Flight Risk (An Ingrid Skyberg Mystery Book 7)

by Eva Hudson

  On Marshall’s nightstand, squatting like a black plastic toad, was an old-fashioned telephone. Not so ancient it had a dial on the front, but old enough for the handset to be connected to the base with a coiled wire. She picked it up and was comforted by a dial tone. A call to directory assistance gave her the number for Belgravia police station. Ingrid asked to be put through to Detective Sergeant Cath Murray.

  “Hey there, stranger,” Cath said. “Nice to have you back in the country.”

  There was something so normal about hearing Cath’s voice that it made the events of the past few hours even more incomprehensible.

  “Thanks.” Ingrid knew she sounded weary. “Can you spare me five minutes?”

  “Are you okay?” Her tone was genuinely sympathetic. “You need some company?”

  “That’s a lovely offer, but that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “Not a social call, then?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay,” Cath said, sounding more business-like. “But before we get on to that, just let me know how things went back home.”

  They played on the same soccer team and were more than co-workers, but they hadn’t quite made it as far as drinking buddies. Ingrid was touched Cath was asking about the funerals.

  “And how are things now you’re back?”

  Ingrid looked at her empty tequila glass. How the hell was she supposed to answer? “Fine. Listen, could you possibly chase something for me?”

  “I can try.”

  Ingrid explained she didn’t want the ANPR request to come from her, or the embassy, and Cath knew not to ask why. Ingrid gave her the date, time and location she was interested in.

  “You want me to check London Transport as well?”

  “They have something better than ANPR?”

  “They do in London.”

  Every bus in the city, Cath explained, was fitted with several cameras, and they were much better at identifying drivers—and riders—because they were lower to the ground and in amongst the traffic. There was also a chance it was a database Red Box hadn’t thought to infiltrate.

  “Leave it with me,” Cath said. “Should have something for you tomorrow. Or the day after. Are we going to see you at footie soon?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to make training this week.”

  “See you next week then, yeah?”

  The two friends said goodbye and Ingrid went downstairs to pour herself another tequila. In the hallway, she passed the thermostat for the central heating. She considered putting it on, but feared the steam jetting out of the boiler flue on the side of the house might attract attention. Better to be cold than discovered.

  Back at Marshall’s desk, she was immensely relieved to discover that Facebook automatically logged Marshall in. If Red Box was monitoring her activity, masquerading as Marshall should buy her a bit of time. She searched for Marcus Williams’s carefully curated page and looked again at his photos. The future senator was styled as the sports jock, the academic, the volunteer and the dutiful son. She wasn’t going to find anything useful in his own posts, so Ingrid checked out his friends. Hopefully they would be less careful.

  She took a good slug of tequila and examined the names and faces. None of his friends immediately stood out, so she went back to the beginning and worked through them alphabetically. She examined everyone’s timeline to discover where they had been on the eighteenth and nineteenth of November. All she needed was one of them to leave a comment about the excellent round of golf they’d played at Swanbury, and she was close to putting Marcus Williams in handcuffs.

  After fourteen friends, Ingrid was still only on the Ds. Her vision started to blur. She either needed caffeine or sleep. She opted for more tequila, this time bringing the bottle up from the living room. She opened iTunes and searched for some beats to keep her awake. Marshall’s most recently played album had been the soundtrack to the TV show Nashville.

  “Aw. Really?”

  Ingrid wasn’t in a country mood. She wanted drums and guitars. She scrolled until she saw Kings of Leon, then found a pair of headphones in Marshall’s drawer to make sure the neighbors wouldn’t hear. The liquor burned through her synapses and the relentless music kept her focused. She was half way through the Fs when she realized she was singing, and onto the Js when she suddenly stopped. Ingrid blinked hard, making sure she wasn’t imagining things. She looked again.

  “Yes!” She raised her glass to the screen. Alcohol usually increased her tendency to talk to herself. “Yes!”

