Look Twice (Ingrid Skyberg Book 8)

by Eva Hudson

  “You’re back!” The youth in the Lou Reed tee seemed genuinely surprised that a customer would return to collect their photos. He put the packet of images on the counter. “I should have said, but I didn’t notice when you dropped it off, that camera still had unused photos on it.”

  “Oh.” Ingrid hadn’t noticed either.

  “So, there are only sixteen photos, but I have to charge you for the entire roll of twenty-four, anyway. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure.” Ingrid fished her card out of her pocket.

  “So, that’ll be ten ninety-nine.” He held out the card reader for Ingrid. “Do you need a receipt?”

  “That’d be great, thank you.”

  Ingrid picked up the pack of photos and took a peek.

  “Oh.” She flicked through them. They were not what she was expecting. Not at all.

  4

  Ingrid walked back to the embassy, and unusually for her, she strolled rather than marched. It was partly down to the heat, but she also found herself looking in windows and glancing up at balconies and wondering how much every property would cost to buy. Maybe the place McKittrick had shown her wasn’t such a bad option.

  Every pub she passed had a large throng of office workers having ‘a cheeky half’ on the sidewalk and chatting noisily before descending into the fetid underground for the long slog to the suburbs. Sidewalk swilling was a feature of London life she’d not seen anywhere else in the world. A combination of good weather being a novelty, air-conditioning being a rarity and outside space being expensive, she presumed.

  By the time Ingrid walked into her office, many of her own colleagues had departed for the summer ritual of a cold beer on a city street. Zeke was still there. “Hi. I’d have thought you’d be off home by now,” she said, depositing the realtor’s details on her desk.

  “I didn’t want to disappear without saying anything.”

  “You can always send me a message, or leave me a note. I thought maybe the seizure would have wiped you out?”

  “No, but your filing system is exhausting.” Zeke leaned against his desk, notebook and pen in hand.

  “Hey, don’t knock it. It works for me.”

  Ingrid woke her computer to find she was still livestreaming KEIS, which was now showing a property renovation show. She checked her cell for messages to see if Svetlana had sent an update on the trial. She hadn’t spoken to her mother this much since she’d left home. It was like they were in a book group, constantly making sure that the other hadn’t missed a key revelation or plot twist.

  “What have you got for me?”

  They ran through the most pressing requests that had come in from field offices across the States. Mostly, they were appeals from case agents needing to access UK records, or requiring a witness or expert to be interviewed to support the bureau’s investigations back home.

  “You seem to have the hang of this already,” Ingrid said. “Must seem very dull after the air force.”

  “Says the woman who rescued the First Lady from the roof of the ambassador’s residence.”

  Jesus, you have a cute smile.

  “Are they what I think they are?” Excitement inflected Zeke’s voice as he nodded at the Snappy Snaps wallet on her desk. “Is it like the morning after the wrap party on Love Island? Strewn underwear and scattered champagne bottles? Naked bodies with only strategically placed Santa hats to protect everyone’s modesty?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You need to seriously downgrade your expectations of the Christmas party. No, it’s more like one of those art house European movies from the 1970s where nothing makes sense.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Now I’m really intrigued. Show me.”

  Ingrid got up and closed the door. Zeke watched her as she brought the photos to his desk where the lack of clutter and a working overhead light gave it advantages over her own. “Do I need to remind you about your duty to keep everything you learn in this office private? Secret, even?”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “No, no, you do not. But you do realize I am now burning up with curiosity?”

  “I think these will dowse your flames pretty swiftly.”

  The first image she placed on his desk was the one she’d seen in the store. It was a map of Scotland. To be precise, it was a photo of a map of Scotland on a computer screen. The next photo was of a pocket-sized diary showing two facing pages displaying a week in March; it wasn’t clear from which year. There were only two entries. On Monday the fifth, the word ‘dentist’ was circled, and on the Friday the entry read ‘submit expenses’. The only other entry was a scribble on the Wednesday that looked like someone was testing out their pen.

