Safe House

by Chris Ewan

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Rebecca turned sideways in her car seat and scrutinised me. Her dark-brown hair coiled around her neck and over her shoulder. Her neck was delicate. The skin lightly freckled.

  She asked, ‘How far do you want to go with this?’

  ‘I want to get to the truth.’

  ‘About Laura’s death?’

  ‘About everything.’

  She nodded, as if she’d expected me to say that. ‘And if I told you that you might not like what you hear?’

  ‘I already don’t like what I know. How much worse can it get?’

  She waited a beat, searching for something in my face. It didn’t take her long to find it. She reached inside her jacket for her mobile and tapped the keys with her thumb.

  ‘We should speak to Teare,’ she said, nodding to herself like she was agreeing with her own decision.

  ‘Shimmin won’t like that.’

  ‘Shimmin needn’t know. He told me Teare wasn’t working today. So we’ll go to her home.’

  I thought about that for a moment. The Isle of Man was small, but it wasn’t so small that I knew where everyone lived. ‘You have an address?’

  She shook her head. Raised her phone to her ear.

  ‘Directory enquiries won’t help,’ I told her. ‘She’s a police officer. Probably ex-directory.’

  She lifted her finger, hushing me. ‘Matt?’ Her face broke into a flirtatious smile. ‘It’s Rebecca Lewis. How would you like to make me even happier?’

  *

  Rebecca’s contact at the control centre came up with an address in Laxey, a small seaside village on the north-east coast. It was a half-hour drive from Castletown, from the south of the island up past Douglas towards Ramsey in the north. I barely talked during the journey. I wanted to run through recent events in my mind and try to come to terms with the revelations about my sister’s secret life. It was easier said than done. Understanding the path Laura had followed was going to take a lot longer than thirty minutes. Figuring out where that path had led her in the last days of her life might be even tougher.

  Rebecca was quiet, too. She only talked to ask me for directions. She didn’t expand on the nature of her relationship with my sister or their shared career in intelligence. She didn’t throw around ideas about Lena’s whereabouts, or our meeting with Erik and Anderson, or the circumstances surrounding Laura’s death. I didn’t doubt that she was thinking about some of those things. Maybe all of them. And it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she had some theories about what had happened. She was a few steps ahead of me – had been all along – and I just hoped that speaking with Detective Sergeant Teare would lead us towards some kind of conclusion.

  The address was for a place on Shore Road. It turned out to be a small terraced cottage on a side street leading away from the beach. The cottage was a pale yellow and the front door was split in two horizontally, with the top half folded back like a stable door to let in the noise of the waves shuffling against the beach. Next to the door was a large window. There was a light on inside. It revealed a cramped kitchen with a circular cafe table positioned just behind the window glass. The table was big enough for two people, but only one of them would have a view towards the sea.

  As a kid, I’d spent plenty of summer days on Laxey beach. It’s a mixture of pebble and sand, and when the tide is out, you can walk beyond the cliffs at the end of the promenade into a separate cove filled with rock pools. Nowadays, the beach is somewhere I walk Rocky out of season. There’s an ice-cream stall nearby, and the mint choc chip still tastes every bit as good as it did when I was a child.

  Somehow, I didn’t think we’d be enjoying an evening stroll and an ice cream with DS Teare. From the look on her face when she came to the door to answer Rebecca’s knock, and her swift double-take when she first saw me, I didn’t think we’d be enjoying much at all.

  Teare was dressed in a long-sleeved white T-shirt over black tracksuit bottoms. The T-shirt looked old. It gaped around her neck and at the ends of her arms, and there was a faded orange stain down by her waist. The tracksuit bottoms were shapeless and too long for her, the fabric rolled up to reveal her bare feet. Her thin hair was scraped back from her forehead and held in place by a plastic hairband. She gripped a small dumbbell covered in pink neoprene in each fist – the kind some women use when they’re jogging or exercising. It occurred to me that the top half of the door had probably been left open to draw a breeze inside while she worked out.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’d like to talk to you,’ Rebecca said.

