by Rod Reynolds
He banked the name and looked up the address on Google Maps. Forty-five minutes from where he was now, with traffic. He went back to the search on his phone. It’d taken him a few minutes to place where he’d seen the man inside before: at the journalist’s office in London Bridge. So what was he doing at her flat now? And why did it niggle him?
The man emerged again after fifteen minutes, leaving on his own. Stringer watched as he rubbed his neck, a faraway look on his face. It was fleeting, the man taking his phone out and pressing it to his ear while he flagged a cab. The blinds in the upstairs window twitched, and Stringer could make out her shadow behind them.
He crumpled the two halves of napkin on the table and threw them in his empty cup.
Tammy Hodgson’s flat was a single-storey modern annexe tacked onto the side of a Victorian semi. It had its own entrance on a side street, around the corner from that of the main building. Stringer parked in a bay across the road from her door.
He’d looked her up before he left. It didn’t take long to get the picture. Hodgson was another journo, formerly with the Examiner – explaining the link to Lydia Wright. A skim of her bio was impressive: she was credited with being on to the Credit Crunch before it happened, and subsequently being among the first to expose the malpractice in the banking industry that had caused it. That’d cemented her place at the top table, and from there she was one of the select group of journalists to first receive the Panama Papers, the 2015 insider data leak from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that exposed money-laundering schemes linked to a dozen heads of state, and laid bare the widespread abuse of tax havens by the global elite. He wondered why her career had seemingly come to a hard stop such a short time later.
He watched her place for half an hour before he decided she wasn’t home. From where he sat he could see the large window of the front room; the main panel was frosted for privacy, but he could make out enough of the room behind it to see there was no one moving about inside. There was the chance she was in the kitchen or bedroom, but he rated it unlikely she wouldn’t have passed through the front room at all in that time. And when a DPD driver pulled up with a parcel, but got no answer from the knocker, it confirmed it.
He slipped across the road and down the short path to her door. There was grass either side of it, but barely enough to call a garden. The annexe ran the width of the main house’s flank, meaning there was no rear access. He checked there was no one on the street then glanced through the side panel of the window, seeing a long, narrow front room with two open doorways leading off the back of it – one was the kitchen, another that was dark and looked like a hallway.
He stepped to the side to get a different angle on the lounge. There was a sofa along one wall, a flatscreen opposite, and a desk with an oversized Apple monitor in the far corner. Two floor-to-ceiling bookcases took up the remaining wall space. The centre of the room was brighter than the edges; he looked up and saw a skylight in the ceiling.
He stepped back, deciding what to do. No way of knowing how soon she might return. He looked at the lock on the front door – new enough to be tricky. He tried the handle to see how firm its housing was.
It was unlocked. The door swung inwards.
He stepped inside on reflex, whipping the door shut so he couldn’t be seen from the street.
His skin felt electrified. The flat was silent, and he stood motionless, feeling his heart thudding in his chest, listening for any noise. He was in a short hallway, another doorway ahead to his left, leading into the front room. He heard a car pass by outside, the most mundane sound, now magnified in his ears.
He took a step forward and paused, the air so close and still it felt like it folded around him. A second step and he was in the lounge. His gaze fell on the desk first. There was an empty space in front of the monitor, two unplugged cables snaking across the desktop – as if a laptop would normally be there. The top drawer was ajar.
He moved slowly across the room to the kitchen doorway, flinching a little every time his shoes scraped the wooden floor. He ducked his head inside, saw a plate, mug and bowl in the sink, a tub of Flora on the counter, the lid off, a butter knife sticking out of it, the contents melted almost to liquid. He waited again, breathing silently. He backed up and went through the adjacent doorway, into the rear hallway.
It was dark, no windows in the passage, the two doors at right angles to each other at the far end both closed. He walked along it, faster now, driven on by the tension knotting his gut. He used his knuckle to push open the door to his right – a bathroom. It was cramped but neat, a shower cubicle filling most of the space, a toilet and compact washbasin the rest.
He turned to the last door. He pulled his sleeve over his hand to turn the knob, then pushed to let it swing open.
Tammy Hodgson was lying on top of the bed. She was fully clothed. Her eyes were open, the whites turned blood red. He didn’t need to go any closer to know she was dead.
A voice in his head shouted: GO, NOW. He resisted it. He took in the room without daring to move. A glass had been knocked from the bedside table, but the carpet around where it lay was dry. Either it’d been empty, or it was an indicator she’d been dead some time. A pillow had tumbled to the floor too, on the other side. There was a pair of flat shoes at the end of the bed, looked like she’d kicked them off, and a novel on the bedside table, laid open face down to keep its page. He couldn’t see her phone anywhere, nor any telltale outline in her trouser pockets.
He checked his watch to see how long he’d been inside the flat – three minutes. He gave himself another two and went back to the lounge, the desk. A frame on the desktop held a picture of Hodgson with a boy, the pair smiling, a sunny day in a park somewhere. His stomach dipped at the thought she had a kid. He glanced around, realising there was no sign of a child living there, no second bedroom that could accommodate him. A grim reassurance the kid wouldn’t be the one to find her. He forced himself to keep going.
