Chasing the Dark (5 page)

It rang once before a man's voice came on the line – young, posh, sure of himself.

‘You've reached the voicemail of Ivo Lincoln. Sorry I can't take your call. Leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.'

I dropped the receiver and threw up in Doreen's shiny sink.

CHAPTER 6

D
oreen had one of those waste-disposal units that grinds up trash and slurps it away, so dealing with the puke was easy. Sorting the mess in my head was going to take a bit longer. One minute Lincoln was giving Mum a lift in London, the next Yuri was calling him from Saxted. Who was this guy? I'd never even heard of him till a couple of weeks ago and now his fingerprints were smeared all over my life. And every time his name cropped up things turned nasty.

Still feeling sick, I called St Saviour's College. This time the guy in the porters' lodge said the Professor was around, so I left my number and a message to call me urgently. Then I fetched down Lincoln's holdall from my room, and laid out all his stuff on the worktop. I switched on the laptop and looked at the password box. The answer
– or at least some it – had to be here. I wandered round the kitchen – opening drawers, staring out the window, twanging the knives in the knife rack – trying to piece together everything I knew about Ivo Lincoln.

According to the papers, he'd been a real wonder boy and, if the pictures were anything to go by, quite good-looking – for a lanky, long-haired toff. Which was why Eddy had got so steamed up about Mum being in his car. Most of the reports said she'd cadged a lift off him because it was raining and she'd had a few too many. I'd gone along with that, just to shut Eddy up, but deep down it had always grated. First, Mum had sworn to me that she'd cut her drinking down to one glass of wine a night. Second she had a rule about never getting lifts from strangers after gigs. She was so paranoid about it she'd done a deal with an all-female minicab service who always drove her home. So even if it
was
tipping it down that night and posh boy Lincoln
wasn't
coming across as a perv or an axe murderer, why chance it? But then, if she wasn't cadging a lift and she wasn't cheating on Eddy, what had she been doing with Lincoln? And something else was bugging me. How come Yuri had decided to hole up in the exact same village that Mum had grown up and been buried in?

I'd gone round in a circle, got nowhere and ended up right back where I'd started. But Lincoln being a journalist kept throwing up another possibility; one I was having real trouble getting my head round. Was there a chance that Mum had been helping him with a story? It didn't seem likely. Not unless he'd been doing a feature on
thirty-something singers who still had dreams of hitting the big time. Yuri on the other hand . . . well, he coincided a lot more closely with my idea of someone a hot-shot reporter might want to talk to – on the run, up to his tattooed neck in all sorts of dodgy stuff, and petrified that ‘bad people' were trying to kill him. Come to think of it, could that be
why
they were trying to kill him, to stop him selling information to Lincoln?

A terrible thought began circling the edges of my brain. I made a supreme effort to shut it out but it waltzed in anyway, making my breath stop and the room start pitching around. The hospital had given me a leaflet that said grief did funny things to your brain and you shouldn't be surprised if you started ‘indulging in fantasy as an outlet for your emotions'. I'd chucked it straight in the bin but now I did a quick bit of DIY counselling and told myself to get real before I cracked up. It didn't work and even sticking my head under the cold tap couldn't slosh away the horrible feeling that I was on to something. The phone rang. I lurched across the room and grabbed it.

‘Hello?'

‘Is that Joe Slattery?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Ralph Lincoln.'

Weirdly, he pronounced it
Rafe
, like it rhymed with ‘safe'.

‘Oh, right . . . um, thanks for calling back. I'm . . . Sadie Slattery's son. I don't know if you remember me. We met . . . at the hospital.'

‘Of course I remember you, Joe. How are you bearing
up?' He sounded old and tired.

‘Um . . . OK.'

‘Still in London?'

‘No, Kent. With Mum's sister.'

‘How's that working out?'

‘Oh, you know. She and Mum weren't exactly close.'

‘That must very difficult for all of you. So how can I help you, Joe?'

‘There's been a mix-up with Mum and Ivo's stuff.'

‘I don't follow.'

‘The bags in the car. The police sent me Ivo's as well as Mum's.'

He made a faint sound, somewhere between a sob and a groan.

‘It's got his laptop and a notebook in it and . . . '

‘I'll . . . organise a courier to pick them up.'

