Sealed With A Death Read online

  Lake’s eyes lifted from his page to glare in Lucie’s own, instantly stopping the flow of words from her mouth.

  “Red Mako is none of your concern,” he firmly intoned, “and not to be discussed here. Leave that to Algers, you can do background research on something else for me.”

  “Background research?” Lucie scowled, “I’m not an office girl…”

  “At this very moment, Ms Musilova, you are precisely what I say you are.”

  Lake’s eyes refused to drop from hers, his face a picture of intensity and an uncustomary anger in his voice.

  “You have cost me time and money, destroyed an investigation and placed me in the uncomfortable position of being indebted to others, although I can’t imagine why I was disposed to go to such lengths to protect you. So whether it’s office work I assign you, or cleaning the toilets in Parliament, you will do it, until I can figure out what use you are to me.”

  “Bastard!” Lucie hissed, drawing immediate frowns and ill-tempered ‘hushes’ from the scattered patrons around them.

  “The right kind of bastard,” Lake whispered in response, fixing her with a look of patronising disappointment.

  Lucie’s wound began to sting, each stabbing pulse matching the throb of rage and self-reproach coursing through her rapidly clouding mind. She wanted to lunge at Lake, grab him by the lapels and scream her resentment into his condescending little face, to have him see – to force him to see – the validity of her actions and the error of his own… But no movement would come, as though the mechanics of her frame were more attuned to dispassionate reality and were fighting back against the more temperamental impulses of her brain. She had fucked up. She knew it. And Lake was correct to admonish her, which made his words all the more difficult to endure. Instead, she inhaled the musty air until her lungs could take no more and wrestled back the tumult raging in her mind.

  “What’s the case?” When she finally spoke, her words were clipped and rigid, as if anything more expressive would break the delicate seal she had placed on her emotions and drown them both.

  “One the Prime Minister would rather we didn’t look into,” came the response, Lake’s gaze returning to the pages before him.

  “Then why are…?”

  “We are Civil Servants, not MP’s,” Lake interrupted. “You and I are permanent parts of the Executive; the politicians chop and change. We are ultimately accountable to the Cabinet Secretary, and it’s he who has encouraged this to be investigated.”

  “Favours for the boys?”

  “Actually not, at least this time. There have been a number of disappearances of late; disappearances which for one reason or another are not top of the media’s or the police’s list of priorities.”

  “Why not?”

  Lake didn’t immediately answer, instead perusing the aged volume on the desk before him.

  “All of those missing are women,” he said softly, a hint of what sounded like shame in his voice. “European women.”

  The familiar pull of resentment that Lucie had felt so often in the past couple of years began to tug at her again, quickly overpowering the contrition that had hitherto encompassed her.

  “When you say ‘European Women’…” she began, slowly.

  “Twelve women have disappeared over the last couple of months,” Lake continued. “All the same profile, young, professional, well respected in their individual fields. All single with no dependents and no immediate plans to leave the country, at least as far as anyone can tell.”

  “And they all come from within the EU?”

  “All of them. Not from any one country; French, Spanish, German, Slovak, Belgian… all disappeared without trace.”

  “I haven’t read about this in the press,” Lucie frowned, assimilating the news.

  “You’re not likely to,” came Lake’s response. “The police are under-budgeted and under-resourced as it is; they’ve been through another round of cuts and let’s just say there is a certain element within the Home Office that is very keen to see what remains of their energies focussed on the more politically expedient cases.”

  “No votes in solving crimes against foreigners, I suppose…”

  “Nor in even recording some of them. And with no formal investigation there’s nothing for the press to report on. Even if there were, the state the media is in today any Force trying to get to the bottom of this would find themselves publicly castigated for prioritising crimes against ‘foreigners’ over crimes against the ‘indigenous’ population. We wouldn’t be involved at all if not for the fact that one of the disappeared was friendly with the Cabinet Secretary’s daughter, who expressed concern enough that he got in touch with me.”

