Safe House (22 page)

Rebecca said, ‘But isn’t it also possible that if someone wanted to sabotage a system, that would be a good way to do it?’

‘Why would anyone want to sabotage their own heating system?’

‘Maybe so a plumber would have to come out. A particular individual.’ Rebecca emphasised her words, like she was handing them to me one by one and asking me to weigh them, feel their shape, try to fit them into the slots of a specific puzzle she’d constructed. ‘I think maybe Laura gave
Lena
your card.’

‘You think Lena sabotaged the boiler?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘Based purely on the facts? So that you’d take her away from the cottage on your motorbike.’

‘All that just for a bike ride?’

Rebecca slowed as she passed under the archway in the brick tower, then accelerated around the curve. Douglas promenade appeared from below, bright and gaudy, like Blackpool without the tower.

She shook her head. ‘You’re forgetting that your journey was cut short. Who knows where she wanted you to go?’

And that’s when the penny finally dropped.

‘I do,’ I said.

Chapter Thirty

Lukas turned the laptop around so that Mr Zeeger and Anderson could see the document he’d called up on screen. It was the memorial sheet for Laura Hale’s funeral – the one with the soft-focus image of Melanie Fleming on the opening page.

‘That’s her for sure,’ Anderson said, tapping his finger against the glowing screen.

‘Agreed,’ Mr Zeeger said.

‘So she gave us a false name. One that checked out. Which means she was smart. Question is, how smart?’

‘Explain.’

‘What I’m thinking,’ Anderson said, ‘is how can we be sure if she’s really dead?’

Lukas spun the laptop back around to face him and got busy with the trackpad. It was a problem that had already occurred to him and one that he’d done his best to answer. He scrolled through his browser history and called up a page from the local newspaper.

The article was brief, but clear. It stated that Laura Hale, aged thirty-one, had been killed in a car accident on a coastal road more than three and a half weeks ago. No other vehicles were involved and police were not treating her death as suspicious. It stated that Laura, who lived in London, had been on the island visiting her parents and her brother, Rob. It also noted that her father was a one-time motorbike racer by the name of Jimmy Hale, who’d triumphed in the Isle of Man TT races on a couple of occasions back in the late 1970s.

‘Doesn’t prove anything,’ Anderson said. He straightened and propped his knuckles on his hips.

Mr Zeeger leaned back in his chair. The light from the standing lamp blazed down on him. He contemplated Lukas. His blue eyes burned with intensity. ‘When was the last time she visited the cottage?’ Mr Zeeger asked.

‘I don’t remember for sure,’ Lukas told him, aware that it didn’t sound good.

‘Would the dates fit?’

Lukas nodded, keeping his eyes down.

‘We should have moved Lena sooner,’ Anderson said. It sounded like he was repeating an argument he’d made many times before.

Zeeger waved his hand. ‘I’m not interested in what we should have done. I want to know what you’re going to do. How you plan to find Lena?’

Anderson was silent for a moment. Then he reached a decision. ‘Melanie Fleming. Laura Hale. Whatever you want to call her, it’s too much of a coincidence for her brother to be involved in this. And not just him, but a private operative, too. I don’t like that. Not even a little.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘I already bugged the girl but the feedback is dead. I’m guessing she read my move. Next best thing is we watch them. See what they might be up to.’ Anderson turned to Lukas. ‘It’s going to take two of us. Think you can find your way back to his place?’

Lukas toggled to a fresh Word document on the laptop. It was one of the invoices from the man’s plumbing business. He copied the address information over into a mapping tool and hit
Search
. He handed the laptop to Anderson before the processor had finished whirring and the graphic had appeared on screen.

Anderson nodded. ‘I have a vehicle downstairs,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive. You navigate.’

*

Anderson had asked me if Lena had given me anything when we’d met. I’d told him that she hadn’t. And it was true. But it was also a lie.

Lena
had
given me something. It was just that she hadn’t passed it to me directly. She hadn’t taken me aside and told me what she was doing. She hadn’t closed my hand around the item and explained its significance, or asked me to hang on to it for safekeeping. So when I told Anderson that Lena hadn’t given me anything, it was true.

