Beth puts the kettle on before taking her suitcase into the utility room. Once there she unloads her clothing into the washing machine. Although the safe house has a machine, this week Beth hadn’t bothered to use it, storing her clothing for her own washer as though she knew she had to do something normal when she got home. Now, she sets the machine going, adding detergent, then she takes her suitcase upstairs.
As she reaches the landing, Beth has a momentary flashback. Someone grabbing her from behind, the chloroform-soaked cloth pressed over her mouth and nose. She can still smell that distinctive chemical odour, and her stomach roils with the recollection. She shudders as she approaches her bedroom door.
Then she hears Mary Blake’s voice, soft and reassuring, in her ear. ‘Take the bull by the horns…’
Beth strides forward and pulls down the handle, pushing the door wide open. She pauses at the door for a split second and then she walks in with forced confidence. She looks over her shoulder, as though she expects her abductor to still be waiting for her and then takes a deep breath.
The room has a smell, she’s not sure what it is. She sees the curtains are still closed, and she goes to the window and pulls them aside. Then she opens the window letting in a waft of fresh air. This done, Beth already feels like she has begun to reclaim the room.
The bed is as she left it, bedding kicked back as though she’d just got up. She strips the bedding away, throwing the duvet cover, bottom sheet and pillow cases into a pile on the floor. Then she goes back out onto the landing and retrieves her spare set. After remaking the bed, she feels more in control. But the room where her attack took place still doesn’t feel hers. There is black dust on all of the surfaces, where forensics had dusted for prints. Going into the ensuite, Beth gets a disinfectant spray from under the sink. She uses it on all the tops and sides of her furniture, removing the murky smears. After that she starts to feel better about her bedroom. The cleaning is an important process, in helping to settle her nerves as she wipes away the memory and fear of the attack with her cloth and spray. She does the same in the bathroom. And then she spends the afternoon cleaning every room in the house.
By tea time Beth is feeling tired, the house is fresher. She’s thrown out all the turned food from the fridge, and cleaned the inside ready for when her shopping delivery arrives the next day.
As she puts away all of the cleaning products, there is a knock on the front door.
Beth goes out into the hallway and stares at the door.
‘Hey Beth. It’s me!’ calls a voice from the other side of the door, though she isn’t sure who ‘me’ is.
She takes her phone from her pocket and looks at it. There is a text from Elliot, saying he’s planning to call after work. Beth goes to the door. She puts the chain on before opening.
Elliot is standing on her doorstep.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Can I come in? I brought take-away.’
He holds up a bulging white plastic bag.
Beth removes the chain and lets Elliot in. He hugs her, giving her a light kiss on the lips.
‘I’ve missed you,’ he says.
Though Elliot was with MI5 when she was released from the psychiatric ward, they haven’t seen each other since that night. They’ve shared texts and phone calls, but that is all, since it was impossible to continue their relationship while she was at the safe house: a place even Elliot wasn’t allowed to know the location of.
Beth is pleased to see him, but there’s also an underlying stress with this unexpected meeting. He’s been here and fixed things for her, at her request, but they’d never been together in her former family home before. It was something she had been avoiding and hadn’t planned on. At least until her divorce was finalized. In the circumstances though, all of these worries don’t matter anymore.
‘Come in the kitchen,’ Beth says.
Beth indicates the small four-seater table and Elliot places the bag of food on the top. ‘Hope you like Chinese,’ he says.
‘I love it,’ she says.
Beth gets plates and cutlery and places them down. Elliot pulls a bottle of Merlot from the bag, as well as several food cartons.
‘I didn’t know what you liked so I went for some safe options. Sweet and sour chicken, prawn curry, egg fried rice and of course some fortune cookies.’
‘Sounds perfect,’ Beth says. She puts two glasses down on the table and sits opposite him.
Elliot opens the screw-top bottle and pours the wine.
As Beth removes the lids from the food cartons she bursts into tears.
‘Oh God! Sweetheart!’ Elliot says. ‘I’m sorry, have I gone too far?’
