Look Twice (Ingrid Skyberg Book 8)

by Eva Hudson

  “And you’re certain your friend will meet you at the station?”

  “Yes. But it’s nice you’re so worried.”

  “And your solicitor is coming in the morning?”

  “First thing.”

  “Because you need that restraining order.”

  “Oh, that is understood.”

  “And never,” Ingrid said, “ever invite a journalist to interview you at your home, or mention where you live in interviews. Restraining orders don’t always work.”

  “Also understood. I’m going to get cameras and alarms and a really big dog.”

  Ingrid smiled at her. “I’m glad you won’t be alone tonight. That wasn’t the night you planned, was it?”

  “No, but it’s been memorable for the wrong—and the right—reasons.” She leaned forward and kissed Ingrid on the cheek. “I’ll never forget this.”

  After an awkward silence, Ingrid piped up. “On the plus side, you’ve got a new storyline for your next book.”

  Daisy crinkled her mouth. “My books are set in 1930s Hollywood. It’s funny, but I can’t think of any movie stars back then who had stalkers. I suppose there must have been some.”

  All around them, passengers picked up their pace as they hurried to the platform. Daisy checked her watch. Two minutes to go. “You think it’s safe for me to board yet?”

  “Give it another minute. Besides, I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “Oh, yes,” Daisy said hopefully.

  “Earlier, before the police arrived, you said you knew why your father was asked to testify in front of the Hawking Review.”

  Daisy looked a little disappointed. “Ah. That.” She moved toward the train, holding one hand against the sliding door so it couldn’t close. “He said he knew why the cops, the Met, hadn’t found Andropov’s killer.”

  Ingrid’s brow puckered. “Why?”

  The doors bleeped and started to close. Daisy jumped on board. “More like who. Someone deliberately scuppered the investigation.”

  16

  Ingrid knocked on the open door of the counter-terrorism squad’s office.

  “You looking for me?” Sam Sherbourne asked.

  “Certainly am.”

  “Give me two minutes.”

  Ingrid leaned against his desk while he finished off his email. The CT office was just as badly maintained as her own, but the big difference was the number of people. Eight agents and six civilian staff shared the space that was not quite twice the size of the criminal division office. Someone was always on the phone, conversations were always being had. Desks were decorated with family photos, potted plants and brightly colored keepsakes. Her room felt monastic in comparison, and every time she was in there she didn’t know if she was relieved to have such privacy and space, or jealous of the camaraderie the CT team shared.

  “Okay,” he said, “what do you need?”

  “You don’t happen to have a copy of the Hawking Review, do you?”

  “Should do.” He called over to his assistant. “Ben?”

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Can you locate the Hawking Review for Ingrid?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Sherbourne turned his attention to Ingrid. He wheeled his chair back and placed his hands behind his head. Sweat patches darkened his pink shirt at the underarms. It was only nine a.m. “What do you need it for? Anything I ought to know about?”

  “Well, if you do, this is me notifying you,” Ingrid said. “I’m following up something that may be nothing.”

  His nose twitched as if he was going to sneeze. “Which is?”

  “The death of someone who was due to give evidence to the Review.”

  He pulled a Kleenex out of his pocket and held it against his nose.

  “Bless you,” Ingrid said, after a surprisingly delicate sneeze.

  “Hay fever,” Sherbourne said. “A US citizen?”

  “No, but it’s one of those cases where you’re not quite sure you’ve got anything, but you can’t stop digging until you’re certain you never will.”

  He threw the Kleenex in the trash. “You have time for one of those cases?”

  “Probably not. But I’ve got a very keen new assistant and this’ll be a good task for him” She lowered her voice. “Did you ever work with an agent called Mulroony? He was—”

  “Sure. Oh Denny Boy.”

  “That was his nickname?”

  “Well, he’s Irish, isn’t he? I remember a few nights in the pub that ended with him singing.”

