Not Dark Yet

11

According to Charlotte Westlake’s records, Marnie Sedgwick had lived in York on a cul-de-sac terrace of tall, narrow Victorian brick semis. It wasn’t far from the city centre, and most of the houses were divided into flats and bedsits. Though it was some distance from the university, it looked like student housing, and Annie wondered if Marnie had been a student, working part-time for Charlotte.

They walked up the steps and Annie rang the bell with the empty nameplate beside it. They had phoned ahead and the landlord said he would meet them there. They heard someone coming down the stairs and Duncan McCrae, the landlord, opened the door for them.

‘Right on time,’ he said, rubbing his hands together.

‘We don’t like to disappoint,’ said Annie, stepping forward. ‘Shall we go up?’

‘There’s nothing to see, like I told you on the phone,’ said McCrae, ‘but be my guest.’ He led the way to the first floor, at the back, where Marnie’s tiny bedsit overlooked an alley full of wheelie bins and the backyards of the houses opposite. Beyond them lay train tracks. McCrae hovered in the doorway as if he was worried they’d steal the silverware. Only there wasn’t any silverware. There wasn’t anything except an empty three-shelf homemade bookcase built of bricks and boards.

‘Exactly when did she leave?’ Annie asked.

‘End of April.’

That worked out at a couple of weeks after the rape, Annie reckoned. ‘Did she take all her stuff with her?’

‘There wasn’t much to take. That’s the thing. She just left one day and left the mess to me. As far as I could tell, she probably didn’t take more than a suitcase with her. Clothes and some personal stuff. She left the rest. A few books. Some cutlery, dishware, pots and pans. Household things. That’s about all. Here one day, gone the next. But her rent was up to date.’

Annie managed to hold her tongue before saying how happy she was to hear that. ‘What about a forwarding address?’

McCrae just shook his head.

‘Previous address?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t ask for her details?’

McCrae shifted from foot to foot. ‘Well... er... no.’

‘What happened to her things?’

‘Bin bag in the cellar. I thought I’d keep it a little while, you know, in case she called back for it.’

‘We’ll look at it when we’re done here,’ Annie said as she started wandering about the small room. She peeled back a moth-eaten curtain and saw the hot plate with two shelves above it, both bare. There was nothing else in the room.

‘Where did she sleep?’ Gerry asked.

‘Mattress on the floor, under the window there, and a ratty old sleeping bag,’ said McCrae. ‘I threw them both out.’

Annie sniffed the air. It was stale and foisty, as one would expect in a room shut up so long in warm weather. She tried to open the window but couldn’t budge it.

‘Bloody painters,’ said McCrae. ‘Only painted it shut, didn’t they?’

‘What was Marnie like?’ Gerry asked.

‘Like? Well, just ordinary really. Quiet. She never said much. Seemed a serious sort of girl. Used to have posters on the walls — save the planet, that sort of thing. Always polite, though. A smile and a hello. Well brought up. You could tell. I never had much to do with her, really, so there’s not a lot I can tell you beyond that.’

‘What happened to the posters?’ Annie could see the bare patches where they used to be.

‘I took them down, dumped them.’

‘Did you notice any changes in her behaviour or demeanour?’

‘Eh? Come again.’

‘Anything different about her around the time she left?’

‘I didn’t talk to her much the last few weeks she was here. I don’t live here, of course, so I wouldn’t know. But I don’t think she went out much. I mean, if I was around fixing something, I didn’t see her coming or going. Like I said, she left at the end of the month.’

‘Did you see her at all?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘How did she seem on those occasions, the last two or three weeks?’

McCrae seemed stumped by the question. ‘Tired, mostly,’ he said. ‘Her eyes, you know. Puffy. With bags under. As if she hadn’t been getting enough sleep.’

‘Or crying?’ said Annie.

‘Aye, maybe that, too.’

That made sense, Annie thought, given what Marnie had been through. Why had she not sought help? What had been going on in her mind? ‘Was she a student?’ she asked.

‘Miss Sedgwick? No, I don’t think so. You’d have to ask the others, though.’

‘How did she get around?’

‘She had a car. A Fiat, I think.’

‘So Marnie was wealthy?’

‘No, I’d hardly say that. You wouldn’t, either, if you saw the car. But she had a paying job. Two, actually.’