‘It’s such a relief not to be alone here.’
Elliot moves to the chair next to hers and reaches for her. He holds Beth until the tears dry up. One hand strokes her back, while the other smooths her hair back from her face. When she finishes crying, she looks at him, embarrassment colours her cheeks.
‘Feel better?’ he says.
Beth nods.
‘Here, have some wine and let’s eat this food. Then, later, I’m going to take you upstairs and make love to you. Is that okay?’
Beth leans into him, kissing him on the mouth.
‘You’re amazing,’ she says.
‘Well, I’m working on it,’ he answers.
They eat in silence. Beth sips at the wine and for the first time in weeks she feels safe. She glances at Elliot as he eats the food with a great deal of gusto. She can’t believe how lucky she is to have met him.
Chapter Two
Michael
The body is lying in a bath full of water. Wrists cut, precise slices along the veins for maximum damage. The water is red as though every precious drop of her life’s blood had drained into it: even after her heart stopped pumping.
She’s a young girl, no older than 18, strawberry-blonde hair, stained crimson now on the long tips that float on top of the water.
I see Neva in her. Younger, yes, but it could be her lying there. I turn this thought aside, reminding myself I’m done with Neva as I bring my mind back to my work.
But shaking her from my thoughts isn’t as easy as I would like: I see her everywhere. I don’t even trust that this girl does resemble Neva. It could all be my mind superimposing her onto the corpse, regardless of my conscious effort to forget she was ever in my life.
Given to the house of killers to be trained as an assassin at the age of 5, Neva was raised by the Network. When I became involved with her, she told me she’d broken her conditioning. She’d enlisted my help to find her birth parents, saying she wanted revenge. At the time I learnt that I too had been under the influence of the Network, trained and brainwashed as a child to become a sleeper agent. Because of our mutual past, Neva and I had a connection. The memory of this still makes me feel sick to my stomach and my heart sore. After months of believing in Neva, thinking we had something, I’d struggled to let go of that belief until enough proof was put before me and I couldn’t deny it anymore. She’d been stringing me along. A thought that was never too far from my mind especially when I was alone. Then, I’d go through stages of unfettered emotions. Anger. Regret. Denial. Sadness. All of which left me drained and miserable and culminated into one main emotion: grief. I mourned her loss despite the knowledge that I’d been tricked.
Every night, unable to distract myself, my mind went through scenarios of where she might be, what she was doing. She was, I believed, working with her mother. An assassin we knew only as Annalise, who had taken over the running of the Network after my father, and chairman of the committee running the Network, Andrew Beech, had been killed at the house in Alderley Edge.
It is harder than it should be to stop thinking about Neva as I try to focus once more on the girl in the bath. Even so I sink my mind into the work at hand, and the distraction is a relief, however brief, from my obsessive thoughts.
Normally this kind of case wouldn’t come our way, but the local police have called us in be
cause my boss Ray had sent out a request to alert us of any unusual death. Despite appearances, this is no suicide. The killer hasn’t even tried to make it pass as one. The knife or blade used is gone and it is impossible to slice more than one wrist like this yourself because the cutting of the first arm makes your hand useless to do the work on the second. But of course, MI5’s very efficient pathologist, Elliot Baker, will confirm this all for certain.
As I wait for Elliot, I slip back to thinking about Neva. Where is she now? Did she flee the United Kingdom to Amsterdam as once we’d both been set to do? Half of the time I hope she’ll contact me, the other half I pray she won’t. I’m lost without her, though I hate to admit it. I feel that void left inside me and I probe it as I remain solitary at this bloody crime scene. Neva’s absence is the phantom left by a lost limb. Part of me has gone with her, and I feel the shadow of my missing part lurking out of reach, but niggling still to be scratched.
I am alone: broken. They say time will heal but I can’t see how I can ever recover. Or how I can pull the fragments left by her betrayal back together to make me whole again.