  Ingrid hoped she kept the surprise from her face. She had become so used to people not talking about Mulroony that Sherbourne’s enthusiasm threw her a little. “You still in touch with him?” She tried to sound casual.

  “No. No one is. He left under a big, black cloud.” His eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking?”

  “I think I must have his old desk. I’ve been getting a couple of calls for him.” She jutted out her bottom lip. “What was the cloud?”

  Sherbourne leaned back. “You know, I’m not sure. I’m going to go with inappropriate drunken behavior. Maybe he hit on the ambassador’s daughter, something like that. Whatever it was, it was big. The sort of thing you can’t come back from. One day he was at work, the next it was as if he’d never existed.” He paused. “He was a sociable guy. A fun guy. But he clearly made an enemy somewhere.”

  Ingrid decided to test the water one more time. “Last call I got for him was a Russian caller. Any of your contacts ever ask for him?”

  He pulled a face. “Nope, can’t say they have.”

  Ben approached, carrying a bound report that was ten inches thick. “This is just the summary,” he said. “I can check with the library downstairs. I imagine they have the full report. System says it’s one hundred and fifty thousand pages in total.”

  The summary was as heavy as it looked. “They better have a damn good index,” Ingrid said, adjusting her grip. “Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Sam.” She passed the bulletin board on her way back to the criminal division and pulled up. Her mouth fell open. Her heart beat hard. Someone had identified the photo of the small brown bird.

  “Who wrote this?” she asked. The clerks and assistants inside the bullpen didn’t even look up. “Who wrote this?” she said again, her voice quavering. She placed the report on the floor, ripped the photocopy from its pin and stepped inside the glass partition that separated the desks from the walkways. “Do you know who wrote this?” Ingrid asked. “Do you?” She was met with shoulder shrugs and head shakes. Her heart raced. The paper trembled in her hands. She looked at the unusual handwriting. The loop of the ‘y’ was almost theatrical. Someone would recognize the penmanship. “Listen.” Her throat was so constricted it was an effort to raise her voice. She waved the piece of paper in the air. “Can I have your attention? Please!”

  The chatter rolled to a stop. Their keyboards fell silent.

  “Thank you.” A nerve twitched in Ingrid’s thigh. “Did any of you write this?”

  No one answered.

  “Did any of you see who did write it?”

  A dull chorus of ‘no’ and ‘huh’ emanated from their mouths.

  “Okay,” Ingrid said, feeling a little stupid for making such a big fuss. “Does anyone know when it was written?”

  A distant voice piped up. “A couple days ago?”

  “Who said that?”

  Ingrid looked around for a raised hand.

  “I did.”

  Ingrid turned. DeWalt’s secretary—her secretary until a few weeks beforehand—was sitting at her desk outside DeWalt’s door at the far end of the room with her hand in the air. Ingrid smiled with relief at Penny’s familiar face.

  “I think it’s been there a couple days,” Penny said, raising her voice.

  “Sounds about right,” someone else said.

  How had Ingrid missed it? “And no one saw who wrote it?” She looked at a sea of bemused faces. “Okay, thanks people. Thanks, Penny. Sorry for the interruption.�
�

  Ingrid picked up the report from the floor and took it into her office. She dropped it on her desk next to the copy of Daisy Steiner’s book. She checked inside the flap and re-read the note she’d written for Kathleen. It was lame. She’d known it was lame when she wrote it, but so had everything else she’d thought of. ‘Hope this might be a welcome distraction. All my love, Ingrid.’ She pushed it away. She couldn’t send it.

  She was a jerk. What she wanted to say, but somehow never had, was that she loved Kathleen more than her own mother, and that she was so sorry that she hadn’t been able to save Megan, or find her killer, and there was no one on earth she wanted to make amends with more than her. But Ingrid couldn’t even tell a good friend to wipe lipstick from her teeth.

  How could she be so brave at work, and such a coward with Kathleen? A wave of self-loathing roared through her. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply before reaching to answer the phone that was ringing on her desk. Zeke beat her to it and picked up from his extension.

