Banks folded his arms. ‘Excellent. Good work.’
‘Thank you, sir. Shall I keep plugging away?’
Banks glanced at his watch. ‘No, not tonight. You deserve a drink. My treat. Besides, Ronald Hadfield’s business practices aren’t our concern unless they have some connection to his father’s death. And after what you’ve just told me, they probably don’t. We’ll let the fraud squad deal with him. I think we need to look a bit closer to home. Where’s Annie?’
‘Gone to see her dad, sir, about working on that sketch of Mia. DS Jackman said Sarah Chen and her housemates knew Mia, too.’
‘The sooner we find her, the better. Just you and me, then.’
Gerry got up and reached for her coat from the rack, and as Banks helped her on with it he noticed a photograph on Annie’s desk and went over to see what it was.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, holding it up for Gerry.
‘Oh, that. It’s a photo of a treble clef the CSIs found in Laurence Hadfield’s bathroom. Annie had it photographed before she took it down to exhibits. It’s in her report, but I haven’t had time to enter it into HOLMES yet.’
Banks hadn’t read the most recent statements and exhibits reports on the Laurence Hadfield case yet, mostly because he had been distracted by the Sarah Chen case, or by Zelda. ‘It’s not Poppy’s?’
Gerry laughed. ‘According to DI Cabbot, sir, she almost had apoplexy at the mere suggestion.’
Banks stared at the photograph.
‘It’s a charm from a bracelet, sir,’ said Gerry. ‘Pandora, apparently. Very popular.’
‘I’ve heard of them,’ said Banks. But already he felt the thrill of connection, the cogs and wheels in his mind shifting, engaging, grinding out images. Adrienne Munro sitting in the Ford Focus, a charm bracelet loose on her right wrist. Whether it was from Pandora or there had been a missing charm, he couldn’t be certain, but it would be easy enough to find out. It was a treble clef, a musical symbol, and that seemed to suit Adrienne, he thought, with her violin and love of classical music.
Then there was the conversation with Colin Fairfax, who had said at one point that he had bought Adrienne a charm for her bracelet. Again, he hadn’t said what kind of charm, but that could also be easily checked. If it happened to be the same one, then it linked Hadfield with Adrienne, who was already linked with Sarah Chen through the note in her room and, now also through the mysterious Mia. Perhaps this wasn’t about drugs, after all.
‘Let’s postpone that drink for a short while, Gerry,’ Banks said. ‘Come with me. We’ve got work to do.’
Zelda loved walking around London in the evening, especially the West End. She loved the lights and the crowds heading for theatres and restaurants, the narrow streets, the noise from the cafés spilling out into the street.
She left her boutique hotel near Seven Dials at seven o’clock to find somewhere to eat in Covent Garden. Though she never worried about it in Yorkshire, she usually dressed down in London to avoid drawing attention to herself, and tonight was no exception. Her clothes were plain and loose-fitting, though not the kind of loose that simmered like a waterfall over her arse as she walked. She wore a padded jacket and a woolly hat to keep warm. No matter what the temperature, though, the streets were always full of people, some of the young girls very scantily dressed. When she had first come here, she had thought they were prostitutes, but Raymond put her right on that score. Though it was a chilly evening, people sat outdoors at café tables smoking, talking and drinking espresso, or stood outside pubs with pints in their hands, laughing at jokes. Sometimes as she walked around the city, Zelda had the eerie feeling that she had seen every face before, that each one was stored in her memory, and she recognised all of them.
Over the past few years, Zelda had become adept at making herself invisible. She hadn’t followed many people in her life, but it had been necessary on occasion, and her skill of invisibility had come in very useful. It was more a state of mind than anything physical. She didn’t need a disguise, but simple, ordinary clothes in dull colours helped: a brown winter coat, woolly hat, a straightforward gait of someone who knows where she’s going but is in no hurry, no signs of a strut or a wiggle.