‘What jobs?’

‘A cafe in town. Waitress. One of those chains. Ask. Zizzi. Pizza Express. Something like that.’

‘You can’t remember which one?’

‘I think it was Pizza Express, but I can’t be certain. She gave me a slice once. Pizza, that is. She brought some home from work with her and I happened to be in the hall. I think the box was Pizza Express but I wouldn’t swear to it.’

‘And the other?’

‘Catering of some sort, or helping caterers. That one was occasional. Just when she was needed, like.’

‘Did she have any close friends among the other tenants?’

‘I did see her chatting with that Chinese lass from 3b once or twice. They seemed quite close.’

‘OK. I think we’ve seen enough here,’ said Annie. ‘Can we go and see the stuff she left behind her now?’

‘Follow me,’ said McCrae. He led them down to the ground floor, where he fumbled for a key in his pockets and opened a door to the cellar. It was more of a basement, really, Annie thought, having imagined a grim and sooty old coal cellar, and she was surprised McCrae hadn’t done it up a bit, given it a lick of paint and rented it out as a basement apartment. Instead, it was full of junk.

McCrae took them over to a black bin bag in a corner. ‘This is it,’ he said.

Gerry went back to the car to get the proper bags to store the stuff as evidence. There wasn’t much, as McCrae had said. Books, mostly philosophy and psychology as far as Annie could tell; two plates, cups, glasses, knives and forks; and a pan and kettle she would have heated on the hot plate. That was it. No personal items — notebooks, diaries, lists of addresses, letters, nothing like that.

‘What about post since she left?’

McCrae walked over to a battered chest of drawers, opened the top one and took out a bundle of envelopes fastened with a rubber band. ‘I keep the mail of any tenants who leave for a while, if they don’t arrange a forwarding address, just in case there’s something important. You’d be surprised. Over the years I’ve had cheques, passports, you name it. These are just junk mail.’

Gerry took the bundle. They might hold some clue as to where Marnie had gone. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘We’ll take these, too.’

After they had carried out Marnie’s stuff and stored it in the boot of the car, they tried the door to 3b, occupied by a student called Mitsuko Ogawa, who was definitely not Chinese, as even Annie’s rudimentary grasp of foreign languages told her. But there was no one home. She scribbled a little note, added her mobile number and said they’d be back later, then she grinned at Gerry. ‘If you ask me, it’s lunchtime. Fancy a pizza?’

Zelda still couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. At one time, she thought she could hear traffic beyond the boarded-up windows, or an airplane fly over, but even then she thought she might be imagining things. One thing she wasn’t imagining was that nobody was coming to rescue her. No Willie Garvin. No doubt the police were trying to find her, but they clearly had no more idea where she was being kept than she did. And there was no way she could see of getting a message out.

She spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways of killing herself before they could take her to that brothel in Dhaka. She tried to wrap the leg chain around her neck to strangle herself, but it wasn’t long enough, so she only managed to strain a muscle in her thigh. She tried holding her breath, and swallowing her tongue, but found she could do neither. She always gasped for breath on the verge of passing out and never got as far as putting her fingers in her mouth to push the rolled ball of tongue down her throat. She couldn’t face trying to bash her brains out against the radiator.

She was a coward, she had to admit. If she were to die, she wanted it to be as easy and painless as possible. Pills, preferably. There was no way she could stand Dhaka, so she had to do it somehow. Maybe there would be more opportunities along the way? Maybe she could even catch somebody’s attention and get free — at an airport, for example, or on a flight. It would be a long journey; they would have to escort her through at least one airport, if not more. She was certain that even Tadić didn’t have a private jet. Or did they plan on travelling overland, smugglers’ routes? No doubt that was why she was being kept here so long, so that they could work out the routes and phoney visas. She had already figured out that the photographs they had taken when she first arrived were for a fake passport, no doubt to be supplied by Keane, the man she thought had killed Hawkins and who had once tried to kill Alan Banks.

Alan. Raymond. She thought of them often; sometimes she thought she would burst with grief when she pictured Raymond alone and desolate at Windlee Farm. He would be a complete mess. That would be one way to die, she supposed. Grief. And what was Alan doing? He would do whatever he could to find her, of that she was sure. But it was hopeless.