Now MI5 are looking for Neva in connection with the brutal murder of an air stewardess called Angela Carter, as well as the timely death of Solomon Granger – a hacker that we think Neva worked with to hijack a plane, killing many innocent people in the process. Granger was found hanged in his cell while in MI5 custody. Suicide. Or was it? After Neva had told me that no one was safe, even in our care, it is probable that she killed him.
My emotions spike, my face flushes and an intense rage surges up inside me at the thought of Neva slipping into our secure facility unseen and taking Granger’s life. Granger is silenced now, and his testimony, though recorded, had little value on his death. His demise stopped us from getting retribution. We can’t put Neva in a line-up and have him formally pick her out. There will be no trial brought forward by the Crown Prosecutor for Angela’s horrible death. This is the worst tragedy of all and something that often frustrates me about my job: the guilty rarely get punished even when we solve a case.
But what Solomon had told us, had at least given some leads that we could follow up.
‘Security Agent Kensington?’ says a voice behind me. ‘Is it okay to come in?’
I turn to see Security Agent Elsa Stevenson standing by the door. She’s wearing her crime-scene suit, and her dark-brown bobbed hair is tucked in under the hood. Everything is in order. I nod to allow her permission to view the scene.
I’m surprised at Elsa’s formal address of me, but then the two of us do not have an easy working relationship. Not since she tried to follow me for my boss, Ray Martin. At the time Ray had placed me in an RAF base in Lincolnshire, and Elsa came along at a convenient moment to ‘help me’ off base in her car. All to give me the chance to head back to London and to Neva. Just as Ray knew I would do if the opportunity arose. The thing is, as a result, I don’t quite trust Elsa, and she has made no secret of the fact that she doesn’t trust me either. But since Beth’s abduction, and now medical leave, Elsa has been brought into our offices and so I’m forced to work with her regardless. Despite all this, I’m actually glad to see her and her presence goes a long way to bringing me back to the present and taking my mind away from my dark thoughts of Neva.
‘God she’s young,’ Elsa says.
‘Yes,’ I nod. I glance at her and see her eyes linger on the knife wounds. Her expression is guarded, though her vocal reaction reveals that Elsa is shocked by the sight of the corpse.
‘This is Neva’s M.O. isn’t it?’ she says.
Hearing her name spoken by Elsa makes my heart leap in my chest. The respite of not thinking about her is taken from me. I see her again dancing behind my eyes. Sleeping beside me. Reaching with loving arms to pull me to her. I shake the images away.
‘Wrist slitting? Killing for no apparent reason? Definitely not,’ I say.
‘But the knife…’
‘A lot of the Network’s operatives use this type of blade. It’s standard issue. That’s why we’ve been brought in. This is no ordinary murder. And they need someone like me to study it,’ I hear the bitter tone in my voice as I snap out the words. I’m sure that Elsa knows all about my profiling skills and my history with the Network, but I feel like putting her in her place a little more. But as I meet her shocked expression I rein myself in. Arrogance is not usually one of my failings. This girl just brings out the worst in me. Or is it just her casual reminder of Neva that has thrown me over the edge?
‘Do you… put yourself into the mind of… the killer?’ she asks.
I pull myself together. Yanking back the irritation and anger Elsa has reared in me. I half nod, half shake my head before saying in a softer tone, ‘In a way, but not really. I analyse behaviour by the way the murder is committed. I can’t really think like the killer does, but the detail gives me insight to what sort of person he or she is. How little empathy they show is interesting too.’
Elsa looks relieved and embarrassed as if she understands my antagonism towards her and recognizes how hard it was for me to moderate myself because of it. ‘Was there any empathy for this one?’
‘Depends,’ I say.
‘On what?’
‘Whether she was conscious or not when her wrists were cut and she was placed in the bath. And only the toxins in her blood will tell us the answer to that,’ I say.
‘But… you have an idea already?’ Elsa prompts trying to smooth over the earlier awkwardness by getting me to talk about my methods.
‘I think she was drugged. There’s no sign of a struggle,’ I say.
