Authors: Chris Ewan
‘You think I should have told them?’ I asked.
‘Irrelevant. You chose not to.’
I bowed my head. Dried my hands on my trousers.
‘But hey, don’t beat yourself up about it,’ she said. ‘They held back on us, too.’
‘What makes you say that?’
She reached inside her leather jacket for her mobile. Prodded at some buttons. Then she turned it around and lifted it before my face.
‘Something else I did this afternoon. Googled Erik Zeeger. Look what came up.’
The image Rebecca was showing me was a screen grab from the website of the
London Evening Post
.
POLICE HUNT FOR MURDER SUSPECT
METROPOLITAN POLICE INVESTIGATING THE SUSPICIOUS DEATH OF A MAN IN A PRIMROSE HILL APARTMENT ARE APPEALING FOR THE PUBLIC’S HELP IN LOCATING A MISSING WOMAN THEY WISH TO QUESTION. LENA ZEEGER, AGED
23,
IS THE ESTRANGED DAUGHTER OF ERIK ZEEGER, DUTCH OIL BARON AND OWNER OF SUPER
Z
OIL. AN ARREST WARRANT HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR MS ZEEGER OVER THE DEATH OF PROMINENT ECO-CAMPAIGNER ALEX TYLER. MR TYLER IS BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED IN AN APARTMENT RENTED IN MS ZEEGER’S NAME . . .
I looked up from the screen. Shook my head. ‘Are you telling me Lena’s the main suspect?’
‘Seems that way.’ Rebecca lowered the phone. Slipped it back inside her pocket. ‘Erik and Anderson must have decided it would sound better if they made her out to be a victim in all this. You’d be more likely to help them if you were sympathetic.’
‘Well that explains why they didn’t want me to go to the police.’
Rebecca pouted. ‘I’m sure that’s part of it. But at least some of what they said is still true. They hid her here to protect her.’
‘Yeah, so she couldn’t be convicted.’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘Not necessarily. Somebody’s still taken her. And they don’t know who exactly. Or at least, if they do, they’re not telling us.’
‘They mentioned this green organisation. The campaign group.’
‘It’s possible.’ She nodded. ‘They could have the resources. The motivation, too. But there is another angle.’
‘There is?’
‘Melanie Fleming.’
I went to speak, to dismiss what she was saying, but she placed her hand on my good shoulder and held me firm.
‘The name meant something to them. Anderson wouldn’t have mentioned it otherwise. And he had reason to suspect a connection to you.’
‘But I already told you my connection. It’s nothing.’
Rebecca searched deep in my eyes. Then she said something that shook me so hard my bones jangled. ‘Remember that I told you I knew your sister? Well, Melanie Fleming was the name I knew her by.’
Chapter Twenty-three
Anderson had told Lukas to look around and see what else he could find. Lukas found plenty. The man was called Rob Hale. According to the contents of the filing cabinet in the corner of the room, he ran a legitimate plumbing business. There were customer receipts and records going back three years. There were orders for heating systems and spare parts and the ownership records for his work van. There were tax returns and VAT forms and insurance documents.
The bottom drawer was different. It related to motorbikes. Warranty documents for several machines. Glossy bike magazines and clippings from local newspapers. The extracts told him the man raced road bikes in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. He’d enjoyed moderate success. A series of top-twenty finishes. Nothing spectacular.
He returned to the laptop. Took a tour through the man’s email correspondence. The email was mostly work-related, customer communications and testimonials. Lukas reviewed the man’s web history. A lot of what he found concerned motorbikes. Parts suppliers, specialist bike magazines and blogs about road racing. Then he accessed the laptop’s file directory. The man’s document management was a mess. Most of the documents were scattered across the desktop screen or accumulated in a trash file that hadn’t been deleted. There were word-processing files, PDFs and JPEG images.
Lukas checked the time on the clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Twenty-five minutes since he’d spoken with Anderson. He crossed to the window and peeked outside. Nobody there. He pressed a button on the answer-machine. No messages.
Lukas allowed himself three minutes more and began to cycle through the documents on the man’s desktop. He found business invoices. He found personal correspondence to the man’s bank, his mobile-phone provider and the electricity board. He found something that caught his breath in his throat and made him crouch closer to the laptop screen.
