Lost Lives (Emily Swanson Mystery Thriller Series Book 1) (7 page)

A week passed by. The weather grew bitterly cold. Christmas lights appeared over the city, sponsors’ brand names flashing in colourful patterns above Oxford Street. Emily woke early each morning, took her meds and read self-help books until noon. On some afternoons, she’d take a nap and then invite herself over to Harriet’s for tea. On others, she’d cautiously venture out into the wilderness that was London, attempting to acclimatise herself to the chaos. She and Jerome had shared a few evenings together, watching television and taking turns to cook. Emily liked Jerome very much, and it felt good to have someone she could call a friend again. But where Jerome happily volunteered information about his personal life—from the demise of his previous relationship to the uncertainty of his future—Emily still found herself dancing around his questions like a skater around a hole in the ice, giving him half-answers or shifting the focus of their conversations back towards him.

More and more, however, Emily found herself distracted by thoughts of Alina Engel. Another week had passed and she was still missing. Another week and still no one was looking for her. It was the latter thought that had propelled Emily to invite Jerome up to her apartment that evening.

“Leftovers courtesy of Il Cuore,” he said, throwing his coat over the back of a chair and handing her a paper bag filled with butterscotch cookies. “So what’s up?”

“It’s Alina,” Emily said, looking away as she tried to find the right words. “I’ve decided to try and find her.”

Jerome blinked. “You mean like Nancy Drew style?”

“I can’t stop thinking about her. She could be dead somewhere.”

“Or sat on a beach, giving the finger to Karl Henry and our charming British weather.”

“I’m serious. Anything could have happened to her, and knowing what we know, I can’t just sit around and do nothing.”

“And what exactly does your decision have to do with me?”

“I want you to help me find her.”

Jerome was quiet, staring at the floor.

“This could be an opportunity do some good,” Emily said. “A chance to make up for past mistakes.”

Jerome flinched at the sting of Emily’s words.

“And what past mistakes have you made?” he asked, folding his arms.

The question threw her off-balance.

“A woman’s life could be at stake,” she said.

“Or not.”

“And that’s exactly why we need to find out. Will you help me?”

She watched Jerome, searching his expression, trying to read his thoughts.

“I’m not doing anything illegal,” he said. “Unless it involves fun.”

***

“Alina Engel was forty-three years old, German, and married to Karl Henry.”

They had just finished eating and were now sat at the table, Jerome sipping on a beer while Emily clutched an orange juice.

“First question. Where exactly in Germany was she from?”

Emily shrugged.

“We need to find out.” Jerome grabbed paper and pen and began jotting down notes. “If we know where she came from then we can locate her family and hopefully discover that she has indeed returned to the nest. Mystery solved, we all sleep well at night.”

“How do we go about doing that?” Emily peered over his shoulder as he dropped the pen and reached for her laptop. Jerome clicked onto Google’s search engine and typed,
How do I find someone in Germany
? Seconds later, they were staring at the homepage of
Das Telefonbuch
, the national German phone directory.

“How’s your German?” Jerome asked.

“I took French.”

“Well, lucky for you I can order pizza and beer in five different languages, including Deutsch.”

Typing
Engel
into a box titled
Wer/Was
, he then clicked on
Finden
.

“We’re going to need more than just her surname.” Jerome said, chewing on his lower lip. “There are over three thousand Engels listed commercially and over eleven thousand privately.”

Emily tapped the screen. “Put in her whole name.”

Jerome’s fingers moved like liquid across the keyboard. “Two commercial, fifty-three private. But would any of them be her? She was living here for ... actually I don’t know for how long. But she wouldn’t have been back in Germany long enough for her name to be registered in the directory.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Emily said, bookmarking the search results. “It’s a starting place at least.”

She picked up her glass and took a sip.

“No beer for you,
mein Fräulein
?” Jerome watched her with a curious eye. “In fact, it’s been no beer for you all week. How come?”

Emily hesitated, remembering his words in the café. She could say she wasn’t in the mood, or she could tell him the truth. Seeing that she was wavering, Jerome shrugged and returned to the site.

“I’m not supposed to drink alcohol,” Emily said. “It doesn’t react so well with the meds.”

Jerome looked up. “Antidepressants?”

Emily nodded, feeling ashamed, then angry that she should feel any shame at all.

