Fatal Crossing Read online

‘Yes. You got it in one. Congratulations — you’ve won an antique sugar bowl.’

  X

  The first thing that struck them was the smell of old age, the same in care homes across the world. Even after the smoking ban, the place still reeked of cheroots, mouldy furniture and stale urine under a very thin veneer of detergent. From the visitors’ lounge they could hear the sound of clattering teacups, and in the TV lounge further down, BBC's weekly Eastenders omnibus was blaring.

  They were only three steps inside the door when a woman with steel-framed glasses, short dyed hair and a lilac uniform stopped them.

  ‘I’m sorry. Visiting hours are almost over. We finish at four thirty, that's in fifteen minutes. It's hardly worth disturbing anyone for such a short time,’ she declared.

  ‘But we’ve come a really long way,’ Nora tried.

  ‘Yes, you may well have. But there's no need to excite the elderly so near their bedtime. It can have very unfortunate effects on their medication,’ she insisted.

  ‘I’m sure Aunt Vanessa can manage. We’re all she has.’

  ‘Aunt Vanessa?’ the woman said and raised an eyebrow. ‘And does Aunt Vanessa have a surname, if I may ask?’

  ‘Hickley,’ Andreas replied.

  A triumphant smile played on the woman's lips. ‘Your information must be wrong. There's no Vanessa Hickley here at Cedar Residence. Perhaps you’re not quite so close to your “aunt” as you claim.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Nora said. ‘Might she be registered under a different name?’

  The contempt in the carer's face was obvious. ‘Do you seriously think that I can or would want to give out confidential information about our residents? You claim that your aunt Vanessa Hickley lives here. We have no one by that name. You have two choices: leave right now or wait for me to call the police and expose you for the thieves that you are.’

  Twenty seconds later they were back in the car in the car park.

  ‘That went well,’ Andreas observed dryly.

  X

  They drove back to London in almost total silence. Andreas snoozed in the back while Nora's thoughts drifted between the traffic and Jazz FM. She wanted to shake him awake and demand an explanation for how they had ended up in each other's arms last night. But somehow she couldn’t cope with his answer. Or what would follow.

  It was growing dark inside the car when they joined the M25 and ended up in a long queue of other Londoners heading back to the capital on a Sunday night.

  The radio played ‘I love you, Porgy’ and without Nora noticing it, her voice found Billie Holiday's as she sang about the complexities of love.

  A drowsy Andreas sat up in the back and stroked her cheek lightly. ‘Hey,’ he said softly.

  Andreas. Please, just stop it,’ she began, turning to face him.

  All further thoughts were interrupted by the loud beeping of a horn. The driver behind them felt she was straying too far into his lane. Nora straightened up the car and indicated that she would be leaving at the next exit, which had a sign for petrol and a McDonald's. She was worn out by her thoughts, by driving, by not having had any lunch, and being with Andreas without being with Andreas.

  ‘Stop what?’ he said, when they had filled up the car and were sitting with their burgers in the shadow of Ronald McDonald and his motorway disciples.

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘No. What were you going to say?’

  ‘Only that I’m tired. Would you drive the rest of the way? Please?’ she lied.

  Andreas nodded. ‘OK. I’ll do my best though I warn you that I’m not wild about driving on the wrong side of the road.’

  Back in the car Andreas made himself comfortable in the driver's seat. Nora sat in the darkness, looking alternately out of the window and at his silhouette in the dashboard glow.

  They were both silent until they returned the car and said goodbye outside the rental firm.

  ‘See you later,’ was all she said, before hailing a cab. She felt tired to her very soul.

  As she looked out of the cab's window, he was still standing where she had left him. When he spotted her, he raised his hand in a quick wave, then turned on his heel.

  Nora fished her iPhone out of her pocket. She had twenty-eight missed calls and thirteen messages on her voicemail. Two of them were from Pete. Three were heavy breathers or someone with chest problems who hadn’t had the guts to leave a message. Two were work calls from the Crayfish and a single one from her mother telling her she was back from Florence.