But it was also a lie.

It was a lie because Lena had given me a very simple, very modest object. So simple and so modest that it had taken me days to spot it.

When I first went up to the cottage, Lukas had tossed me a key to the garage. The key was relatively small. A touch flimsy. But it had fitted the lock on the garage door just fine and I’d been able to access the boiler.

Later that afternoon, Lena had come up with her plan for the following morning, involving my van and my motorbike. She’d told me to take the garage key with me, so that I didn’t need to ask Lukas for it when I returned.

I did as she suggested and the key had worked just as well the following day. I had it in my pocket when we rode away on my bike. It was still there after the crash, when my leathers were cut away from me and my belongings were collected together in the plastic bag that Dad had carried from the hospital.

That was how I’d been able to hand Rebecca the garage key when we’d walked up to take a look around the cottage. Just an ordinary key. Attached to a simple plastic key fob. I should have spotted it by then. I should have seen what I was looking at. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t because I hadn’t been expecting it. Because it was so commonplace. So obvious.

There was a
second
key on the fob. I didn’t even register that it was there until Rebecca had finished searching the cottage and had passed me the keys. But as I looked down at my palm, I finally understood that there were
two
keys. There’d been one originally. For the garage. And now there was another one.

The second key was a little longer. A touch sturdier. And it was distinctive because unlike the garage key it had a series of raised and lowered bits on both sides of the blade. The garage key had a simple circular bow, but the second key had a bow with an angular shape, like the top half of a hexagon. There was an embossed number on one side. I couldn’t recall the number off the top of my head. But I knew there were three letters stamped on the other side, and I could remember those quite clearly.

‘You’re sure the key wasn’t there before?’ Rebecca asked me, once I’d finished explaining.

I thought back to the feel of the key in my hand when Lukas had first thrown it to me. I conjured up the memory of fixing the key in the lock on the garage door. There hadn’t been a choice to make. I hadn’t tried one key, then the other. There’d only been one key.

‘I’m sure,’ I said.

‘And you think Lena put it there?’

‘She was watching me work, so she could have slipped it on to the fob when I was focused on the boiler.’

‘Clever.’

‘Not really. It took me a long time to notice.’

‘But that’s my point. She arranged it so that you took the key away and returned with it without even knowing. I think she was planning to have you take her somewhere. Somewhere specific that was connected to the key.’

‘Didn’t exactly work out for her, then, did it?’

‘Maybe not. But whoever snatched Lena doesn’t have the key. She must have known she was taking a risk by leaving the cottage. That’s why she wanted you to carry it instead of her.’

We were driving along the promenade, gliding by the neon lights outside a club-bar, the glass and steel exterior of an offshore bank headquarters, the well-lit interior of a fancy restaurant. We passed a long curving terrace of Victorian townhouses. We passed the ornate Gaiety Theatre, a Chinese restaurant, a fish-and-chip shop.

I realised I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten for hours. I asked Rebecca to pull over and then I headed inside the steamy chip shop and returned a few minutes later with two paper packages and a pair of plastic forks.

‘What the hell is this?’ Rebecca asked, once she’d unwrapped her meal.

‘Chips, cheese and gravy,’ I told her. ‘Local speciality.’

‘
Eugh
.’

‘Enjoy.’

I stabbed my fork into a knot of chips covered in thick gravy and melted cheese, then shovelled them into my mouth. Rebecca wasn’t eating. She was too busy pulling a face.

‘Trust me,’ I said.

She curled up her nose and pricked a chip at the very corner of her tray, filmed with the barest smear of gravy. She raised it to her mouth. Hesitated. Then she popped it inside and chewed like she was experimenting with some far-flung tribal dish.

She swallowed. Shrugged. Ate some more.

‘So where did Lena want you to take her?’ Rebecca asked, between mouthfuls. ‘You said you knew.’

‘There were three letters inscribed on the key handle.
NSC
.’

