by Chris Ewan
Rebecca went on to explain about the white van the dirt bikers had seen in the weeks leading up to Lena’s disappearance. She outlined her theory about how an obstacle had been used to throw us from my bike. Then she told them about the telephone number she’d obtained for the man who’d reported my accident. She freed the scrap of notepaper from the pocket of her leather jacket and laid it down on the table.
Anderson snatched up the paper. ‘You called this number?’
‘Twice,’ Rebecca said. ‘The first time around, the man who answered said I had a wrong number. Then he hung up. I called him back. His phone was switched off.’
‘You blew the lead.’
‘No, I worked the lead. But talking of screw-ups – how did you come to choose the Isle of Man as a safe haven for Lena? How did you select a location that was bugged?’
Anderson crumpled the piece of paper in his hand. ‘That’s not something we’re at liberty to discuss with you.’
‘Shame. I have a feeling I might have enjoyed the explanation.’
Anderson was about to respond when something stopped him. He leaned to one side and slipped his hand inside his jacket. Pulled out a phone. The screen was illuminated and the phone was buzzing softly. He peered at the display, then stood from his chair, holding up two fingers.
‘Couple minutes,’ he mumbled, and moved away towards the rear of the cabin, where his conversation couldn’t be overheard.
‘How long had Lena been on the Isle of Man, Mr Zeeger?’ Rebecca asked.
Erik hesitated. He checked on Anderson’s position, then seemed to decide that the question was harmless enough. ‘A little under two months.’
‘Two whole months in that cottage?’ I said, and whistled. ‘It’s no surprise Lena was keen for a break.’
‘We were hoping to move her soon. When it was safe.’
‘Tell us about the police,’ Rebecca said. ‘You told us it would be dangerous for Lena if we contacted them. How so?’
Erik flattened a hand on the surface of the table. Spread his fingers. ‘The police would . . . complicate matters.’
‘With all due respect,’ I said, ‘they have resources none of us have access to. And they know the island inside out.’
‘Please, you must trust me. The people we are dealing with, the people who wish to harm me, they do not concern themselves with the police.’
‘Two men may have been killed,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been injured. You can’t expect me to say nothing.’
The fingers of his spread hand arched and tensed. They inched, crablike, across the surface of the table. I could see the platinum band of his wristwatch glinting out from beneath the cuff of his shirt. ‘I am sorry for your troubles. And as for my men, they worked for me. I do not forget it. Believe me.’
Rebecca rested a hand on my forearm. Clenched lightly. ‘I think all Mr Zeeger is saying, Rob, is that he’d appreciate us keeping quiet for the time being. At least until he and his advisers have had an opportunity to see if they can assist Lena.’
Her face was plain, untroubled. I knew she was experienced in dealing with investigations and the tough decisions they had to throw up from time to time. But I didn’t feel comfortable with what was being asked of me.
‘If it’s a matter of compensation . . .’ Erik began.
‘I’m not after your money,’ I said. ‘Christ. This is about my conscience. It’s about me knowing I did the right thing.’
‘The right thing.’ He nodded, but his face was tangled, as if he was having difficulty understanding. ‘But you must see, I do not have this luxury. I wish only for Lena to be safe.’
His striking blue eyes were fixed on me. I glanced down, then off along the aisle. Anderson was returning to us. He slipped his phone away and stroked his chin.
‘We’re almost done here,’ he said. ‘I just have a couple more questions. Tell me, did Lena say anything to you – anything at all – that you haven’t told us? I’m thinking before the accident. About seeing anyone watching them. Wanting help from you. Anything like that?’
‘I don’t believe so,’ I said.
‘She didn’t give you anything? A note? A message?’
‘No,’ I told him. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Standard question. Shot in the dark. Final one.’ He straightened his squat head on his shoulders. Stared hard at me like he was sizing me up for a headbutt. ‘Melanie Fleming. That name mean anything to you?’
I felt myself rock backwards. I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Looked from Rebecca, to Erik, to Anderson. They were studying me. All of them. I shook my head. Blinked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Who is she? What’s her involvement in this?’
Anderson grunted. ‘That’s something we’d sure like to figure out.’
*
Lena had her ear pressed hard against the cold metal door. She was straining to hear something, but all she could pick up were the vibrations of the engine, the pounding of the waves and the swirling vacuum sounds coming from her own ear.
Something had happened. She was sure of it. First there’d been the bleat of the foghorn. Then shouting – the bark of urgent voices. Then had come the low rumble of the engine straining hard down below. The deep churning of the propeller. The groaning and creaking of the hull. The lurching of the boat.
She wished she had a porthole, some way of looking outside. But all she had was this cabin. The painted metal walls. The noises she was straining to decipher. And the sense, somehow, that something had changed. That perhaps, after all, there was something to hope for.
*
‘They’re lying,’ Anderson said, once the tall guy in the sling and the hot-ass investigator with the prissy attitude had left the aircraft. ‘About Fleming. Probably about a lot of things.’
He crouched down and watched them walk away across the runway apron. The big man was shaking his head, like he had a bug in his ear. Rebecca Lewis was striding alongside him, her backpack over her shoulder.
‘What makes you so sure?’ Erik asked, watching them also.
‘His reaction, for one thing.’
‘And?’
Anderson stared at his employer. Lifted his phone into his line of sight. ‘And Lukas is alive. He finally called in. Seems he’s taken a tour through our Good Samaritan’s home. He found an image there. This guy Rob, and Fleming. Together.’
