Not Dark Yet

by Peter Robinson

“We don’t know,” said Annie. “Did Marnie have any siblings, brothers or sisters?”

  The Sedgwicks looked at one another in silence for a moment, then Francine said, “No. Marnie was an only child. I . . . you see, we couldn’t have children of our own, and . . .”

  “Marnie was adopted?” said Annie, giving Gerry a puzzled glance.

  “Well, yes. I assumed you knew.”

  “Nobody told us.”

  “It didn’t make her any less our own. We couldn’t have loved her more if I’d given birth to her myself.”

  “No, of course,” said Annie. “It’s just that we didn’t know. It never came up in any of our investigations.”

  “There’s no reason why it should, is there?” said Dennis.

  “I suppose not. You just took us by surprise, that’s all. How old was she when you adopted her?”

  “Just a baby,” said Francine. “They had to keep her in a while longer than usual because she was born early. But she was a beautiful, tiny, perfect baby.” She collapsed into sobs, and her husband embraced her.

  Annie sat thinking and Gerry scribbled away in her notebook.

  15

  BANKS FELT A LOT BETTER THE FOLLOWING MORNING AFTER his first night at home. He was even hungry enough to scorch some toast to eat with his coffee. The headache was almost gone, as was most of the nausea. The dizziness still came and went, but the main thing was that he had got his memory back, or most of it, and had even managed to shuffle it into what seemed like the right chronology. The problem was what to do with it.

  The missing fragments had fallen into place. He remembered Keane telling him that Zelda was being kept in the same building, and that she was with Petar Tadić, who was settling a score of some kind. Then Keane went on to tell him about Tadić torturing and killing Faye Butler, and his killing Hawkins, who was double-crossing the Tadićs. And he saved the best for last: Zelda had killed Goran Tadić, just as she had written in her notebook. So it wasn’t fantasy. Now Banks really could be charged with aiding and abetting the murder, should it all come out.

  Banks thought again of the severed arm Burgess had mentioned. What had Petar Tadić done with his brother’s body? Could it be his? It wasn’t every day they found severed arms in recycling plants, even in London, nor was it unknown for gang members to chop up dead colleagues and scatter the parts over a large area. No time for ritual or honour when you’ve got a body to get rid of. So it could be Goran’s arm. On the other hand, there were other Croatian criminal gang members in the country, so it wouldn’t do to jump to conclusions without more evidence.

  Banks also now remembered Zelda yelling for him to run as the fire flared up. He had done so instinctively, without looking back, but when he got outside and turned to see her, she wasn’t there. He had gone back to the doorway, he remembered, to see if she was still inside and whether he could get to her. The place was an inferno by then, and there was nothing he could do without sacrificing his own life, and his instinct for self-preservation had kicked in. He got the hell out of there. He had staggered away, half choked, then fallen in the weed-filled reservoir, hit his head on the bottom and passed out.

  Now he was convinced that he should have waited for Zelda, even though the flames were quickly spreading, or at least made sure she went before him, instead of just running off without thinking. If she had been trapped by a falling beam or something and burned to death, he would never be able to forgive himself. He vaguely remembered brief snatches of consciousness, the firefighters picking him up, paramedics loading him on to a gurney, someone shining a light in his eyes, someone gently shaking him in the night, but most of it was blank until he woke up in the hospital bed.

  But now that he had his memory back, he was stuck with a serious dilemma. He still didn’t know where Zelda was, or even if she was still alive. Newry had simply said there were two bodies in the burned-out treatment plant. Keane was certainly one of them, but the other could be Zelda’s or Petar Tadić’s. It was also possible that there was a third body the search team hadn’t yet found, and that all three were burned to a crisp in there. Burned human remains sometimes went undetected, or were damaged by firefighting and recovery operations. Fire scene investigators often couldn’t tell the human remains from other fire- and water-damaged debris.

  If Zelda had survived, though, she had probably run off through a different exit and gone somewhere she thought was safe. But things had changed. Now he knew she was a murderer—at least an alleged murderer, according to Keane—and he was a cop. He was supposed to catch murderers and see that they went to trial and, if found guilty, received their due punishment. But this was Zelda. Nelia Melnic.

