Final Offer

by Eva Hudson

  “I’ve been calling you.”

  “I know. My phone got down to six percent battery. It’s back down to twelve now, so I can’t talk long.”

  “You’ve heard of a charger, haven’t you?”

  “Marshall,” she said firmly, raising her voice to a level where heads turned, “shut up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “And listen. The fire at my apartment was deliberate.”

  “I, er—”

  “Just listen for once. The fire service pulled a man out of the fire—”

  “You never said.”

  “Listen, for chrissakes! I’ve just visited him in hospital, and he said my name was Vesnina. At first I thought maybe Rybkin had tried to kill me like he did Agent Rennie, but why would my assassin think I was Natalya? It doesn’t make sense, but it does explain why Nick Angelis tried so hard to warn me.”

  She waited for an interruption. None came.

  “Marshall, not only is my cover blown, but they know where I live, and they want me dead.”

  “Aren’t you being just a little bit paranoid?”

  Marshall Claybourne, always so sympathetic.

  “If he was there to kill you, why is he the one in the hospital?”

  She sighed. “I haven’t figured that out yet, but forgive me if I’m a little alarmed. I am formally requesting a security presence outside my apartment and for someone to stand at the end of this guy’s bed till he can be questioned.”

  “Your assistant has already instructed a firm of decorators.”

  “What?” Sometimes Jennifer Rocharde was too damn efficient. “Well, get them to stop, Marshall. There will be things in my apartment that could lead them to my mom, to friends, to personal information they could use against me. To Carolyn.”

  Silence.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll put someone on the door. What about you? Do you need protection?”

  “I’m an FBI agent, Marshall. I can handle myself.”

  “We should arrange a safe house for you.”

  “I definitely need somewhere to stay.”

  “I’ll get Jennifer to sort something.” He sighed deeply. “When are you coming into the office?”

  Ingrid started walking in the direction of the Tube. “Depends. The Met have arrested the man who ran down Agent Rennie. I’m on my way to observe the interview.”

  “Really? That’s great news. I can let his wife know.”

  To her shame, Ingrid had forgotten about his wife. Or soon to be ex-wife. Or widow. “How was she when you spoke to her?” Ingrid sidestepped a man in a hospital gown pushing an IV drip and clutching a Sainsbury’s bag.

  “Devastatingly calm.”

  “Can’t have been easy.” She cleared the hospital grounds and turned onto the gray, grimy sidewalk.

  “It wasn’t. Now while I’ve got you on the phone, can you confirm for me your location today at sixteen hundred hours.”

  Ingrid had no idea. “Um, in the office? Having a meeting with you?”

  “Wrong answer, Agent. You need to be at Dr Ives’s house having a meeting with her.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “It’s protocol.”

  “But I’m not undercover anymore, am I?” She stepped away from the curb, freshly aware of the potential threat from passing cars.

  “Make life easy on yourself and go, will you?”

  Ingrid curled her lip petulantly. “I don’t see the point.”

  “Agent, you have missed one appointment already. You miss another, I have to report it. It’s called pastoral care. Something the Bureau takes very seriously.”

  That was a lie.

  “Ingrid.” She always preferred it when he used her name. “You saw a colleague die yesterday. You need to visit your therapist. I know you don’t like it, but it’s important you go.”

  “Fine.” It wasn’t. “Is that why you’ve been calling?”

  “You’ve not listened to your messages?”

  “All they said was ‘call me.’”

  “Oh. Guess I didn’t know what to say.”

  Ingrid’s pace slowed. “Say what?”

  “It’s Carolyn.”

  “She okay?”

  Ingrid heard him take a deep breath. “She’s got…”

  “Yes?”

  Silence.

  “What is it, Marshall? She’s got what?”

  “Oh, God.”

  “You’re scaring me. Is she all right?”

  “Not really.”

  “What is it?”

  “Listen, it’s not easy for me to say. Not here. Not out loud.”

  Ah, so he’d found out. Ingrid came to a halt and waited for Marshall to spit out the words before they curdled inside his mouth.

