The Ingrid Skyberg Mystery Series: Books 1-4: The Ingrid Skyberg Series Boxset

by Eva Hudson

  On the ticket machine she noticed a large ‘help’ button above a round speaker. It had to be worth a try. She pressed it. A few seconds later, a garbled voice spoke to her. So garbled, she couldn’t work out what was being said.

  “Er, hi,” she said, leaning toward the intercom, “I’m a—” Explaining who she worked for was too complicated. “I work with the police. I want to speak to anyone from London Transport who was working at Westferry station this morning.”

  The metallic voice—male, African—rattled the speaker.

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t make that out. Could you repeat that please?”

  More unintelligible sounds.

  “Thanks for your help.” Ingrid walked back toward the exit. She sprinted down the stairs to street level knowing her best bet for finding Kate-Lynn without witnesses was to hit the phones instead of the sidewalk. At the bottom of the staircase, Ingrid saw something she hadn’t noticed on her way up: beneath the steelwork was a pile of cardboard and clothes. She reached into her bag and felt around for her wallet and pulled out a £10 note.

  “Hi,” she said to the pile of clothes. “I’m sorry to disturb you.” The pile of clothes didn’t move. She crouched down and gently grabbed a dirty, worn sneaker and shook it gently. “Hi,” she said again. “Hi, I really need your help.”

  The rough sleeper started to move.

  “I’m so sorry to disturb you.”

  A young, dirty face, eyes blinking in the light. It was a woman, no older than Kate-Lynn. Ingrid held out the £10 note. The young woman eyed her suspiciously.

  “I’m looking for someone,” Ingrid said. “She’s about your age. Eight, maybe nine months pregnant. She’s gone missing, but she was here this morning. I’m just wondering if you saw her.”

  “You’re American,” the woman said.

  “And by the sounds of things you’re Scottish.” It was one of the few regional dialects Ingrid was confident of identifying correctly. “I’m sorry I had to wake you.”

  The woman was staring at the £10 note.

  “Take it,” Ingrid said.

  The girl extended her arm and snatched it from Ingrid’s grasp. “What was it you were asking?”

  “Were you here this morning, just after five?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you see a pregnant woman. Your age. Wearing a summer dress?”

  “Yeah, I saw her.” Her eyes, now adapted to the light, darted left and right. “I’d just got here. Even this time of year, even this far south, it’s too fucking cold to sleep at night.”

  Ingrid knew it wasn’t just warmth that kept girls like her on their feet at night: it was safer to sleep during the day and be alert during darkness.

  “You alone?” Ingrid asked.

  The girl shook her head. It was only then that Ingrid saw another body lying under the clothes.

  “Boyfriend?” Ingrid asked.

  “No, just a mate. You got another one of those tenners?”

  Ingrid pulled out her wallet and looked inside. “I do. If I give it to you, what am I going to get in return?”

  “I can tell you where she went, your friend.”

  There were several beer cans lying by the cardboard mattresses. Ingrid knew exactly what her money would be spent on: a piece of her wanted to give the girl enough for a room for the night. She handed over the note.

  “I spoke to her,” the girl said.

  “How did she seem?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was she scared? Anxious?”

  “No, just lost. She wanted to know how to get to Vauxhall. I told her I had no fucking idea but that the trains would start running in a bit and she could ask someone on the train.”

  “Vauxhall? You’re sure?”

  “Aye.”

  “And did she get on a train?”

  “Took her five bloody minutes to get up those stairs.”

  Ingrid studied the girl’s features, assessing whether or not she was telling the truth or just what she wanted to hear. She looked up at the stairs above their heads then back at the girl. “Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem.”

  Ingrid ran straight back up the steps, tapped her Oyster card onto the automatic reader and waited for a train. She’d have to come back for the Triumph. The departure board said the next train was to Bank station, and the one after that to Tower Hill: which route would Kate-Lynn have taken? Ingrid studied the Tube map on the station wall. It was no longer as confusing to her as it had been when she’d first arrived in London, but it took a while to find Vauxhall station on the Victoria line.

