by Eva Hudson
Like the rest of the building, Ingrid’s office looked tired and so dated it could almost be called vintage. Everything from the furniture to the ceiling tiles looked like it had come from the consulate of a small nation in receipt of international aid. Ever since the decision had been made to build a new embassy on the south side of the Thames, all investment in the Grosvenor Square building had stopped, leaving Ingrid and her colleagues dealing with a succession of leaks, drafts, infestations and compromises.
“Good morning,” Jennifer Rocharde said without even looking up from her screen, a telephone receiver clamped between cheek and shoulder. Jennifer was the division’s recently promoted senior clerk and was on a mission to show everyone at the embassy she had earned her promotion. Her eyes were bright, her tail was bushy.
“Morning, Agent Skyberg.”
“Morning…” Damn, Ingrid couldn’t remember the poor guy’s name. It was only his third day. It was one of those boring names, the kind of name a man in his fifties would have, not a twenty-three-year-old who hadn’t quite outgrown his acne. Trevor? Martin? “Morning, Don.”
Ingrid gave Jennifer a wave as she sat at her desk, sweat making her leggings slide over her skin as her behind hit the seat.
“Good run?” Don asked, nervously trying to make small talk with his new boss.
“Yup,” Ingrid said abruptly; she was distracted by the messages Jennifer had left on her desk. Her month’s absence from the division had meant a backlog of cases to be reported on, filed and closed. Pressed against her computer screen was a row of Post-It notes, stuck in an arc to resemble bunting. Three of them told her that Ralph Mills had phoned. Again.
Ingrid ripped the Velcro fastener of the pouch strapped against her right bicep, then tore off an identical pouch from her other arm. She retrieved a cell phone from one and her wallet and locker key from the second. She scrolled through the missed calls on her phone: there were three of them; surprisingly only one was from Ralph. She’d been back a week and they hadn’t spoken. She stared at the small illuminated screen, breathing deeply as she recovered from her run. She thought for a moment about just calling him there and then. Getting it over with. Getting the embarrassment out of the way. Her finger hovered over the call-back option. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Not after what had happened in Minnesota. In fact, she wasn’t at all sure she could ever face Ralph again.
“OK,” Jennifer said to Don, “Shaun from the visa team says he can get, like, three. Agent Simmons and Agent Ryan are in. How many more do we need?”
“How many have we got now?” Don asked. His voice was baritone deep: Ingrid wondered how such an impressive sound could come out of such a puny chest.
Jennifer tapped her pen down a list on her pad. “Seven.”
“Then we need another two; another four ideally in case of no-shows.”
“Ingrid?” Jennifer turned to her boss. “Do you want to play?”
“Play what?”
“Softball. Regent’s Park. On Friday. After work.”
Ingrid hoped her face disguised the surprise she felt: Jennifer Rocharde was not the kind of girl you expected to be indulging in outdoor pursuits. The twenty-five-year-old tended to get out of breath just bringing coffee up from the canteen. “Who’s playing?”
“US of A against the Republic of France.”
“Excuse me?” Ingrid turned her computer on.
“The French embassy is getting a team together.”
“Wouldn’t they rather play rugby? Or boules?”
“Oh come on!” Jennifer said, her cheeks flushing slightly. “You’ll be our secret weapon. You’re, like, the best at sports.”
“I haven’t played softball since Quantico.”
“And I bet you were brilliant at it. Can I put you down? Say yes.” Sometimes—often, in fact—Jennifer’s eagerness resembled a puppy’s.
Ingrid didn’t like the idea of spending her free time with Simmons or Ryan from the counter-terrorism team, but it would look bad if Jennifer could get them to play and not her. “I guess. Sure.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Ingrid was pretty sure she saw Jennifer perform a fist pump. Ingrid’s screen blinked into life. She keyed in her password and opened her emails while Jennifer got back on the phone and tried to recruit additional team members. How had Jennifer made quite so many friends? She had only been in London a few months longer than Ingrid and yet she was always meeting people from work, or telling tales about a speakeasy in Shoreditch or an Ethiopian restaurant in Kentish Town. Now that Ingrid wasn’t speaking to Ralph, she could count the number of friends she had in England on one finger. Not for the first time in the past week, Ingrid wondered why she had come back to London at all.
Don approached Ingrid’s desk. “You want me to run through your appointments today?” he asked.
“So long as my first task is taking a shower, sure. Pull up a seat.” Ingrid didn’t like being anyone’s boss—delegation and trust were two concepts she had trouble with—but she knew she had to be kind and encouraging to the new recruit.
“OK,” he said, pulling up the calendar on his iPad. “Your first—”
Ingrid’s desk phone started to ring.
“You want me to answer that for you?” Don asked.
Ingrid picked up the receiver. She could answer her own damn phone.
“Agent Skyberg”
“Please stand by,” the voice said. “I have the ambassador for you.”
Ingrid’s heart instantly pumped harder. The ambassador? She had never called Ingrid before. They had barely even met. A series of whirrs and clicks came down the line: the ambassador was obviously still in Estonia.