  “Special Agent Ingrid Skyberg’s line.” His eyebrows shot up. “I’ll put you through now.”

  Ingrid’s extension started to trill. “It’s the ambassador’s office,” he said.

  Ingrid picked up. “Agent Skyberg.”

  “Please hold.” The voice was distant. The line had an echo. It definitely wasn’t a call from the sixth floor. Ingrid waited to be connected.

  “Ingrid?”

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s me. It’s Jen.”

  Ingrid’s face bloomed with a huge smile. Jen was the perfect person to lighten her mood. “Hello stranger. How are you? Where are you?”

  “Almaty.”

  “Is that Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan?”

  “Ooh, so close. Kazakhstan. Jack’s the new ambassador. Well, acting ambassador.”

  “And how is it?”

  “Mostly it seems to be, like, receptions with oil workers and their wives.”

  “You enjoying it?”

  “Oh, Ingrid, it is fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I am loving every single second.” Jennifer Rocharde was a guaranteed ray of sunshine. Or Jennifer Tucker, as she was now. Even though it had to be five in the morning where she was. “I can’t believe you’re still in London. I thought you wanted to get out.”

  Ingrid sighed. “I did. I kinda still do, but…”

  “But?”

  “Carolyn—you remember Marshall’s sister, right—is coming back, and I promised to take care of her.” Ingrid sighed. “So, I’ll be here for at least another three years. I’m actually house-hunting.” It was lovely to catch up with her old assistant, but Ingrid had asked Jen to call for a reason. She wanted to know what Jen remembered about the day Mulroony took a photo of her holding a birthday cake. “Listen, this is going to sound weird and arbitrary, but did you get the image I sent you?”

  “You mean the one you’d labeled ‘puppy63’ and sent to my Gmail from some random email address you’ve set up? Yes, I got it. Where did you find it?”

  Why hadn’t Ingrid anticipated that question? “It fell out of a file,” she fudged.

  “Uh-huh.” Jen was skeptical. “So why the secret squirrel routine?”

  Fair point. Best to respond with a question of her own. “Do you remember it being taken?”

  “Like, vaguely.”

  “Do you know who else is in the photo?”

  “Sure. The girl on the right is Sacha Daniels, she was like Sol’s secretary for a few months, and the girl in the middle is Missy Benoit. She was only in London a month or two. She left to start art school in Paris. I think.” When Jen said ‘I think’ Ingrid had learned that was just self-deprecation. Jen’s memory for facts and faces was faultless. “And obviously that’s DeWalt to one side. I hear he got Marshall’s job.”

  Ingrid stared at the photo. “That’s DeWalt?” She was incredulous. “You sure.”

  “Totes,” Jen said. “I remember that shirt.”

  He had lost a lot of hair and gain several pounds in five years. “Whose birthday was it?” Ingrid asked.

  “Hmmm.” Jen went quiet. “You know what, I don’t think it was anybody’s. Isn’t that weird?”

  Ingrid waited for her to continue.

  “Yep, yep I remember now.” She paused. “You know, it really was weird. The guy who, like, took the photo was Voldemort. You remember, right? The guy we were never supposed to speak about.”

  “Mulroony?”

  “That’s very brave of you saying his name out loud,” Jen said. “I take it you’re alone?”

  Ingrid gave Zeke a big smile. “No, just living dangerously.”

  “Well, anyway, he brought the cake in. And the candles. He said he needed a photograph of a birthday party to send home. So, he got the three of us together and was very specific about where we stood.” She inhaled audibly. “Yep, now I think about it, it was totally weird. It’s like totally creepy that he kept it. What file was it in?”

  Ingrid opened her drawer and took out the packet of photos. She placed it next to the torn photocopy of the bird. “Was Mulroony always like that? Always odd?”

  “I didn’t really know him—”

  “I thought you worked with him?”

  Jen was taken aback. “No, no, I worked with the CI team back then.”

  “So how come you were working on the criminal side when I joined?”

  “You don’t know?” Jen was incredulous.