  “Marshall, what is it?”

  “Just call her, will you?”

  “Marshall!”

  “Oh, well… She’s…” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “She’s got a girlfriend.”

  Ingrid had to clamp her lips between her teeth to stop herself from laughing. “Well, that’s good, because the way you were acting, I thought you were going to say she had cancer.”

  “Ingrid! You’ve met my parents. It’ll devastate them.”

  “Not as much as cancer.” She hung up and marched toward the Tube.

  By the time she arrived at Belgravia police station, Cath Murray was already conducting the interview with the hit-and-run driver. Ingrid joined DI Faulkner and Jim Beckford from SO15 in the observation room.

  “Ingrid,” Faulkner said, “glad you could come along. Help yourself to tea and coffee.”

  Ingrid extended a hand toward a tall officer she hadn’t met before. “Ingrid Skyberg,” she said, “FBI.”

  “DC Simon Waring. Pleasure to meet you.”

  “Likewise.” She scrambled her phones out of Rennie’s backpack. “Have you got somewhere I can charge these?”

  “Power points are over there.”

  “You don’t have an actual charger, do you?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “No,” Faulkner said, “but you could go and get one for our guest, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Waring closed the door behind him, and Ingrid turned her attention to the screen where Cath Murray and Del Boy were interviewing the suspect while his solicitor took notes.

  “How’s it going in there?” Ingrid asked.

  DI Faulkner looked positive. “His English is excellent, so no translator required, and he’s co-operating… up to a point.”

  Beckford cleared his throat. The rock-star detective evidently didn’t feel the same way.

  Ingrid pumped oily coffee from a stainless steel urn into a cup. “He say who hired him?”

  Faulkner didn’t immediately answer. “You won’t like it.”

  “Try me.”

  “He says no one did. It was an accident.”

  Ingrid’s eyes widened. Rage detonated inside her. “How can he…” There was no point finishing the sentence. She knew it was hard to prove intent. Her arm trembled with anger, sloshing her coffee over the rim.

  “I’m sorry,” Faulkner said. “It’s hardly a surprise though, is it? Says he was unfamiliar with the hire car, inadvertently pressed on the accelerator, and when he realized what he’d done, he panicked and sped off.”

  Ingrid slumped onto a plastic chair.

  “Fucking bastard.” She turned to Beckford. “Have your team got a file on him?”

  He sucked in his cheeks. “We have now.”

  Faulkner suppressed an eye roll: there was no love lost between them. “Good news is Cath’s doing an excellent job with him. Watch.”

  Ingrid looked at the screens.

  “Mr Babić, can you please tell us why you were visiting Mayfair yesterday?” Cath seemed very serious. Ingrid wasn’t used to her mate being so professional.

  “What nationality?” Ingrid asked.

  “Croatian,” Faulkner said.

  The suspect replied he w
as hoping to buy his wife a gift.

  “And would you usually drive into central London?” Cath asked.

  “I find the Underground very confusing,” Babić said.

  “Isn’t finding a parking space a problem?”

  Babić’s shoulder shrug suggested it wasn’t something that concerned him.

  Cath looked down at her notes, then back up at the interviewee. “We have a lot of traffic camera footage of the car you were driving yesterday. According to Hertz, you picked up the vehicle from their Euston Road branch at eight thirty yesterday morning.” She sat a little more upright. “Can you explain why you needed to hire a car in one part of central London to drive to another neighborhood? Wouldn’t a cab have been more convenient?”

  Babić looked at his solicitor, who nodded he should answer.

  “It had been my intention,” Babić said, “to visit some of the UK. I was to drive north. But first I buy my wife a gift.”

  “North?” Cath asked. “Whereabouts?”

  Indecision flickered across his face. “Scotland.”

  Cath paused. “How long were you thinking of going for?”

  “A day or two.”

  “Hmm. Yet when we found the car you had abandoned, you hadn’t packed any clothes? Or a toothbrush? Tell me again, Mr Babić, why did you hire the BMW yesterday morning?”