“Agent Skyberg, this is Frances Byrne-Williams.”
“Good morning, ma’am.” The words came with a little difficulty due to the tightness in her throat.
“I need you to do a favor for me.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“I need you to get to Truman Cooper’s house right away. You know who he is, don’t you?”
“Of course.” He was the Brat Pack actor Ingrid had seen at the gallery the night before. “My assistant will give you the address. He’s a very dear friend of mine and he seems to be in the most terrible trouble. He’s distraught.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“I’ll let him tell you himself.” The ambassador put her hand over the receiver and proceeded, as far as Ingrid could make out, to talk to someone in German. She removed her hand. “You still there?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“Truman is probably the highest-profile American living in the UK at the moment, so I want you to offer whatever support he needs. No press, no local cops. Discreet, that’s what I’m asking for.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“Thank you, agent. I’m going to hand the phone to Felix, he has the details you need.”
Once Ingrid had written down the address of a residence in Wapping, east London, Ingrid returned the receiver to the cradle and exhaled.
“Everything OK?” Don asked.
“Sure.” Ingrid picked up the locker key from her desk.
“You want me to continue?”
“Whatever is in my diary for today, I think you better cancel it.”
Ingrid opened her locker and pulled out her suit and her washbag.
“New assignment?”
“Looks that way.” Ingrid stared at her suit. It was three years old and had been packed in so many suitcases and traveled so many miles it looked like it had come from a thrift shop. Even she knew that bootcut pants were no longer in style. She peered into the bottom of her locker.
“Jennifer?”
“Yes?”
“Have you seen my shoes?”
“You took them home last night. You said you wanted a back-up pair for that thing Sol took you to.”
“Really? I did that?” Ingrid looked down at her sneakers. “Well, I guess I’ll be wearing these all day.”
; “Want me to go to Oxford Street for you?” Jennifer offered. “Size seven, right?”
Ingrid looked over at the eager clerk: she was starting to understand why she had so many friends. “You know I would normally tell you not to bother, but I have a feeling you’d make a better choice than me anyway.”
“Black. Something you can wear with pants or a skirt?”
Ingrid nodded. “You’re a star. And I’m going to need a car to take me to a place called Wapping in about half an hour.”
“It’ll be waiting for you in the garage.”
Ingrid swiped her washbag and headed for the door.
“Before you go,” Jennifer said. “Sol says he needs you to do target practice. Today if possible.”
Ingrid was halfway out of the office before she’d worked out what Jennifer had said. She popped her head back round the door.
“Target practice? He does know you can’t carry a gun in the UK?”
“Like, duh. He says you need an up-to-date certificate or something.”
“Did he say why?”
“Nope. Just that you’re going to need it.”
4
The embassy driver followed the Thames east. Between the buildings there were glimpses of Tower Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral, but Ingrid was beyond the tourist stage and didn’t look out of the window. She scrolled through Truman Cooper’s IMDb listing on her phone as the black sedan inched through the London traffic. Ingrid had seen more of his films than she had realized, mostly on VHS at friends’ birthday parties when she was a teenager, by which time his films had already been ten years old.
He’d become a star at nineteen, a proper dreamboat pin-up, on the back of a movie called Slow Dance and between 1983 and 1986 he’d made a string of films starring opposite his fellow Brat Pack members Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez. He’d played a dancer, a soldier, an athlete, a Wall Street trader and a public defender, but the all-American boy’s Hollywood career was over by the time Ingrid had started elementary school.
Her cell started to vibrate in her purse. She looked at the screen: it was Ralph. She let it go to her messaging service. She knew she had to speak to him at some point, but that point definitely wasn’t right now. She switched her attention to Truman Cooper’s Wikipedia entry which revealed that he had continued to act in theater, directed a few plays, taken the occasional guest role in TV series, acquired a stalker and won an early series of Celebrity MasterChef. Two years ago, he had relocated from his Montana ranch to London to star in a new TV series, an Edwardian period drama in which he played a fading American playboy who had unexpectedly inherited a distant relative’s stately home. The Belgravia Set was the most successful imported TV drama in American history, according to USA Today.
Her phone rang again. It was a number she didn’t recognize. She swiped to answer.
“Special Agent Ingrid Skyberg.”
“So you are ignoring my calls, then.” Ingrid felt a sudden pressure in her stomach: it was Ralph’s voice. A hot flame flashed over her skin, whether due to guilt or embarrassment she wasn’t sure.
“It’s been hectic,” she lied. “I didn’t want to call until I had time to talk properly. I’m sorry, I should have found a moment but—”
“It’s OK.” She could tell from his voice that it wasn’t. Detective Constable Ralph Mills was more sensitive than any other police officer she’d known, his heart worn prominently on his sleeve.
“Listen—”
“Yes?” He sounded a little too eager. Which made what she was about to say even harder.