It was a plain document with a photographic image centred on the middle of the opening page. The image was a headshot of a young blonde woman smiling to camera. Her head was on an angle, her hand in her hair. The photograph had been cropped into an oval shape, the edges blurred. There was text above and below.
Lukas recognised the woman. Melanie Fleming. The same Melanie Fleming he’d seen on the desktop image with the man called Rob Hale. But she wasn’t called Melanie Fleming in the document he’d just opened. She was called Laura Hale. And according to the text set out below her image, she’d died almost a month ago.
*
The man Menser had telephoned was angry. But he was good. He ran the contingencies. Developed a plan. Called back inside ten minutes.
The first decision had to do with Clarke. They still needed two men, on account of the girl. Menser was the clean-up guy. He was responsible. But Clarke was part of the deal. Part of the clean-up.
They followed the coast south. The coastline was low and flat. Lush and green. Outside the port, population was minimal. Houses scarce. They could follow the coast for an hour and see no one at all. No boats in the water. No fishermen on the shore. Jets passed by overhead, red tail beacons glowing against the twilit sky.
The beach, when they found it, was sheltered and mostly pebbled. A narrow track led down to it. There was a turning circle and a white-washed hut at the end of the track. Menser trained his binoculars on the hut. It was canted to one side, the wall bulging in the middle. Plywood sheets had been hammered across the window and door.
The beach looked OK. The beach would work. Menser called it in, then ducked below deck while Clarke prepped the dinghy.
The girl was sitting on her bunk, knees tucked up by her chest, chin on her knees. Her bad arm rested on the bunk, palm up, beside a bag of half-eaten potato crisps. The skin of her wrist was swollen and mottled green and mauve. He could see fluid gathered there.
She didn’t look up at him. Didn’t ask him what he wanted. He thought about saying something. But an explanation implied something. Undermined him. So he showed her the gun and told her to stand. Had her walk out of the cabin in front of him and made her climb the ladder while he trained the gun on her. The ladder wasn’t easy. She had to climb with her good hand, her injured wrist tucked against her chest. He watched her grasping for the next rung, snatching a step up, repeating the process.
She waited for him at the top, resentful but obedient.
The dinghy was in the water and Clarke was in the dinghy. A rusted metal ladder was bolted to the hull of the trawler. Clarke had a rope wrapped around a low tread, close to the surface. The dinghy was bobbing on the rolling swell, bumping against the hull.
Clarke called up to the girl. Her lip curled, and for a moment, Menser thought she might spit.
He jabbed her forwards with his gun. She grasped the ladder, then cast an accusing look at him.
‘Down,’ he said.
‘My hand.’ She showed it to him. Gnarled and warped on the end of her arm. It sickened him. The idea of her trying to grip with it. The snag of bone against skin.
‘You climbed up,’ he told her. ‘Now you can climb down.’
He raised the gun. Pointed it at her forehead. Held it there for the count of two until she began to descend. She struggled down three steps before Clarke was able to reach up and pluck her feet from the treads. She shrieked and fell into his arms and wriggled and bucked. Clarke held her tight for a moment too long, a wide grin slashing his face, before swinging her round and settling her on her backside in the bottom of the boat.
Menser slung his backpack over his shoulder and climbed down the ladder, his gun still gripped in his hand. The treads were slick beneath his feet. He could feel crusted salt under his fingers. A wave rolled in, sea spray wetting his bare scalp. He held fast, the inflatable floating up towards him, then dropping away. His backpack fell from his shoulder and hung from his elbow. He lowered a foot, treading air until the boat pitched up and his toes brushed rubber. Clarke grabbed him by the belt and hauled him inside.
The dinghy made things awkward. The confinement. The silence. Menser had told Clarke the change of plan and Clarke had absorbed it without comment. But he had to know there would be consequences. Repercussions.
And then there was the girl. Watching him with a neutral stare, her deformed wrist cradled in her lap. She was assessing him. Reading the change in her predicament. The change between him and Clarke.
A slow, sickly smile crept across her mouth. Teeth filmed with saliva. White gunk in the corners of her lips. Her unwashed hair greasy against her brow. Her eyes engorged in her gaunt face, like the eyes of an addict. But the light of triumph glimmered deep within them. A victory. Just a small one. She was radiant with it.