At the computer, Jerome returned his attention to
Das Telefonbuch
. “If we knew which town or city Alina hails from it would narrow our search.”

“We could ask Karl Henry.” Emily watched him, looking for signs that her admission had changed his attitude towards her. If it had, Jerome was a better actor than she’d imagined.

“I don’t like the idea of messing around with Karl Henry,” he said. “We already know he enjoys getting his point across with his hands, and if you’re right about Alina, then he’s the last person we want to get tangled up with.”

“Perhaps Harriet will know.”

“It’s worth asking. What other information do we have?”

Relaxing a little, Emily leaned back in her chair. “Alina disappeared on Monday the twenty-fourth of August. She called Karl at around nine pm from a bus stop to say she was on her way home from work. No one saw or heard from her again. Earlier that same day, Karl arranged for Bill the handyman to change the lock on his apartment door, then paid him hush money to keep quiet about it. The lock had been broken from the inside, as if someone had been trying to smash their way out. Go take a look. They’ve been sanded down and painted over, but there are scratches and grooves still visible.”

“I believe you. Go on.”

“Some time shortly before Alina’s disappearance, Harriet Golding was woken in the middle of the night by shouting. Karl and Alina were fighting again. Only this time, they weren’t alone. A third person was there. A woman. Harriet couldn’t hear what she had to say to them but whatever it was shut them up and fast.”

“That’s weird. I wonder who it could have been.” Jerome wrote everything down, forming a timeline of events. He stared at the page, thinking. “You know, there is one direct way we could find out if Alina is missing. And it would save us a lot of time and trouble.”

Emily folded her arms, staring out of the window. “Ask the police.”

“Exactly. But I don’t know how much they’re allowed to tell us, not being related or in any way connected to her.”

“Surely they’d be able to tell us whether or not she’s been found.”

“You want to call tomorrow and ask?”

“No.”

The word fled from her mouth like a turncoat.

Jerome stared at her, his brow wrinkled. “Okay. I guess I can do it on my lunch break.”

“Alina was a nurse, wasn’t she?” Emily turned away, her hair falling across her face. “I found part of her uniform in the clothes she left behind, and the missing persons notice said she worked for some sort of foundation.”

“Do you remember the name? It could be worth giving them a call to see if they know anything.”

Emily cast her mind back, picturing the notice pinned to the public board. “The Ever After Care Foundation.”

“Sounds like a funeral home.”

Emily typed the name into the laptop.

“Not so far from the truth,” she replied.

They stared at a gaudily coloured webpage decorated with dove motifs. The Ever After Care Foundation was not a funeral service, but a private hospice for the terminally ill located east of the city in Hainault. Images on the website presented a sprawling manor house flanked by modern annexes and surrounded by woodland. The grounds boasted colourful, topiary-lined gardens, and two large ponds.

Other photographs showed bright and comfortable rooms that, if it weren’t for the hospital-style beds, could have been mistaken for hotel rooms. As Emily pored over the website, an insipid queasiness began to unsettle her stomach. Memories were crawling out of the shadows like insects, moving just beneath her skin.

“I’ve lost you again.” Jerome squeezed her arm.

Emily mustered a half-smile. “It looks very comfortable. A nice place to spend your last days.”

“Is there a phone number?”

Clicking onto the contact page, Emily located the number and Jerome made a note of it.

“You want me to call this one too?”

“I can do it.”

“That would mean switching on your phone, you know.”

“As a matter of fact I already did.”

It was true. As soon as she’d returned home, she’d taken the phone from the drawer, switched it on, and held her breath as she waited to see if Lewis had contacted her. She’d pretended to be indifferent to the empty screen. Wasn’t his silence exactly what she had predicted? But then a solemnness embraced her, wrapping its sinewy arms around her neck.
Your life means nothing
, it whispered in her ear.
You have ceased to exist
.

“I’m impressed,” Jerome said. “Maybe I can have your number now?”

Emily took his pen and wrote it down. She stared across at Alina’s painting.

“I was going to ask you about that,” Jerome followed her gaze. “Why have you hung it on your wall? It’s a monstrosity.”

“It got me thinking. Who painted it? Why would they have painted Alina in such a strange way?”

“Maybe it was Karl. He certainly has a warped view of the world. Especially when it comes to his wife.”

“I don’t think so. The artist signed it with the initials AC.”

