Not Dark Yet

by Peter Robinson

  But a man can only do so much reading and gardening, and on the second day of his sick leave, Banks made a few phone calls, and on the third, he took an early train from York.

  “THIS IS the second time you’ve had me brought up here,” Charlotte Westlake complained as Gerry tended to the recording equipment in the interview room and Annie settled down in her chair late that afternoon. “I hope you’ve got a damn good reason.”

  “Be careful, or you might get what you hope for,” said Annie.

  “Wait,” said Charlotte. “As the officer who arrested me and brought me here suggested, I requested my solicitor to meet me, so I would be grateful if you would please wait until she arrives. She won’t be long.”

  Annie and Gerry exchanged glances, then they left a young constable on guard and went down to the canteen for a cup of tea while they waited. Coffee at Costa would have been preferable to weak canteen tea, but they didn’t want to leave the station. They had already planned the strategy of the interview, such as it was, the previous evening in the Queen’s Arms. Gerry had uncovered more than enough information from her talk with Charlotte’s mother and the box of letters and postcards Lynne Pollard had been only too happy to share. The rest had come from the General Register and the various databases available to her online. If she was right about some of the conclusions she had reached, based on scraps of information picked up here and there, Gerry was sure that Charlotte would paint herself into a corner from which the only way out was the truth.

  As yet, Annie and Gerry didn’t know what that truth was, and the possibilities kept shifting with the information coming in. When all they had was a number of inspired guesses, planning a strategy became that much more difficult. They would have to improvise from time to time. The basis for Charlotte Westlake’s arrest—suspicion of murder—was probably a bit far-fetched, Gerry would be the first to admit, but it was a means of bringing her in and throwing her off guard. It would also allow them to keep her in custody for twenty-four hours if necessary.

  Charlotte’s solicitor, Jessica Bowen, turned up twenty minutes later and after a ten-minute huddle with her client, they all settled down in the airless room. Gerry got the recording equipment working and made the introductions.

  “Are we all sitting comfortably?” asked Annie. When the reply was silence, she said, “Then I’ll begin.”

  Jessica Bowen gave her a stern glance for the frivolous Children’s Hour opening.

  “Mrs. Westlake,” said Annie, “was Marnie Sedgwick your daughter?”

  Clearly, whatever Charlotte Westlake had been expecting, it wasn’t this. She seemed like an animal desperate to escape its cage, squirming in her chair, turning pale, looking towards her solicitor one moment then back to her questioner the next. “Wha . . . ? How do . . . ?” Gerry wondered how on earth she thought that they wouldn’t discover this information. More burying her head in the sand? Naive or stupid?

  “Simple enough question,” said Annie, ignoring the reaction. “Can you please give me an answer?”

  Charlotte took a deep breath and struggled to regain her equilibrium. Her lawyer gave her the nod to continue. “Technically, I suppose, yes, she is,” she said.

  “Technically?”

  “I’m her birth mother, but as you clearly know already, I gave her up for adoption. Her true parents are the ones who brought her up.”

  “The Sedgwicks?”

  “I wasn’t aware of who adopted her. It’s not standard practice to give the birth mother such information.”

  “Did you have any hand whatsoever in her upbringing?”

  “None.”

  “How old was she when she was adopted?”

  “A baby. I never . . . I mean, straight away. As soon as possible. I never even held her.”

  “Who was the father?”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Not to us it isn’t,” said Annie. Then she turned over a page. “Very well, we’ll leave that for the moment.” She paused and went on in a weary tone. “Why didn’t you save us a lot of trouble and tell us this information right from the start?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t seem relevant somehow. It was a long time ago. Nineteen years.”

  “Didn’t seem relevant?” Annie repeated. “That’s one of the lamest excuses for lying to us that I’ve ever come across. Don’t you agree, DC Masterson?”

  “It’s pretty lame,” said Gerry.