Despite the fear and the will to suicide, Zelda was hungry again. As long as her body survived, it would demand sustenance, just as it needed movement and air. She could stand up, but she couldn’t move far in her leg iron. She marked time every now and then, just to keep her circulation going.

After that second visit, Tadić’s sneering sidekick had returned to deliver a chamber pot and throw a plastic bottle of water and a Big Mac at her. She had seen the way he looked at her, and knew that only fear of Tadić stopped him having his way. That and the vomit on her T-shirt, perhaps.

The Big Mac was cold, but she had gobbled it down. The water she tried to make last. The chamber pot was a blessing, as she imagined the only alternative — short of squatting on the floor — would be for one of them to accompany her to the toilet whenever she needed to go. A chance to wash and change would be nice, though. Surely, they would want to clean her up before they travelled? A bath, perhaps? Fresh clothes. But what was the point of any of it if she was going to die anyway, either before she got to Dhaka, with any luck, or soon after she arrived there, if the worst happened?

Sometimes she thought that she couldn’t take her own life because she still had dreams of escape, hope of being rescued. It was true, these things could happen, though they grew less likely hour by hour. If she didn’t eat, then perhaps she would get ill and die of malnutrition, rather than by her own weak hand. But she thought that would take much longer than they planned keeping her here.

Also, in some of her darkest moments, she had a strange feeling of elation out of nowhere. It was like a smell — not of the sea, but of the seaside — and a vague image of being a little girl walking with her hand in her father’s at Odessa flashed through her mind. A sense of safety and warmth. But it was also neither a smell nor an image; it was an inchoate memory of total happiness she had perhaps never experienced. How could you have a memory of something you had never felt? But that was what it felt like.

In the embrace of that perfect happiness, she had not a care, not a worry, not a thought, but the sheer pleasure of being. No fear of what was to come or regret for what was past. It was pure and simple happiness, the ghost of childhood’s essence.

But it was rare and fleeting. Most of the time she felt a deep and paralysing sense of fear and dread, edging into despair, that no amount of reason or epiphany could dispel.

Driving in York was an absolute nightmare, Gerry thought as she steered her way along narrow streets lined with parked cars, braked sharply for pedestrians, and missed a turning that forced her to make a long detour. But parking was even worse. Finally, in frustration, she pulled into the forecourt of York Explore Library and Archive and threw herself on the mercy of the woman in charge, who told her she could leave the car there until they were finished.

‘Next time we’ll take the bloody Poppleton Park & Ride,’ Annie said as they crossed the road and walked the short distance down to Pizza Express. The city was bursting at the seams with tourists and locals out enjoying the fine weather, and this area around the bridge was always crowded. It led ultimately up past St. Mary’s and the library to the Minster, which stood at the top dominating everything, a magnificent Gothic construction, its main tower obscured by scaffolding.

Pizza Express was in an old building with a high ceiling on Museum Street near the bridge and opposite the Museum Gardens. The large dining area reminded Annie of a banquet hall in some ancient stately home. They flashed their warrant cards, and Annie asked the girl who showed people to their tables if she might talk to the manager. The girl disappeared through a door to the back and came out moments later with a tanned young man in a suit and tie. He didn’t look old enough to be a manager, Annie thought, but what did she know about the hospitality industry? He introduced himself as Mark Baldini.

She showed him the photograph. ‘Do you remember a woman called Marnie Sedgwick? Does she still work here?’

‘Marnie. Yes, I remember her,’ he said. ‘She left around the beginning of May.’

‘Do you remember the circumstances of her leaving?’

‘It was so sad,’ Baldini said. ‘Marnie was a good worker. She’d been here about a year, but towards the middle of April she changed. She wasn’t concentrating, seemed to be dragging her feet. She wasn’t attentive, she mixed up orders, delivered things to the wrong tables.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I liked her. And as I said, she was a good worker, so I took her aside into the office and had a word with her.’

‘How did she react?’

‘She didn’t react much at all. She agreed she wasn’t doing a great job, said she wasn’t sleeping well, that she couldn’t concentrate. I asked her if she was ill or if there was anything wrong, anything I could help with, and she shrugged and said no. I asked if she thought she could attain her previous high standard of work again, and she said she’d try.’

‘Did she?’