‘NSC?’ Rebecca paused with her fork in the air. ‘What’s that? The manufacturer’s logo?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘A bank? Maybe the key was to a safety deposit box. Maybe she’d stored something important. Something valuable.’

I jammed more food into my mouth. Mopped my lips with a napkin. ‘It’s not a bank. I can’t think of a bank over here with the initials NSC. And our accident happened on a Saturday morning. Only a handful of high-street banks are open then. And none of them are the type with safety deposit boxes.’

‘Then I give up. Tell me.’

‘The National Sports Centre,’ I said. ‘I think it’s a locker key.’

Chapter Thirty-one

Lena was lying on her side. One arm was behind her. Her other arm, the one with the swollen wrist, was in front of her face. Her legs were positioned as if she was running. Her right leg was fully extended and her left was bent at the hip and the knee. It wasn’t her natural sleeping position. Someone had arranged her like this. They’d done it so that she wouldn’t roll on to her back and swallow her tongue and choke to death because of the sedative they’d given her.

The sedative was still in her system. She was sure of that. Her head felt fuzzy, her muscles relaxed. There was a buzzing in her ears and her temples. She could feel a haziness all around her, prickling her skin like a field of static electricity. She recognised the sensation. She’d experienced it before.

Her mind was conscious long before she was able to move her body. That had happened the last time, too. Something to do with inhibitors in the nervous system. She knew that your body shut down when you went to sleep so that you couldn’t physically act out your dreams. She guessed the sedative had a similar effect.

It was infuriating. Her neck ached and she wanted to relieve it. She must have drooled while she was unconscious because she could feel cold liquid pressed against her cheek. The arm that was below her was throbbing and tingling all over. The weight of her body had cut off the blood supply.

She tried to open her eyes. No luck. The muscles wouldn’t respond. Her eyelids felt sticky and rimed with grit.

She listened for sounds from around her. Heard only the hissing and the pulsing of the blood in her ears.

She didn’t think she was in the car any more. Whatever she was lying on was cushioned and soft. And there was no sensation of movement. No engine noise.

She strained her ears for more, and
bam
, just when she least expected it, her eyes snapped open.

She was staring at a wall. But it was no ordinary wall. It was covered in some kind of foam material that had been tacked up like tiles. The foam was dark grey and textured in a series of ridges and hollows, like the interior of an egg box.

She raised her head. Slowly. So slowly.

The bright pink duvet was beneath her. Beneath the duvet was a floor carpeted in thick rubber underlay.

She dropped her head back down. Into the pool of cold saliva. Then she summoned her strength and gritted her teeth and flung her rag-doll body around until she was lying flat on her back.

She let go of a wheezing breath. The foam tiles covered the ceiling, too. They blanketed the entire room. She knew why they were there now. It was the same with the rubber underlay. Soundproofing. In case she screamed for help.

The tingling was getting worse in her arm. It was intensifying as her blood flowed back through the arteries and flooded the tissue and swamped the nerve endings. She flexed her fingers. Electric charges streaked up her arm. Her fingers were clumsy and weak. She had no grip. No feel.

There was a single bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling. The bulb was burning brightly, surrounded by a blurred corona. Did that mean it was night-time still? The same day or the next?

She kicked her legs out straight. Stretched her toes. Her shoes were gone but she was wearing her socks and the rest of her clothes. She tucked her injured wrist in against her chest and sat upright.

The hissing in her ears and the buzzing in her temples grew worse. The room pitched and lurched in front of her, like she was still on the stupid boat. She ground the heel of her hand into her eye socket. Tried to fight the surge of nausea that washed over her. She felt drowsy as hell but she couldn’t allow it to overcome her. She had to stand up.

Standing was a battle. She broke it down into stages. First, she struggled on to her knees on the ridged rubber floor. Then she crawled to the far side of the room. The crawling didn’t take long. The room wasn’t large. There was a window in the wall above her. She reached up and grasped the ledge with her good hand. She heaved with her arm and pushed with her legs. Her legs were feeble. They trembled and quaked. She rested her chin on the dusty ledge. Stared out at the view.