  “She came back into your life,” Annie said, “and not long afterwards, she was raped. And you didn’t think any of this was relevant?”

  “But there’s no connection. It’s just coincidence. I still don’t think any of this is relevant.”

  “Try again,” Annie said. “Irrelevant, coincidence—these aren’t excuses we recognise. And this time, give us the real reason why you didn’t tell us.”

  “I’ve already told you. Besides, I didn’t want to get involved. I knew you’d make too much of it.”

  “Better. A little bit,” said Annie. “But you are involved, like it or not. And this lie, or omission, makes you even more so. See, when people lie to us about one thing, we assume they might be lying about other things, too.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” said Charlotte, clasping her hands on the table. “You’re just being nasty. You must know that I couldn’t have raped poor Marnie.”

  “Nobody’s suggesting you did.”

  “Then why persecute me? Why don’t you leave me alone? Any mistakes I’ve made I’ve had to live with. You’ve no right to sit in judgement on me.”

  “There’s no easy way of putting this,” said Annie, “but things have taken another turn. I assume you know about Marnie’s death?”

  “Her . . . what?”

  “Her death,” Annie repeated. “I’m sorry. I thought you might have known.”

  “How could I have known? Who was there to tell me?”

  This had been a difficult part of their approach to plan. Either Charlotte knew what had happened to Marnie, or she didn’t, and there was no easy way of finding out. In the end, they decided it was best to confront her with the truth. Gerry watched closely and believed that Charlotte’s reaction was genuine, that she hadn’t known.

  “It’s very important you tell us the truth about this,” Annie said. “Did you know that Marnie was dead?”

  “No.” Charlotte shook her head. “I’m not even sure I believe you. You’re trying to trick me. Tell me that’s what you’re doing.”

  Gerry saw the misery etched in her features and knew she was telling the truth.

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of such bad news,” Annie said.

  “What happened? How . . . I mean . . . ?”

  Annie went on. “She took her own life just under a month ago, on 17 May. A few days before Connor Clive Blaydon was murdered.”

  “A month,” Charlotte repeated. “All that time. And I never knew. Where? Why? How?”

  “Near home. In Dorset. As for why, who knows? I assume it was because she couldn’t come to terms with what happened to her and she felt shamed, damaged, broken. Or that she found out she was pregnant.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Charlotte. “Things come full circle.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Charlotte started to cry and reached for a tissue from the box on the table and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe she’s dead.”

  “Take a minute,” Annie said. “Can I get you anything?”

  Charlotte held her hand up and gulped down some water. “I’ll be all right in a minute. Let’s just get this over with.”

  “It might take a while,” said Annie. “We can take a short break if you need to. But if you’re OK to carry on, we will.” She glanced at Jessica Bowen, who nodded.

  “I’m OK,” said Charlotte. “I want this all over with and I never want to see you again.”

  “That all depends very much on your telling us the truth. You lied to us about your connection with Marnie Sedgwick, and that
’s why you’re here. How did she find you in the first place?”

  “The usual way. She applied for her birth certificate when she turned eighteen then tracked me down through one of those online hereditary sites.”

  “When was this?”

  “January. Just after Christmas.”

  “Why did she wait so long?”

  “She told me later that she wasn’t sure she could go through with it. She’d been very happy with the Sedgwicks, and she didn’t want them to feel they’d been inadequate or somehow let her down. It’s not unusual for children seeking their birth parents to feel apprehensive, to hesitate.”

  “And she came to see you this January?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the office?”

  “No. She got my home address first.”

  “How did the meeting go?”

  Charlotte shifted in her chair. “Awkward, as I’m sure you can imagine. But I think she understood finally, how the adoption was best for her, not only me. How I couldn’t possibly have been a fit mother. I think she understood.”

  “Was she angry?”