‘Nothing changed. I hated to do it, but I knew in the end I’d have to give her notice. I was going to tell her she could come back when she was better, like, and I’d do my best to make sure she got her job back, but she couldn’t go on as she was.’

‘How did she respond?’

‘I never got to tell her. The next day she got an order wrong, and the customer was very snappy with her. He was one of those pushy, loud-mouthed blokes. You know the sort. Always right, always angry. He shouted at her, called her a stupid cunt, and Marnie dumped the pizza on his lap and ran out in tears. That was the last I saw of her. I made sure we paid her what we owed her, into her bank account, like, a standing order, and that was it. What was it? What was her problem? Do you know?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out, Mr. Baldini,’ said Annie. ‘Was she close to any of her colleagues here? Anyone who’s still here?’

‘Yes,’ said Baldini. ‘Mitsuko. In fact, it was Marnie brought her to us, got her the job. I think they shared a flat or lived in the same house or something.’

‘Mitsuko Ogawa?’ said Annie.

‘Yes. Lovely girl. Terrific waitress.’

‘Is she here now?’

Baldini glanced around. ‘She should be.’ Finally, he pointed to a table in the far corner where a petite young woman was serving pizza and salad. ‘That’s Mitsuko.’

‘Can you do us a favour?’ Annie asked.

‘Depends what it is.’

‘We’re going to have some lunch here, so could you give Ms. Ogawa an early tea break or whatever and ask her to join us at our table? We won’t keep her for long.’

‘Of course. Take as long as you like. We’re not too busy right now.’

It was mid-afternoon, and the place still seemed fairly full to Annie, though she and Gerry had no difficulty getting a table for four. Busyness in a place like this was all relative, she supposed.

When their waitress came by, Annie ordered a margherita pizza and side salad, and Gerry picked a Diavola. Both ordered Diet Cokes to accompany their meals. They had barely got their order in before a young woman joined them at the table. She introduced herself as Mitsuko Ogawa and sat down. Annie guessed that Mitsuko was around Marnie’s age. She was small, with shoulder-length black hair drawn tight from her forehead and fastened at the back. Her eyes shone with concern as she sat down and smoothed her dress over her knees.

‘Mr. Baldini said you wanted to talk to me about Marnie,’ she said, with a slight Geordie accent. ‘Do you know where she is? What’s happened to her?’

‘I’m afraid we don’t know where she is,’ said Gerry. ‘That’s one problem we were hoping you might help us with. I understand the two of you were close?’

‘I thought so,’ Mitsuko said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something changed. I don’t know what it was, but she just wasn’t the same after. Did Mr. Baldini tell you what happened here?’

‘Yes. He said her work went downhill and she left in tears.’

‘That’s about right.’

‘Do you have any idea why? What was wrong with her? He said he thought she might be ill.’ They had a very good idea of what was wrong with Marnie, but they couldn’t tell Mitsuko; they were hoping she might be able to tell them more than they knew already.

‘She wasn’t eating properly,’ said Mitsuko. ‘Or sleeping very well. But I don’t think there was any illness as such. Just a sort of malaise, you know, weariness, depression. She lost interest in everything. But I don’t know why. We used to be friends. When she first moved into the house a year ago, we spent a lot of time together, you know, just talking, listening to music. We’d go out to the pub, the cinema, concerts. Marnie likes art-house movies — Bergman and Kurosawa, that sort of thing. And she likes goth rock. You know, old weird stuff like Joy Division, Nick Cave, Sisters of Mercy. All that dark stuff. My taste is a bit more mainstream and upbeat. Action thrillers and Marvel. And I prefer music you can dance to. But we liked each other.’

‘So you’d say you are close friends?’

‘Yes,’ said Mitsuko. ‘Yes, I would. I’ve been beside myself since she left. Has something happened to her? Please tell me if it has. I’ve been worried sick.’

‘Not that we know of,’ said Annie. ‘We’re just trying to find her. What’s she like?’

‘Marnie? I suppose she struck me as fairly complicated, really, serious, sensitive, deep-thinking, but she can also be pretty happy-go-lucky a lot of the time. She’s great fun. We had some laughs. She loves life, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t see the problems in the world. She’s especially serious about climate change. That Greta is a real hero of hers. Or should I say heroine? She’s generous, thoughtful, interested in people. I got the impression she was maybe a bit secretive. Like, you’d spend an evening with her and realise you’d told her your deepest darkest secrets but you hadn’t learned much about her in return. Enigmatic, I guess. But I suppose we all are, to some extent.’