‘OK, but . . . um . . . before I get his laptop back to you I was wondering if you'd mind me taking a look through his files.'

‘Whatever for?'

I took a breath. ‘Have you ever wondered if there might be a link between the crash and a story he was investigating?'

He went so quiet I thought the phone had gone dead.

‘Professor, are you there?'

‘Yes, I'm here.'

‘Have you . . . ever wondered that?'

‘Listen to me, Joe. When someone young and healthy dies an untimely death, those left behind automatically search for answers to take away the senselessness of their
loss. It's a natural part of the grieving process.' The hospital had obviously given him the same leaflet. ‘So yes, I did consider the possibility that Ivo's death had not been accidental. In the end, however, I had to accept that what happened to my son was just a hideous and arbitrary case of hit and run.'

‘Well, sir' – the ‘sir' slipped out like I was talking to a teacher – ‘I'm still at the looking-for-answers stage, so would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?'

He sighed. ‘Very well.'

‘What
was
Ivo working on?'

‘I'm sorry to disappoint you, Joe. A prolonged assignment in Afghanistan had left him so exhausted he'd taken a break. Ironic, isn't it, that he survived the dangers of Helmand only to die on the streets of North London?'

‘How long was he off work?'

‘A month. I wanted him to take longer but there's a big energy summit coming up and he'd been asked to profile some of the delegates.'

‘Did he go away anywhere?'

‘Yes. Kiev.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Ukraine. It's the capital. He'd studied there for a while, got to know it pretty well.'

‘Ukraine . . . that's in . . . Eastern Europe?' I said, wishing I'd kicked the habit of nodding off in Geography.

‘Yes. Part of the former Soviet Union.'

‘So they speak what . . . Russian?'

‘For the most part. Some local dialects as well, I believe.'

Was that Russian Yuri had been muttering in his sleep? Had Ivo met
him in Ukraine?
My heart punched my ribs so loudly I was sure the Prof could hear it down the phone. I needn't have worried. He was too busy warbling on about Ivo getting a first class degree in Slavonic studies – whatever they were.

I knew nothing about Ukraine except for this documentary me and Mum had watched about a macho undercover reporter on the trail of a huge money laundering operation. He'd ended up in Kiev and got beaten up by a gang of sleazy thugs who'd discovered his secret camera and didn't fancy being on telly.

‘Aren't journalists always on the lookout for stories, even when they're on holiday?' I asked. ‘Aren't there masses of gangs over there?' Cogs whirred in my brain.
Gangs run by the kind of ‘bad people' who were after Yuri
.

‘Joe, I know you're confused and unhappy, but think about it logically. If Ukrainian mobsters wanted to get rid of Ivo, why wait until he got back to England? And why pick a method as risky and uncertain as running his car off the road? It makes no sense.'

‘It would if they wanted to get rid of Ivo
and
Mum.'

The words hung there, raw and shocking. I couldn't believe I'd actually thought them, let alone said them out loud.

‘You're not telling me your mother had links with the Ukrainian Mafia, are you?'

‘Not that she was letting on.'

He made a grunty noise, like he almost laughed, and his voice relaxed a bit.

‘As far as I know, Ivo wasn't working on anything at all in Ukraine. So you see: no sinister investigations on the
go, no forays into the criminal underworld.'

I wasn't buying that but I'd sworn to Yuri I wouldn't betray him so I trod carefully,

‘I . . . er . . . still wouldn't mind having a look in his laptop.'

I heard a sigh and then a scratchy sound like he was rubbing his chin. ‘Oh, very well. If it will set your mind at rest.'

Yes!
I jabbed the air but tried to keep my voice calm. ‘Do you know his password?'

‘I think he used Bitsy241 for pretty much everything. It was a family joke, you see. Bitsy's his twin, two for one.'

Why did posh people have such weird names?

I pulled Ivo's laptop towards me. It was top of the range, even had built in mobile broadband. I typed in Bitsy241, pressed Enter and felt a nervous buzz as his desktop flashed on to the screen. ‘Brilliant. Thanks.' My fingers brushed the keyboard, itching to get into his files.

‘When did he go to Ukraine?'

‘The beginning of February.'

‘When did he get back?'