  Ingrid poked her tongue against the inside of her cheek, glanced at Zeke, then carried on. “I told you they were… art house.”

  The next image featured the word ‘sois’ written on a notebook. The one after that was another photo showing something on a computer monitor, a bird that Ingrid was fairly sure was a starling. The next image was of a bird she didn’t recognize. Possibly a female blackbird? Brown and nondescript.

  Zeke looked at her and ran a palm over his close-cropped hair. “Is this some kind of prank for the new boy?”

  Ingrid gave him a half smile.

  “Cause if it is, I think I’d prefer the trash can balanced on the top of the door.”

  “They get weirder.” Ingrid continued laying out the photos, all of which were of images on a computer screen. An Amazon.com listing for a book called National Affront by a writer named David Steiner. The physicist Stephen Hawking. A Google Street View image of the kind of mock-Tudor 1930s family home that made up most of the outer London boroughs.

  Zeke looked at her. “Why would someone take photos of these things on their computer?”

  “And then hide the camera in the ceiling?”

  They stared at the images, utterly disbelieving someone would bother to do either thing.

  “Where’s the embarrassing Christmas party kompromat?” Zeke asked. “I thought this was going to be fun.”

  Ingrid sensed they were standing a little too close together, and took a side step as she peeled the next photo out of the packet. This one showed three Post-it notes. One bore the number 36, another the words ‘west park’, and the third just had the letter E and the number 16 on it.

  Zeke’s lip curled and he tilted his head. “Is this, like, some real-life game of Clue?”

  “If it is, maybe the color of the Post-its is significant.”

  Zeke stroked an imaginary mustache. “Why yes, Inspector, I see it now. One yellow, one blue, one green.” He faked a French accent. “It is so… signifique.”

  The next three photos were what she had expected from a camera hidden in an office ceiling: images of a party.

  “Is that outside?” Zeke asked, nodding in the direction of the bullpen. “Do you recognize any of them?”

  Ingrid peered at the photos. Three white women in their twenties held a birthday cake between them and smiled for the camera. The three images were nearly identical, presumably because whoever was taking the photos was struggling to center the women in the frame: they were so far to the left of the image, one of the cake holders was nearly cropped out of it.

  Ingrid’s mouth fell open.

  “What is it?” Zeke asked.

  One of the women was Jen, her former assistant, looking much younger than the woman who had left London the previous Christmas. The photo must have been taken shortly after Jen started work at the embassy. She barely looked old enough to have graduated high school, let alone Vassar. “Don’t get your panties bunched up, but I do know who that is.” Ingrid pointed to Jen. “You may occasionally hear me refer to her as ‘Saint Jen’.”

  Zeke’s eyes twinkled. “My predecessor?”

  Ingrid was surprised. “You’ve heard of her?”

  “Or perhaps you mean my nemesis?” There was something gleeful and theatrical about Zeke. Ingrid sensed he was going to be fun to have around. “DeWalt
may have mentioned I’d have a hard time living up to her.”

  Ingrid scrutinized him, narrowing her eyes. “You know when you start dating someone?”

  He looked wistfully upward. “Vaguely.”

  “It’s never a good idea to bad mouth the ex until you’re sure of your ground.”

  “Ex?”

  “You are so hungry for office gossip Zeke McDaniel that you are in danger of making it up.”

  Ingrid looked again at the photo of the very youthful Jen. Then she scanned the table for the photo of the diary. “What year would the fifth of March have fallen on a Monday?”

  Zeke snapped his fingers. “Good thinking.” He blitzed the keyboard, and a few seconds later a search result popped up on his screen. “Twenty twelve.”

  “Five years ago.” Jen had done so much growing up in that time. She held the photo closer and looked at the people in the background. As far as she could make out, none of them still worked for the Legal Attaché Program.

  Zeke picked up one of the other birthday cake photos. “It hardly looks like the sort of office party you need to hide in the ceiling.”

  There were four photos left in the packet. One showed a spiral bound reporter’s notebook turned on its side with four arrows drawn perpendicular to the faint printed lines. Three small arrows were bunched together near the spiral, and a heavier, taller arrow was towards the bottom of the page.