  The resentment in Lucie’s stomach had reached her throat, joining the lump of anger and hurt that she felt there, and she blinked away a tear that threatened to drop.

  “Remind me again why I put my foreign arse on the line for this bloody country?”

  “At the moment your rear is quite well protected as I don’t want you out in the field; you can investigate and that’s it. You report your findings to me and we’ll take it from there.”

  Lucie nodded, swallowing back her emotion and confining herself to the facts.

  “Where do I start?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  “As luck would have it, very close to home. The latest victim was resident in Camden Town; it was a Detective Inspector there who began to put the pieces together and theorised that these were not all isolated cases, before he succumbed to political pressure to suspend the investigation – I’ll email you what files we have. As aide to constituency’s MP it won’t seem too improper for you to ask a few questions.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Ismail,” replied Lake. “DI Asif Ismail.”

  “And what can he tell me that we don’t already know?”

  “That’s for you to find out, but you at least have an unexpected lead.”

  “Yes?”

  “They’ve found a body. Ines Aubel – the last woman to disappear - turned up dead last week, not far from her home. She was raped before she died.”

  Lucie looked away, shutting her eyes, while Lake remained silent.

  “I’ll, er… I’ll get onto it,” Lucie eventually whispered, pushing her chair from the desk and standing up, ignoring the various pains in her battered body.

  “I’ll expect to hear from you shortly,” Lake responded. “Oh, and Ms Musilova?”

  “What?”

  “Try not to balls it up this time, I’m sure you don’t want any more innocents on your conscience, and I’m frankly disinclined to rescue you again.”

  The barb hit home harder than the bullet had done and burned twice as fiercely. She opened her mouth to respond through her rage, but no words would come. Instead, she silently cursed the bastard who had brought her into this world and turned on her heels, striding out into a day as freezing and frosty as the country itself now seemed to be.

  FIVE

  As she strode, her hand toyed anxiously with the content of her overcoat pockets, and she pulled out the twisted plastic strip which housed her medication; the tiny, white pills which helped her keep the worst of her depression in check. Spying a bin as she turned the corner into Judd Street, she threw the tablets into it, stuffed her hands back in her pockets and headed for the pub before her.

  She didn’t deserve the pills, she told herself, and neither did she deserve to throw her sorrows on the Church she had once served as a military Chaplain in the RAF, back in the days before her capture by enemy forces. Since then, while her faith had remained intact, she had forgotten how to articulate it, and so her days of ministry were over. What she deserved right now, at least what she convinced herself she deserved, could be found in the alcohol behind those doors

  It wasn’t long before she had surrendered her senses completely to the spirits she poured inside her. The steadily growing collection of glasses had already attracted glances, some mocking, som
e wary, by the time Lucie pushed herself up from the table and staggered to the Ladies.

  Lake was a bastard. There was no doubt of that. His routine method of recruitment to the Overlappers was to find someone with the required skill set, struggling to stay afloat in a sea of compromising circumstances. When all hope seemed lost, Lake would sail in and throw a lifeline, but only so that he could own them from that point. It was an odd form of employer loyalty, but it seemed nonetheless effective, as all those Lucie had thus far encountered in the Department, Kasper Algers included, lived in perpetual wariness of the man who could transform their lives for ill in an instant should he so choose. While Lucie’s efforts in the recent case of Sir Geoffrey Hartnell had earned her a reprieve from the threat of imprisonment, Lake still exercised his power over her with his threats to remove from her the resources to find her mother’s murderer – a former intelligence operative named Trystan Dagonet. But Lake was also well-versed in the psychological manipulation of his workforce. So much so in fact, that Lucie almost thought he enjoyed it; but she was damned if she knew what game he was up to now.