  Faulkner smiled. “She’ll get him. We’ve got lots of ANPR data. He was driving round the US Embassy for several hours yesterday. Parking on yellow lines and sitting with his engine running.”

  “She needs to persuade him it’s enough to make a jury believe he had intent,” Beckford said. “Then he might decide to take someone to prison with him.”

  Faulkner turned to Ingrid. “Make no mistake, he’s going to do time.”

  Ingrid gave her a half smile. “That’s something,” she said. But it wasn’t Rybkin in an orange jumpsuit.

  Waring stepped back into the room and handed Ingrid a charger. She immediately plugged in Natalya’s phone, which had died. When it got to twenty percent, she would charge her own.

  There was a knock and a young female detective opened the door. “Ma’am.”

  “Daphne.”

  “Ma’am, I thought you’d want to see this.” She closed the door and passed a folder to her boss. “We ran the preliminary checks, nothing obvious, no immediate links to Rybkin or even Russia. But look at that.” She pointed to a paragraph in one of the documents. “It’s his Border Agency approval.”

  Faulkner studied the young DC. “What am I missing?”

  “Look,” she said, pushing her shoulders back. “He arrived on a flight from Athens on October 25.”

  “Still not getting it,” Faulkner said.

  Ingrid stood and peered at the document over Faulkner’s shoulder. Her throat constricted as she read. “Oh wow.” She moistened her dry lips with her tongue. “It’s the same flight Oleg Tarlev came into the UK on.”

  “The guy who pushed the lawyer out the window?” DC Waring asked.

  “The very same,” Daphne said, smiling. “So they must have known each other, right?”

  Faulkner’s face brightened. “Oh, good work, Daph. Brilliant. Let’s show this to Cath, and let’s give him enough rope to tie around Rybkin’s neck.”

  41

  Cath stepped out of the interview room. She’d been in there for over an hour, and it was time to take a break. Her tweed suit was looking creased; her ice-blond quiff was slowly collapsing to one side. She wearily high-fived Ingrid.

  “Good work in there, Dink.”

  “What do you reckon?” Cath asked.

  Ingrid let Faulkner answer first.

  “Honestly, when you showed him the photo of Tarlev, I genuinely don’t think he recognized him. Ingrid, what’s your take?”

  Cath unwrapped a tea bag and set about making herself a cuppa.

  “I agree with the inspector,” Ingrid said. “One of your colleagues, was it, Daphne?”

  “Yep,” Faulkner confirmed.

  “She’s requested CCTV footage from passport control from their arrival. I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows the two men really don’t know each other.”

  “Though that stuff can always be faked,” DC Waring said.

  “Stuff?” Cath asked.

  “Pretending you don’t know each other,” he clarified.

  Ingrid’s phone, still plugged in on the other side of the room, illuminated silently with an incoming call. Whoever it was would have to wait.

  “Simon,” Cath said, dipping a tea bag on a string into a steaming mug, “can you go upstairs and make sure someone is cross checking Babić and Tarlev. Somewhere, in the Venn diagram of their lives, I’m willing to bet the shaded area includes more than just that Athens flight.”

  DC Waring looked put out to have been asked to leave. Faulkner gave him a stare.

  “Sure. Yes, boss,” he said.

  “We find the link between them, we’re closer to finding their paymaster,” Cath said.

  Faulkner looked at Beckford. “This something you can help on, Jim? You got avenues to explore?”

  “Something like this,” he said, pushing his hands into his pockets, “we’ve only got the same databases you have.”

  “Well, I’m sure at some point SO15’s involvement will prove valuable,” she said pointedly, her nostrils flaring.

  “Can you also see,” Cath said as Waring reached the door, “if we’ve picked up the Greek national from Holborn Tube?”

  When he’d gone, Cath raised the tea to her lips and her shoulders softened. “You heard any more from your buyer?” she asked Ingrid.