  Ingrid ran her fingers through her hair. It was just so bizarre.

  She laid out the final three images: two more photos of a computer screen, one showing a Google image search displaying a grid of thumbnail photos for the search term ‘yard’, and a close up of a code made from letters, hyphens and mostly numbers. The final photo was of a page from the Evening News reporting on a gala at a nightclub called Mojito Joe’s. Actors, socialites and millionaires in tight-fitting evening wear posed for the camera.

  “Would you like me to get you a copy of that newspaper?” Zeke asked.

  Ingrid pursed her lips. “Yes, yes I suppose I would. And that book.”

  They stared at the matrix of images on his desk. Scotland, a starling, Post-its, handwritten notes, a low-key birthday celebration, Stephen Hawking, a book. “Taking one of these photos would be weird—”

  “But taking all of them,” Zeke interjected, “is just borderline psychotic.” He planted a hand on his hip. “But it sure makes you want to know why though, doesn’t it?”

  It did. Ingrid started to pace the room. Not only had someone taken these photos, they had then hidden the camera with eight unused frames behind a ceiling tile. It’s not like it had been placed on top of a locker, or behind a book on a shelf. To hide it in the ceiling required balancing on a chair on top of a desk, or using ladders. Why would anyone want to take such images and then go to such lengths to hide them? Why didn’t they finish the film? Why didn’t they get the film developed?

  “Oooh.”

  “What?” Zeke asked.

  Ingrid swiped up one of the photos and dashed to her own computer. She’d recognized what the string of letters, hyphens and numbers was. “See this,” she said. “Two letters, hyphen, five numbers, hyphen, six numbers, hyphen three letters? It’s a code for an FBI intelligence report.”

  A wide smile lit up Zeke’s face. “Now it’s like one of those Le Carré movies.”

  “Yeah,” Ingrid said, waiting for her ancient monitor to flicker back into life, “one with Alec Guinness rather than, oh, what’s his name?”

  “Gary Oldman?”

  “That’s the one.” The database finally loaded, and she typed in the code and waited. And waited. An egg-timer rotated slowly in the center of her screen and then, finally, the documented loaded.

  Ingrid peered at it, her lips pursed, her brow furrowed, her heart thudded. Zeke leaned over her shoulder. He had a pleasant earthy smell. “Threat Assessment of Far-Right Groups in the UK.” It was dated October 19, 2011.

  “So,” Zeke said, cautiously, “it’s linked to the photo of the book in the Amazon listing. That was also neo-Nazi related, wasn’t it?” Ingrid scrolled through the report, hoping for a cross heading or an image to pop out at her, something that would explain why the file was so important someone had photographed its database number.

  Her cell illuminated. It was Svetlana. Ingrid inhaled deeply. “I need to take this.” She swiped to answer. “Mom, hi.”

  “Malyshka.”

  Svetlana hadn’t called her that for years. “What is it, Mom?”

  “You have not seen?” She sounded more anxious than normal.

  Ingrid leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. She hadn’t replaced the tile correctly; it was slightly slanted within its aluminum holder. “No, Mom. I’ve had to work. What is it? What’s happened?”

  “I can’t believe you have not seen it.” Svetlana’s accent was a thick as the day she defected from the USSR. “I thought you watch news all the time.”

  “There’s a time zone difference. Mom, please, what is it?”

  Svetlana paused to take a deep drag on her cigarette. “He says he didn’t do it.”

  “Jones?”

  “He says he didn’t kill Megan and he will prove it.”

  5

  Ingrid became aware of a buzzing sound and then, moments later, that the sound was her phone. After Svetlana’s bombshell the night before, she’d done a hundred lengths of the Hilton pool in an attempt to exhaust her body—but mostly her brain—into sleeping. It had worked. She reached out a stiff arm to the nightstand and grabbed her phone before it buzzed its way onto the floor. “Mom, what is it?”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “It’s six a.m.”

