Not Dark Yet

by Peter Robinson

  He caught a mid-afternoon train, which would get him home by about six o’clock, in plenty of time for a little pottering in the garden and a good read. As he listened to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, played by Rachel Podger, he drifted and gazed at the passing landscape as he had done on the journey down, this time mulling over what Burgess had told him.

  It seemed as if Zelda had been busy behind his back, if the accounts were to be believed. And he saw no reason why they shouldn’t be. Why was she asking the barman questions in her dead boss’s local? He had no idea. Was she becoming overzealous in her search for Keane, or was there some other reason? Banks and Annie had warned her not to get too involved right from the start, told her that Keane was dangerous, but she seemed to have ignored them. Where had she come across the connection between Hawkins and Keane in the first place, and what was it? Was Keane now working with Tadić?

  And how did Zelda get on to Faye Butler? That was a gigantic leap. The evidence pointed towards Faye being Keane’s ex-girlfriend. Or Hugh Foley, as he called himself now. Why was she tortured and killed, and who did it? And what was Zelda’s part in it all? Unanswerable questions at the moment, he knew, but they nagged away at him.

  Burgess had asked Banks to talk to Zelda first and, if possible, avoid further action. He had agreed to try to find out what her meeting with Faye Butler was all about. But how was he to do that? Was he really going to bring Zelda into the station and question her, caution and all? If so, on what charge? Besides, that was one of the things Burgess had said he was trying to save Zelda from by letting Banks talk to her.

  It would probably be best, he thought, to try an informal talk, but he had to be more probing and less willing to believe her than he had when they had talked before. He didn’t think she had been playing him, but she had been holding out, and he was still worried about the possible danger to her. One only had to consider what happened to Faye Butler and Hawkins to worry about that. And he wondered about the man Faye had met in the park. Who was he? Keane? But Keane wasn’t stocky. The only positive thing was that Zelda had been back up north when Faye had disappeared, as she had been in Croatia when Hawkins had been killed in the mysterious house fire, so the police could hardly change tack and accuse her of those crimes. Her behaviour was suspicious, yes, but complicit, no.

  The question of Phil Keane remained. He could be Hugh Foley. It would certainly make sense for him to change his name if he returned to England, especially to Yorkshire. Keane was fortyish when he and Banks had first crossed swords, so he would be about fifty now, definitely too old for Faye Butler, by her friends’ standards. But Banks remembered that Keane was a smooth-talker and that he had been in youthful good shape. He seemed the kind of man who was attractive to women. He had taken in Annie Cabbot, after all. No doubt he still seemed younger than he was. Besides, Banks thought, the age thing was often irrelevant to the people involved in a relationship, such as Zelda and Ray, and was of concern mostly to prissy moralists who loved to pronounce judgement on other people’s lives based on the view from outside. Superficial morality for superficial people.

  Keane was good-looking, medium height. Ten years ago, his hair had been dark, with touches of grey, but he could easily have dyed it light brown. The beard would have been easy to grow, too, and a thinning hairline is natural for some people with the advance of years. The art book also made sense. Whatever he was up to now, ten years ago Phil Keane had been an art expert, not to mention a forger of provenances, and there was no reason to believe that his interest in art had lessened as his climb up the slippery pole of criminality had taken him higher and higher. So was Keane/Foley involved in sex trafficking now? It wouldn’t surprise Banks. Even Zelda had pointed out early on that his document-forging skills would be every bit as useful in the world of people trafficking as in his previous enterprise.

  The Bach finished, and Banks switched to Xuefei Yang playing music by Debussy, Satie, and others arranged for guitar. How he wished he could play like that. He hadn’t tackled any classical pieces yet. Truth be told, he hadn’t even got beyond Bobby bloody Shafto in Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day. That and holding down a playable G chord without breaking his little finger were pushing the limits of his patience and endurance these days. But he would get back to it.

  The train rattled past the Darlington Arena and into the train station. The barriers were open, and Banks walked down the ramp and under the tunnel, then back up to the car park opposite the station exit, where he had left his car that morning. Behind the car park, a cattle auction was in progress, and he could hear the auctioneer’s calls.

  He was thankful, as always, to see the Porsche was undamaged. After half an hour of motorway driving, it was also a pleasure to turn off into the Dales along a winding road, lined with trees that opened every now and then on the magnificent vistas of rolling green hills dotted with bright yellow squares of rapeseed. And soon he was pulling up on the crunchy gravel in front of Newhope Cottage in Gratly. The sense of relief he felt as he turned his key in the door was only partly drowned out by the worries resulting from his conversation with Burgess, and where they might lead him.

  IT WAS the first time Gerry had visited Blaydon’s house since she and Banks had found his disembowelled body floating face down in the indoor swimming pool. She felt some trepidation as she wound along the long drive towards the open area in front of the Tuscan-style grounds. When she turned off the engine and got out of the car, she felt the silence weigh down on her. The fountain out front was still turned off, the cherubim and seraphim surrounding the stone pond dry. Last time, she remembered, there had been a dead bird floating in the brackish water. That was gone now, and the water was covered in a greenish scum. The topiary was grotesquely misshapen, deprived of a gardener’s ministrations, and the trellised arbours and wisteria groves overgrown with weeds, the roses in the rose garden all dead. Bindweed wrapped itself around whatever vegetation there was, strangling it, sucking the life out of it. Long shadows of trees fell over the gardens.