Jerome wrinkled his mouth in distaste. “If someone painted a picture of me like that I’d be wondering what I’d done to piss them off.”

With leads to follow in the morning, they soon parted ways. As Jerome headed for the door, Emily stopped him.

“Here.” She handed him the spare key to her apartment. “In case I’m locked out again.”

“I’m not sure I’m the best person to—”

“Yes, you are. Besides, my only other choice is Harriet, and as nice as she is, well, you’ve been inside her apartment.”

Jerome closed his fingers over the keys. “Point taken.”

Once she was alone, Emily returned to the laptop and the Ever After Care Foundation website. It really did look welcoming. The staff, whether real or models hired to be in the pictures, had broad smiles and sympathetic eyes. Alina was not among them.

As Emily waded through the various pages, memories returned to taunt her, pulling on her wrist, dragging her through darkened rooms until she found herself at her mother’s house, perched on the edge of the bed. A crumpled form lay swamped by sheets. It moved, twisting its head around to see her. But Emily would not look. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut and pictured Alina. The shape in the bed began to moan; a pitiful drawn-out cry, riddled with pain, that threatened to go on forever.

Emily shut down the laptop. Tears stung her eyes. She willed them away, willed them to dry until her eyes were like deserts, until her mind was an arid landscape of bones.

The train was half-empty as it pulled out of Liverpool Street station and began its mid-morning journey towards the city outskirts. Office buildings towered on both sides of the track before the train disappeared into a long black tunnel. When it emerged, the scenery had changed. Emily and Jerome stared out at long stretches of industrial estates filled with rows of warehouses and peppered with disused gas holders. She’d read about those enormous, round storage tanks when studying the Industrial Revolution at school. Leftovers from an age when factory chimneys belched out thick noxious gases and tuberculosis rotted the lungs of the poor, they were now an indelible stain on a modern cityscape of steel and glass.

The train brought them as far as Romford. From there, they took a bus to Yellowpine Way, then began the twenty-five minute walk to the Ever After Care Foundation.

“Welcome to hell!” Jerome grimaced as they made their way through a labyrinth of identical suburban streets. “You know we could have taken the tube almost the entire way instead of your cross-country pentathlon. It’s bloody freezing!”

“I don’t like the tube.”

Emerging onto Romford Road they headed south until they came to an overhead pedestrian walkway, which spanned the width of the four-lane road.

Emily froze.

“That’s the place,” she said, pointing to a bus stop on the opposite side. “That’s where Alina called Karl before she disappeared.”

Behind the bus stop and bordering the edges of the road was a long stretch of forest. Looking over her shoulder, Emily saw a plot of locked up warehouses. She imagined Alina waiting for the bus, illuminated in the darkness by the single street light.

“Come on.”

Emily and Jerome crossed the walkway, passed the bus stop, and located the entrance of the private road that led to the Ever After Care Foundation.

“I’m not sure about this,” Jerome said, pausing to stamp his numbing feet against the ground.

His apprehension was not unfounded. Yesterday’s phone call to the police had proven fruitless. The desk sergeant he’d spoken to knew nothing of Alina Engel and upon learning that Jerome was neither her friend nor her relative abruptly ended the conversation. His next call was to the Missing Persons Bureau. A beleaguered operator advised him that, due to the age and nature of the missing persons report, he would need to submit an email enquiry. Hopefully, someone would reply within five working days.

Emily had taken an altogether different approach. She had called the Ever After Care Foundation and, rather than enquire about Alina Engel, she’d arranged an appointment to take a tour of their facilities. It was a slightly irrational move, she supposed, but now that they were here it seemed senseless to turn around.

Hands dug into pockets, Emily and Jerome followed the winding road that split the forest in two. By the time the road had opened up to reveal acres of flat land with the Ever After Care Foundation rising like a monolith from its centre, Emily’s face was so cold she felt as if she had been slapped.

Beside her, Jerome tugged the hood of his coat over his forehead. He grumbled to himself, occasionally glancing in Emily’s direction.

As they came closer they saw topiary-lined gardens. Most of the plants had died back or fallen victim to frost. It was a very different picture to the vibrant images on the website. The manor house, however, was much more impressive. A series of turrets and chimneys adorned the sloping slate roofs of the c-shaped sandstone building. Nineteen windows watched the strangers draw near. Emily wondered what riches might have once been spied through them as lords and ladies met to discuss the dowries attached to their daughters’ impending, arranged marriages.