‘The day before the crash, which meant I hadn't seen him for over a month before he died. And that was just for a quick coffee on a fleeting visit to town. You never think, do you, that it might be the last time?'

A stab of pain snatched my breath. The last I'd seen of Mum was the edge of her coat whisking through the door as she'd rushed off to the Trafalgar Arms. On her way out she'd kissed the top of my head and told me not to stay up too late, but I'd been so engrossed in
Doctor Who
I hadn't
looked up.
Don't go there, Joe
. I leant my head against the wall and swallowed hard.

‘So this courier . . . when are you sending him?' I said.

‘Whenever suits . . . unless . . . well, if you had time to bring Ivo's things to Cambridge I'd be delighted to give you lunch in college. I'd pay your travel costs, of course.' His voice was getting gruffer and I knew what was coming. ‘It might help you to talk to someone who understands what you're going through.'

No, it wouldn't. No way. But if I went to Cambridge I could go on picking his brain about Ivo.

‘OK. Yeah. Thanks. How about tomorrow?'

‘Unfortunately I'm teaching all day. How are you fixed for the day after?'

My breathing got calmer as we discussed normal stuff like train times. But my brain was still playing up – flooding one minute, stalling the next.

‘Excellent, that's settled then. But Joe …'

‘Yeah?'

‘The sooner you forget these crazy notions, the sooner you'll begin to move on.'

He rang off. I tapped into Ivo Lincoln's files.

What?
That couldn't be right.

Lincoln had only got six saved documents. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and opened the first one. It was an insurance claim form, downloaded on 4 March, the morning of the crash, for stuff he'd had stolen the day before. I scrolled through it.

Name: Ivo Horatio
(you're kidding me)
Lincoln

Place of theft: Oselya Guest House, Strizhavka, Ukraine

Items stolen: Apple Mac laptop, Samsung camera, leather bag, books

I was gutted. Everything he'd written in Ukraine would be on the stolen laptop. He must have bought this one as soon as he got back. The other documents were all letters to banks, building societies and credit card companies, trying to sort out his money. Not a whiff of any heavy-duty investigations. Not a mention of Mum or Yuri.

I tried the Bitsy password on his emails, felt my heart speed up when it worked and started scrolling through his messages. Now I know you shouldn't speak ill of the dead but
Jes-us
this guy was boring – and so were his mates. No jokes, no funny YouTube clips, just dreary press releases about nuclear energy and the ‘struggle for justice' in places I couldn't pronounce.

Maybe I
was
crazy. Maybe Mum getting killed in Ivo Lincoln's car and Yuri having Lincoln's number was just one of those wacky coincidences you read about on the internet, you know – random man answers public phone on crowded station and it's his long-lost brother calling. For all I knew, Yuri could turn out to be Polish, Hungarian or Swedish, which would blast the Ukrainian connection to rubble. I picked up the scrap of newspaper with Ivo's phone number on it. There was a tiny line of print above the scribble. I squinted hard, trying to make it out.

ФaKTЫ И KOMMeHTapИИ.

Letter by letter, I checked the words against a site listing foreign alphabets. It was Russian all right. Spelled out in English it said
Fakty i Kommentarii
– which, according to Wikipedia, was the biggest-selling tabloid in Ukraine. I was right. Yuri was Ukrainian! It might not sound like much of a breakthrough but I felt like I'd bought a winning scratch card.

Tyres crunched on the drive. Doreen was home. I logged off, scooped up Lincoln's stuff and bolted to my room. Halfway there I realised I'd left his notebook behind and I was heading back to get it when the phone rang. I heard Doreen come in the back door and pick up in the kitchen. I'd thought it might be the Professor calling back but it was obviously someone for Doreen. She was putting on her poshest voice and letting out chirps of fake laughter between comments like, ‘Yes, indeed, Mr Pritchard . . .', ‘What an honour . . .', ‘Such a remarkable woman . . .'

I hung back, watching her through the bannister, waiting for her to finish. She was smiling and patting her hairdo, though as usual there wasn't one single hair out of place.

‘Oh, of course. In my line of work, discretion is everything. I like to think my regular clients regard me as a trusted personal friend.' Suddenly the smile froze. ‘I don't understand. That really wouldn't be . . .'