  “So, I woke you?”

  “Yes, you woke me.” Ingrid stretched the muscles in her face, a cat-like silent yawn. She blinked at the sunlight framing the edges of the hotel drapes. “What is it, mama?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Mama, what is it?” When had she started calling her ‘mama’? Was it because they were talking so often? Ingrid didn’t like it. ‘Mom’ was intimate enough. ‘Svetlana’ was preferable.

  “It is Kathleen.”

  Megan’s mom. Ingrid’s unofficial aunt. “How is she holding up?”

  “She collapsed last night.” Svetlana inhaled on a cigarette as Ingrid found the remote control under the sheets and flicked on the TV. The BBC’s Breakfast show was interviewing the UK’s Secretary of State for Justice about the government’s refusal to impose new gender equality legislation. She switched over to CNN. “I know what you think, Kroshka. How can someone collapse when they are in bed already?” Kathleen’s obesity had meant she’d not left her bed for the past five months.

  “I wasn’t thinking that. Did something happen to her?” Ingrid still hadn’t processed the news that Jones claimed he hadn’t killed Megan. She slung her legs out of the bed and slowly opened the drapes. The sky was hazy and yellow. There was no indication that the weather was about to break.

  “Yes, something happened to her. The EMTs came. They’re still there. I think he broke her heart, that’s what happened.”

  “Mom, wait. It’s on the news.”

  Ingrid unmuted the TV. A reporter stood outside the house on State Highway 49 and spoke in serious tones. It had been recorded before the EMTs showed up. “Speculation is mounting,” she said, clutching a huge furry microphone, “about the identity of the man James Jones claims carried out at least some of the killings that happened in the property behind me.”

  Speculation. Ingrid had come to hate that word. It was the only excuse a journalist needed to prod and probe outlandish accusations and persist with hurtful intrusions. Ingrid changed channels, well aware that her own appetite for trial news was fueling the blanket coverage. But it was different for her. It was personal.

  “You rather listen to yesterday’s news than what I have to say?”

  Ingrid rolled her eyes. “No, mom. I just thought—”

  “I’m here
, aren’t I? Don’t you think I would know more than some reporter?”

  Ingrid deflected the accusation. “How is Kathleen?”

  “She’s dying.”

  “Mom!” Even for Svetlana that was alarmist.

  “They’re not even taking her to hospital, that’s how sick she is.”

  “Mom, they can’t take Kathleen to a hospital because she can’t fit through the door. We’ve discussed this before. They’d actually need a builder to take out the wall.” Ingrid cracked open a bottle of water from the minibar and took a sip. “And a hoist.”

  Ingrid waited for her mother to say something, but Svetlana always chose silence rather than uttering the words ‘I suppose you’re right, honey’.

  “And can you imagine doing that with all those cameras outside her house?” Ingrid’s pity for Kathleen surged. “Will you give her my love when you see her?”

  Svetlana didn’t respond directly. “If Kathleen dies, she will be his tenth victim, you know that? He won’t be able to say he’s not guilty of that. Causing her all this stress.”

  Ingrid worked out the time difference. “Shouldn’t you be in bed, Mom?”

  “You think I can sleep? With Kathleen like that?”

  Ingrid’s alarm sounded, and she turned it off. Six fifteen a.m. “Mom, I have to get ready for work now. You should try to rest. Turn off the TV and go to bed.”

  Telling Svetlana what to do was a mistake. “What you work today, Kroshka? Big case?”

  Ingrid stretched her legs, rising onto her toes. “Still putting together that sting at the docks. The one I told you about.”

  “I remember. The one where nobody does anything right.”

  “I didn’t say that, Mom. It’s just that different agencies have different ways of doing things.”

  “And your way is the right way.”

  “I never said that either. There are just lots of gaps, a few misunderstandings. It doesn’t take much for something like this to collapse, or for us not to get the evidence in a way that lets us bring a prosecution.”

  Svetlana said nothing for a while. “The problem with you, Kroshka, is that you don’t trust people.”