In stark contrast, the one storey modern extensions attached to either side of the building were ugly and out of place.

Apart from a handful of vehicles in the car park the place felt deserted.

“I just don’t see why you couldn’t have asked about her over the phone, instead of dragging me out here to freeze my ass off,” Jerome said in a hushed voice. “And there are dying people in there. It just feels wrong.”

Emily stepped up to the impressive oak front door and pressed the intercom button.

“No one’s going to tell us anything over the phone,” she said. “We’re going to take a tour, that’s all. Hopefully, we’ll glean something while we’re here.”

“Well, I don’t want any trouble. The only reason I came along is because this is a ridiculous idea and someone needs to watch your back.”

“I appreciate it.”

The door opened and a nurse in her mid-fifties, who was short but powerfully built and dressed in a blue and white uniform, greeted them.

“Goodness, it’s icy out there!” A blast of frosty air extinguished her smile. “Come in, come in! Before we let the heat out.”

They stepped into a grand hallway resplendent with wood-panelled walls and hanging chandeliers. A grand double staircase grew up from the centre. Nestled in between was the front desk, where a young woman sat at a computer. She looked up, noticing the visitors.

The interior of the building had undergone some major transformations in order to accommodate its patients. Beige carpet now insulated the stone floors. Ornate windows had been replaced with double-glazed replicas to eliminate draughts.

“Well now, who do we have here?” the nurse asked, neatening her bun of dark hair.

“Emily Swanson. I called yesterday. This is my partner, Jerome.”

Already overwhelmed by the near-tropical heat, Jerome pulled off his scarf and jacket.

“Oh yes, of course” the nurse nodded. “Well, Emily, I’m Nurse Bates. I’ll be showing you around today, but first I’ll need you both to sign in with Rosa over there.”

As the nurse led them toward the reception desk, Jerome whispered, “Your partner? Really? And well done for giving them our actual names!”

Once they were signed in and wearing visitor badges, Nurse Bates led them towards white double doors.

“It’s your mother you’re here for?”

Emily nodded. “She has bowel cancer, stage four. She doesn’t have long. A few weeks perhaps. I’d like them to be comfortable.”

Nurse Bates patted her on the hand. “Well my dear, she’ll be properly looked after here. We have all the home comforts and therapies you can think of to make her stay as pleasant as possible. You’ll see as we go around that all our visitors are treated with the utmost dignity and respect.”

It was a strange term, Emily thought.
Visitors
. As if those who came to stay here were passing through, when in fact they had reached the end of their journey.

They began the tour with the dayroom.

“We won’t go in.” Nurse Bates held up a hand as they came to a halt in the doorway. “We don’t want to disturb anyone unnecessarily.”

As the nurse ran through the list of facilities, activities and events linked to the dayroom, Emily and Jerome looked around. It was a curious mix of old and new. Original features, such as the unused fireplace that ran across the east wall, remained. More contemporary additions, such as wall to wall carpeting, lighting fixtures with dimmers, and an enormous flat-screen television, were a reminder that in spite of the archaic surroundings, this was very much the twenty-first century.

Furnishing the dayroom was a mismatch of couches and loungers, and a set of sturdy elm bookcases. Red and gold Christmas decorations concertinaed towards the central chandelier, while a plastic Christmas tree stood beside the television, its branches cradling bows and baubles. Emily couldn’t decide if she found its presence a comfort, a reminder of how vibrant and benevolent life could be, or if those colours served to taunt the dying, to remind them this Christmas would be their last.

A handful of patients dotted the room. Most of them were elderly and frail, their bodies half-devoured by cancer, heart disease and other life-ending illnesses. But there were a few who were much younger, including a woman in her thirties whose headscarf concealed the clumps of hair that had grown back now her chemotherapy was at an end.

A few patients had family with them. Some still wore coats despite the stifling room temperature. Talk was quiet, sporadic.

“Most of our patients receive home care,” Nurse Bates said, keeping her voice at a respectful volume. “Around eighty-five percent of them as a matter of fact. The majority of sufferers would rather spend their last days in the comfort of the familiar, but there are a few, like these, who choose to end their lives here. Have you considered home care as an option?”

Emily had stopped listening. She stared at the woman with the headscarf, who sat alone, lost inside her dressing gown. Her eyes were muddy and dull, their vivacity snuffed out by an abandonment of hope. Why hope, her expression said, when death was already extending a hand?

