”
“Which is the first?”
“Depends who I’m talking to. Given you’re a yank, I’m going to say Augusta.”
She thanked him for his time and moved to another table when her burger arrived. It was better than she’d dared to hope. She’d been hungrier that she’d realized. What did the instructors at Quantico used to say? Better to run on calories than adrenaline.
When she got back outside, the rain had relented and the sky was dark even though it was only ten past four. Ingrid pulled back out onto Greenacre Lane and headed for Burnt Oak. She’d driven five hundred yards before a black sedan driving in the other direction caught her attention. It was another hundred yards before she realized why. It had a diplomatic license plate. They were rare outside of London, and she needed to know if there was a connection to the embassy.
Ingrid checked her mirrors, swiftly performed a three-point turn, and accelerated until the sedan came back into view. It pulled off at a junction marked by a sign saying ‘Private Property—Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’.
Ingrid drove on, pulled over, waited two minutes, then drove back to the junction and took the turnoff. After a hundred yards, the road surface turned to gravel and then became a mud track with a central spine of grass between rutted tire tracks.
She couldn’t see cameras or patrolling dogs, but was going to assume both were present. She came to a forged iron security gate and slowed. She peered through and made out the sedan’s headlights bouncing through the valley beyond. Ingrid carried on a few yards, switched off the engine, opened the window and listened. No dogs barked. No traffic noise. Just crows squawking in their roosts and the wind shifting through the bare winter trees.
Ingrid picked up her phone from the passenger seat. She waited patiently for Google Maps to pinpoint her location until she was a lonely blue dot in a featureless green rectangle. She switched to satellite view, hoping to reveal what lay on the other side of the gate. The image was pixilated at first, but when it loaded, she zoomed in. This time the image stayed pixilated. She zoomed again. Now the pixels were even bigger.
Ingrid exhaled so hard she whistled. The location had been deliberately blurred. Not even Buckingham Palace was blurred out on Google Earth. Or the Pentagon.
What the hell was beyond those gates?
6
By the time Ingrid made it back to the embassy, Jen had gone home for the evening. The building had an end-of-term feel not just because it was almost Christmas, but because many of the diplomatic staff wouldn’t be returning after the holidays. When President Brady left office in January, his successor would appoint a new London team. Screensavers on idle computers showed log fires flickering under canopies of tinsel and baubles.
Ingrid wasn’t very good with Christmas. She had wonderful memories of one Christmas in the late eighties when her cousins visited, but after her father died when she was ten, the festivities became a standoff between her and her mom. Svetlana Skyberg had grown up in Soviet Leningrad. After defecting to the US in 1976 following a bronze-medal winning performance at the Montreal Olympics, Svetlana tried hard to be the all-American wife, and the all-American mom. She demonstrated this at Christmas with elaborate, if inedible, meals and endless, unwanted, gifts. “In Soviet Union, this was the dream,” Ingrid was told. Whether it was Halloween or Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, Svetlana went all out to display two things: her allegiance to the nation that had accepted her, and that she could do everything on her own.
After Marshall’s funeral, Ingrid had visited her mom. Svetlana still took care of the pigs––even in the Minnesota winters––and still smoked forty unfiltered cigarettes a day. She also kept saying, ‘You don’t need to visit’ when, if Ingrid didn’t, she’d only be asked why she never visited. Svetlana had felled her own tree from the woods and dragged it into the house before decorating it with so many baubles and streamers it was hard to see a single pine needle.
Ingrid turned her attention from the miniature Christmas tree on Jen’s desk, twinkling to itself, to her own computer. She needed to find out what was beyond those gates on Greenacre Lane. The only aerial imagery she could review immediately was on public access databases, and the location was blurred on those too. She could put in a request to see the unblurred images from the CIA’s satellite, but that would take time.
The Ordnance Survey map of Buckinghamshire showed what looked like a farmhouse on the land she was interested in. A Land Registry search revealed the property was called Uppenham Hall and owned by Kingfisher Holdings. Unsurprisingly, the next thing she learned was that Kingfisher Holdings was an offshore trust, a shell company that allowed the true owner to remain anonymous. Ingrid fired off a request for information to the registrar, but didn’t expect to hear back.