  Teare glared at Rebecca and I got the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. ‘So you’re Nancy Drew. Heard you came to the station. Heard Shimmin threw you out on your arse.’

  ‘May we come in?’

  ‘No, you may not. Now bugger off. I’m busy.’

  ‘It’s important,’ I said.

  ‘Then talk to Shimmin.’

  ‘I don’t trust him.’

  She dipped her head. Showed me the whites of her eyes. ‘You should. He’s a big fan of your dad’s.’

  She went to swing the door closed. I put my hand in the way, palm flat against the varnished wood. The impact jarred my bad shoulder in a way I didn’t relish.

  ‘Please. This is about more than my bike crash now. It’s about my sister’s death, too. We think they may be connected.’

  Teare paused. Breathed deeply. She looked like she wanted to bounce the door off my head. But I could see I’d got her interest.

  ‘Connected how?’

  ‘By Laura’s work,’ Rebecca said. ‘She was an officer with British Intelligence.’

  Teare smirked. Wiped the back of her hand across her nostrils. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Very,’ Rebecca said. ‘Now, may we come in?’

  *

  Teare led us along a short corridor to a dingy sitting room at the rear of the cottage. A black leather sofa faced a flatscreen television. The television was screening an exercise video featuring a minor soap actress chanting bouncy encouragement. Teare jabbed some buttons on a remote, killing the picture and the hum of a DVD machine. Then she kicked a thin blue exercise mat towards a pair of French doors that opened on to a scruffy patio terrace.

  She left the room and returned shortly after with a fold-out wooden chair. I recognised it as one of the chairs that had been nestled beneath the table I’d seen through the kitchen window. She collapsed on to it and gestured at the sofa with a weary swing of her arm.

  ‘Sit. Make yourselves uncomfortable.’

  After a moment’s thought, Rebecca selected the far end, positioning me closer to Teare. The bitter tang of her sweat was pungent in the enclosed room.

  ‘So which one are you?’ she asked me.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The Hardy Boys. She’s Nancy Drew. That makes you either Frank or Joe Hardy.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, and shuffled forwards on the sofa cushion to keep my shoulder clear of the backrest. ‘We need your help.’

  ‘So you said. I still don’t see why.’

  She dug a hand inside the pocket of her jogging trousers and removed a can of Diet Coke that she must have fetched from the kitchen at the same time as the chair. She tapped the lid twice, then popped the seal. She drank greedily, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her T-shirt when she was finished.

  ‘You asked questions,’ I said. ‘About my crash. When you came to speak to me at the hospital.’

  ‘Shimmin asked questions, too.’

  ‘No he didn’t. He did everything but ask questions. He didn’t want to know.’

  Teare drained some more of her Coke. Her lips slurped noisily at the can. She was slouched in her chair, legs spread, with her bare toes clawing into the dark-green carpet. Her feet looked dry and callused. A thick pad of skin had yellowed at her heel.

  ‘File’s closed,’ she said.

  Rebecca nodded. ‘We saw the incident report.’

&
nbsp; ‘So then you know there’s nothing to investigate.’

  I glanced at Rebecca. It was difficult to know where to take things. Erik had asked us not to go to the police about Lena. He’d said the risk to her could be increased if we did. But Erik had lied to us. His credibility was shot.

  ‘What about my sister’s death?’ I asked.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Is the file closed on that, too?’

  ‘’Course it is. She killed herself. I’m sorry, but that’s how it was.’

  ‘She was worried about something before she died.’

  Teare pulled a face that seemed to say, well, duh!

  ‘That’s how Rebecca became involved,’ I said. And then I went on to tell her what Mum had told me. About Laura’s skittishness in the days before her death. How tired she’d been. Her difficulty sleeping. How she’d asked Mum to contact Rebecca if anything happened to her.

  ‘So?’ Teare asked.

  ‘So she was afraid,’ I said.