  Jamie Jefferson, a fellow student at Oxford, the cox on the rowing team, had posted a photo of himself and two friends. They were in a damp-looking field under a gray sky. They had their arms around each other. Two were holding cocked shotguns, the other was proffering a grouse. The caption read: Awesome day at Sammy’s place. Ingrid wrinkled her nose. The geolocation tag was Bishopsgate.

  “Boom.”

  She poured another tequila and enlarged the image. There was no one in the background, and she didn’t have the right software to see if the reflection in one of the boy’s glasses would reveal a faint image of Marcus Williams behind the lens. But if a judge put Jamie Jefferson under oath, he would only have two choices: perjure himself or place Marcus Williams in the vicinity. And if Jamie wouldn’t, one of his two smiling friends would.

  Ingrid pushed back in the chair and ran her fingers through her hair. They snagged on a knot that she tried to unpick. She hadn’t looked in a mirror since the restrooms in Tesco, and her hair had been a bird’s nest then. Ingrid kept staring at the screen, certain she was looking at her Get Out Of Jail card.

  “Oh, you doofus. Call yourself an FBI agent.”

  The obliging Jamie Jefferson had tagged Sammy. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t clicked on his name immediately. The tequila, probably.

  Samir Karim.

  Karim. Karim. Why was that ringing a bell? Ah. The spelling was different. Kareem. “As in Sheikh Mohammed Al-Kareem.” She inhaled deeply. “Please tell me you’re related.”

  24

  Ingrid opened her eyes. It took her several moments to work out she was in Marshall’s bed. She rolled over to check the time on her phone. Her shoulder was stiff and head hurt, but possibly not as much as it might have done given the empty bottle of tequila on Marshall’s desk. Where was her phone?

  “Ah.”

  That was why it wasn’t there. Terror rippled through her veins as she remembered what had happened. The air outside the duvet was cold. She wanted to stay in the warm, but she needed water. And something to eat. And painkillers. She pushed herself up to a seated position, stirring the bile in her stomach, and slung her legs over the side of the bed. She had slept in the track pants she’d bought at the supermarket and was slightly impressed with herself for buying such versatile clothing.

  Ingrid rubbed the sleep from her eyes and crossed the room slowly. She reached the window and pulled at one of the drapes. Through the slender, bright gap, she checked to see if anyone was watching the house. It was Ealing, she told herself; everyone drove a nice car, but as best she could tell, neither the Audi, the Mercedes nor the BMW contained an ex-Mossad spy. Which was just as well: fighting for your life is always harder with a hangover.

  She pulled on the socks and sweater she’d worn the night before and staggered to the kitchen. Marshall was a coffee snob, so it was not a surprise to find a bag of artisan beans blended to an Italian recipe. She poured them into a grinder and flinched at the noise when it crunched into action. She found his Moka stovetop coffee maker—he always insisted it made far superior coffee than a French press—then opened the refrigerator.

  “Ew.”

  She’d forgotten about the rotting vegetables and furry milk. Her stomach heaved, thrusting a painful jab through her abdomen. In the freezer she unearthed some frozen fruit and ice cream. An unopened bottle of apple juice lurked in a cabinet. Black coffee and a berry smoothie. It was almost healthy. She took a swig of each and trudged back to th
e bedroom. She stopped halfway, her attention seized by a photo of Marshall and Carolyn, aged twelve, in front of the Gateway Arch. Ingrid had taken the picture, but could not remember why they went to St Louis? An aunt? A sports game?

  Ingrid sat down at the desk and picked up Marshall’s fully charged phone. He had three new messages. Not bad for a dead guy. It still demanded a code. She bit the inside of her lip. Maybe Carolyn’s birthday was worth a go? The keypad shuddered and told her to try again. How many chances did she have left?