Uppenham Hall was important enough to have a Wikipedia entry. It had been built in the 1780s by one of the proprietors of the sugar company Tate and Lyle, and the seventy acres of gardens had been designed by Decimus Burton, a landscape gardener famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page. It was one of the largest private residences in the southeast of England, and previous owners included a duke, a lord and a prime minister. For all its wisdom, Wikipedia had nothing to say about who currently owned the land.
“Ingrid. You’re back!”
She glanced up from her screen to see Marshall’s secretary in the doorway. She was almost sure the woman’s name was Penny.
“Hi.”
“Jen’s already left, then?” Penny was so stylish she looked French.
“Guess so.”
“Will you be joining us, or are you chained to your desk?”
Ingrid didn’t want to admit she hadn’t been invited to whatever the event was. “Still got lots to catch up on.”
“You must have. I think Jen’s planning several of these parties so she can say goodbye to everyone.” So, Jen was having a leaving party and Ingrid wasn’t on the guest list. Ouch. “Um. How was it? We were all thinking about you.”
“You mean the funeral?”
Penny nodded.
“Fairly tough. Marshall was only thirty-seven you know… Sorry, of course you know.” Ingrid had launched into her usual defensive platitude mode when Penny had been as close as anyone to Marshall. “It was really hard on his parents. Obviously.” Ingrid tensed with awkwardness. “It must have hit you pretty hard too.”
Penny pressed her lips together and blinked back tears. “Yup. I still think he’s going to fly out of his office demanding something gets done yesterday.”
“Sounds like Marshall.”
Penny paused. “Maybe see you later, then?”
“Sure.” Ingrid returned to her screen.
“Oh, almost forgot.” Penny hovered in the doorway. “I’ve not really done anything with Marshall’s office. I mean, there’s no word on his replacement, and, well, what with your history together… Well, I wondered if it would be better if you went through his things rather than me? You know his family and everything.”
Ingrid was taken aback. “Sure. Of course.”
“Thanks,” Penny said. “I don’t think there’s a rush. No one’s said anything about needing the office.”
“Leave it with me.” Ingrid didn’t like that co-workers assumed she’d had a special relationship with Marshall. Sure, they had a shared, if volatile, history, and she did care for his family, particularly his little sister Carolyn, but Penny’s implications of intimacy made her uncomfortable. However, if she found something sentimental in his office, it would be a good excuse to give Carolyn a call. She really should check up on her.
“Nice to have you back,” Penny
said before leaving.
“Enjoy the party.”
Ingrid returned to her work. She inputted data about Uppenham Hall and Kingfisher Holdings into the FBI’s open-source database that scraped news sites, social media profiles, alumni periodicals, government and public records as well as 4Chan and Reddit feeds. It served up connections and patterns in minutes that had previously taken weeks of research to deliver. Ingrid let it whirr away in the background and checked her emails. She was pleased to see there was one from the Met responding to her request for a transcript of the 999 call Matthew Harding’s wife had made.
“Sorry, we don’t have the manpower for transcripts at the moment, and I haven’t had time to find the exact call you requested, but here’s the link to the database and you can find the call you’re after. The password below will be active for the next twenty-four hours. Wish I could be more helpful…”
She clicked on a link to hear the recording of a 999 call and was presented with a list. Each entry was a recording of someone calling the emergency services. The first was a report of a trash can on fire. The next call was just screaming. Calls from several counties had all been handled by the same data center, and there was no way without listening to know which call was asking for an ambulance, the police or the fire department. Each call started the same way. “Emergency. Which service do you require?”
Ingrid leaned back in her seat and linked her hands behind her head. It was going to be a long evening. She would need fortification. The clock on the wall told her the basement canteen would still be open.
Fifteen minutes later she was back at her desk with the last portion the canteen had of Thai curry and two bottles of German beer. She opened the first of them on the edge of her desk and set to work. After a forkful of food, Ingrid clicked on the next link. And the next. She knew roughly what time Mrs Harding had made the call, which narrowed down her search, but there was no option to select by location. It was only when she clicked to listen that she could see where the call had been made. If it was from a landline, then the exact address was given; if it was from a cell, the GPS coordinates and cell tower information was listed.
