Lost Lives (Emily Swanson Mystery Thriller Series Book 1)

by Malcolm Richards

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m sorry to call you. I have your number from when you made your appointment. This is Rosa, the receptionist at the Ever After Care Foundation. I wanted to talk to you about Alina.”

  For a moment, Emily couldn’t speak. Then she said, “Of course. What do you want to tell me?”

  Rosa’s voice fell to a hush. “Can I meet you somewhere?”

  “Now?”

  “No, tomorrow. Four-thirty. There’s a diner called Bramfords. I’ll text you the address. But Miss Swanson?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please don’t tell anyone about meeting me.”

  The line went dead before Emily could say another word.

  For the next few minutes, she paced circuits around the living room. Just as Emily had given up hope, Rosa had stepped out from the shadows. Synchronicity. She looked across at Alina’s portrait, into the fathomless blue of her eyes.

  “I’m meant to find you,” Emily said, her voice filled with new vigour. “And I will.”

  Outside, the rain continued to fall.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The morning arrived in a swirl of ice and wind. Entering the cramped supermarket, Emily picked up a basket and trawled through the aisles. She had picked a good time to shop as the store was void of its usual train of people. There was a different man working the cash register. As he scanned and packed her items, Emily glanced across at the noticeboard. The missing persons notice was gone, replaced by postcards advertising tarot readings and rooms to rent.

  Back in her apartment, she made herself a cheese sandwich and swallowed it in three hungry bites. It was the first food she’d eaten in over a day. Next, she called Jerome, reached his voicemail, and hung up. It was one o’clock. There were still three and a half hours to fill until she met Rosa.

  Unable to relax, Emily crossed the hallway and knocked on Harriet Golding’s door. A few minutes later, she was sat in the old woman’s living room, being served tea while she relayed yesterday’s visit to the hospice.

  “What an odd thing to do!” Harriet said, pulling a folded blanket from the back of her chair and draping it over her lap. A draught was seeping in from somewhere. “Why ever did you go there?”

  Andrew, who sat across from them, looked up from his book.

  “I thought her colleagues could tell me what happened to her,” Emily shrugged.

  “And did they?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’m meeting one of them later, a girl called Rosa.”

  “Well you be careful, my dear,” Harriet said, leaning forward. “You should be off finding yourself a nice fella instead of getting yourself into all kinds of mischief. And what about a job? I don’t know how you can afford to keep that place all by yourself and not have to worry about finding work.”

  Not in the mood for Harriet’s invasive questioning, Emily drank her tea and then made her excuses. By three-thirty, she had cleaned and polished her entire apartment and filled the washing machine with dirty laundry. At a quarter to four, she grabbed her thickest winter coat and headed out.

  Bramfords Diner was north-east of The Holmeswood, in Shoreditch. Using the map application on her phone as a guide, Emily walked the thirty-minute journey. She was becoming more and more familiar with the streets surrounding her home, and although she still found crowds intimidating and had to use her breathing exercise to remain calm, she was learning that it was easier to move with them than fight against them.

  By the time she found the diner hidden away on a cobbled side street, her entire body trembled with cold. Bramfords was a gimmicky affair modelled on American diners of the nineteen-fifties. Red booths with white tables lined both sides of the room, while a bright pink counter jutted out into the centre. Rock ‘n’ roll versions of traditional Christmas songs played from a jukebox.

  Slipping into a booth, Emily ordered coffee from a waitress with silver-blue hair and tattoos on her knuckles that read HELL YEAH. As she watched the windows, snow suddenly began to fall; a sprinkling of flakes at first, which soon turned into a flurry.

  The pavements were already covered when Rosa appeared five minutes later. She stopped in the doorway, her long red coat like a streak of blood against the white.

  Emily half-stood, half-waved a hand.

  “My sister’s taking care of my son right now, so I can’t stay long” Rosa said, sliding into the opposite seat. She was maybe nineteen, twenty years old at most, with olive skin, thick black hair worn in a ponytail, and dark, deep-set eyes that reflected the light as she nervously surveyed the room.