  The monitor flickered into life, revealing details of her investigation from the night before. Eighteen browser windows were open, all displaying a different Facebook page for one of Williams’s friends. None of them put Marcus on the hunting trip to Uppenham Hall with Samir Karim who, it turned out, was also on the rowing team. Either it was an extremely unlikely coincidence that Marcus Williams was riding on Greenacre Lane just a few hundred yards from his teammates’ day out, or he had been very good at making sure he wasn’t photographed.

  Everything she had on Williams was still circumstantial. A prosecutor would persuade a jury she’d gathered evidence as part of a vendetta to clear her own name. Who knew what Williams’s teammates would say under oath. Would the influence of his father’s billions and political contacts be enough for them to perjure themselves? The fact was, she still needed Katja.

  Ingrid took a slug of coffee. The good news was that Katja was still alive, which had surely meant Red Box didn’t know she’d witnessed the accident. And if they didn’t know about her, then they couldn’t ensure her silence. The bad news was her only witness was too petrified to talk.

  Ingrid checked her emails. “Bingo.”

  The analysis of the number Katja had been calling in Turkmenistan was complete. Ingrid started to perform a fist pump, but found she needed her hand to stifle a yawn. She clicked on the email. There wasn’t much information, just the address associated with the number and the name of the account holder who lived in a small town on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Satellite imagery showed it to be a residential street with very few cars, usually a sign of an impoverished neighborhood. An image search returned photos of the town’s mosque and a nearby quarry as the local highlights.

  With the same number being dialed at the same time of the week, Ingrid’s instinct was that Katja was calling home. But if she was right about Katja being trafficked, there was a significant risk the calls were to whoever had smuggled her into the UK. Victims were often conned into making journeys with the promise of jobs that would repay the loans they’d been forced to take out to cover their travel costs. It was unlikely, but possible, that the regimented call pattern indicated she was phoning to make a repayment. Ingrid stared at the number. It either belonged to Katja’s parents or her tormentor. Calling it could put Katja’s life in even more danger. She needed to think a little more before picking up the phone.

  Ingrid wandered into the bathroom. Marshall’s hairs were still in the sink, his toothbrush still in the holder. It hadn’t been used in a month. How gross would it be if she…? Her teeth were sticky. Her tongue was furry. She turned the hot faucet—why did the Brits still have the hot and cold separate instead of mixers?—and held the toothbrush underneath the flow. A minute in scalding water was as good as disinfectant, right? Her teeth felt much better after a good scrub.

  Ingrid lingered in the shower for a long time. At first, she mulled over the wisdom of calling the Turkic number, then she simply didn’t want to get out. It was warm inside the shower cubicle and she hadn’t thought about what she would wear.

  “Come on, Skyberg. It’s cold, but it’s not Minnesota cold.”

  Wrapped in a towel, she entered Marshall’s walk-in closet. He didn’t have a lot of clothes—he threw things out the moment they started to sag—but they were all well-made, if a little dull. She’d never even seen him wear a colored sock.

  Ingrid pulled on a pair of slacks that she belted over a crisp white shirt, hoping the Annie Hall style was back in fashion. She looked like she was waiting tables. Ingrid looked at her feet. The one thing she had never borrowed from Marshall were his shoes, and the only pair she owned were the lime green sneakers she’d bought the day before. Even with two pairs of socks she couldn’t make Marshall’s size thirteens fit her size nine feet.

  “Ooh, I wonder…”

  Ingrid padded down the hallway to the room Carolyn had used. Under the bed were several pairs of Converse and a pair of brand-new Dr Martens boots. Carolyn either hadn’t had space for them in her suitcase, or she had decided her parents would find news of her sexuality difficult enough to come to terms with without her—and Ingrid could just picture Marshall’s mom saying this—‘flaunting it for the whole world to see’.

  The DMs were a pinch too small, but they would do.

  She was cold. She needed a sweater or a cardigan. On a shelf in Marshall’s closet was a neatly folded rainbow of cashmere sweaters worthy of a window display. She grabbed a cream one before rushing back to the desk. She’d had an idea of how to get into Uppenham Hall, but something made her return to the closet.