  The electric train glided along the viaduct, passing between buildings and affording her glimpses into apartments and offices. Electronic announcements mixed with the tssh-tssh coming from other passengers’ headphones and a distant phone conversation from the other end of the carriage. Ingrid tuned it all out and focused on Kate-Lynn Bowers.

  She made a mental list of all the things she knew about the girl. She was from Illinois, but had joined a surrogacy program in California. She had escaped Nuestra Señora, leaving behind her phone and her wallet yet somehow managed to keep hold of her passport. This bothered Ingrid: from what Tom and Truman had told her about Nuestra Señora, it sounded like the kind of institution that would keep hold of their clients’ passports. In fact, Ingrid realized, that wasn’t the only thing that troubled her about the passport: in her experience, the kind of girl who’s desperate enough to become a surrogate isn’t generally the same kind of girl who even has a passport. Something wasn’t fitting together.

  Ingrid had to figure that, nine months ago, Kate-Lynn Bowers had been so desperate about something that she chose surrogacy, but in the very recent past something worse had happened to make her flee—she didn’t even pack a toothbrush—and board a transatlantic flight. She needed to arrange for an agent from the LA field office to collect the girl’s phone. If she couldn’t find the girl quickly, retrieving data from her phone was the obvious next step.

  Ingrid tried to imagine how frightening the prospect of giving birth must be for someone so young, especially in a strange country. It had to be a terrifying prospect for Kate-Lynn. Yet the threat of being forced to return to California had seen her walk out of the safest place in England she could have been with people who cared deeply—in the short term, at least—about her wellbeing. When she pieced together what she knew, Ingrid was forming a picture of a scared, vulnerable but strong-headed young woman.

  And then, of course, there was the bullet.

  The good news, however, was that it seemed Kate-Lynn Bowers wasn’t totally alone in London: she had to know someone in Vauxhall. It wasn’t like she asked for directions to Buckingham Palace or King’s Cross station. Vauxhall was the kind of place you only went to if you had a damn good reason to go there. All Ingrid had to do was work out what the hell that was.

  On the seat next to Ingrid was a discarded copy of the previous day’s Evening News. She was just about to pick it up and see what stories her old adversary Angela Tate was reporting on when her phone started to buzz in her pocket. She got it out and looked at the screen. That is not possible. That is simply not possible. She swiped to answer.

  “How the hell did you know I was just thinking about you?”

  “Call it journalistic instinct if you like. Honed over decades.”

  “You’re not on the train, are you?” Ingrid looked around the carriage, searching for a woman with temperamental hair and a penchant for leopard print.

  “No,” Angela Tate said, “I’m at the office, and I’ve got a slightly more pressing question for you, Agent Skyberg.”

  Ingrid got the distinct impression she was about to be ambushed by the most astute journalist in the city. She took a deep breath. “Go ahead.”

  “What were you doing at Truman Cooper’s house this morning?”

  14

  Ingrid clipped the security pass to her lapel and hit the button for the 23rd floor.


  The trip to Vauxhall hadn’t been worth it. It wasn’t so much a dead end as a Hydra’s head of infinite ends. She’d emerged out of the Tube station to be confronted by one of the busiest intersections in London. As well as the Tube, there was also a railway station and a bus station, not to mention a four-lane roundabout. If Kate-Lynn had indeed gone to Vauxhall there was no way of finding out easily where she had headed next. Sure, there were probably as many security cameras as there were traffic lights—the area was home to the headquarters of MI6—but getting the warrants and the manpower to obtain and study the footage would take days. Ingrid had conducted a brief tour of the place, and apart from a large motorcycle dealership with a seductive array of Bonnevilles and Thunderbirds, Vauxhall’s main attractions appeared to be a petting zoo, a collection of gay bars and an unusually dense concentration of Portuguese restaurants. There was no maternity unit, no café catering to recently arrived American tourists, no obvious reason for Kate-Lynn to go there. Assuming she had got to Vauxhall around 6am, it would have been busy with early commuters and finding witnesses would require the assistance of the Met. And for that, Ingrid would need an actual crime to have been committed. As the elevator doors opened, Ingrid remembered the bullet: if it hadn’t disappeared, it was the kind of evidence that could get her the back-up she so desperately needed.