  “I guess I just assumed you’d worked with my predecessor.”

  “No, I only, like moved to that office because Voldemort’s assistant… Julie Something. Julie Bairstow. Actually, it’s a really horrible story. I can’t, like, believe I totally forgot about this. She, um, she got attacked walking home. She was in, like a coma, for months.”

  Ingrid’s mouth fell open as she pulled out one of the cake photos.

  “I don’t think she ever fully recovered, you know. I’m pretty sure at some point she was transferred back to the States and is, like, in a little hospital near her folks.”

  Ingrid didn’t know what to say.

  “She was, like, hit with a hammer. Geez, I can’t believe you don’t know about it. It was just the worst thing ever.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Right after Mul–, I mean Voldemort left.” Jen breathed in. Ingrid could almost picture her placing a hand on her hip. “Why all these questions, Ingrid? What’s going on?”

  This was a question Ingrid had prepared a little white lie for. “I pulled up a case file from the library, and in among his notes was this photo. I couldn’t see how it was significant, but thought you might know something.” Ingrid swallowed. “Plus, it’s been ages, and it was really just an excuse to catch up.”

  “Hmm, well, if I had done that filing I would have, like, totally put the photo in the folder labeled ‘Creepy Guy has secret office crush’. Maybe he needed a pretend girlfriend to show his mom?”

  Ingrid was struck by how easy it was to talk to Jen. For four years they’d worked closely together and seen each other through embarrassments and hangovers and unwise dating choices and impossible bosses. She had missed her more than she’d acknowledged. They chatted for another fifteen minutes before saying their goodbyes.

  “Old friend?” Zeke asked when Ingrid finally put the phone down.

  “That was Jen,” Ingrid said.

  “Saint Jen? The Saint Jennifer?” He placed both hands over his heart. “Well, I feel honored to have come so close to perfection.”

  Ingrid pushed one of the birthday photos in Zeke’s direction. He got up and crossed the office. “Don’t know how much of that you overheard?”

  Zeke’s eyes narrowed. He had probably heard all of it but feigned ignorance.

  “Apparently our mystery photographer brought in his own cake for a non-existent birthday.”

  “Odd.” He picked up the photo. “You’d think then, he might have taken a better photograph of the actual cake, wouldn’t you?” He placed it down
on top of the photocopy. Then he raised his gaze and looked very deliberately at Ingrid. “Oh my God.” He slapped her playfully on the upper arm. “Oh, my effing God! When were you going to tell me?”

  “You mean you didn’t notice before? Apparently, it’s been on the bulletin board for a day or two.”

  “Geez, I think I would have noticed that.” He swiped up the photocopy. “So, you’re a skylark, are you?” he said to the image of the bird. “I don’t suppose you know why someone keeps calling for you, do you?”

  17

  Ingrid walked up to the reception desk. “I’m looking for the Darwin building.”

  The goth behind the desk smiled at her and pulled out a leaflet. He turned it over to reveal a map of the campus of the London College of Media. “You’re here.” He marked their position with an X. Ingrid saw he had implants on the back of his hand that resembled an iguana’s spine. “And the Darwin is out of the double doors, down the street and is the red brick building on the corner.” He smiled, revealing a tattoo on the inside of his lower lip. “You can’t miss it.”

  Most of the buildings in the street belonged to the college. Ingrid guessed that it just wouldn’t have been possible to build a large university in such an ancient city, and so LCM had acquired a random collection of buildings in proximity to one another. According to the carved stone panel above the entrance to the Darwin building, it had once been a hospital for tropical diseases.

  At another reception desk she got more directions and set off in search of Lecture Theater B. A network of busy corridors and noisy stairwells brought her to an internal lobby and a sign for the lecture theater. A handwritten sign on the door said, ‘No entry. Latecomers must use the rear door.’ Finding that door involved another maze of walkways, and two flights of stairs. Ingrid slipped in and flipped down a blue plastic seat near the back where the lighting was poor.