‘Did she tell you about her life?’ Annie asked.

‘Not much,’ said Mitsuko. ‘Bits and pieces over the time we knew each other, I suppose. But that’s how it happens, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t usually sit down and tell your new friends your whole life story at once. You find out about people slowly, over time. Bits and pieces come out when something reminds you of a particular incident or sparks a memory. That’s what it was like. She comes from down south somewhere, but I don’t remember where, if she ever even told me. It was near the sea, I think. I know she missed the sea. But she could be annoyingly vague on details. She’d just moved up here when we first met a year or so back. Wanted a change of scene. I could relate to that.’

‘Did you make such a change?’

Mitsuko smiled. ‘Yep. All the way from Sunderland. My dad came over here to work for Nissan when they opened the plant in 1986. He and my mother liked England so much that they stayed. I was born here.’

‘Why did Marnie move to York? Was she a student here?’

‘No, she wasn’t at uni. And I don’t know why she moved — except for that change of scene I mentioned.’

‘I see. Are you sure you can’t remember where she came from? We’re really keen to find her, and anything to speed that up would help us a lot.’

‘I’m sorry. She talked about her father quite a lot, what a great guy he was, how kind and gentle. Hang on, though. She did say something once about it being Hardy country. Her dad liked Hardy. We did him at school. That’s Wessex, isn’t it?’

Annie had no idea. She shot Gerry a glance.

‘That’s right,’ Gerry said. ‘Well, Wessex isn’t a real place, but Hardy based it mostly on Dorset. Plenty of sea around there.’

Annie rolled her eyes at Mitsuko. ‘The benefits of a public-school education.’

‘We never did Hardy at school,’ Gerry protested. ‘Far too risqué. I read him off my own bat one summer holiday when I was at uni. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. You should try it.’

‘Life’s too short,’ said Annie. ‘I’ll stick with Martina Cole and Marian Keyes.’ She turned back to Mitsuko. ‘What did Marnie have to say about her childhood?’

‘She said she had been happy growing up. I got the impression it was a pretty ordinary childhood. You know. Caring parents, and all. Like mine, really. Did well at the local comp. She was all set for uni, and she said she’d done her first year at Nottingham, studying History, I think. But she soon realised she simply couldn’t afford to finish it, that she’d end up so much in debt she’d never get it paid off. I mean, History might be fun, but it’s hardly a passport to a high-paying job, is it? Not that I think that’s what uni should be about or anything. Her folks were great, she said, but they didn’t have a lot of money, and she wasn’t going to even ask them to help her out. So she dropped out.’

‘And came here to work at Pizza Express?’

‘Yes. That’s about it. I suppose you could say both of us are trying to figure out what to do with our lives, where to go next. I mean, this job isn’t meant to be permanent for either of us.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m at uni,’ Mitsuko said. ‘English Literature. Also pretty useless for the job market.’

‘Did Marnie ever tell you anything about the other job she had?’

‘You mean the posh parties?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I think she only worked a few, but she said she got paid as much for one of them as she did in a week working here, so that was a big incentive to do more. She didn’t care much about all the celebs and so on, but I think she kind of liked the job in a way. She said most of the time she was in the kitchen, or driving back and forth from base. It was like some sort of industrial kitchen on MasterChef, she told me. She did talk about a footballer she met — she knows I’m a big Sunderland fan — and what an egotistical jerk he was. And a guitarist from a band I liked who didn’t have anything much to say to anyone. Little vignettes like that. There were a lot of boring old politicians and businessmen there, too, but she didn’t have a lot of contact with them. She worked behind the scenes.’

‘Can you give us their names?’ Gerry asked. ‘The footballer and guitarist. We may have heard of them.’

Mitsuko looked puzzled but said, ‘Sure,’ and told them. Gerry had heard of the footballer but not the guitarist. Annie knew of neither.

‘What about the man who threw the parties,’ Annie asked. ‘The man whose house it was? Connor Clive Blaydon?’

‘Was that his name? She never said. Just that she was working for an old friend of her boss.’