  The rest were from Jeff Spencer of the Metropolitan Police. He left a mobile number with his fifth message.

  Nora checked her watch. It was thirty-five minutes past ten. The chances of him still answering his phone were probably close to zero, but then again, he had asked her to call him as soon as she got his message.

  He picked up before the first ringtone had ended. ‘Spencer.’

  His voice was deep and dark. She imagined that he would have a beautiful baritone singing voice. She introduced herself.

  ‘Miss Sand. I’m delighted to hear from you. I’ve spent most of my weekend trying to get in touch with you,’ he said with a hint of reproach in his voice.

  ‘I had no coverage,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Please would you come to Scotland Yard tomorrow morning at nine o’clock?’ he asked, without further ado.

  ‘What's this about?’

  He hesitated, and she could hear the noise of many people in the background. ‘I’m at a party. However, I’m sure you can guess what it's about when I tell you that I’ve studied a certain suitcase you handed in with great interest.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be there tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Good. Just ask for me at reception. Goodbye,’ he said and rang off.

  Nora sat for a while holding her mobile before she let it slide into her handbag and resumed staring out of the cab window. There wasn’t a single star in the sky.

  16

  Her alarm clock rang a microsecond before the Crayfish called her on her mobile, and in her rush to turn off the ringing, she dropped the phone on the floor.

  ‘What are you doing, woman?’ he demanded to know when she finally retrieved him from the floor.

  ‘Nothing. Minor technical issues,’ she said, fighting to free herself from the duvet.

  ‘Is that right? Anyway, what do you have for me for this week?’

  Nora told him about the weekend's dead ends and how she was on her way to Scotland Yard's Profile Unit. ‘And,’ she added triumphantly, ‘I’ve been granted permission to visit Bill Hix on Thursday.’

  ‘Wow,’ the Crayfish said in a tone of voice that bordered on impressed. ‘How did you swing that?’

  ‘Er. I don’t really know,’ she admitted.

  ‘But that's no use to me this week. What have you got for me right now?’

  Nora scratched the back of her head. ‘Boss. I’m actually really busy with -’

  ‘How about the Falkland Islands? It's a long time since we’ve heard anything about them, isn’t it? The New York Times had an interesting feature in their weekend supplement.’

  ‘Please can it wait? I have to leave for Scotland Yard in half an hour.’

  The Crayfish grunted reluctantly. ‘All right, call me this afternoon. I want to know where the story is going.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Nora promised, hung up and jumped in the shower.

  The skirt/jacket combo made another appearance, and she just had time to pick up a coffee from her local Starbucks before she flopped down on the last seat on the tube with two days’ harvest from her letter box under her arm.

  As the tube train made its way towards the city centre, she quickly sorted through her post.

  Invitations to a gallery opening and a reception at the Irish Embassy. She stuffed them into the front pocket of her handbag, knowing full well she would probably forget all about them.

  At one time, when Nora had been summoned to her first press briefing at Scotland Yard, her head h
ad been filled with romantic detective stories about pipe-smoking detective inspectors with impressive moustaches who solved crime riddles by pure deduction, while sitting behind polished desks in awe-inspiring buildings.

  The reality was that Scotland Yard had long since left the original Scotland Yard near Whitehall and Trafalgar Square and moved into a rather anonymous, post-war building on Broadway. The front of the building might just as easily have been that of a Dutch investment bank, if it hadn’t been for the concrete blocks to deter car bombs, and the rotating triangular New Scotland Yard sign, which was the favourite background for any BBC journalist when they breathlessly reported that there were no new developments in some crime story or other.

  The only connection to countless British crime novels was the fact that the building housed the pioneering British crime database, which some bright spark had christened Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, commonly known as HOLMES. Nora had even heard that the course to teach budding crime experts to search for information using it had been named Elementary.

  She was in the reception at five minutes past nine. She had been on time originally, but had spent longer going through security checks than she had expected because a man she had taken to be a Polish police inspector on an exchange had forgotten to empty his trouser pockets. First his keys. Then loose change. Then a pocket knife, which he handed remorsefully to the officers.