  “No. She said she had been, at first, but it passed. She was just curious. She didn’t want me to take her in or even develop any kind of maternal relationship. As far as Marnie was concerned, the Sedgwicks were her parents. She just wanted to see me in the flesh, so to speak, and for me to know that she existed.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Later, she came to me at the office. She wanted work. There was no special pleading or anything, she wasn’t after any favours. She wasn’t even asking for special treatment. She knew what I did and thought she could fit in somewhere. Simple as that. She already had a waitressing job at Pizza Express in York, but she wasn’t getting paid very much, and she said she wanted to save to go back to university.”

  “But she’d already dropped out of Nottingham.”

  “Because she didn’t have enough money, and she thought she was wasting her time studying History. She wanted to take on a practical subject like Management Studies or Hospitality.”

  “And you encouraged her?”

  “I told her I’d done fairly practical subjects at uni, that it was a good idea if she hoped to get a good job. That you can always read history and literature in your spare time, but it’s not going to earn you a living unless you teach. I gave her work. It wasn’t much, but she was well enough paid for what she did.”

  “What about your relationship? Did it thrive?”

  “I wouldn’t say it thrived, no. There was always a distance. You’d expect that after so many years. As I told you, the Sedgwicks were her parents, no doubt about that. She made it clear and I accepted it. But it didn’t degenerate, either. We got on well enough.”

  “Why did you give her up for adoption in the first place?”

  “The usual reasons. I was too young, too selfish, too irresponsible.”

  “What about abortion?”

  “I’m from a Catholic family. All right, so my parents were lapsed Catholics, and I’ve never been religious, but I just felt that abortion wasn’t an option at the time.”

  “Fair enough,” said Annie.

  “I was living a pretty wild life. Free and easy. All the travel, sun and sand and everything. I didn’t want to be lumbered with a child to bring up.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “When I found out I was pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “I went to stay with a friend in Herefordshire, near Hay, where they have the book festival. That was for my . . . what did they used to call it . . . lying in? That’s what I did. I lay in and waited. The baby was born at the nearest hospital, a small one, and I gave her up for adoption. End of story.”

  Annie consulted the notes Gerry had made. “And after that you put your life back together, got on track, started a career in events planning? Met your husband?”

  “Having a child shook me up. I grew up pretty quickly, I’d say, even though I didn’t have the responsibility of child-rearing. So, yes, I threw myself into a new career. I happen to be a quick learner. The degree helped, too. Or at least, Oxford did. Connections. I also have some facility with languages. French, Spanish, a little Greek.”

  “So what was your reaction when Marnie came to you and told you she’d been raped?”

  “She never . . . I mean, I . . .”

  “Come on, Charlotte. Don’t start lying again. We were doing so well. Who else could she go to? Not her own parents. She wanted to protect them. You were probably more like a big sister to her than anyone else.”

  Charlotte turned to Jessica Bowen, who leaned forward and whispered in her ear. Charlotte nodded a couple of times and turned back to Annie. “All right,” she said. “Marnie did come to my house when I got back from Costa Rica, and she told me what had happened. She was in a terrible state, emotionally. I . . . I did my best to comfort her. She wouldn’t go to the police. I tried to persuade her, honestly, but she didn’t want to go through the humiliation, the victim-blaming. She said she thought she could put it behind her. I wasn’t too sure about that, but I realised my job, my only job, was to give her comfort and support right there and then. Which I did.”

  “And now we come to the big question, Charlotte,” said Annie. “Who did it? Who raped Marnie Sedgwick?”

  BY FIVE o’clock that afternoon, Banks was sitting in the shade outside La Porte Montmartre, on the corner of the Boulevard Poissonnière and the Boulevard Montmartre, in Paris, with a large glass of excellent red Bordeaux in front of him, watching the world go by. It wouldn’t have been true to say that he hadn’t a care in the world—he had many—but at moments such as these, the cares receded, and it felt good to be alive.