The top drawer was empty apart from some loose change and a paper clip.
Second drawer – empty.
Bottom drawer – ditto.
In his mind he saw the killer or killers hurriedly dumping the contents into a duffel bag, along with her laptop. He looked along the bookshelves – a mixture of fiction and non, books on international finance, politics, banking, Russia, sharing shelf space with rows of rom-coms and crime.
He checked his watch, glanced around again. The TV was above a cabinet with two cupboard doors, the only other storage in the room. He crossed to it and opened both, glancing at the window as the fear made him feel like he was being watched. Inside were DVDs, a box of tangled AV cables, a sheaf of printer paper and a stack of magazines. He leafed through the top few issues, saw nothing of relevance.
He silently closed the cupboards and stood up, woozy. The dead woman on the bed. The signs they’d ransacked her.
The intruder at Lydia Wright’s flat…
CHAPTER 27
Lydia left early, hoping to steal an extra half hour if Paulina Dobriska showed up sooner than they’d arranged. There was time to make the meet and still get to the office for midnight, but an extra thirty minutes could make the difference. Staring through the Tube window at the orange streetlights blurring across the north-London night, she wondered why she cared about punctuality anymore. Wasn’t she quitting?
Stephen’s money was folded away deep inside her bag. She’d make up the rest of Sam Waterhouse’s fee out of her own pocket. Somehow. Waiting while the train crept north made her antsy so she tried to focus on her priorities. Most important: did Paulina know either the victim or the attackers? Lydia’s assumption was not, but if it turned out she did, that blew things wide open. Second, what happened after the video ended? It seemed likely she’d fled, but what did she see? If Sam Waterhouse was right that there was someone else helping them, maybe Paulina got a look at a car or a person – people? – waiting somewhere. Third: had she spoken to the police? If not, why not? An
d maybe linked to question four: had she been threatened, directly or otherwise, in the aftermath? She sounded terrified on the phone, so maybe that was its own answer to both.
The automated voice announced Brent Cross was the next station. The train glided to a stop, the platform at rooftop level. The shopping centre was just visible through the trees, the glow from its lights seeping into the night sky. The train waited with its doors open after she stepped off, the unnatural quiet undercut by the rush of traffic coming from the North Circular.
Antsy to straight-up nervous. Her thoughts started to unspool, speeding up with her heartbeat. She took her time going down the steps to the ticket hall, trying to bring back some calm. Half a dozen other passengers overtook her as she went. Behind everything, there was still her anger at Tammy. She’d held off from calling her, and the realisation Tammy hadn’t even bothered to message her to explain why she stood her up at Southwark the night before only pissed her off more. So now being first to the punch with Paulina gave her a sense of payback.
She came out of the ticket hall into a gloomy car park. She was twenty-five minutes early. There was a light on in the minicab office to her right, a café, a dry cleaners and a newsagent next to it, all of them shuttered for the night. The other side of the car park was lined with trees and bushes, a glimpse of a row of mock-Tudor houses behind them.
She walked along the small parade of shops. A man behind a high desk in the cab office glanced up as she looked through the window, but went straight back to his phone. She carried on to the end of the parade, where it met the main road. Above her, a bridge coated in peeling grey paint carried the tracks above the street, an empty bus stop underneath it, one of its Perspex panels missing.
There was no sign of Paulina. She looked around and saw a tall pole holding two CCTV cameras, pointed at the car park and the station entrance. Back in the ticket hall, a man in a suit was talking on his phone, and one of the station staff was writing on the white board. She retraced her steps and went to stand near them.
After fifteen minutes, a woman appeared at the corner of the car park, alone. She stopped at the far end of the shopping parade and looked around, glancing in Lydia’s direction. She made eye contact but Lydia didn’t move. There was a resemblance, but it was hard to tell at a distance.
The woman took a few steps towards her again and curled her finger for Lydia to come over, her manner impatient, as if Lydia had missed a signal. She moved slowly in her direction, trying to get a better look. As she came close, she felt a flutter in her chest – it wasn’t Paulina.
‘You are Lydia?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Paulina is waiting. She’s in the car.’ The woman jerked her head to her right.
‘Can you tell her to come here, please.’
‘She will not come. She sent me.’
Lydia stared at her, and slowly started shaking her head. ‘No. If she wants the money, I’d like to see her face first.’
The woman rolled her eyes. ‘You come with me or I go home, up to you. You two playing your bloody silly games. The car’s right there.’ She inclined her head again, her hands in the pockets of her hoodie.
Lydia looked up at the CCTV cameras, then back towards the ticket hall. The Underground man had a panel open on one of the ticket gates, trying to fix it. Do you want this or not? ‘Okay.’
The woman turned and walked on ahead of her.
‘How do you know Paulina?’ Lydia said.
‘She’s my cousin. She stay with me when she arrived from Poland. Now all this crap and she says she has to go back.’
Lydia sped up so she could draw level with her. ‘Did she tell you about what happened?’