  ‘Or she was depressed. Under stress. Something personal, maybe. It’s still suicide. Reason doesn’t change it.’

  ‘If it was suicide, why would she have asked my mum to contact Rebecca?’

  ‘I dunno. Maybe she wasn’t thinking straight. Depression can do that to you. Paranoia, maybe. Could be a hundred reasons.’

  Rebecca reached for my arm. Pulled me back gently, so that her view of Teare was unobstructed. ‘Did you attend the scene?’

  ‘Where she did it, you mean? No, I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Shimmin. Some uniform, I guess. Some SOCO guys. And later I heard they had to get a fire crew and a hire crane out. To lift the car.’

  ‘Why weren’t you there?’

  She shrugged. ‘It was early in the morning. Before my shift. And Shimmin’s my superior. He didn’t need my help.’

  ‘Did you offer?’

  ‘’Course I did.’ She scratched absently at her gut. Her T-shirt hitched up, revealing a slab of pasty skin. The dark slot of her navel. ‘No offence,’ she said to me, ‘but we don’t get many like your sister. Pills, maybe. But a car off a cliff? I hadn’t seen one of those.’

  ‘So why did Shimmin say no?’

  She sniffed her fingers. Grimaced. ‘He already had it under control. And it’s not like we’re in some television cop show. We don’t all have partners and go round investigating crimes in pairs.’

  ‘You came to my hospital room in a pair.’

  She shrugged again. ‘I was the one who took the call from uniform, after your doctors phoned in to report some of the quirks in what you were saying.’

  ‘And Shimmin?’

  ‘He said he’d tag along. I guess he thought your old man might be there. Maybe he’d share a few stories with him about the good old days of the TT. Or maybe he reckoned I’d be too insensitive, what with the background of your sister’s death, and all. I have a reputation for it.’ She raised her can, as if in a silent toast.

  ‘Did you know my sister was a spy?’

  Teare fought a grin. Her teeth were crooked. Lips cracked. ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Rebecca said. ‘We worked together.’

  ‘Oh, this is priceless.’ She hooked a thumb at Rebecca. Hoisted her eyebrow for my benefit. ‘You believe this?’

  ‘I have reason to.’

  ‘Yeah. What reason?’

  I was silent. Thinking hard. My reason was Rebecca’s say-so. It was Anderson’s use of a name my sister had adopted when we’d played at being make-believe investigators as children. Nothing more than that. Nothing substantial.

  ‘I want to go back to Rob’s bike accident,’ Rebecca said. ‘Someone reported it to the emergency control centre. Otherwise how would an ambulance have turned up?’

  Teare contemplated her Coke can. She rolled out her bottom lip. Peered inside the teardrop-shaped hole.

  ‘That seems to me an obvious avenue to explore,’ Rebecca said. ‘I take it you did that.’

  ‘I can’t comment,’ Teare muttered. ‘Can’t talk about an investigation.’

  ‘Then it’s just as well I called the witness myself, isn’t it?’

  Teare’s head snapped round. Her eyes narrowed. Running calculations. ‘How’d you get that number?’

  ‘That’s largely irrelevant. But what I think is interesting is that the man who answered my call claimed to have no knowledge of any accident. No link to the Isle of Man. Almost as if he’d never been contacted.’

  ‘So you got the wrong number.’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘Did you see the tyre tracks outside the cottage? They were recent. From the rental car Rob saw. And why didn’t you get someone out to take a look at the heating system, to confirm one way or another whether any work had been carried out on it?’

  ‘Now hold on –’

  ‘Did you know a white van was spotted in the vicinity of the plantation in the weeks leading up to Rob’s crash? Did you know the entire cottage was wired for surveillance? Every room? Cameras and microphones?’

  That caught Teare. She wasn’t trying to speak any longer. But her eyes were alive with questions.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Rebecca said, ‘that you’re either so incompetent you should be fired, or you deliberately chose not to investigate any of the quirks you mentioned. And yes, you work for a small police force on a small island, but you strike me as intelligent and motivated enough. You said yourself you’d been itching to get out and look at the aftermath of Laura’s accident. But you didn’t poke around Rob’s incident at all.’