  The brass handle of the toilet door slammed against the shiny white veneer of the tiles as Lucie’s hostile mind relished replaying the words Lake had spoken to her on a perpetual loop of torment. She knew better than to think that every word Lake said was true, but if there was even the slightest chance her mistakes in Calais would lead to more innocents suffering, then…

  Her legs were going, she could feel it. Leaning her hands on the sink she looked up at the mirror above, her spinning vision settling on the face that stared back, and she hated it.

  “Fucking idiot!” she slurred at herself contemptuously, “Stupid, murdering idiot!”

  The mirror offered no answers and merely spewed the insults back at her, mixing them with her intoxication and guilt, and allowing a cocktail of dangerous instability to ferment. Lucie could hear that part of herself begging her to step back from the brink, but she shook her head free of its warm and comforting words, fixating instead on the creature in the mirror, which stared maliciously back at her, at once taunting and chastising her for her failure. She screamed at it to shut up, to look away and leave her in peace, but still it stared with such intensity that she could bear it no more. Drawing back from the sink, Lucie flung herself forward, her forehead meeting the image with such ferocity, it shattered into a hundred pieces as she slid down, exhausted and weeping, blood spattering her skin.

  The sound of the door swinging open, and the cries of the aggrieved bar staff, forced her to stagger up and push her way out of the pub. Though she may not have cared about personal consequences, she was aware of her responsibility to Kasper, who for all his faults had been her friend. An MP’s assistant may not be very newsworthy in themselves but turning up drunk and vandalising a pub toilet would inevitably bring both of them an unwelcome degree of attention if she hung around. Mercifully, the other patrons were in no mood to challenge her, and she barged her way out of the doors and into the busy, afternoon street, quickly losing herself in the crowd.

  She cursed herself as she struggled to stop the spinning in her head and regain proper control of her mind and actions, and cursed again as she tripped on the doorstep of the coffee shop she now sought refuge in. Her behaviour in the pub could easily have got her into trouble and Lake would undoubtedly have taken her off the case if she had, not to mention the embarrassment she might have caused Kasper. Her rage spent, all that was now left was regret and as she sipped the large, black Americano she held between her cold hands, she resolved to make amends.

  The alcohol still toying with her system, Lucie raised the mug high, her voice a little too loud for the comfort of those around her, and toasted the object of her new assignment, heartily.

  “To Ines Aubel,” she vocalised, earning tuts and half glances from the other patrons, that Lucie neither acknowledged nor cared about. She took a sip and clunked the cup down onto the saucer, already stained with Lucie’s spillages. “To Ines,” she repeated, softly to herself. “I’ll find the bastard who killed you, Ines, and by God I’ll make them pay…”

  SIX

  After swallowing two of the strongest painkillers she could find in her flat, Lucie spent the first hours of the morning studying the files emailed to her by Lake, and cursing in irritation at their brevity. This ‘DI Ismail’ her boss had mentioned had put together the bare bones of a report on the matter, connecting the murder of Ines with the previous disappearance of six other women, all from EU Member States, but annoyingly light in other details. If she was to get any further, she needed to speak with him, and thought the best way to do it was to arrange a meeting on behalf of Algers, who as local MP would have a legitimate concern in the case. Algers though was proving difficult to track down. There was no answer from his office and his mobile cut straight to voice mail, leaving Lucie to opt for the direct approach.

  Never one for business clothes, Lucie nonetheless dressed as conservatively as seemed appropriate for a supposed Parliamentary assistant, donning brown corduroy trousers and a black polo shirt with just the white trim as a nod to her Sixties preferences, wrapping herself finally in her increasingly tattered overcoat. Her discomfort with navigating the Underground had never completely left her in these past few months of living in London, but without too much uncertainty, she found herself disembarking at Kentish Town station a short while later, before heading up Holmes Road to the building where DI Ismail was supposedly based.