She loved the anonymity, how she could walk around by herself without being pestered. Every time she went to London, she stayed in a different hotel, a different part of the city – Chelsea, Kensington, Soho, Piccadilly, even Earls Court, Notting Hill or Swiss Cottage. And it seemed there was nothing odd about a woman eating alone in London. At least not in the kinds of restaurants she sought out. She always managed to find some hidden-away treasure, a little backstreet bistro or trattoria of some kind.
Tonight she spotted a tiny French restaurant off Mercer Street which had a few empty tables, and she went inside. A maître d’ seated her without even asking whether she had a reservation, and she ordered a carafe of claret and studied the menu. When she had decided on the steak frites, she took out her e-reader and propped it up on the table. She had bought the kind with the origami cover, as it folded over and made a stand for itself, which was perfect for reading while eating alone. She had found that people were even less inclined to disturb her when she was reading.
Zelda always liked to get to London the night before she started working; it was a kind of buffer between the beautiful but remote and isolated world of Beckerby and the depressing reality of her job. It was useful and necessary work, but she couldn’t deny that it was often dispiriting, recognising those dreaded faces from her past, from some of the worst times of her life. In this state, tonight, she felt that she floated free of it all, was able to empty her mind of her concerns and concentrate on the words on the screen: Kawabata and the otherworldly Japan.
The waiter brought her meal and poured some more wine for her. She hadn’t thought it was the kind of restaurant where the waiters did that, so she guessed he was a gentleman of the old school. That was the thing about these hidden French restaurants, the waiters were almost always elderly men, much the same as at many of the best restaurants in Paris.
As she ate her steak, sipped her wine and looked up at an antique travel poster showing the Eiffel Tower on the wall, she thought of Paris, where she had spent her last year in servitude. Almost anyone she had known the previous few years would have killed for the life of luxury she had led there. But it was still slavery. She was wined and dined by the rich and powerful. Politicians. Bankers. Oligarchs. Gangsters. But she was still expected to lie on her back and please them. And her enforcers were never far away. They made it clear that she was not free to leave the luxury of the high-price call girl’s life. Slob and Vitch, she called them. They delivered her to the fancy restaurants and five-star hotels and waited while she did her duty, then they drove her to her flat afterwards. Sometimes they insisted on a piece of the action, too, one after the other, just to put her in her place, before they left her alone for the night. And even then, she knew, they were never far away, always watching.
And Paris was as good as it was ever likely to get.
The only reason she had risen so high in the first place was that someone had seen enough potential in her to know that she was being wasted where she was in the cheap brothels of the Balkans, so he had made an offer for her, which was accepted. She was sold. No more backstreet brothels in Sarajevo or Zagreb, cramped cars off the autobahn or kerbside promenading in Prague. Suddenly, it was all expensive perfumes, fine clothes and top-drawer clientele. But Zelda soon learned that the only difference between these men and the ones she had encountered in backstreet brothels was the quality of their suits. The man who bought her, Darius, once made Zelda watch while his minders kicked a rival pimp to death in an alley in the rain. The message was clear and simple: cross us and this will happen to you. She didn’t feel a thing.
No more than she did when she slit Darius’s throat less than a year later.
11
‘As you all know,’ Banks began, standing before the whiteboards on Wednesday
morning, ‘things have changed a lot since our last meeting. First of all, I’d like to welcome the officers from West Yorkshire who have joined us on this inquiry.’ Banks paused for a moment while the detectives nodded or waved to make themselves known. ‘You’ve all been allocated your roles and responsibilities, and I know some of you are double-hatting, but none of that should stop you from doing your main job: crime investigator on this team. We don’t want any tunnel vision here. All input is welcome. Not just welcome, but expected. And I won’t say we have all the technical resources of the various experts and specialists constantly at our fingertips, but the experts are here and available, and they will be working with us. There’ll be time for introductions later. What I’d like to start with is a summary of what we’ve got so far and what we need to know. When we’ve finished here, there’ll be actions and TIES aplenty, so make sure you grab a good spot in the queue or you’ll never make it to the Queen’s Arms before closing time.’
A polite ripple of laughter went around the room.
