by Eva Hudson
1 People have been calling my number for him
2 The following people have been killed to protect his identity. David Steiner. Saskia Cole. Jacob DeWalt. Mulroony’s assistant (coma)
3 Before Mulroony was extracted, Skylark was a codename for a suspected double agent inside MI5 or the Met
4 Until his death, I thought it could have been DeWalt.
The other piece of paper just said:
Why would DeWalt frame Mulroony if he wasn’t Skylark?
Ingrid stared at the list and shoveled in a mouthful of food. She realized her own name had come close to being added to the list at Tilbury. She checked the clock and scooted over to her desk to dial Sam Sherbourne. It had been a couple of hours since they’d last spoken.
“Hey.” He sounded weary.
“Any news?”
“No, he’s still sitting in the beer garden of the Green Goblin pub not drinking very much, and I’m still sitting at the table opposite keeping an eye on him.” He sighed. “He even bought me a drink.”
It was very strange behavior for someone being tailed. Just sitting there, brazenly waiting for Sherbourne to, what? Get bored? Get a better offer? Fall asleep? Normally, it took six agents to maintain surveillance, but Burridge was letting the FBI do it with one.
“And is he doing anything?”
“Nope, looking at the paper, looking at his phone.”
“It’ll run out of juice soon,” Ingrid said.
“So will mine.”
Fair point. “You want to call it a day?”
“Dunno. I’m kind of intrigued. It’s so alpha I think I want to know where this is heading.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
Ingrid scrambled in a few more mouthfuls of food and returned to the spare desk. Her eyes settled on the single line of scrawl on the second piece of paper: Why would DeWalt frame Mulroony if he wasn’t Skylark?
She thought about what Libby had said about his buddies and his favors and his frat obligations. Was Skylark a friend of DeWalt’s? Or someone he owed a massive favor to? It wasn’t the most outlandish theory she’d ever come up with.
Sensing she might be onto something, Ingrid pulled up the folder Penny had created and went through DeWalt’s diary appointments for the preceding week. Her cell vibrated on the desk. Svetlana. “You’ll have to wait, Mom.”
DeWalt’s workload was familiar. The Monday morning meeting with the Legat and representatives of the Agency and the NSA. The Tuesday afternoon briefing with the State Department team. Speaking engagements at security conferences and appearances at committee meetings. His workload didn’t seem any heavier than when she had been covering the desk.
Her cell buzzed again. Svetlana. Again. The best way to get rid of her was to answer it. “Mom, hi.”
“How can you say hi at a time like this?”
Ingrid held the phone away from her ear and snarled at it. “Is that no longer the correct way to answer a call?”
“And why do I always have to call twice to get you to answer? Huh?”
“Mom, I’m at work.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Actually, yes, the number of times you call me, I think that maybe you don’t.
“Work is all you do. Always work, work, work.”
Ingrid inhaled deeply through her nose. In with anger, out with love. “Mom, I really am very busy.”
“Which is why you not even know what is happening.”
“With the trial?”
“Yes, with the trial. The defense has rested. The jury is deli-delibery—”
“Deliberating.”
“And now you make fun of my accent.”
Ingrid eye-rolled. She did not have time for this. “Mom, my other phone is ringing. I’ll call you back tonight.”
Just as she ended the call to Minnesota, her desk phone did indeed start ringing. “Skyberg.”
“Oh, hello Ingrid, I don’t know if you’ll remember me.” The voice—female, English—was alarmingly familiar. “It’s Dr. Ives. You used to come to my house.”
“Yes. Yes, I remember.” Her skin rippled with discomfort. Ingrid had been forced to visit a psychotherapist against her wishes when she was undercover. “This is unexpected.”
“I must confess, I didn’t expect to be speaking to you today either, but your name was on a request I received.”
Ingrid was suddenly back in Dr. Ives’s front room. Her body tensed accordingly. “It was?”
“You asked for Jacob DeWalt’s medical records?”
“Ah.” So he had also been a patient of hers. “You have been told that he’s died?” Ingrid said tentatively, unsure of the protocol.
“Yes, that information accompanied the request. And the reason for my calling is that I do not have a psychological report ready for Jacob, and it would take me several weeks to prepare one.” She paused. “So I thought it was best if I relayed my findings over the phone. Perhaps you could make notes?”
“Um, yes.” Ingrid looked around her chaotic desk for a pad and pen. “Yes, that would be great.” Ingrid scribbled on the pad to make sure the ink was flowing. “Please, go ahead.”
“First of all, can I ask how he died?”
“He fell. From a fifth-floor balcony.”
“Did he jump?” Ives asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to determine.”
“I’m rather afraid that he did.”
It was as if Dr. Ives had slugged her in the chest. Ingrid let out an involuntary pocket of air and sat with her mouth ajar.
“In our most recent sessions, he had been exceedingly morose. I last saw him two days ago, and he told me he had done a terrible thing.”
“I see,” Ingrid said, though she didn’t.
“He said he didn’t think he could live with what he had done. Or that he could withstand his children finding out.”
Ingrid couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She ran a hand through her hair and closed her eyes. “And what had he done?”