‘Did Marnie say exactly what she did there?’

‘A bit of everything. Dogsbody, she said. Loading and unloading the dishwasher, arranging trays of canapés, opening wine bottles and tins of caviar. She’d lend a hand with just about anything if they got busy or someone didn’t turn up.’

‘What about meeting the guests, serving drinks and so on?’

‘She got to serve drinks occasionally, but she didn’t like it much. Mostly they had a bunch of scantily dressed women to do that.’ Mitsuko lowered her voice. ‘She did say there was stuff going on, you know. Escorts and that sort of thing.’

‘Did she mention anyone in particular, anyone who had shown interest in her?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What about unasked-for attention?’

‘Uh-oh. Well, that’s always a given, isn’t it, for someone like Marnie? Even here. She isn’t exactly beautiful, but she’s definitely striking. And sexy, I suppose. In that innocent sort of way, you know, without realising it, or at least without emphasising it or playing it up at all. She just is, you know.’

‘Natural?’

‘Very.’

‘Anything serious? At the parties.’

‘She got offers, you know. A thousand quid if you spend the night with me. That sort of thing. Some old wrinkly who liked young girls. Maybe the occasional pat on the bum.’

‘How did she react?’

‘Shrugged it off, mostly, like you do.’

‘Did she mention any names?’

‘Apart from the footballer and guitarist? Not really. Not that I remember.’

‘The name of anyone who propositioned her?’

‘No. I don’t know if she even knew their names. I mean, I’m not saying it happened a lot, just that she thought it was a bit of a laugh, that’s all.’ Mitsuko paused and frowned, as much as her tight forehead would let her. ‘Is this going somewhere? Why are you so interested in the parties? Did something happen to Marnie there?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Annie. ‘Did something?’

‘It wasn’t long after her last party gig that she... you know... Did something bad happen to her there?’

‘Did she talk to you about that particular party?’

‘No. That’s when she... she went strange. We never got to talk about it. Oh, my God. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Something happened to her. Is she hurt? Is she dead?’

‘Nothing like that.’ Gerry rushed to reassure her. ‘We’re just trying to find her, that’s all.’

‘But something happened, didn’t it? Please tell me. Was it drugs?’

‘I’m sorry, Mitsuko,’ Annie said. ‘We can’t give you any information. Right now it’s confidential. You mentioned escorts. Did she talk to you about the things that went on at these parties? Sexual things, or other stuff.’

‘She said there were drugs. Mostly cocaine. But she never took any. She wouldn’t do that. And she thought some of the women with impossibly big boobs were hookers. They would sometimes disappear with a guest for a while. Apparently, the place had a lot of bedrooms. Sometimes people got lost, she said, and wandered into the kitchen and got embarrassed. And once she saw some naked girls swimming in the pool.’

‘Sounds pretty exciting,’ Gerry said.

‘Marnie didn’t think so,’ said Mitsuko. ‘She just thought it was sad. Or funny. But it paid well.’

‘Did she ever mention Charlotte Westlake?’

‘Her boss?’

‘Yes.’

‘Once or twice, just in passing, like.’

‘Did she say how she first heard of Charlotte?’

‘No. She didn’t tell me. And I never thought to ask. It was just a job, you know, like this. I did... never mind.’

‘What were you going to say?’ Annie prompted her.

‘Nothing. It was just an impression, but from the way she talked, I sort of felt she’d known this Westlake woman from before.’

‘From before? When?’

‘I don’t know. But don’t you just get feelings like that sometimes, from the way someone talks about someone? I don’t know, body language, a facial expression. It was just a passing fancy.’

‘Did Marnie drink much?’

‘She liked a drink — white wine was her favourite — but she didn’t overdo it, no. I’ve only seen her drunk about once or twice in all the time I’ve known her.’

‘How did it affect her?’

‘First she’d get very funny, silly, then she’d fall asleep.’

‘You mentioned drugs. Did Marnie take any? You said she didn’t touch coke; what about others?’

Mitsuko looked away.

‘You can tell us,’ said Annie. ‘We’re interested in finding her, not arresting her for smoking a spliff or whatever.’

‘Ecstasy a couple of times, at parties. And maybe the occasional smoke. But that’s as far as it went. Never the hard stuff. Like I said, she wouldn’t have taken any of that stuff at those parties she was working.’

‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘She went out a few times with Rick, one of the guys from the pub we hung out in. The Star and Garter. He’s nice enough. Fancies himself a poet, and Marnie was a sucker for artistic types. All that goth darkness and stuff. But I don’t think it was serious.’

Gerry made a note and Annie asked, ‘Is Rick still around?’

‘Sure. Should be. But I don’t think he’ll be able to tell you anything. They split up around the same time she started getting strange.’ Mitsuko paused. ‘I’m still really worried about her, you know. That she might do... you know... might harm herself. She was soooo depressed when she left.’

‘Do you know if she saw a doctor?’

‘I suggested it, but she just shook her head.’

‘Did she give you any idea at all of what might be going on, what caused her state of mind?’

‘No,’ said Mitsuko. ‘And in the end, I just learned to stop bothering her. She’d get mad, tell me to shut up and leave her alone. I couldn’t get through to her. And it hurt, you know.’

‘I can imagine it did,’ Annie said. ‘Do you know where she went?’

‘No. She just took off after that incident at work. I was working here that day, too, and Mr. Baldini said I should go after her and make sure she was all right. He’s very nice. So I did, but when I got back to the house, she was packing a few things in a suitcase. I asked her where she was going, and she said she was just going away for a few days to be by herself. I asked her what was wrong, but she told me it was nothing, not to worry. And that was it. I was dismissed. She drove off and she never came back. I left emails and messages on her mobile but got no response. I’ve been worried about her ever since. It’s been over six weeks now and not a word. When you find her, please let me know. I won’t try to see her or anything if she doesn’t want. I just need to know that she’s all right. Will you tell me?’

‘Yes,’ said Annie. ‘Do you have a recent photograph you could share with us? The one we have is very poor quality.’

‘Sure. I think.’ Mitsuko pulled out her mobile from her back pocket and searched through her photo library. ‘We went for a cheap city break to Rome last October,’ she said. ‘It was amazing. We saw the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, everything. Here.’ She turned the phone so they could see a clear picture of Marnie with a Roman ruin in the background. ‘That was taken in the Forum.’

‘Thanks,’ said Annie. ‘Can you email it to me?’

‘I can AirDrop it,’ Mitsuko said.

In a few moments Annie was asked if she was willing to accept the photo. She clicked yes, and there it was. She held out the phone and Gerry bent forward to see it too. It was the first time they had seen what the person they were after looked like. The image from the SD card did her no justice at all. Marnie was a lot more attractive than Annie had been able to tell from the video capture. And no doubt the fact that she was enjoying a weekend break in Rome, and hadn’t just been assaulted, helped a great deal. Her big dark eyes stared directly into the camera, her complexion was pale and flawless and her short hair definitely hennaed. She wore a simple white T-shirt, no make-up or heavy jewellery, and had no tattoos on her arms or neck, but there was something of the goth in her appearance, both challenging and defiant. It was perhaps more of an attitude than a style, Annie decided, something in her stance and the seriousness of her expression.

Their pizzas arrived. Mitsuko asked if there was anything else, and they said they didn’t think so. Not for the moment. She said she would be around the restaurant if they thought of anything, and went back to work.

As they tucked into their lunch, Annie thought about Marnie and remembered her own experience. After she had been raped, she had wandered around in a depressed haze of guilt and shame, wondering how she could ever have let such a thing happen to her. But it was her anger that ultimately saved her. She never let go of the fact that it wasn’t her fault; it was the fault of the bastards who raped her. And clinging to that idea was probably what saved her from Marnie’s fate, whatever it was. Annie had clawed her way out; Marnie seemed to have gone under.

She completely understood why Marnie hadn’t been able to tell her best friend what happened. She had never shared what happened to her with a living soul until she told Banks in a moment of weakness on their first case together. It was a long time ago now, but the pain and shame would never completely go away; they were deep down, rooted in her very being. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t live a normal life, couldn’t function properly. She did. She wanted to find Marnie and tell her that she could do it, too, even if at first she wouldn’t believe it.

As soon as she got back to the station from York, Gerry got on her computer. A search through the databases revealed that a Marjorie Sedgwick lived in a place called Wool, in Dorset. According to Gerry’s information, that came under the Purbeck North policing area. She made a note of the address, then phoned the Purbeck police.