  ‘She asked me questions at the hospital,’ I pointed out.

  Rebecca nodded. ‘And then all that zest and inquisitiveness left you completely, Detective Sergeant Teare. Almost as if it evaporated. Which is odd, wouldn’t you say? I mean, if a girl playing Nancy Drew can find a whole bunch of inconsistencies in a case like this, then a seasoned police investigator like yourself should have no problem at all doing the same thing. All of which makes me think someone told you not to ask any more questions. And since I’m only the amateur here, I’m going to guess it was DI Shimmin. But as the professional, maybe you could let me know if I’m right?’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Menser and Clarke took the first car, the one without the sedated girl in the boot. Clarke did the driving. He drove along a series of A roads to Preston, then joined the M6 and accelerated north. The journey ahead of them wasn’t long and traffic was minimal. Darkness had fallen and it was warm and intimate inside the car. Too warm and intimate. The silence was pressing. It was a living thing, pulsing between them. Clarke switched the radio on, tuning into a local station, but Menser dialled it down. He wanted to think. To concentrate.

  Clarke cleared his throat. ‘So, I apologise,’ he said.

  ‘That’s it? You apologise?’

  ‘I made a mistake.’

  Menser braced his elbow against the door panel and rested his head on his closed fist. ‘You made a lot of mistakes.’

  Clarke looked across at him, the glow of the instrument dials casting his face in an orange hue. That ridiculous soul-patch below his bottom lip. His pensive eyes.

  ‘You want to know why I called an ambulance?’ Clarke asked.

  Menser said nothing.

  Clarke spread his fingers above the steering wheel. ‘First of all, it’s not what you think.’

  ‘What do I think?’

  He shrugged. ‘Brainy guy like you, you could come up with a lot of ideas. And maybe one of those ideas is that I tried to sabotage the assignment in some way.’

  Menser didn’t reply. Sabotage had been his first thought. His second was to ask himself why.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t do that,’ Clarke said. ‘What would be in it for me? Why would I suffer weeks in a surveillance van with you if I was planning to let you down? Why would I help you take the girl? Why would I leave her with those guys just now?’

  Menser had asked himself the same
questions already. Many times. He hadn’t come up with an answer. Not a satisfactory one, anyway.

  ‘Truth is,’ Clarke said, ‘I felt sorry for the biker.’

  Menser stared at him, his eyes tracking the headlamps of the 4x4 that was overtaking them. ‘You felt sorry for him?’

  ‘He was hurt. Scared.’

  ‘Jesus, Clarke. The girl was hurt and scared. The guy who ran from you in the woods was definitely scared. And what about his buddy? You know, the one you tied to a chair and drowned? He looked pretty scared to me.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘It was?’

  Clarke nodded. ‘He knew what he was getting into. What he was involved in. But not the biker. He got caught up in this thing by accident.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  There was an illuminated road sign ahead. It was the sign he’d been looking for. They were closing in on Lancaster.

  ‘Take the next junction,’ Menser said. He checked the time on the dash. ‘Ferry doesn’t leave for nearly five hours. Look for a hotel. Nothing fancy. We’ll get some sleep.’

  Clarke flicked on his indicators. Moderated his speed.

  ‘Will you talk to him for me?’ Clarke asked.

  Menser said nothing. He looked out his side window at the curving off-ramp.

  ‘Will you explain for me? Tell him why I did it?’

  Menser remained silent. He stayed that way as they approached a set of traffic lights, as they turned and crawled along the road, passing retail parks filled with two-storey office buildings and chain restaurants and garage concessions and out-of-town gyms, looking for the neon glow of a motorist’s hotel.

  And all the while, he was thinking hard. Thinking about the girl in the boot of the second car. About her behaviour. How disconnected she’d been. Asking himself if he was right to be concerned by her attitude. If she knew something he didn’t. Something important.