  “That’s fine,” Emily replied. “Thank you for calling me.”

  The waitress came over and Rosa ordered a coke. When they were alone again, Rosa squinted at Emily and said, “So, who do you write for?”

  The question threw Emily off-balance. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a journalist, right?”

  “Me? No, of course not. Why would you think that?”

  Confusion washed over Rosa’s face. “When you asked Olivia—Nurse Bates—about Alina, you said you’d met her through a friend at a party.”

  “That’s right.”

  The waitress came back with the coke. Rosa pulled it towards her, pinching the straw between finger and thumb.

  “Alina didn’t go to parties. She went to work and she went home. And she certainly wasn’t allowed to have any friends. You’re not a journalist?”

  Emily shook her head.

  “Then who are you?”

  “I know this is going to sound strange,” she said, “but I moved into her old apartment a couple of weeks ago. I found out she was missing and that no one was doing anything about it.”

  “So you are?”

  “I’m trying.”

  Rosa took a sip of her coke. “That is strange. I thought maybe you were with that other woman, the journalist.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  Pushing her glass to one side, Rosa said, “She turned up a couple days after Alina disappeared, said she was a friend of hers, that she was looking for her. She wrote for some website, something like that. She was asking all about Alina, and then she started asking about Ever After. Did I think it was well managed? Did I ever see anything out of the ordinary? Questions like that. So I told her.”

  Emily leaned forward. “Told her what?”

  Rosa stopped to look over the room, her eyes flitting from customer to customer.

  “That something’s not right at Ever After. That I don’t think Alina made it back to Germany, no matter what anyone says.”

  Silence fell across the table. Outside, the snow came down thick and fast.

  “The evening before Alina disappeared,” Rosa began, “one of the night nurses was running late because of the traffic. I volunteered to stay on and help with the less palliative duties until she arrived. I do that sometimes. Being a single parent isn’t easy, sometimes I need to take the extra hours to pay the bills. Anyway, Alina was also down to do the night shift. When she showed up she was even quieter than usual. If her shithead husband wasn’t on duty you could usually get a few words out of her. But not that night.”

  Emily put down her coffee. “Wait. Karl Henry worked at Ever After?”

  “Still does. He’s the head caretaker. Anyway, that night when she came in, Alina kept holding her side, like she was in pain. I asked her what happened, even though it was obvious, but she kept saying she was fine.”

  “Karl had hit her?”

  “Let’s just say it wasn’t the first time she’d come in like that.” Rosa paused, looking over her shoulder at the falling snow. “The nurse I was covering for turned up around eight. I was getting ready to leave when Sandy, one of the other nurses, asked me if I’d seen Alina. She needed her help with some paperwork but she couldn’t find her. When she didn’t answer her pager, we went looking for her. And I mean we looked everywhere. But Alina was gone.”

  “She left?”

  Rosa shook her head. “It was so s
trange. We checked the bathrooms, the patient wings, staff facilities, everywhere. Then, about twenty minutes later, she suddenly appeared on the stairs. Something was wrong. She’d been crying. But it was more than that. She looked scared to death. Before anyone could say anything, she ran through the front door. Doctor Williams came down and followed her outside. When he came back a few minutes later, he told us he’d sent Alina home early, that she was having some personal troubles and wasn’t well enough to work.”

  Rosa looked up with glassy eyes. “It was the last time any of us saw her. She didn’t show for her shift the next day. Neither did Karl. And then the police came, asking questions about her behaviour at work and about her relationship with her husband. I didn’t lie—we’d all seen the bruises. Meanwhile, that bastard was walking around with the sun shining out of his ass.”

  “But what about the police?” Emily interrupted. “Did they talk to Doctor Williams about that night?”

  “They did, but I couldn’t tell you what was said. A couple days later it was all cleared up. Nurse Bates and Doctor Williams called a staff meeting, told us Alina had sent a letter. They read it to us.”