  The bland house itself towered over her, three storeys of limestone, brick, and stucco, with gables, shuttered windows and a low-pitched slate roof, its facade like a crudely drawn face. Gerry remembered the beginning of a film she had seen years ago with her parents, who loved old black-and-white movies, especially horror movies. She couldn’t remember the plot or the title, but it was something about a house being insane, and the idea had terrified the twelve-year-old Gerry so much that she had experienced nightmares about it. Had Blaydon’s mansion taken on the essence of things that had happened inside it? Was this house insane? She told herself not to be so silly.

  The heavy front door was locked, and police tape warned any prospective trespassers to keep away, along with a lone constable on guard duty, having a quick smoke. Gerry knew that the house was still an official crime scene and that the CSIs and various scientific support officers came back to check on things from time to time. But there was no one else around today, except the bored constable, who checked her warrant card and had her sign his clipboard. She walked up the steps of the porch, with its stone columns, and gave a little shudder as she put her key in the lock and opened up.

  Her footsteps echoed in the high-ceilinged entrance hall. She paused to gaze at the gilt-framed paintings on the wainscotted walls—a stormy seascape, harvest time, eerily lit docks at night. She was here to find and check out the room where the rape had been filmed, so she moved on through the corridors, following the diagram she had brought. Eventually she found it.

  The small bed had been stripped and even the mattress taken away for forensic examination. The lampshade where the camera had been hidden had been removed, too, leaving a bare bulb. Gerry turned it on as the room had no windows, just as she had expected. A fairly wide-angle lens would capture the whole bed from above, but only from that one perspective. And the wide angle meant poor depth of field.

  Gerry took some photos with her mobile. She was certain that the CSIs ha
d been through the room and left nothing behind, but she looked around in any case—under the skeletal bed, in the empty wardrobe, in the drawers of the bedside table, also empty. As expected, she found nothing except traces of fingerprint powder here and there. It felt odd to be standing here, in the room where it had happened. She tried to imagine the poor girl’s fear and panic, hoping only that whatever drugs the man had given her had dulled it to the extent that she hadn’t suffered too much. Gerry remembered the final image of her half-naked body left among the tangled sheets, how the girl had turned on her side and curled up in a foetal position. Feeling a sudden surge of revulsion deep in her stomach, she turned and walked out of the door.

  Before she knew it, she found herself standing in the doorway to the pool area. No traces remained there of Blaydon’s gruesome death or Roberts’s slightly less gory one, but standing there and smelling the ghost of chlorine brought it all back. Roberts had been over the other side of the pool, sprawled against the glass wall, which had been smeared with blood where he had slid down after being shot.

  And Blaydon was like nothing she had ever seen before. At first, she had thought his body was some kind of sea monster from those old films she had watched with her parents. The water was tinged dark red around it, and a cloying sweet metallic smell mingled with the sharp chlorine. All she could make out was a dark tangle that looked like tentacles below the body, and his arms stretched out at the sides, like a cross. He was naked, and the whiteness of his skin stood out in contrast to the dark water. She shivered as she relived the sight.

  But today, the bodies were gone, the pool empty, the sickening mix of chlorine, blood, and severed bowels no longer cloying the air. Gerry hadn’t expected to find anything new on this visit; she had just wanted to get a feel for the scene. But she hadn’t expected it would have such an effect on her. She stood for a few moments until the waves of nausea and shock the recollection had brought on ebbed, then she went back to her car.

  THE DRIVE was easy, with very little traffic, and Zelda made it to the airport with time to spare. With any luck, if her flight left on time, and if she took a taxi from Heathrow to King’s Cross, she would be able to catch the last train home to Raymond. She felt nervous as she went through the immigration and security formalities. She had dumped the knife she hadn’t used in a river on her way up from Purcari and was carrying nothing incriminating. She cleared all the airport hurdles without hindrance and settled back in her seat as the plane took off.

  Zelda felt edgy and rattled, but she was glad she had handled Lupescu the way she had. Perhaps the guilt was enough, if he felt it as much as he had professed to do. A decent man with a wife and family didn’t do what he had done and sleep easy at night. Perhaps it hadn’t been so difficult at first to avoid thinking too much about what happened to the girls he picked out. They say some people lack empathy and can’t imagine the suffering of others—the kind of thing that permeated Zelda’s nightmares and kept her awake at night—and perhaps Lupescu was one of them. Maybe he did deserve to die, but that was out of her hands now; she would leave his fate to karma.

  The plane landed and Zelda made her way through the busy terminal. If there was any air-conditioning it wasn’t doing much good, because the air felt hot and sticky. When she got to the e-gate, she stepped forward when the green light came on, inserted her passport in the slot and looked up at the camera. It seemed to take for ever, and she began to feel nervous. Eventually the light turned red and her progress was barred. Her heart began to beat fast and hard. So much so that she was sure she was shaking. An immigration officer waiting on the other side let her through and led her over to a desk, where he pored over her passport and ran it through his computer.