  He had read parts of her notebook, but he had brushed them off as fantasy at the time. What if it was true, as Keane had said? What if Zelda had killed Goran Tadić? What was he going to do about it? He had seen her kill Keane with his own eyes. A good argument for self-defence could be made for that killing. But Goran Tadić? Perhaps the same was true, but he knew nothing about the circumstances of what happened. Maybe Keane was lying; it wouldn’t be the first time. But he had thought Banks was about to die, so why bother lying to him? To send him to his grave thinking a woman he cared for was a killer? Was Keane that cruel? Perhaps. The sensible, logical, moral thing to do was report what he knew to AC Gervaise, or Superintendent Newry, and leave it to others to track down Zelda, and to the jury and judge to decide on her fate.

  But he couldn’t do that.

  So what the hell was he to do?

  ANNIE AND Gerry had skipped the cream tea and started out from Wool shortly after they had talked to the Sedgwicks, but not before Gerry had phoned the General Register Office and managed to persuade someone there to track down the birth details of Marjorie Sedgwick. They told her not to expect an answer until the following day as they were short-staffed. Now it was the following morning, and they were both tired. It had been a long journey back and a late night.

  “We didn’t dig deeply enough into Marnie’s background,” Gerry said as she sat on the edge of Annie’s desk in the squad room, coffee in hand. “My mistake. I’m sorry. I should have found out what happened to her before we went to Dorset.”

  Annie swivelled in her chair. “Not to worry too much,” she said. “We hadn’t known her full name for very long. It’s still early days, and we’ve got more to work with now. It probably won’t make any difference in the long run. We’re not racing against time.”

  “I suppose the question we should ask ourselves is whether we still have a case to investigate now that the victim is dead.”

  “Good point,” said Annie. “We’ll certainly have to scale down. The budget’s bound to be cut. But let’s carry on until we hear something from the AC. We can at least argue that we think the rape and Marnie’s suicide could be somehow connected with Blaydon’s murder.”

  “Fair enough,” Gerry said. “And if Charlotte Westlake was more involved than she’s letting on, we may be on to something.” She glanced at her watch. “We should find out what the registry has to tell us soon enough.”

  “Let’s not forget,” Annie added, “there’s still a rapist walking free out there.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Gerry. “I’ve been thinking. You know, maybe you were just being provocative the other day, suggesting that Charlotte Westlake might have killed Blaydon, but let me play devil’s advocate here and suggest that Blaydon was the rapist, and Charlotte was keeping quiet either out of fear or some sort of misplaced loyalty. Why have we never seriously considered Blaydon for the rape before?”

  “We did discuss it with Alan the other day,” Annie said. “But we dismissed the idea. And it hasn’t been very long since we found the cards.”

  “Yes, but why? We never followed up. We never took it seriously. Maybe we dismissed it too soon?”

  “It was hard to follow up. Blaydon was already dead. And we had no clear image of the rapist from the SD card images.”

  “Fair enough,” Gerry argued.
“It’s blurry and vague. But the image in the recording is as likely to be him as just about anyone else. Same size, shape, and gender, at any rate. OK, maybe you can tell it’s not a giant or a hugely overweight person, but other than that . . . You couldn’t recognise your own father from it. Think about it.”

  “We just never thought of Blaydon as a rapist, did we?” said Annie. “A crook, yes, a gangster or wannabe gangster, yes, maybe even a killer, but a rapist? Maybe you’re right and that was short-sighted of us.”

  “We had nothing concrete to link him with Marnie until you told me Timmy Kerrigan saw him talking to her at the party.”

  “True,” said Annie, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “I think it does,” Gerry said. “It’s the first time we’ve had any sort of evidence or witness statement linking Blaydon and Marnie together. Sure, she worked at his parties, at least a couple of them, at any rate, and he probably knew of her existence through Charlotte. But until you talked to Timmy Kerrigan, nobody reported having actually seen Blaydon and Marnie meeting and talking. Remember how Charlotte told us she was getting worried about how decadent the parties were becoming, how they were crossing boundaries of taste and morality? Perhaps we were seeing Blaydon in free fall, and that was where he landed. Rape. Take the boundaries away and you’re left with moral anarchy. What he wanted, he took. And maybe he wanted Marnie.”