  “What did it say?”

  “That she was sorry to have left so suddenly without saying goodbye, but for personal reasons she’d had to go, right then and there. Back to Germany. Of course everyone breathed a sigh of relief. People were sad to see her go, but at the same time they were happy she was safe. Happy she was away from him. Nurse Bates told us Karl would be returning to work the following week and that under no circumstances were we to mention Alina. Everything was to continue as normal.”

  “What happened when Karl came back?” Emily had been listening to the girl’s story with growing concern, and now her mind pulsed with thoughts.

  “It was like Alina never existed. That man went back to work like, I don’t know, like he couldn’t care less that his wife was gone. That didn’t make sense to me. Even if he didn’t love her you’d think he’d be pissed off she’d left him.”

  “You think he had something to do with it?”

  “All I can tell you is that he wasn’t behaving like a grieving husband. And that letter? Anyone could have typed it up. Everyone just accepted it, like Alina had stood there herself and read it to us.”

  “But you didn’t believe it.”

  “No, I didn’t. It was a feeling, I don’t know. Something telling me this wasn’t the truth.” Rosa paused, checked the door again. “I went through the employee files and pulled up Alina’s details. Her parents were listed as next of kin. So, I called them. They didn’t speak a word of English and I don’t speak German. But it didn’t matter because when I mentioned Alina’s name, they became upset. I don’t know what they were trying to tell me, but they kept saying her name, over and over. You don’t need to speak the same language to know when something’s wrong.”

  Emily sucked in a deep breath. Alina hadn’t made it home after all. “Do you still have her parents’ number?”

  “Someone removed her file. It’s gone. You know, at first I told myself she just hadn’t made it home yet, that she’d written her resignation letter and then disappeared for a little while to get her head straight. But then I remembered her talking about her parents. She’d said they were both old and getting sick, and that being an only child she always felt guilty about living so far away from them. Doesn’t that tell you that if she left, she would have gone straight home? I made that call a week after Karl came back to work. That gave Alina over two weeks to get home. But she didn’t make it.”

  The gravity of what Rosa was saying left Emily feeling uneasy.

  “Who have you told about this?”

  Rosa pushed her coke away again and drummed her fingers against the table top.

  “That journalist. And you.”

  “What about your colleagues?”

  Rosa hesitated, shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Alina’s not the first person to disappear.”

  Emily thought back to what Rosa had said earlier. Something’s not right at Ever After.

  “There have been patients,” the young woman’s voice dropped to a whisper as she wrapped her arms around her ribcage, as if protecting herself from an invisible attack. “Just a few, but all with the same background—self-referred, no friends or family to speak of. The kind with money, but who are scared of dying alone. Anyway, these patients, they’ve checked in, and within a day or two, maybe three ... they’ve gone.”

  “What do you mean? They died?”

  “I mean, they’ve gone. Disappeared. In the middle of the night, as if they changed their minds and left without telling anyone.”

  “How many exactly?”

  “This year? Three.”

  Emily thought about it. “Maybe they did change their minds and leave.”

  “And walk off into the middle of the night? These people were sick. They were dying, with weeks to live. Besides they’d have to get past the staff without being seen. No one on duty the nights they disappeared reported seeing anything suspicious. They’d just vanished from their rooms, like in those alien abduction movies. The nurses were freaked out but the only explanation anyone could come up with was that somehow those patients had found a way out and gone off to die who knows where.”

  Emily thought back to her findings from the missing persons website—all those unidentified bodies locked away in drawers like unsorted papers in a filing cabinet.

  “I know I sound paranoid,” Rosa said, leaning closer. “Maybe I am. But after the last patient disappeared, I checked the rota to see who had been on duty that night, and when I saw who it was, I checked the nights the other patients vanished. The nurses were different each time—we have a bank who work on rotation—but one person’s name came up every time. Someone who wasn’t a nurse.”