Banks turned to the whiteboards, one of which had a number of points listed beside colour photographs of Adrienne Munro, Laurence Hadfield and Sarah Chen. ‘On Monday,’ he went on, ‘DCI Blackstone from the West Yorkshire Homicide and Major Inquiry team brought to my attention the murder of a Leeds University student called Sarah Chen, found dead of serious head wounds in a ruined bothy in open country north of Leeds. The interesting thing about Sarah’s murder as far as we’re concerned is that she had a slip of paper in her room with Adrienne Munro’s name on it. As yet, we can make no other connection between Adrienne and Sarah, except that both were second-year university students, and both were dressed for a party or a night on the town when they were found dead in remote rural locations.
‘In a further development, as a result of information from a case DI Cabbot was working on with DC Masterson here in North Yorkshire, a Pandora charm was found by our search team in the bathroom of a house owned by Laurence Hadfield, an international financier who was found dead under mysterious circumstances on Tetchley Moor last week. Adrienne Munro was wearing a Pandora bracelet when her body was found.
‘On the instructions of DS Cabbot, the CSIs returned to make a thorough search of Hadfield’s drains and found hair samples that match Adrienne Munro’s, which would place her even more certainly at Hadfield’s house – in his bathroom – recently. I know that a hair match isn’t the most reliable form of identification, but it’ll have to be enough to be going on with. We’ll have DNA on the hair samples soon, I’m assured, as enough of them had follicles attached.
‘Pathology indicates that both Laurence Hadfield and Adrienne Munro died within a short time of each other. As yet, we don’t know the exact time of Sarah Chen’s death, since the post-mortem won’t be carried out until this afternoon. Estimates at the scene, though, indicate she had been dead about a week when she was found, which could put her in the same time bracket.
‘Last night, DC Masterson and I contacted the Exhibits Officer and checked the bracelet Adrienne had been wearing. We were able to ascertain that there was one charm missing. We then re-interviewed Colin Fairfax, Adrienne’s ex-boyfriend, who told us that he had bought her a Pandora charm for her birthday. It was quite distinctive, and expensive, a treble clef of silver encrusted with cubic zircons.
‘So we now have definite links between Sarah and Adrienne, and Adrienne and Laurence Hadfield. Also in the picture somewhere is a surgeon, Anthony Randall, a friend of Hadfield’s, who phoned the deceased three times on the day we think Hadfield disappeared. Mr Randall has offered no reasonable explanation for the frequency or content of these calls. The last one, close to eleven thirty in the evening, went through to voicemail, but Randall left no message. We think Hadfield was dead by then. But we still have no idea how he got to Tetchley Moor. When DI Cabbot and DC Masterson arrived at Hadfield’s house last Friday, they found his mobile on his study desk. According to his cleaning lady, he would normally not go anywhere without it. This also applies to Adrienne Munro, who left her mobile in her bedsit. Sarah Chen was carrying nothing on her person when her body was found, and there was no mobile in her room, though her housemates say she had one. Is everyone with me so far?’
Most of those present nodded; a few made sounds of assent. Many still looked puzzled.
‘Good,’ said Banks, ‘because it only gets more complicated. Along with Adrienne Munro’s name on the slip of paper in Sarah’s room, there was what appeared to be a mobile telephone number. It wasn’t Adrienne’s, and so far it doesn’t appear to belong to anyone else. Naturally, we’re assuming it’s a pay-as-you-go phone, a “burner”, as the American cop shows would have it. We have no idea why Adrienne would have a second mobile phone, if indeed she had, as none was found either on her person or in her bedsit. Needless to say, we need more information on this mobile.
‘Drugs are certainly a possibility. Both dead girls were known to have been at least casual users, though there is no evidence of hard drug use. Nor do our drugs squads have them on their radar. So if it is drugs, they’re relatively new to the scene. I know I said we have no evidence that Adrienne Munro was murdered, but she didn’t get into that car by herself, and there was no sign of her possessions at the scene. The phones we do have – Adrienne’s and Laurence Hadfield’s personal mobiles – have only innocuous numbers, texts and emails on them, as far as we can gather so far. Just friends and family, doctor, dentist and so on, as you’d expect. Hadfield’s phone, of course, needs extensive investigation, as it was also used for his business purposes, which could be connected with his death.