  To her surprise, her smile to the desk sergeant, coupled with a quick examination of her Parliamentary pass card and her claim to have arranged a meeting with the Detective Inspector on behalf of the local MP, did not result in her ejection from the premises. Instead, the shaven-headed and somewhat stocky officer cheerily advised her that DI Ismail was currently unavailable, but that she could take a seat and wait in reception if she wished. The wait itself was not too excessive and eased by the coffee the sergeant provided her as she flicked through a day old newspaper left on the plastic chair beside her.

  Lucie’s eyelids had begun to droop by the time she heard the sergeant’s voice pipe up, advising someone that there was a woman from Parliament waiting to see him. Opening her eyes, she jumped up, hoping not to look too groggy as she walked to the desk with her hand outstretched.

  “DI Ismail?” she asked, a large smile adorning her face.

  The Detective took a moment to respond, a slight frown appearing across his face as he took in the woman before him. He was about forty, tall and reasonably slim and dressed in a simple, grey suit, worn with a colourfully patterned tie loosely knotted beneath it. His face, though handsome, was lined by an obvious exhaustion with which Lucie sympathised. His movements were as cautious as his voice as he raised his hand to take the one she offered.

  “Yes,” he quietly confirmed. “I’m sorry, you are?”

  “Lucie Musilova,” she answered in her best ‘chirpy professional’ tone. “I’m here for our meeting.”

  “Erm, sorry, what meeting?” Ismail’s brow furrowed deeper still in confusion.

  Lucie frowned too, wincing apologetically to reinforce the lie.

  “Ah…” she began. “I’m the Parliamentary aide to Kasper Algers MP. I was told by our office that they’d booked a meeting with you about a case Mr Algers is keen to discuss.”

  “I don’t discuss cases with the public.”

  “I’d guess not, but this is official business. Mr Algers has been invited by the Mayor to discuss crime concerns in the constituency, and I know that the Home Secretary is taking an interest too…”

  “Ok, ok,” Ismail interrupted, holding his hand up, his tone suggesting to Lucie that he knew full well she was bluffing but didn’t want to debate the issue here and now. “I’ve got ten minutes, alright? Sarge, can you sign her in please?”

  The formalities of registration ended with a friendly smile from the desk sergeant and a walk up a couple of flights of stairs to the Ops room, pounding with the
sound of ringing telephones and cursing CID officers. Ducking his head through a side room door to check it was free, Ismail beckoned Lucie in to follow him, leaning against the desk inside and not inviting Lucie to take a seat.

  “Let me see your pass,” he curtly demanded; Lucie obliging, not entirely surprised by the coldness of his manner. After glancing down briefly as she held it out to him, Ismail nodded and folded his arms tightly.

  “Ok, what’s this all about?”

  “Sorry?”

  “There’s no ‘meeting’, there never was.”

  “I am Kasper Algers aide though, and I am here to talk to you in confidence about a case.”

  “I told you, I don’t talk about cases. Data protection laws, you know.”

  “I’m afraid I’m here on a higher authority than that.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ismail laughed. “Whose?”

  Lucie swore under her breath. She hadn’t wanted to show her cards, at least not so early, and certainly not on a case that the government she supposedly served would not be completely happy about were they aware of it, but without Algers’ status to support her story she had little choice. Reaching into her pocket she pulled out the Security Services ID card Lake had issued her with and held it up to the disgruntled Detective.

  “Have you seen one of these before?”

  Ismail’s face hardened as he examined her card, clearly conscious that the situation was falling even further out of his control. He nodded stiffly.

  “SIS?

  “A branch of it, yes.”

  “I’ve worked with MI5 before, which branch are you with?”

  “None of your business, I’m afraid. Suffice to say you’re obliged to answer my questions, and if you repeat this to anyone, I’m authorised to shoot you in the bollocks.” Lucie gave a half-smile as she finished, reasoning that if she was going to pull rank and exaggerate her reason for being there, she may as well try to sweeten the atmosphere with a joke. Fortunately for her, the gamble seemed to pay off as Ismail returned the ID with a half-smile of his own.