  “You’re suggesting that he drugged Marnie’s drink and took her to the bedroom?” said Annie.

  “Why not? It would have been easy for him. He was the boss. It was his house. He knew the layout. He had access to any room he wanted. All he had to do was get her alone for a while and give her a drugged drink. Apparently, he didn’t know about the minicam with the motion detector that Roberts had set up. Think about it. End of the evening. Marnie’s been working. She’s tired. Her parents said she was always too trusting. Blaydon was an old friend of Charlotte Westlake’s. Maybe Charlotte’s been protecting him?”

  “But she has no reason to do that. He was dead before we ever talked to her. She’d nothing to fear from him. I mean, why protect a dead man?”

  Gerry shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s a perfect theory.”

  “OK,” said Annie. “Let’s say we run with that for a while and see where it leads us. What happens next? Who killed Blaydon?”

  “Well, it wasn’t Marnie. She jumped off Durdle Door on 17 May and Blaydon and Roberts were killed on 22 May. The Albanians still look good for it, I’d say. The ballistics, the gutting. It’s their style. But who’s to say Blaydon wasn’t also the rapist and that his murder had nothing to do with the rape? We shouldn’t necessarily let one crime distract us from another.”

  “So maybe we could go back to my original screwball suggestion,” said Annie. “That Charlotte Westlake murdered Blaydon. Let’s face it, she doesn’t have much of an alibi for 22 May. Organising some book award in Bradford? Really?”

  “What was her motive?”

  “Anger at what he did to Marnie? Female solidarity? After all, Marnie was her employee, not one of Tadić’s hookers.”

  “Still, that’s pushing it a bit as a motive, isn’t it?”

  Annie laughed. “Like yours, it’s hardly a perfect theory. Maybe Roberts was the intended victim and Blaydon was collateral damage? Roberts could have been blackmailing Charlotte about something, and she uncovered his whole scheme, threatened to tell Blaydon. Maybe Roberts had a recording of her we didn’t find? Maybe because she took it when she killed them?”

  “Too many maybes,” said Gerry. “We’re going around in circles here. It’s making me dizzy.”

  “It doesn’t mean we should stop searching, though, does it? Even though Marnie and Blaydon are dead. And I think we should definitely have a much closer look at Charlotte Westlake. We’ve interviewed her twice, and I don’t believe she’s been completely honest with us on either occasion.”

  “I’ll get on it.” Gerry’s phone rang, and she grabbed the handset. She listened for a while and made some notes, then thanked the caller and put down the handset.

  “Come on, then, give,” said Annie. “You’re like the cat that got the cream. What is it?”

  “Marnie’s father is listed as unknown,” Gerry said, “but the mother’s name is Christine Pollard.”

  “No way!” said Annie.

  Gerry smiled. “Way.” They high-fived.

  “Have you got an address?”

  “The parents in Halifax. That was nineteen years ago, mind you. I’ll talk to them if they’re still there, then maybe we can haul Mrs. Westlake in again. Arrest her this time. Suspicion of murder. The full works: caution, lawyer and all, if that’s what she wants.”

  Annie rubbed her hands together. “Oh, goody,” she said. “I’ll oil the rack and sharpen the thumbscrews.”

  THERE WERE still a few firefighters and CSIs at the old water treatment plant when Banks pulled up at the cordon they had erected around the main building, where all the damage had been concentrated. The control room took up the entire lower floor, and upstairs there had been a number of offices and a staff common room, where the second body had been found. Since then, searchers had looked again for any traces of a third victim, but found none. That was good news.

  Banks showed his warrant card to the officer with the clipboard who guarded the scene and walked towards the entrance.

  “Better take care,” said one of the fire investigation officers. “It can still be a bit dodgy in there.”