‘There is also a mysterious presence in all this known simply as “Mia”. DS Jackman talked to Sarah Chen’s housemates last night and found out that this Mia had befriended Sarah in the student pub close to the beginning of term and then disappeared from the scene completely. The same happened in the Adrienne Munro case. According to the descriptions DS Jackman elicited, we’re sure it’s the same woman. We have a sketch artist working on this, and we hope to have something ready by end of play today. Any questions?’
A stunned silence greeted Banks’s summary of the investigation, but eventually a detective from West Yorkshire shyly raised her arm.
‘Yes?’ Banks said.
‘DC Musgrave, West Yorkshire, sir. Do I understand correctly that the three deaths are linked?’
‘We have links between Sarah and Adrienne – the name and phone number – and between Adrienne and Hadfield – the Pandora charm. We have no specific link between Sarah Chen and Laurence Hadfield. We can also link Randall to Hadfield, but not to either of the girls. Yet.’
‘Has Laurence Hadfield ever been involved in the drug trade?’ someone else asked.
‘Not as far as we know,’ said Banks. ‘I realise there are too many gaps in our knowledge. That’s what I want us to work on. We can start by finding out what the phone number meant, what Anthony Randall talked about to Laurence Hadfield and what their relationship was, why Sarah Chen had Adrienne Munro’s name. We’d also like to know how the Pandora charm ended up in Hadfield’s bathroom.’
‘Do we know who wrote the note with the name and phone number?’ another West Yorkshire detective asked.
‘That’s an interesting point,’ Banks answered. ‘The short answer is no, we don’t. But we have checked, and our handwriting expert has determined through comparison that it wasn’t written by Adrienne Munro, Laurence Hadfield or Sarah Chen.’
‘Mia, perhaps?’
‘Possibly.’
‘There’s been cases of students hooking up with older men for sex and companionship in exchange for money,’ said DC Musgrave again. ‘For the older men, I mean, the sex . . .’
Banks smiled. ‘I think I know what you mean, DC Musgrave. Sugar daddies.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And it’s a good point. It’s a line of inquiry we’re not going to overlook, along with Hadfield’s business interests. Both girls were dressed up a bit more tha
n your usual student, even for a Saturday night. And the dresses they were wearing weren’t cheap. Adrienne Munro concocted a story about a scholarship to explain her improved financial situation this year, but all the large recent deposits in her bank account were made in cash. Sarah Chen told her housemates she had received an insurance payout on her father’s death, along with money left to her in his will. He died over two years ago, so that seems unlikely, but we’re checking into it. There may be a very good reason for all this, and if it isn’t drug-related, it could involve sex for cash. On the other hand, neither girl had been interfered with in any way, and neither had had sex recently, according to the pathologists, though Sarah Chen’s post-mortem might tell a different story. Perhaps they’d been acting as escorts only, something of that nature. Hadfield was a wealthy businessman, so he could no doubt afford a pretty girl or two to hang on his arms if he had clients he wanted to impress, even with a hands-off embargo. Anything else?’
Nobody said anything.
‘OK,’ said Banks. ‘Check in with the incident room as often as you can. We’ll be constantly updating HOLMES. Any leads you come across, contact DCI Blackstone or me if you can get hold of us. But use your initiative. Better to get something done and moving than sit around on your arse because I was out of the station at the time. What do they say? “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” Even from me. Now off you go. Pick up your actions on the way, and let’s see some progress before the day’s out.’
The offices Zelda worked in occupied two floors of a building on Cambridge Circus. The upper floor consisted of work spaces for the six people, though it was rare that they were all occupied at the same time, and the lower floor was given over entirely to archives and records. The decor was typical institutional drab, coats of jaundiced gloss so dense you could see your reflection on the walls. The heaters never worked properly, and the most modern elements of the space were its security system and computer software.
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