“Well, that he didn’t tell me. My job is to help him understand what he is feeling, not to subject him to the Spanish Inquisition.”
Ingrid shuddered as she recalled Ives’s probing to explore how she really felt about things.
“This thing he was referring to? Did it relate to his work, or his family?”
“The situation with his ex-wife had been a source of strain and upheaval for a long time, and it didn’t help him to think clearly, or be optimistic, but it was a work thing. Ingrid,” Dr. Ives paused. Ingrid had always hated the way Ives said her name. “This was a very profound shame he felt. This wasn’t about not getting the bad guy, or overlooking a vital piece of evidence.”
“Then what was it?”
Ives sighed. “He exhibited signs of disgust, of very deep loathing, emotions I generally only see in patients who have done something against their own moral code, who have breached their own ethical boundaries.”
“But you have no idea what it was?”
“I could speculate, but that would go against my own moral code.” Ives cleared her throat. “The reason why he was struggling so much was because he was a deeply moral person. Most law enforcement clients are.”
Ingrid was still reeling from the news that affable, likeable Jacob DeWalt had been in such turmoil. She couldn’t think what questions to ask.
Ives continued. “He said he knew that good people occasionally did bad things, but that he had done something so wrong that he could no longer claim to be one of the good guys. Ingrid, I have been a therapist for twenty-five years; I have rarely seen a man wrestle with his conscience like this.” She inhaled audibly. “I can’t tell you what he did, only that he said he never meant to, and that he could not live with having done it.”
Ingrid took a moment to absorb what Ives was telling her. “Never meant to?”
“He said it started with a favor, a small thing, and then he had been asked again, and sudde
nly he realized that he was compromised, and then finally that he was complicit.”
That was sounding familiar.
“I worked with Jacob for four years. He was a man who could tolerate a lot of gray. He accepted, for instance, that it was a lot to expect a man and a woman to remain faithful to each other for decades, and he could understand why criminals who had been rehabilitated deserved their freedom. His morals were actually quite flexible. So…”
“So?”
“So, whatever it was that he couldn’t live with was not a small thing.”
Not a small thing. What the hell did that mean? All Ingrid’s loathing for Dr. Ives’s platitudes and equivocation surged to the surface. “Is there anything else?” she said through gritted teeth.
“Only that I am very sorry you have lost a colleague. If you want to talk to me about it, you know that we can always resume our sessions.”
Over my dead body. “Thank you, that’s very kind.”
Ingrid ended the call and walked over to the spare desk and looked at her list. She shook her head as she crossed out DeWalt’s name from the list of people Skylark had killed. Within seconds of putting down her pen, Ingrid’s cell buzzed on her desk.
“Jesus, can I just get a moment alone?”
She was down to nine percent battery life. She searched in her drawer for a charging cable as she swiped to answer. “Cath, hi. Sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward position. Did your arrests go well?”
“Actually, they did. But that’s not why I’m calling.”
Ingrid found a cable and plugged her phone into the USB port on her computer. She leaned over, as the cord was too short to allow her to sit upright.
“I just had a very strange call from the Chief Super at another station. Highly unusual.”
“You been tapped up for another promotion?”
“No, listen.” Cath lowered her voice. “He needed to get an official message to you unofficially.”
“Okay. Sounds intriguing.”
“Apparently you’ve got a Wayne Burridge under surveillance?”
“Ah, yes. Yes, we do.”
“You need to tell your team to step back.”
Team? It was just Sherbourne. “Why?”
“He’s one of us.”
What? “He’s a cop?”
“He’s undercover.”
Why would an undercover cop follow me? “Oh.”
“And your operation is in danger of blowing his cover.”
Ingrid was stunned into silence. “I thought he was a locksmith.”
“Good cover, eh? I gather he’s embedded with Extinction Rebellion, and they’re always suckers for men with vans.”
It explained Burridge’s cockiness. And the death certificate: he must have assumed the identity of the child who died.
“You’ve gone awfully quiet,” Cath said.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know any reason why a Metropolitan police officer who’s undercover with Extinction Rebellion would have me under surveillance?”
“Hmm. Not a scooby,” Cath said. “But I can ask around.”
Ingrid left the phone off the hook and turned off the vibrate function on her cell. She needed to think. She needed space. And silence.
There was a knock at the door.
37
Ingrid groaned then turned round. Marsha was leaning against the door frame, arms folded, a concerned look on her face. Ingrid managed something approaching a smile.
“You look beat,” Marsha said. “How’s it going?”
Ingrid flapped her hands uselessly in the air. “I have no idea. I need a little time to think.”
Marsha stepped inside and closed the door. “I think you’ve got the best air conditioning in the building. Can I move in, please?” She pulled over a chair and sat in front of Ingrid. “To be honest, I just needed five too. You can ignore me. I figured in here I can’t hear my phone, and I can’t see my emails.”
“Tough first day?”
“I feel like I’ve run an ultra-marathon in heels.” She kicked off her sling backs and rubbed her bare feet. “Sorry, is this gross?”
Ingrid slumped back against her chair. “Not at all.” Now that she thought about it, her own feet needed some respite from her shoes. She kicked them off, instantly feeling a little less anxious.