  A sign near the metal detector, which could match those found in airports, announced that the current threat level was severe.

  ‘What does severe really mean?’ she asked the female officer who patted her down.

  ‘We’re not allowed to say. It would undermine the system,’ the officer replied.

  ‘But then why put up a sign in the first place, if it's that secret?’

  The officer shrugged and gestured towards the reception where a young woman was speaking on the telephone behind an armoured-glass window. When she spotted Nora, she pointed to a book, which lay open on the counter, and a pen attached to a metal disc with a small chain.

  Nora wrote down her name. Under company, she wrote Globalt, and then the date and time. The woman signalled to Nora to hand her the book and entered, with the phone now wedged between her chin and shoulder, her name on a computer. Then she pointed to a wall-mounted camera.

  ‘Smile,’ she mimed.

  Nora looked straight into the camera. Shortly afterwards a printer buzzed behind the receptionist, and Nora found herself holding a shiny new laminated card.

  The receptionist eventually gave up trying to contact whoever she had been looking for, hung up with sigh and spoke to Nora.

  ‘You need to keep the card visible at all times, and it's only valid today. The card is the property of the Metropolitan Police and you must return it when you leave the building,’ she reeled off.

  Nora nodded.

  ‘And who are you visiting?’ the receptionist rounded off.

  ‘Spencer. Mr Jeff Spencer.’

  ‘OK. Spencer? The Jeff Spencer?’ she asked. She sounded impressed and rang him immediately.

  Nora heard several ‘yes, sir, yes, sir’ fired off in quick succession. Two minutes later a young, red-haired man in uniform came down to meet her.

  He introduced himself, ushered her towards the elevator and pressed the button for the fifth floor. They continued down a long corridor with matching doors on both sides. Nora tried reading the names in passing, but the signs only bore number and letter combinations such as Q45 and VA5.

  On a yellow cord around his neck the man wore an ID card, which he lifted to swipe through a door lock at the end of the corridor. Finally they arrived at a messy front office where Nora thought she could smell fresh coffee. On the desk was a half-open box from Dunkin’ Donuts and Nora counted three doughnuts, which tempted her with their sticky sugar and red jam.

  The door opened, and a rotund, white-haired woman wearing a tunic-style garment came towards them.

  ‘Oh, good, you’ve fetched Miss Sand. Excellent. Jeff’s in the meeting room with the others.’

  Then she turned to Nora. ‘Doughnut?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m trying to quit.’

  They entered the meeting room and Jeff Spencer rose to his full height, which was almost two metres, when he saw Nora in the doorway. She could tell immediately that this was serious.

  And yet she couldn’t help smiling as she remembered Polly from The Oysterman who had asked Mr Spencer about his possible kinship to Princess Diana. The man's skin was the colour of milky coffee and his hair an Afro rarely seen in the British aristocracy. He was in shirtsleeves, but his suit jacket was hanging over a chair, and on the wall behind him were the pictures of the twelve girls from the suitcase.

  Two tables had been pushed together into an L-shape, and Spencer was flanked by a blond woman in her twenties, who introduced herself as Irene, and a man called Stuart Millhouse, who looked to be in his early thirties. Spencer gestured to Nora to take a seat and poured her coffee from a cafetière.

  ‘We’re a bit peculiar up here,’ he apologised. ‘We don’t drink as much tea as most other Brits,’ he explained, while Millhouse's grin suggested there were plenty more reasons why the rest of Scotland Yard thought the inhabitants of the fifth floor were eccentric.

  Nora focused on the pictures on the wall behind him. They were copies, blown up to triple size. That in itself wasn’t frightening. What made the hairs on Nora's arms stand up was that under pretty much every picture, there was a name. And underneath the name, the laconic message: Missing.