  The wait seemed interminable. Zelda did her best not to appear nervous, but there was nothing she could do about the beads of sweat on her brow. Perhaps Lupescu had called the police, after all, and they had informed immigration. Perhaps they were going to deport her. Or maybe it was nothing to do with Lupescu but something about her French passport, her settlement status. The hostile environment. She knew that she hadn’t lived in France for long enough to gain true citizenship, or lived anywhere else for long since Chișinău, for that matter. But that wasn’t her fault.

  The real problem was her past. Danvers and Debs had certainly known that she had been a sex slave. How easy it would be for a hostile government department to translate that into the idea that she had worked as a prostitute. Definitely an undesirable alien. And much worse, she was a murderer. Fortunately for Zelda, nobody knew about Goran Tadić, and the French authorities had even more reason for keeping the demise of Darius secret than she did. He had been pimp to a number of high-priced call girls, Zelda included, and had collected a great deal of compromising material on certain prominent French politicians, material that Zelda had been stealing when he had caught her, and she had killed him.

  The fact remained that deep down she felt she didn’t deserve to have a happy life in England with Raymond. Or anywhere. But she wanted it so badly. In her best moments she could justify what she had done—these were evil men who had done terrible things—but there were darker times, when her deeds haunted her and drove her to the brink of despair. Was the past to be her undoing? Could she ever get beyond it and remake herself into a decent, normal human being?

  “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  “No problem, Miss. Minor glitch. The machine’s sensitive.”

  So am I, she was about to say, but stopped herself. These people weren’t known for their sense of humour. She waited and chewed on her lower lip as the officer continued to study her passport and frown. He asked her where she’d been.

  Zelda thought it should be obvious from her passport stamp, but there was no point acting the smart arse. “Moldova,” she said. “Chișinău.”

  “What was the purpose of your visit?”

  “Revisiting childhood places. I was born there.”

  He gave her a sharp glance. “How long were you away?”

  Again, she thought of referring him to the stamp on her passport, but dismissed the idea. “Three days,” she said.

  “Not very long to visit childhood places.”

  “It was long enough,” Zelda said. “I had a deprived childhood.”

  Oops. Nervous humour. Big mistake. But he simply failed to react. “How long are you staying here this time?”

  “For ever, I hope,” she answered, sounding as cheery and confident as possible. “I mean, I live here.”

  He didn’t smile. He simply handed her passport back to her and said, “Have a nice day.” She was going to inform him that there wasn’t much of it left, but again her common sense kicked in before she opened her mouth, and she remembered that it was more sensible not to engage an immigration officer in conversation. Just get out of there. Fortunately, she had no checked luggage, so she could head straight for the taxi rank.

  Not much more than an hour and a half later, she was settling into a first-class seat on a train heading north. Finally, she was on her way, though she was too tense to read. She still felt unsettled by her experience at immigration. Why had that happened? Was her passport flagged? Had Danvers and Deborah spread the word? Would the immigration police soon be knocking on her door in the small hours? Or would it be someone else, someone far more dangerous, who didn’t even bother to knock?

  She had got the passport quickly in Paris because her lover Emile had sway in the government, and because the powers that be had wanted both to reward her and get rid of her. So maybe it was dodgy, even though Emile had assured her it was genuine. But Emile was dead now, and she didn’t think she could count on any further support from the French government. She had given them what they wanted, and they had no more use for her. She should count herself lucky that she had come out of it smelling of roses. There were times when she thought she was also lucky that they hadn’t decided to have her eliminated instead. It must have been an option. And she clearly couldn’t count on
the British for anything, the way things were heading. But why now? She had used the passport several times since she had been living in England without any trouble at all.

  Most of the journey she stared out of her window at the slowly darkening summer evening and listened to one of her three favourite symphonies. This time it was Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, and as she listened and rocked gently to the train’s rhythm she thought about William Buckley, Vasile Lupescu, and her immigration fears. When the train arrived at York, she felt better. It still wasn’t quite dark. Midsummer evenings. The longest day wasn’t too far off. She breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped on to the platform and walked to the taxi rank. Home, Raymond, and peace at last, she thought, as the taxi made its way along the A59 past Kirk Hammerton towards the A1.

  5

  OVER THE WEEKEND, BANKS HAD GIVEN A GREAT DEAL OF thought as to how he might get Zelda to “loosen up.” First of all, he ruled out an interview room, or even his office, as too formal. Moving on from there, he counted out the entire police station, which reeked of authority. She could never relax in such a place, and nor could he. In addition to the personal trauma Zelda had been through, Banks thought she was, like many Eastern Europeans since Stalin’s days, genetically terrified of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. And of the police in general. To them all cops were the FSB, KGB or Stasi, whatever, but Banks thought he had forged a bond with Zelda and that if he approached her in the right way, she would feel more at ease.