  The moment she opened the door, she forgot what it was.

  She peered at the sweaters and the shoes and the suits. What was it? What had she seen? It wasn’t the shirts. It wasn’t the woolen coat. She had the sense the thing she was interested in wasn’t clothing.

  It was the suitcase. Out of the corner of her eye, she’d spotted the case had a built-in lock. She kneeled down and examined it. It read 2112. Ingrid pressed the zip pulls into the lock and rolled the barrels, locking the case. She then thumbed the barrels back to 2112 and the case unlocked. So that was Marshall’s code. Somehow, she’d known it would involve the number 21.

  Alarmed that she still knew Marshall so well, she ran back to his desk and grabbed his phone. She tapped in the code and held her breath until the lock screen was replaced with the regiment of apps on his home screen.

  “Oh, Marshall. If only you’d been this helpful when you were alive.”

  25

  Ingrid didn’t speak Turkmen, and the inconvenient fact she was supposedly dead meant she couldn’t make use of the Bureau’s translator services. She hoped six decades of Soviet control made it likely whoever answered would understand a little Russian.

  She checked the time and was shocked to find it was almost eleven thirty. With the drapes drawn and the quietness of the suburban street outside, she’d thought it was much earlier. Turkmenistan was five hours ahead of London. Afternoon was a good time to make the call.

  Ingrid’s palms moistened as her fingers hovered over the keys. It was almost certainly Katja’s family, right? The odds of the number belonging to the trafficker were minimal, weren’t they? Heat radiated from her pounding heart. After a deep breath, Ingrid keyed in the digits.

  A woman picked up after a few rings.

  “Hello,” Ingrid said in Russian, “I am calling from England––”

  The woman talked over her. Ingrid didn’t understand what she was saying, but heard loud and clear that the woman was anxious. Her syllables tumbled over each other, her pitch seesawed. The static on the line didn’t help, but Ingrid was eventually able to work out the woman was repeating the same word. Wait.

  “Do you speak Russian?” Ingrid asked.

  The woman responded in Turkmen. Ingrid was unable to decipher any of it.

  “Do you speak English?”

  She waited for a reply.

  “England,” the woman said, still sounding panicked. “England. Da.”

  Ingrid heard shouting in the background. Then footsteps. A male voice. Should she hang up?

  “Yes?” The man sounded old.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Little.”

  “Do you speak Russian?”

  “Nyet.”

  “I am calling from England––”

  “Katja?”

  Ingrid exhaled so hard her breath was visible. “Yes, I am phoning about Katja–�
�”

  He dropped the phone. He had a frantic conversation with the woman. Ingrid had no idea what they were saying.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “Five.”

  “Five?”

  “Yes, five.” There was a long pause. “Minutes. Five minutes. Please.”

  There was a clunk as he put the receiver down more gently this time, followed by a flurry of footsteps and doors opening and closing. Ingrid could no longer hear the woman, but thought she could detect the man muttering to himself.

  Ingrid strolled to the window and checked the road through a gap in the drapes. A gangly youth in exercise gear loped down the street, taking a keen interest in the parked cars as if he was looking for one to steal. Or maybe he was checking his reflection in the windows. She scrutinized the houses opposite and satisfied herself none were hosting a Red Box operative on surveillance duty.

  She looked at the phone. The call had so far lasted three minutes. Now and then, she heard a noise at the other end of the line. She felt like a NASA engineer waiting for Apollo 8 to reappear from the dark side of the moon.

  A rumble came through from Turkmenistan. A squeak of a door opening. Loud voices. Footsteps. Then silence.

  “Hello?” It was a young man’s voice. He was out of breath.

  “Hello. You speak English?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “I am calling from England.” Ingrid chose her words carefully, mindful not to say anything that could put Katja in harm’s way.