  She stepped out into the vast open-plan office of the Evening News and looked for someone who could help her. Everyone was so focused on their work that no one even registered her presence. “Wow,” she said out loud, noticing the view. How does anyone get any work done here? The 23rd floor of Docklands’ tallest tower offered astonishing views back toward the City and West End of London. Ingrid walked over to a window, and made out a few of the obvious landmarks: the Gherkin, the London Eye, the gleaming new Shard.

  “Agent Skyberg.”

  Angela Tate, hands on hips, was dressed in a leopard print dress and her trademark patent leather boots. Her wild frizzy hair had slightly more gray than when they’d last met, something Angela was compensating for with a brighter shade of lipstick.

  “Angela,” she said, “nice to see you.” Five words Ingrid never thought she’d say to the Evening News’s chief reporter.

  “Come this way.” Ingrid followed as Angela Tate navigated her way between banks of desks. “Excuse the mess. Actually, I have no idea why I’m saying that. I don’t really care about the mess. Reminds me of home.”

  The office looked like it was doubling up as a warehouse, with stacks of boxes and crates at the end of each bank of desks. “Are you moving offices?” Ingrid asked.

  “Bloody hope not. We’ve not unpacked since the last move. Got taken over by Ivanov’s lot, moved us out here. Consolidation with their other titles. Probably be sold to the Saudis next.” She stopped momentarily and turned. “They’d only move us out to Osterley or some other suburban hell. So, could be worse.”

  “What’s the scoop of the day?” Ingrid asked, stepping over a stack of magazines.

  “Something I couldn’t get past the lawyers. Right,” Angela’s pace slowed as she maneuvered through a narrow gap between tall gray file cabinets, “this is the picture desk. Danny?”

  A man in his twenties with geek specs, an Elvis hairstyle and a buttoned-up gingham shirt turned round.

  “Danny is our deputy picture editor. Danny, I’d like you to meet Charlize Theron.”

  “Ah,” he said, getting to his feet. He looked Ingrid up and down. “You don’t actually look that much like her.”

  “I look nothing like her,” Ingrid said.

  “Oh, come off it,” Angela said, “you must get it all the time.”

  Ingrid had heard it before, though not often. She ran her hand through her hair nervously. “She’s got to be a lot taller than me.”

  “Well, you created quite a stir this morning when the pics came through.”

  “Can I see them?” Ingrid asked.

  Danny nodded and entered a flurry of keystrokes into a search field on his computer.

  “If I hadn’t been coming to see Danny about something else—can’t say what, obviously—and spotted you on his screen, the showbiz desk was getting ready to run a tease on the big Hollywood star who was joining the cast of The Belgravia Set.”

  A series of images fluttered onto Danny’s enormous flat-screen monitor like the flipped pages of an animation book. All of them featured Ingrid at microsecond intervals climbing off her Triumph Tiger 800 outside Truman Cooper’s Wapping residence.

  “Actually,” Danny said, “her publicist said she was filming in Cambodia, or Thailand, or somewhere, but for a few minutes we thought we might bid for exclusivity.”

  Ingrid stared at the screen. “Really? Isn’t a movie star more likely to be climbing out of a limo, or a cab?”

  “All the stars ride bikes,” Danny said. “Only way they can be anonymous.”

  Ingrid nodded. “So who took them?”

  Danny clicked on the top left corner of the image to reveal a pop-up window. “The G-Whizz Agency. Snapper called Emil Ali.”

  “Is he someone you work with a lot?” Ingrid asked.

  “The agency, yes. Buy stuff from them all the time. The actual photographer?” Danny shrugged. “Never met him but his name crops up every now and then. The kind of pap that sends a courier package just to get a celeb to answer the door in their undies.”