  Emily’s stomach somersaulted. “Karl Henry.”

  “Usually we keep cleaning and maintenance to daytimes, but sometimes there’s a need to carry out certain duties at night. Karl Henry was on site each time a patient disappeared.”

  “And now his wife is missing.”

  “There’s more,” Rosa said. She opened her wallet and fished out a card, placing it in front of Emily. “That journalist, she told me there were people working at Ever After who were there for their own personal gain, that I should be careful of who I trust.”

  Emily examined the business card in front of her. The journalist’s name was Reina Tammerworth. There was a mobile phone number and email address, and the URL for a website that didn’t sound much like the local news: www.theunsavourytruth.com

  “Do you think she meant Karl?” Emily asked.

  “I don’t know. She told me to call if Alina showed up. When Nurse Bates read out that letter, I called her the same day. It went straight to voicemail. I tried a few times, left messages. I didn’t hear from her again. Something’s wrong, I know it. That’s why I came here today. I thought you could help.”

  “Why haven’t you gone to the police?”

  “And tell them what? I have my boy to think of. I need to keep him safe.”

  Emily watched the girl stand up. Her dark complexion had grown pale. Her fingers trembled as she fastened the buttons of her coat.

  “Rosa, what is happening at Ever After?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “But I’m scared. Maybe if you can find that journalist she’ll be able to help you. But Emily?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please, don’t tell anyone I was here.”

  And with that, Rosa was gone, dashing through the door, disappearing in a swirl of ice and snow, her red coat fading like a flickering flame.

  Emily sat in the booth, unmoving, her mind racing. She picked up the card Rosa had given her, and let out an unsteady breath.

  Rosa’s story was deeply troubling. Frightening even. Turning the business card over and over in her hands, Emily watched the snow. There were two paths she could
take. One would lead her back to the safety and banality of her apartment. The other would take her along a dark corridor of shadows towards the unknown. Only one would lead her to Alina Engel.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The snow fell throughout the evening, burying the pavements in heavy drifts. The usual after-work drinkers had forgone their usual tipple in favour of heading home. Those pedestrians who had decided to brave the adverse conditions traversed the frozen pavements with care, testing each foothold.

  London was a city used to rain and smog, and it showed. Salt trucks were only now rolling out in the suburbs, covering the icy roads in sprays of rock salt. In the busiest parts of the city, vehicle pollution was toxic enough to blast the ice from the tarmac, transforming it into a thick, black slush that slithered into the gutters like primordial ooze.

  By the time Emily had finished telling Jerome about her encounter with Rosa, a wind had picked up and whipped the snowfall into a frenzied flurry.

  “I don’t like it,” Jerome said. They were sat in his living room, eating noodles from cartons. “It sounds dangerous, not to mention a little far-fetched.”

  “Why do you think that?” Emily picked at her food. She wasn’t hungry in spite of having had little to eat all day. It was becoming a habit, she noted.

  “Patients disappearing in the middle of the night, mysterious journalists asking questions ... and we don’t even know this girl.”

  “Are you saying Rosa made it all up? Why would she go out of her way to meet with me? Why would she invent such a story?”

  “It just sounds like one of those made-for-TV movies. Besides, I’m still not completely over our little visit to the hospice.” Jerome paused, staring at Emily. “I’m sorry about your mum though. Is that why you moved away? New beginnings and all that.”

  Emily’s eyes stung with tears. Just the mere mention of her mother could bring them on; those tiny droplets containing dangerous fissions of so much grief, so much anger.

  “New beginnings and all that,” she said.

  Jerome shovelled more noodles into his mouth. “I get that. Sometimes you just need to leave everything behind and move on. I did it. Moving here was a big thing. I left behind my family, my friends. It was hard, I got lonely. But I made new friends, and I’m lucky because my family are always there at home, waiting for me to visit or change my mind and come back. To be honest, if my luck doesn’t change soon, they may just get their wish.”