Elsa looks again at the girl. She frowns and I know she’s trying to see what it is that I see. Not everyone can do it. I recognize the signs by experience and instinct as well as all I learned taking my profiling degree.
‘Look,’ I say trying to show her something tangible. ‘Her eyes are closed. She was sleeping. She didn’t feel a thing, but nor could she save herself.’
‘You really are good at this,’ Elsa says, her eyes slightly narrowed.
I don’t respond to the compliment but it makes me feel like a prick for my arrogance and moodiness when she first came in.
To allay any further tension I leave the bathroom, and Elsa, to look around the other rooms of the apartment. This is a short-term rental for tourists. When the girl didn’t check out as planned, housekeeping found her and called the police.
In the bedroom the girl’s case lies open on the bed, half packed. Not something you do if you plan to take your own life and this only reinforces my initial opinion that she didn’t intend any such thing. The other room is a lounge diner. There’s bread in a toaster, popped up, toasted, but left unbuttered and uneaten. There’s also a cold mug of tea on the kitchen worktop.
Someone came in while she was making her breakfast, but there was no apparent struggle, unless the assailant tidied up afterwards. I begin to wonder if she knew the person. Or was she overcome after being drugged? That would require much more stealth. The drink could have been spiked while she was in the other room getting ready to leave. But how did the perpetrator get inside if they weren’t invited?
I sniff the contents of the mug. There’s no unusual scent. That doesn’t mean anything though.
On the side is also the girl’s handbag. With gloved fingers I remove her wallet and find her identification. Her name is Sinead O’Brierley. And she’s just turned 18 according to her driving licence.
‘Hi Michael!’ I come out of the kitchen to find Elliot Baker, fully suited, like Elsa and myself, in crime-scene gear. Mask, gloves and hood all in place so that we avoid cross-contamination of the scene.
‘Hello, Elliot. I have a feeling the girl was dosed. Probably the half-drunk mug of tea in the kitchen,’ I say.
Elliot nods, smiling over his face mask. ‘I’ll be sure to save the contents for analysis,’ he says.
I realize I’m being a bit of an arse telling the good doctor what to do. That’s twice
in one day that I’ve been full of myself. And neither Elsa nor Elliot deserve this from me. He’s one of the best, and often his opinions expand, or reinforce my own observations. I give him a self-conscious nod then move away and leave him to do his job.
Elsa loiters near the front door as Elliot and his team move through the flat, photographing, bagging and tagging anything of interest. The girl in the bath is dealt with last, once moving her isn’t going to affect any of the evidence elsewhere.
Elliot spends a long time in there with her. Photographs are taken and fingerprints are found around the bathroom. Only then is the water in the bath drained away through a sieve and the body lifted out. She’s placed in a body bag and put onto an ambulance trolley to be taken out to the mortuary van. I watch one of Elliot’s men wheel her away as I stand outside the apartment, my role there merely to observe, and take away anything I can that will help me build a profile of our killer. This one is not going to be easy because it seems random. Yet, I know it isn’t. I believe she is linked somehow to our ongoing investigation of the Network, Neva and her peer assassins. I don’t have any proof, just a gut feeling, and someone, somewhere must have believed it too, otherwise the police would be taking care of this one and not us.
When Elliot is finished the flat is cordoned off with crime-scene tape. We’ll keep this place off limits even to its owner for a while until we are sure we haven’t missed anything.
I pull off my PPE and stuff it into a black bag with the forensics team’s suits to be disposed of later. For every new crime there’s always a new suit. No risk of contamination that could ruin a future case.
‘Well that wasn’t pretty,’ Elsa says beside me at the lift.
‘Death never is,’ I say.
Chapter Three
Neva
Six years ago
She looks a lot like me, Neva thought as she watched her target through a pair of binoculars. Talia Bukowski was her name. She was similar in age to Neva; around 20 years old. The girl was tall, slender and strong, a well-trained operative and Neva, never one to take the easy hit, decided she wouldn’t just kill her at a distance, she would get closer and learn more about her intended victim.
Kill a Spy: The House of Killers Page 2