Erik absorbed the information. Nodded sagely. ‘Then do whatever it takes. I want Lena found. I won’t lose her again.’
Chapter Twenty-two
We got back to the car and I dropped into my seat, legs trembling. I slammed the door behind me.
‘We have to go to the police,’ I said.
Rebecca held up a hand. ‘Not yet.’
‘What do you mean not yet? You expect me to just take this? To pretend I didn’t see anything? That we didn’t just have that conversation?’
She put her finger to her lips, turned the key in the ignition and cranked the radio on loud. An advert for a Manx bakery boomed out. She balanced her backpack on her knees, unzipped it and fished around inside. Her hand emerged with a grey hunk of plastic gripped between her finger and thumb. She made a point of showing it to me, then closed it in her fist and leaned towards my ear. ‘They’re listening,’ she whispered.
Her breath was hot against my skin. I eased away. Stared at her. She unfurled her fingers. The device was no bigger than a ten-pence piece. Oval in shape.
I went to speak, but she covered my mouth with her finger. Lowered the volume on the radio.
‘I feel like a walk,’ she said, in a deliberate tone. ‘Clear my head. Any ideas?’ Her eyebrows hitched up, like she was prompting me.
‘There’s Castletown beach, I suppose.’ My voice sounded sullen and wooden. Like I was a bad actor reading over my lines for the first time.
‘Perfect.’ She dropped the piece of plastic into her bag. ‘Tell me where to go.’
I kept my speech to a minimum, conscious of every word I was uttering. The world I lived in
was becoming more peculiar by the day. Missing women. Private jets. Surveillance equipment and listening devices. I was having a hard time adjusting to it all. I can’t tell you how much I wished I didn’t have to.
Castletown beach was a sweeping band of wet sand and rockpools, fringed by dunes and wild grass and backing on to a coast road that ran alongside the airport runway. We parked behind a curved sea wall. Behind us, a terrace of imposing townhouses was painted in a pastel spectrum. Away to our right, above a tangle of seaside cottages and rooftops, I could see the distant stone outline of the medieval castle that had given the town its name.
Rebecca locked her bag inside the car. She showed me her empty hands, like a magician about to perform a card trick, then folded her arms across her chest and strolled down a wrinkled slipway to the beach. I followed her on to a bank of washed-up pebbles, then hauled her round by the shoulder.
‘What the hell?’
‘They bugged us.’ She shrugged. ‘Anderson planted it when he checked my bag.’
‘You saw him? Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I didn’t want to appear rude.’
‘Unbelievable.’
‘Don’t take it personally. Erik’s desperate to find his daughter.’
I clasped my free hand to the back of my head. Kicked a pebble with my toe. ‘What am I involved in here?’
‘You tell me.’
I paused. Peered hard at her. I didn’t know what she meant.
‘Melanie Fleming,’ she said.
‘Huh?’
‘Who is she? When Anderson mentioned her name, you practically wet yourself. And don’t think he didn’t notice. You weren’t exactly cool.’
I bent down and picked up a stone. It was weighty. Solid. I felt the edges with my thumb. They were smooth. Worn flat. Dry against my skin.
I turned and walked towards the limp waves brushing the shore. My legs felt leaden. My movements stiff. Close in, the water was a muddy brown. Farther out, towards the horizon, it was a steely blue. The light was fading from the sky above. In an hour or so, it’d be sundown.
‘Are you going to tell me?’ Rebecca called from behind.
‘I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘But it won’t make any sense.’
She joined me at the shoreline. I was standing in a knot of seaweed, close to a jagged rock surrounded by flat, compacted sand. I felt the heft of the stone in my hand. Tossed it in the air and caught it again. Eyed the dirty froth on the waves rolling in. An orange buoy way beyond that.
I opened my hand. The pebble fell among the seaweed by my toe with a soggy whump.
‘Melanie Fleming,’ Rebecca said again.
I inhaled deeply. Caught the whiff of brine on the air. The putrid stench of the decaying seaweed that had collected in drifts away to our right. I crouched down. Placed my hand in the chilly shallows of a receding wave.
‘I was Peter Parker,’ I said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Spider-Man.’
Rebecca shifted the weight between her feet. The toes of her black training shoes sank into the damp sand. ‘OK.’
‘Laura was Melanie Fleming. It was a game we played when we were kids.’ Another wave washed against the shore. I waggled my hand, watching the sand kick up from below and cloud the water. ‘We used to investigate things around the care home. If we thought one of the residents was suspicious, say, we’d spy on them. Or we’d follow the staff. Take notes and meet up to discuss them. That kind of thing.’
I straightened. Flicked the water from my fingers. Finally got up the courage to meet Rebecca’s gaze. ‘Laura used to love detective shows. Dempsey and Makepeace. Cagney and Lacey. Sometimes I’d sleep over in her room and we’d watch them together. That’s where Melanie Fleming came from. It was a character she created. For the game.’
I didn’t know what reaction I’d expected from Rebecca, but whatever it was, I wasn’t getting it. Her head was on an angle, waiting for more.
‘It has to be a coincidence,’ I said. ‘That’s why I didn’t mention it to Anderson. So yes, the name meant something to me. But I couldn’t see the point in telling them about it. What possible connection could it have?’
She clenched her bottom lip between her teeth. A strand of hair had come loose from her ponytail, curling around by her temple. It moved in the gentle sea breeze.
‘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 SUPERZ 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.