  Banks thanked him, put on the hard hat the officer handed him and went inside. The smell of wet ash and burned rubber was almost overwhelming inside the building. Its acrid, gritty texture caught in his throat. He also thought he could discern an undertone of petrol, which took him right back to the night it happened and set off a surge of panic that fortunately passed quickly. A man turned from collecting samples, pulled his face mask aside and said hello. Banks recognised the lugubrious fire investigation officer Geoff Hamilton. They had worked together on a narrowboat fire set by Phil Keane some years ago.

  “Anything new?” Banks asked.

  “Nothing startling,” said Hamilton. “Your CSIs found evidence of a car parked at the side entrance, in the old staff park. The ground’s concrete, cracked and weedy, and the tracks are too faint to tell us much, but there were some oil stains and skid marks. It was definitely there. And recently.”

  “Anything else?”

  “This is where you were tied up,” Hamilton said, pointing to an area not far from the main door. It was still possible to see what had once been ropes, now twisted and charred, on the ground, and chalk marks had been made around the area where Keane’s body had fallen. “You were lucky,” he went on. “You can see where all the petrol was. Someone obviously cared whether you lived or died.”

  “Yes,” said Banks, remembering Zelda’s face close to his, her breath pungent with days of bad food, fear, and a trace of vomit, the speed with which she worked at his bonds with the knife before the flames whooshed up around them. Then the shouted instruction: “RUN!” He should have looked back.

  “Is this our old friend again?” Hamilton asked.

  “Doesn’t it have his signature?”

  “There are similarities. It’s multi-seated, different spots connected by streamers. Not entirely as random as it might have seemed. I’ll have to get more analyses done, gas chromatology and so on, and compare them with the records.”

  “No need to bother, Geoff,” said Banks. “It was Keane. I was there.”

  “So I heard,” said Hamilton. “Don’t let it become a habit.”

  “I promise. By the way, you might check with the Met fire investigation service on a fire at a house in the Highgate area a couple of months ago. It presented as a typical chip-pan fire, but . . .”

  “Not his style, if this is anything to go by.”

  “He may be versatile. I’d say it’s worth a closer look, but as he was likely one of the corpses they hauled out of here
, maybe there’s not much point in pinning a crime on a ghost. But there are a couple of coppers I can think of down there who wouldn’t mind knowing. Just one for the record books, maybe, if you’ve got a spare moment.”

  Hamilton grunted. “Chance would be a fine thing.” Then he put his face mask on again and knelt by a pile of charred rubbish.

  Banks went upstairs to the other marked crime scene. There was tape across the doorway and most of the floor had collapsed, so he stood for a few moments and stared at the chain, darkened by fire, attached to the solid metal radiator, half disappeared through the burned floor. Was this where Zelda had been kept? Though the fire had only spread up there later, it had done as much damage as it had everywhere else. The walls were charred and the ceiling partially collapsed. The firefighters had been a while turning up, mostly because there had been no working alarm and no one present had been in a position to call them. So how had they been informed? Banks wondered. Who had called them? The building wasn’t very far from the A1, though it was hidden from the motorway by a stretch of woodland. The flames would possibly have been visible to a passing motorist once they had reached their apex.

  He went back downstairs and found the side door that led to the small staff car park. He could see the CSIs had marked off an area with an oil stain and tyre tracks where someone had accelerated too quickly. Zelda? It made sense. She had cut Banks free then dashed off to save herself. She would have been in a hurry to get away before anybody found her. Maybe hurt and in pain, too. But where was she?

  The road out wasn’t much more than an unfenced laneway, but after curving a mile or more around the woods and running parallel to the A1 for a while, it came to a roundabout that fed into the main artery. From there, she could have gone anywhere. CCTV and ANPR would be no use because they had no idea what make of car she was driving or what the number was, and the A1 was always busy. It could be the dark Ford Fiesta that Kit Riley had told them about in the Black Bull, but there were thousands of dark Fiestas on the roads. They might be able to find out, given time, but it would probably be too late by then. She would have dumped the car as soon as she could and found some other mode of transport.