“We should meet.” Ingrid hoped Ralph had some contacts she could use in her new role profiling Russians in London. At least she hoped it was her new role, if Louden would just add her rubber stamp. As well as billionaire art buyers, Ingrid needed to get access to the fixers and enforcers further down the income scale, the kind of men who cooled hot rubles into kosher currency or made sure beluga caviar escaped customs tariffs. The kind of crooks a copper like Ralph probably ran into every month, if not every week.
“I’d like that.”
She felt awful. She knew he was anticipating a different kind of conversation.
“How about lunch later?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh.” His disappointment was audible.
“No, it’s not like that. I just got a new assignment. I really don’t know how the next few hours are going to pan out.”
“Well,” he took a deep breath, “I’ll be at Borough Market from twelve-thirty until I have to leave for my shift. You know the stall that sells those burgers everyone’s going on about?”
“Yes, yes I do.”
“They’re as good as everyone says. Come if you can?”
She didn’t want to promise anything, but felt she had to offer him a crumb. “I will.”
Ingrid stared at her phone as it faded into standby mode. Well, she said to herself, that wasn’t the conversation I’d expected to have with him. They had spent one night together, a night Ingrid had anticipated would be the first of many. But then she had gone to Minnesota. An uncomfortable memory from a motel near the Wisconsin border forced its way into her thoughts. She really didn’t know if she could see Ralph, not after what she’d done.
“Do you want me to wait for you?” the driver asked as he parked the car.
Ordinarily, Ingrid wouldn’t have taken an embassy car in the first place, but as she didn’t yet know what kind of trouble Truman Cooper had gotten himself into, she asked the driver to stay outside. A getaway vehicle might be required.
Ingrid checked the address she had written down to make sure she was standing in front of the right building. All she could see were the enormous wooden gates of an industrial goods yard. To one side was a brushed stainless steel intercom panel. When she approached it, she heard the whirr of a security camera swinging into action. She looked up into its lens and pressed the button.
“Hello.” It was a woman’s voice. Ingrid couldn’t make out her accent from just two syllables. Italian? Romanian?
“This is Special Agent Ingrid Skyberg. From the US embassy.”
The intercom buzzed, there was a solid clank as a lock was released and one of the huge wooden gates slid behind the other. Once Ingrid has passed through the gap, the gate immediately closed behind her. She found herself trapped inside a newly cobbled courtyard, accessorized with mature olive trees, a brand-new Range Rover and a decidedly covetable Triumph Thunderbird. In front of her was a restored warehouse that faded lettering told her had once been the premises of the Dunedin Trading Co. A large steel door opened. A dark-haired woman in her twenties appeared at the threshold in the kind of understated woolen black dress that Ingrid suspected cost over $1,000.
“I am Manuela.” There was no emotion on her features, no inflection in her voice.
“Special Agent Ingrid Skyberg.”
Manuela opened the door a little wider and indicated that Ingrid should step inside. A faint sneer appeared on her face suggesting she thought Ingrid was from a lesser sartorial species. Ingrid was led through a hallway dominated by a heavily riveted cast-iron staircase and into an open-plan space which, despite the high ceilings and exposed beams, felt inviting as well as impressive.
“Sit,” Manuela said. “The gentlemen will be with you shortly.”
Gentlemen? Manuela’s grammar lacked the precision of her couture. Ingrid didn’t like having mean thoughts—English was obviously her second language—but the housekeeper’s demeanor had been so contemptuous of Ingrid that she couldn’t help but score a tiny, silent point against the woman. Manuela gestured toward a group of three Corbusier couches arranged in a horseshoe around a coffee table made from a single piece of wood and some kind of salvaged machinery that could have been found in the building by the renovators, or alternatively bought in a Belgravia antiques shop for more than Ingrid earned in a month.
Manuela’s heels clacked across the worn wooden floorboards back
into the hallway. Instead of sitting, Ingrid walked over to the huge casement windows and immediately gasped: Truman Cooper’s back yard was the Thames. The house was right on the river. “Wow,” she couldn’t help saying out loud. She stood at the window for a few moments staring at the view. To the west she could see Tower Bridge and the colossal new Shard tower behind it. To the east, the broad river curved south in front of a cluster of skyscrapers at Canary Wharf.
An expertly assembled collection of rugs, throws, cushions and art made the industrial room feel like a home. Ingrid thought about her own apartment; furnished simply and cheaply by her landlord, the only personal touches she had added were the vodka in the freezer and the free weights beneath the bed. She knew comparing her home to that of a millionaire actor was ridiculous, but she nevertheless felt a twinge of panic: the emptiness of her apartment was an indication of just how rootless she felt. In the space of a few months she had broken off her engagement to Marshall, been more promiscuous than at any other time in her life, and now Megan had finally been buried, the fire that had compelled her to join the FBI had been extinguished. The certainties of marriage, morals and career had crumbled, and Ingrid didn’t really know who she was any more.
“Agent Skyberg. Thank you for coming.”
The man she had spoken to in the courtyard the previous night was striding toward her.
“Mr Kerrison,” she said, extending her hand to shake his. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
“You weren’t?”
“No, I was told to come and meet Truman Coop—”