  A blond girl with a bob and dimples had been identified as Inge Husted from Stavanger, Norway. A dark-haired beauty with corkscrew curls had been identified as Louise Laan from Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Gertrud Neuberg from Munich, Germany, was hanging between two girls from Bruges, Belgium and Halmstad, Sweden.

  Nora gulped.

  ‘Are they the victims of Bill Hix? Victims who weren’t identified back then? Are they the girls whose tongues were found in the cabinet of horrors?’ The questions flew out of her, and she was already pulling out her notebook and pen from her bag.

  ‘Miss Sand,’ Spencer said with exquisite manners and an accent she would guess had its foundation at Eton and later finished off at either Cambridge or Oxford. ‘May I remind you that you’re at a police station, and politely point out that things here work a little differently than in your world. Here we’re the ones asking the questions,’ he said.

  Irene started to giggle, but quickly controlled herself.

  ‘The suitcase. Tell me all about it,’ Spencer said, throwing up his hands. ‘I want to know everything.’

  He wasn’t joking.

  Nora told them how she and Pete had happened to stop off in Brine after an interview. He asked about the interview. When had they left Mr Benn? When did they arrive in Brine? Had they stopped off on the way for any other reason? What was the registration number of Pete's car? Nora didn’t know, and even before she got to the part about the bric-a-brac shop, she was exhausted from his many questions.

  She told them about Brine, about her collection of suitcases at home, how the brown suitcase in the window had caught her eye, and how she had bought it from Mr Smithfield. Did she have receipt, Spencer wanted to know.

  Nora shook her head. But then how could they be sure that the suitcase really did come from Mr Smithfield's shop? She could have found it anywhere; it might even be her own.

  ‘Well, I guess you’ll have to ask Mr Smithfield about that,’ she snapped irritably.

  ‘We would like to,’ Spencer said. ‘But the man seems to have taken himself off to some yoga ashram, which doesn’t permit mobile phones or indeed any contact with the outside world that doesn’t include the use of chakras.’

  Nora made a mental note of this information. So there was something Mr Spencer didn’t know. He was starting to get on her nerves, and out of sheer spite she decided that if he wouldn’t let her tell her story in her own time, she wouldn’t volunteer any
information. Of course, if he asked her directly if she had had a beer with Uncle Harry, she would tell him. And she might even be willing to divulge that she had traced the suitcase to a nursing home in Farthington. But if he carried on like this, the chances of her sharing her research with him were vanishingly small.

  He made careful notes of her answers in a black moleskin notebook. They had now reached the point in her account where Nora had found the pictures in her flat.

  ‘And what did you do when you discovered pictures of young women who most likely were the victims of a violent crime?’ Spencer asked with raised eyebrows.

  ‘I had no reason to think that a crime had been committed. They were just pictures someone had left behind. So I made a cup of coffee.’

  ‘Aha. You made a cup of coffee?’

  Nora was aware that her irritation was getting the better of her. ‘Hey, how about we just rewind a bit. I had no — absolutely no – idea of anything untoward. I mean, just look at the pictures,’ she said, gesturing towards the wall. ‘Do any of these pictures scream crime to you?’

  For the first time Stuart Millhouse opened his mouth. ‘Perhaps the fact that the girls are missing and very much missed by their relatives and families — and have been for years,’ he pointed out.

  ‘But I couldn’t know that!’

  ‘No, Miss Sand couldn’t know that,’ Spencer said, pouring oil on troubled waters.

  ‘So perhaps Miss Sand would like to share with us what first roused her suspicion?’

  Nora told them about the photograph that appeared to have been taken on board the England ferry, and how she had discovered the Danish TV documentary with the Karl Stark interview, and about her friend, Andreas, who was a Danish police officer.

  Spencer noted down their names and asked Nora to spell them twice to be absolutely sure.

  ‘And where's that picture now?’

  Nora explained that it was currently being investigated in Denmark.

  ‘So that means we’re missing a photo?’ Spencer said, clearly annoyed.

  Nora showed him her copy and was told to email it to the Profile Unit. Millhouse disappeared and came back two minutes later with a printout, which he put up next to the other pictures.