“Emily’s mother insists on a hospice,” Jerome told Nurse Bates, who beckoned them away from the dayroom and led them upstairs to the patients’ rooms. Showing them into a vacant bedroom, the nurse explained that each room was en suite, and was equipped with an adjustable hospital-style bed and a wall-mounted television. Emily stared at the empty bed. She was at her mother’s house again, that emaciated husk turning into dust beside her.

As Nurse Bates led them back toward the staircase, she pointed out the large lift doors. As if on cue, they slid open and two nurses wheeled out an elderly man asleep in a hospital bed.

“Sometimes I wonder what Doctor Williams was thinking, founding a hospice in a placed filled with stairs,” Nurse Bates continued. “But then as you walk around, all the wonder, all the majesty of the house takes your breath away. There’s so much history here it seems fitting somehow for our visitors to become part of it.”

“How long have you worked here?” Jerome asked as they took the stairs to the next floor. A wide corridor stretched out before them. There were rooms for massage, reflexology, Reiki, and Shiatsu, as well as designated spaces for art and drama therapy, and grief counselling for both patients and their families.

“What a question!” the nurse laughed. “Well, it must be coming up for almost twenty-nine years. I’d previously worked for Doctor Williams for a number of years before he’d gone on to bigger and better things. You can imagine my surprise when out of the blue I received a phone call from him asking if I wouldn’t mind heading a team of nurses here at Ever After. It had been running for about a year then. Doctor Williams was dissatisfied with the level of care his current team was able to provide. I’d always held Doctor Williams in high regard, so of course I was extremely flattered.”

“Twenty-nine years is a long time,” Jerome mused.

“It is indeed! A long time and a lot of lost lives.”

“How do you cope with it? The dying, I mean.”

Nurse Bates sighed. “Counsel, prayer, and cabernet sauvignon. Of course, it would be a lie to say you get used to people passing away, in spite of it being a frequent, sometimes daily occurrence. But as I always say, the day you stop feeling anything is the day you need to find yourself a new calling.”

The final stop of the tour was the multi-faith prayer room, located downstairs in the west wing extension. It was a simple room, void of religious iconography. The silence in here was all encompassing, and Emily felt it around her like a death shroud.

“Doctor Williams has worked incredibly hard to make this place what it is today,” Nurse Bates said, walking her visitors back towards the reception area. “You won’t find better nurses or greater quality of care anywhere else—even if I do say so myself.”

Their visit was coming to an end. Jerome looked across at Emily, trying to catch her attention. If she was going to ask about Alina, now was the time. Emily, however, was lost in thought.

“Can we meet Doctor Williams?” he asked Nurse Bates. They were passing through the dining room now, the foyer just through the next door. “He sounds like a very interesting person, doesn’t he, Emily?”

Emily blinked. “Yes, he does.”

Nurse Bates led them out into the foyer, where two nurses conversed in low voices with the receptionist.

“I’m afraid Doctor Williams is offsite today,” she said. “I could ask him to call you if you have any further questions?”

The nurses at the front desk smiled at the visitors, then headed towards the dayroom. Jerome removed his badge and scrolled through the sign-in book, taking his time to locate his name. He shot Emily a sideways glance, and was about to give her a subtle nudge, when she said, “Thank you for your time, Nurse Bates. Obviously, there’s a lot to take in right now, although I realise there’s not a lot of time to make a decision. Perhaps I can call you later, once we’ve discussed it with my mother?”

“Of course,” Nurse Bates said. “These decisions aren’t made lightly. We’ll be here, so go ahead and call when you’re ready.”

“I’m just glad we met that nurse when we did,” Emily said, turning to Jerome. “In a situation like this, you have to think ahead. What was her name? I forget.”

For a second, Jerome was silent, searching her expression for clues. Then, he was reluctantly playing along. “I can’t remember. She was German, wasn’t she?”

“That’s right.”

Uncertainty creased Nurse Bates’ brow. “Alina?”

“Yes, I think that was her name,” Emily replied. “That was it, wasn’t it, Jerome? Alina. We met her at a mutual friend’s house warming a few months ago, and when I mentioned my mother, Alina told us all about this place and about all the good that was being done here. It was a stroke of luck really, meeting her when we did.”