  Ingrid glowered at her: she did not want anything about the Picasso sting revealed in front of the SO15 officer. She leaned over and checked Natalya’s phone. “Not yet. But the sun’s barely up in New York. Give it time.”

  “Del Boy said he was getting everything arranged for the handover,” Faulkner said. “Last thing he mentioned was he’s going to prep two locations.”

  “Thorough,” Ingrid said, glancing at Beckford, who was reading something on his phone and didn’t seem to be paying attention.

  “Del Boy’s a good copper,” Faulkner said. “Unlike some others I could mention.” A slight nod of the head toward the door indicated she meant Waring. Ingrid hadn’t taken to him either. “I’ll get him to send you over the details.”

  Ingrid’s phone winked, announcing it was finally fully charged. “Listen,” she said to Cath. “I’m going to push off. You’re doing a great job, and you’ve got enough to keep him in custody, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “So I’m going to leave you to it. But, obviously, call me if he squeals the name of his paymaster.”

  “Obvs,” Cath said.

  “I’ve got some things to follow up on. Is there somewhere round here I can make a few calls?”

  Faulkner suggested a restaurant near Victoria Coach Station that was reliably quiet, ridiculously cheap and served the best lasagna outside of Italy.

  Ingrid didn’t hesitate to take them up on the recommendation and soon found herself sitting in a bland restaurant with blond wood fittings, white tablecloths and saccharine landscapes in plastic frames. While she waited for her lasagna, she called Carolyn.

  “Hey kiddo.”

  “Marshall asked you to call?”

  “Um, I hung up on him before he could get round to that.”

  “Really?”

  Ingrid reflexively picked at the corner of a napkin, rolling shreds of paper into tiny red balls. “I just wanted to check you’re okay.”

  The girl was fine. She was elated, in fact. She was in love, and nothing Marshall or her parents could say would change that.

  “I didn’t mean about Lula. She seemed lovely—we should all go out for dinner—I meant about everything else. You gave me a scare the other day.”

  “That was a one-off.”

  “You sure?”

  Carolyn sighed. “I was stupid. Trying too hard
to fit in.”

  “I’m just glad you called me.”

  “So am I.”

  A smile stretched Ingrid’s lips. She loved playing the role of big sister, but more than that she relished being more popular than Marshall. A man in an overcoat caught her smiling and nodded at her. Ingrid’s insides froze.

  “I gotta go. But let’s meet up next week, okay?”

  The man was fifty-odd, unshaven, tall, knuckles embellished with cygnet signs like a night club doorman. Surely he looked too much like a hit man to actually be one?

  “Espresso?” A smiling, tanned waiter with a white shirt pulled tight over his impressive pecs stood in front of her.

  “Yes.” She smiled back at him. Something about him suggested he moonlighted as a stripper. “Thank you.”

  “Lasagna is just coming.”

  Ingrid’s eyes locked onto his buttocks shifting under his trousers as he walked back to the kitchen. Maybe a dancer rather than a stripper. She returned her attention to Mr Overcoat, who was studying a menu. He shared a surliness, a sense of menace, with Babić, Tarlev and the man who’d been pulled out of her apartment.

  She needed to find out who he was. It would help if she could remember more about her evening with Tim. Which would also be easier if she knew anything about Tim beyond what was in his Tinder profile. Surname? No. Employer? No. Home address? Nope, not that either. If she was honest, she couldn’t even be sure his name was really Tim. She had no way of knowing if he had a criminal record or a reputation for getting women so drunk he could do what he wanted with them. Yet again, Ingrid’s foray into the world of dating was covered in ignominy.

  She took a deep breath and tapped the Tinder app on her phone. She scrolled through the messages they’d exchanged. They were all appropriately flirty and backed up what she remembered of their date: Tim from Camberwell was a really nice guy. Nicer than the men she usually dated. Which was why it unsettled her he hadn’t been in her bed when the fire brigade arrived.

  Hi, she texted. How are things?

  She knew it was lame, but what was she supposed to say? She flopped back against the seat and glowered at the man in the overcoat.

  Her phone brightened. A message from Tim.