  “Nice.” Ingrid said. “He must have been sitting in a car on the opposite side of the road. I didn’t see him.”

  “The lenses they’ve got, he could have been miles away,” Angela said.

  Probably somewhere in the dog park.

  “So what I need to see,” Ingrid said, peering at the screen, “is everything else he took this morning.”

  Danny turned back toward his computer. Angela Tate held her hand out. “Before you do that, Danny my boy, Agent Skyberg and I have a little negotiation to carry out.”

  “We do?” Of course they did. Somewhere on Angela Tate’s body there had to be a tattoo that said ‘Quid Pro Quo’. “Sure.”

  Angela led Ingrid toward a small kitchen area where Evening News employees who knew how to operate a kettle made tea for themselves. The only beverages Ingrid could recall Angela drinking were of the alcoholic variety. Ingrid suspected her domestic skills didn’t extend much further than paying the cleaner and ordering take-out.

  Outside the busy kitchen was a small seating area with hard foam couches that were showing their age. Angela sat down heavily on one of them and indicated Ingrid should join her. On the wall above them was a framed photograph of Karlos Ivanov holding up an edition of the paper. Ingrid couldn’t work out why it was capturing her attention so much.

  “So,” the veteran journalist said, “we both know you didn’t come here to look at pictures of yourself.”

  “True.” Ingrid sat down and noticed a run in Angela’s pantyhose stretching over one knee, rising out of her boot and disappearing under her dress. She wasn’t sure if she should mention it.

  “And I know you’re not dumb enough to think I’d let you out of here without telling me why Truman Cooper needed the help of the FBI this morning.”

  “Also true.”

  Angela pursed her lips together, forming a craquelure of creases. “So, why are you really here, Agent Skyberg?”

  Ingrid was drawn again to the photograph and stood up to take a closer look.

  “Agent?”

  The caption beneath the image read: ‘A real Londoner. New proprietor Karlos Ivanov celebrates the acquisition of the Evening News with a pint in his local pub.’

  It was the Queen Mary public house in Pimlico.

  15

  Something moved out of the corner of her eye and Ingrid turned instantly toward it. Please God no. A plane was outside the window, no more than five hundred yards away. It was so close she could see it was a Lufthansa jet. No one else seemed to notice.

  Angela stared up at Ingrid, then followed her gaze out the window. “Ah, probably s
hould have warned you about that. It always freaks out the Yanks.”

  Ingrid couldn’t answer: it was as if she had seized up, a hundred years of rust accumulating in just a few seconds.

  “London City airport,” Angela said. “Sometimes they do get awfully close. Although I am reliably informed they are always further away than you think.”

  Ingrid’s pulse deepened as she watched the jet continue past the building and behind the adjacent HSBC tower.

  “When this place was first built it was the only tower for several miles,” Angela said. “You got a complete three-sixty. Had a friend who worked on the Mirror at the time, said they lost hundreds of man-hours watching planes land and take off.”

  Ingrid’s heart rate still hadn’t returned to normal.

  “Agent?”

  “Yes?”

  “You were about to tell me the real reason you schlepped out to Canary Wharf.”

  “Ah.” Ingrid looked again at the photo of Ivanov, buying herself a little time. She needed to throw Angela a bone. A juicy, distracting, irrelevant bone. “Wouldn’t I be better off speaking to one of your colleagues on the showbiz team? I’d have thought a story about an actor was a bit beneath your pay grade.”

  “Flattery won’t work.” Angela leaned in. “If it requires the FBI, it’s news. So?”

  Ingrid recoiled slightly, retreating from Angela’s aroma of Camel cigarettes. “It’s really not that big of a deal.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “He’s an old friend of the ambassador. I was just relaying some information to him, passing on a message.”

  Angela’s mouth crinkled, her lips forming a vermillion slash. “So that explains why you went to his house—not an adequate explanation, by the way—but it doesn’t tell me why you came here to see whatever photos Danny’s got on his computer. Oh bugger,” Angela looked down at her knee. “I appear to have laddered my tights. That’ll teach me for climbing over fences.”