The woman guided them down a long residential street, heading away from the bridge. ‘I tell her I don’t want to know. I got enough bloody problems with Brexit and all that shit, I don’t need her trouble. She tell me she’s leaving, I said okay.’
They made another left turn, down the road with the mock-Tudor houses. ‘Where’s your car?’
The woman pointed somewhere ahead. ‘Up there. Red Kia.’ She walked on again.
Lydia looked back towards the main road, ten metres away. Already thirty seconds from the station. She couldn’t see the Kia she was talking about.
‘You coming or no?’
She kept walking but her insides were crawling. She let the woman’s voice bounce around her head, thinking it sounded like the one she’d heard on the Facebook call earlier. Almost sure of it. Was this Paulina after all, playing games? Or something else?
The woman was a short way ahead; she stopped and turned around again, beckoning Lydia to catch up, impatience returning. Lydia slowed as she scanned the cars in the darkness, trying to see the Kia—
A man burst out of the car next to her. He locked his arm around her neck, so fast she couldn’t even scream. She clawed behind herself for his face, instinct taking over, but the woman rushed over and pinned her arms.
She couldn’t breathe, starbursts in her vision. They bundled her towards the open door. She felt the man turning to force her inside; she got her foot on the frame to stop him, but he cinched his grip tighter and one of them kicked the back of her knee to buckle her leg. She was halfway inside the car—
His arm went slack. The man collapsed to the pavement, dragging her with him.
She snatched a breath. From the ground she saw the woman turn and run. Lydia pushed the limp arm off her neck and scrambled to get up, but then she saw a new face standing over her. Through her panic she recognised him – the man who’d been talking on his phone in the ticket hall.
He reached his hand out to help her up, some kind of weapon dangling from the other one. ‘Come on.’
Stringer watched Lydia Wright walk away from the station from the other side of the road. He’d hung around the ticket hall while she waited for as long as he could without being conspicuous, then moved to a bus stop under the bridge that gave him a line of sight to where she was standing.
He took photos of the woman she was following on his phone, catching her face in the light from the minicab office. No one he recognised. He heard her saying something about ‘trouble’ and ‘not wanting to know’ before they slipped out of earshot. He let them get a head start then followed after, Wright’s evident unease spreading to him.
When they turned off the main road, he went as far as the corner and stopped, a tall hedge wrapped around the first house on the street providing cover. He saw the journalist hesitating, and the woman getting impatient ahead of her.
They walked on a few more steps and then everything went to shit.
He saw the door of a black Saab fly open and the man lunge out. Big guy, heavyset, dark clothes. Stringer started running, pulling his telescope baton out of his pocket. The woman was helping now, clearly in on it too.
He flicked the baton out as he came close and coshed the man on the back of the head. He went to swing again, but the guy was already down. On the floor, he saw his eyes lolling. A snap take: not the same man who’d broken into her flat.
The woman took off down the street. Stringer reached his hand out to Lydia. ‘Come on.’
She looked up at him, eyes wide and face taut.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
She scrambled backward and used the car to claw herself to her feet, gaze flicking between him and the man on the floor. Stringer had one eye on the surroundings, looking for the woman or anyone watching from the houses. He glanced at Lydia again and curled his hand twice, circling around the car at the same time so he could check the number plate.
‘What the fuck is…?’
He memorised it and then knelt on one knee, using the pavement to jam the baton back into its handle. ‘We’ll talk. Not here.’
The man on the ground stirred and Lydia stepped into the gutter to get away from them both.
Stringer started moving off, eyes locked on hers, hand outstretched.
Lydia watched, frozen in place.
‘I’ve seen the video.’
Her eyes flared again. ‘What is … Who the fuck are you?’
‘Come with me.’
She shook her head, backing away across the road. She made it to the other pavement and then she turned and ran full pelt.
Lydia ran into the station checking over her shoulder. She couldn’t see the staff member from before anywhere. Her legs were trembling and she was covered in sweat.
She ran up the stairs to the platforms. There were a handful of people dotted around. The indicator boards showed three minutes for a train in either direction. She stood at the top of the staircase and realised she was trapped if they were behind her. She looked at the tracks, gauging if she could scramble across them – but then what? Fuck, fuck—
She reached for her phone to call the police. When she unlocked it, there was a notification on the screen – a DM from Paulina Dobriska’s account:
KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT YOU LYING CUNT. WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, WE CAN GET YOU ANYTIME
Lydia dropped the phone. It crashed onto the metal lip of the top step and then cascaded onto the next one. She took a ragged breath, violent tremors shaking her whole body now.
‘You alright, love?’
She looked around and there was a man with a baseball cap standing to her side.
He bent down to scoop up her phone and held it out for her. ‘Christ, hate it when that happens.’
The screen was shattered but still working, the notification legible through a thousand splinter lines.
She snatched it from him and backed away, his expression turning to a question mark. She watched his face, wondering if he was part of it, waiting for his mask to slip. Instead he stayed where he was, looking at her like she was drunk.
She saw the white help point ahead of her on the platform and she ran towards it. She pressed the Emergency button and a ringing sound came from inside the unit. She looked over her shoulder but the man who’d picked up her phone had sidled off down the platform.