  His last-minute hotel, which went under the uninspiring name of Hôtel 34B, turned out to be a gem. For less than one hundred euros he got a comfortable room, decorated all in white, clean and spacious enough. It didn’t have a balcony, but the windows overlooked the street below. The buildings on both sides of Rue Bergère were five storeys high, so it was like looking into a narrow canyon. Cars and motor scooters were parked by the pavements and even though it was only a little side street there was a constant flow of people. He could see three restaurants from his fourth-floor window: Les Diables au Thym, Dr. Auguste, and Bio c’Bon, an “organic’ salad bar, on the corner with Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, where there were many more restaurants and cafes, along with a hypermarché. The hotel was no frills and had no restaurant or bar, but Banks didn’t need such luxuries when there were so many places to eat and drink in the neighbourhood. Like the cafe he was in now.

  He was waiting for Jean-Claude Meursault, an old friend from the police judiciaire. They had first met at an Interpol conference in Lyon fifteen years previously and had stayed in touch ever since. Jean-Claude had retired the previous year, and Banks had attended his farewell party. If anyone knew anything about Zelda’s time in Paris, and whether she was there at the moment, it was Jean-Claude.

  A commissaire at 36 Quai des Orfèvres for many years, Jean-Claude reminded Banks of his hero Maigret, physically as well as in mind and attitude. The Rupert Davies Maigret, of course. As far as Banks was concerned, Gambon was good, Atkinson was execrable, Bruno Cremer was the French choice, but Rupert Davies was Maigret. He was large and burly, and though he didn’t smoke a pipe, one would not have seemed out of place in his hand or mouth. He also had that calm, slow manner of the deep thinker about him, though as Banks had once seen when they encountered some trouble in a bar, he could be remarkably quick on his feet.

  Banks glanced around at his fellow drinkers: a group of tourists, a couple of old men sitting in silence together, a businessman trying to impress his secretary, an elegant woman sipping white wine and glancing nervously at her watch, perhaps waiting for her lover, two garrulous young Frenchmen sharing jokes. Gauloises smoke drifted over from the next table, reminding Banks of his school exchange with a boy from Lille when he was about fourteen. It was quite a disc
overy at that age to find out you could order a beer in a bar, then sit and drink it while enjoying a Disque Bleu and no one would think twice about it.

  He watched the people passing by. Nobody seemed in much of a hurry. Suddenly, he saw the young Francoise Hardy, tall, willowy, with shiny long chestnut hair, stylishly dressed, carrying four long-stemmed red roses. She noticed him looking at her and flashed him a quizzical smile that for some reason made him feel like a dirty old man. But he wasn’t dirty and he didn’t feel old. He knew quite well that she wasn’t really Francoise Hardy, but Francoise Hardy as she would have been over fifty years ago, when he was an awestruck schoolboy on his first trip abroad in the heady days of Salut les copains, Sylvie Vartan, Johnny Hallyday, France Gall, and Richard Anthony. And he didn’t feel any different now from that young man who had listened to her sing “Tous les garçons et les filles’ as he gazed at her photo on the album cover all those years ago.

  He remembered a field outside Lille, surrounded by trees, a stolen kiss with Brigitte while the others immersed themselves in a game of boules. The scent of warm grass, the tang of wine, the softness of her lips yielding shyly. That was it. That was all. That was enough.

  “Alain.” The familiar voice brought him back from the past in a rush. It was Jean-Claude. He had always used the French for his name, called him “Alain.”

  Banks stood up and they embraced warmly then sat down. The waiter drifted by and Banks ordered another Bordeaux for himself and whatever Jean-Claude wanted, which was a glass of Chablis.

  “I was miles away,” Banks said. “You know, I just saw a girl who was the spitting image of the young Francoise Hardy.”

  Jean-Claude smiled indulgently. “Always the romantic.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?”

  “For a policeman, I think it is.”

  The drinks arrived and Jean-Claude took a sip. “Excellent,” he said. “You know, she was born not far from here. In the ninth, at any rate.”

  “Francoise Hardy?”

  “Oui.”