Chapter Twenty-four
‘Come back with me to the car,’ Rebecca said. ‘I think you should sit down.’
I didn’t argue. I wasn’t feeling good. I was groggy and there was a flat droning in my ears. I was trying to think straight, to understand what Rebecca had said to me. Her words kept repeating in my mind. They didn’t make sense. They couldn’t.
My sister. Laura. With a different name?
I stumbled sideways. Staggered clumsily across the scree of pebbles and driftwood that had collected near the slipway. The sounds of the beach – the breeze through the sand, the waves collapsing against the shore, a seagull’s squawk – were distorted and perverse.
‘Here.’ Rebecca opened my door and guided me into my seat. ‘Head between your knees.’ She gripped me by the back of my neck and pushed my head forwards. I could feel my sweat beneath her fingertips. Hot blood swirled around inside my skull with a violent centrifugal force.
Rebecca reached into the rear of the car for her backpack. I stayed down, snatching shallow breaths.
‘Have some of this.’ Rebecca was offering me a bottle of cranberry juice. I sipped the juice while she fumbled inside her backpack until she found the grey plastic bug. ‘Back in a minute,’ she said.
She walked to the edge of the pavement and dropped the bug inside a storm drain. Then she closed my door and walked around and climbed in beneath the steering wheel. She turned the ignition key a quarter-circle and powered down my window.
‘Better?’
I nodded.
‘A shock?’
I took another sip of the cranberry juice. Wiped my lips with the back of my hand.
‘You could say.’
‘Ready for more?’
I nodded again. Stared out through the windscreen at the darkening sea. The crested waves. The sun was beginning to wane. The sky was blooming a pale violet.
‘Laura didn’t work in the City, Rob. At least, not in the way you think she did. She was an officer for British Intelligence. We both were.’
I closed my eyes. Swallowed. Listened to the pop and crackle in my ears. ‘How long?’
‘She joined after me. I left within a year of her being there. That was four years ago. My guess is she was still working in intelligence when she died.’
I released a long breath. Looked some more at the churning sea. What I was hearing seemed impossible to me. The story of another sister. Another life.
But it could also explain why Laura had been so distant in the past few years. Her reluctance to share all but the most basic information about her life.
‘Are you saying my sister was a spy?’
‘Put simply.’
‘So why the false name?’
‘Protection. Self-preservation.’
‘But what if she met someone who knew her? Wouldn’t it blow her cover?’ Even as I said the words, they felt ridiculous in my mouth. How much of what you hear about intelligence work was pure fantasy? I couldn’t see Laura carrying a gun, seducing foreign agents, operating behind enemy lines.
‘Not everyone would do it,’ Rebecca said. ‘But it wasn’t a big risk for your sister. She’d spent most of her life on this island, remember.’
‘Not her university years.’
‘True. But you have to learn to compartmentalise.’
I swivelled my head. Looked at her flatly. ‘Isn’t that just a fancy word for shutting yourself off?’
‘You sacrifice yourself to the work. That’s what it takes.’
And, by the sounds of it, Laura had sacrificed her identity, too. The thought connected to something in my mind.
‘Mum said when she called you, she got the impression you didn’t know who Laura was.’
Rebecca paused. Her eyelids fluttered. ‘That’s because to me, she was Melanie Fleming.’
‘Then how did you work out who Mum was talking about?’
‘For starters, it’s not every day someone phones me the way your mum did. Telling me that in the days before she died, Laura asked for me to be contacted if anything happened to her.’
‘It’s still a leap.’
Rebecca took the cranberry juice from me. Screwed the lid back on. Tapped it with her nail. ‘Her middle name.’
‘Hendon?’
Rebecca nodded. ‘When I was hedging with your mum, she repeated Laura’s name – only this time, she said all of it. Hendon’s not exactly common. I remembered it was Melanie’s middle name, too. Then everything else started to fit. Her age. Her description. The Isle of Man.’
Hendon was Grandpa’s surname. Mum’s maiden name. Mum had been an only child and she’d wanted to keep the name alive in some way. So her first child had been christened Laura Hendon Hale. If there’d been a hyphen in it, it might have sounded posh, but not quite so unusual. Melanie Hendon Fleming didn’t sound any better.