“You can ignore me,” Marsha said.
“You are the least ignorable person I know.” Except, perhaps, Nick Angelis.
“Is that a good thing?”
Ingrid wasn’t sure. Was it just that they had a complicated history? Was it Ingrid’s own discomfort that meant she couldn’t look away when Marsha was in the room? She felt they should have ‘the conversation’, the one that made it clear nothing was going to happen between them. Maybe if she cleared the air, then she could ignore her.
“Okay, don’t answer that. Do your thinking. I’m just hiding. Unless you want a sounding board?”
Ingrid rose slowly to her feet and grabbed the sheet of paper with the single question on it: Why would DeWalt frame Mulroony if he wasn’t Skylark? “Give that some thought,” Ingrid said and returned to the notes and photos on the spare desk. Marsha joined her, standing a fraction too close.
“You haven’t actually shown me these before. These are what started it all, huh?”
Ingrid gestured to the ceiling tiles. “Yup.”
“You want to talk me through them?”
Ingrid told her about Steiner’s book, his suicide, the Hawking Review into the Met’s bungled investigation of the dissident Dmitri Andropov’s murder. She explained about the Post-its and the file number and the cake and wondered if she was going crazy.
Marsha pointed at the photo of the diary. “What year is that?”
“Twenty-twelve.”
“Anything else happen that week?”
Ingrid stared so hard at the dates that her vision blurred. Something was gnawing its way out of her memory. “Can’t think.”
“Okay, we’ll figure that out. And is this what a skylark looks like?”
Ingrid wasn’t listening. “I’ve remembered.”
“Yes?”
“March seven, Twenty-twelve. Saskia Cole was murdered.”
Marsha arched one eyebrow, then peered down at the photo. Ingrid followed her gaze. The squiggle she has assumed was Mulroony getting the ink to flow suddenly looked a lot like a lower case S followed by a lower case C. Was her brain making a connection where there wasn’t one?
“Oh,” Marsha said, suddenly unnerved. “Wait here. I won’t be a moment.”
She dashed out of the office, leaving Ingrid to wonder what on earth she had said. She looked again at the photos. What had she seen? Less than a minute later, Marsha burst back in holding a Post-it. She handed it to Ingrid.
“Really?” Ingrid looked again.
Please call DCI Rushton, sois, New Scotland Yard.
Ingrid flamed with embarrassment. Sois. She saw it now.
“Libby left it on my desk. I had to ask her what sois was, and she said it was just her handwriting. It was SO15.” Marsha almost looked apologetic. “So then I had to ask her what SO15 was. Of course she didn’t know, but I imagine anyone who’s worked this office for more than a week does.”
Ingrid sighed. “Special Operations, Group 15. The Met’s counter-terrorism command.” She tilted her head back and silently screamed at her stupidity. “I thought it was goddamn French!”
Marsha placed a hand on her shoulder. “The good news is it’s further confirmation Skylark is in the Met.”
Ingrid fizzed with embarrassment. Fury reddened her cheeks. The shame that Marsha—a woman she admired almost more than any other—had been the one to spot her rookie error made her want to wriggle out of her own skin. “I think I pretty much had that confirmed two days ago when he tried to kill me.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d forgotten to mention that
to anyone.”
“You goddamn fool.” Marsha reached out to Ingrid’s face, forcing her to look at her. “You okay?”
Ingrid nodded. “Yes, thanks to a bee.”
“What?”
Ingrid filled Marsha in on Tilbury.
“And the man who followed you, who fired a gun at you, you think that was Skylark?”
Ingrid let out an enormous sigh. “Yes, I suppose I did. Up until about an hour ago.”
Marsha narrowed her eyes. “Go on.”
“I just spoke to DeWalt’s psychologist.”
“And?”
“She said something that made me wonder if it was DeWalt after all.”
“Okay,” Marsha said, encouraging Ingrid to continue.
“She told me it was her assessment that he had broken his own moral code, that he had done something deeply shameful.” She stopped and looked at Marsha. “Doesn’t that sound a tiny bit like betraying your country?”
Marsha stared at her with serious eyes. “But if he was Skylark, then why did he tell Libby to spy on you?”
Ingrid sucked on her teeth. That was an excellent question. Why indeed? “Because…”
“Yes?”
“Because someone was leaning on him? Penny said he was getting pressure from somewhere.” She paused. “Someone.”
Marsha smiled at her.
“What?”
“Just admiring. Watching you crack a case is like watching Monet paint.”
Ingrid turned away, embarrassed, and returned to her desk. If her new theory was right, then DeWalt’s phone records would show who had been leaning on him. If it was Skylark, then his number would likely be in the call log.
Ingrid examined the list of numbers on her screen, aware of Marsha watching her. Her breathing was rapid and shallow as she scanned the list. She didn’t recognize any of the numbers, so she inputted them into the FBI’s database. If they already had a record of the numbers, then it’d match them to names and organizations. She drummed her fingers on the desk as she waited for the results to spew out.
And then she saw it.
“What is it?”
“Look at this,” Ingrid said.
Marsha crossed the floor in bare feet and stood behind her. “This is the call log of DeWalt’s cell—”