A youthful-sounding PCSO answered her call, saying he knew the Sedgwick family by name and that they did, indeed, live in Wool, though he was very careful to point out that he didn’t know them because of any criminal activity, suspected or real. When Gerry pressed her case and asked why he knew the name, he grew evasive and muttered something about a tragedy. Even though he had verified who Gerry was by calling back the Eastvale number she had given him, he still seemed reluctant to say more.

‘If you can’t or don’t want to talk to me,’ said Gerry, ‘can you please put someone on who will?’

There was silence, then the sound of the handset being set down on a hard surface. Gerry tried to picture the location. Many of these police stations were much like the ones in rural Yorkshire, nothing more than the local copper’s living room with a filing cabinet and a few wanted posters on the walls. She imagined a thatched roof cottage with a blue POLICE sign over its door and opening hours noted down the side.

‘Sergeant Trevelyan here,’ came a new voice at the other end. ‘Who am I speaking to?’ Gerry thought Trevelyan was a Cornish name. Still, Cornwall wasn’t that far from Dorset. His accent didn’t give anything away; it was pure RP.

‘My name is Geraldine Masterson,’ she said. ‘I’m a DC at Eastvale Regional Police HQ in Eastvale, North Yorkshire. I’m making enquiries about a local girl called Marnie Sedgwick, and the database has led me to a Marjorie Sedgwick in Wool, Dorset. Your PCSO seemed to recognise Marnie’s name.’

‘Not many who wouldn’t around these parts,’ said Trevelyan.

‘Oh, why is that?’

‘Not the best of reasons, I’m afraid. Poor Marnie Sedgwick only went and killed herself, didn’t she? The tragedy’s still fresh in everyone’s mind.’

Gerry felt her skin prickle. ‘Killed herself?’

‘Aye. Jumped off Durdle Door.’

‘When did this happen?’

There was another pause, then Trevelyan said, ‘May. Seventeenth May.’

About a month after the rape, Gerry realised, and five days before Blaydon’s murder. She made a note on her desk pad.

‘Can I send you a photo of her, then we can be certain we’re talking about the same person?’

‘Go ahead. Text it to my mobile.’ He gave her the number. A few seconds after she had sent the image, she heard a ding and Trevelyan came back. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’s poor Marnie, all right.’

Christ. Gerry felt a chill flutter in her chest. ‘You said she jumped off Durdle Door?’

‘It’s a limestone arch in the sea near Lulworth Cove. The water’s worn a hole in it over the years, so it’s like an open door in the rock. The beach there is a popular tourist spot.’

‘I’ve seen pictures,’ said Gerry. ‘Would you mind if my colleague and I come down to see you? We’d like to talk to the family, too, if possible.’

‘It’s all right by me,’ said Trevelyan. ‘Hell of a long way to come, if you ask me, though, and I won’t have any more to tell you than I have right now.’

‘Will you arrange for us to see this Durdle Door and to speak with Mr. and Mrs. Sedgwick?’

‘Easy enough. I’ll certainly ask them. You understand they might not wish to dredge it all up again. It’s still raw.’

‘We can be very gentle. Please try, Sergeant. It’s important.’

‘I’ll do my best. See you soon then?’

‘We’ll talk to you soon.’

Banks hadn’t heard the Blue Lamps live for quite a while, but they were every bit as good as he remembered, their bluesy feel, rhythmic complexity, and subtle use of harmonies as strong and as familiar as ever. To Banks’s ears, it was CSNY meet the Allman Brothers, but with an unmistakable edge of more recent pop styles in the mix.

It was a nostalgic evening, and they played songs from their earliest albums mixed in with more recent work, along with a few covers they had revisited now and then over the years. At one point, Brian announced, ‘I feel like I’ve been listening to this song since I was in my cradle. This is for my old man. He’s here somewhere tonight. Love you, Dad!’ The crowd cheered and the band launched into a bluesy ‘Visions of Johanna,’ with Brian taking the lead vocal and a soaring lyrical guitar solo. Emotion fizzed in Banks’s chest and almost made it to his eyes. As with most of Dylan’s mid-sixties songs, he didn’t understand a word of it, but it sure had a powerful effect on him.

The Sage was full, and the fans both enthusiastic and saddened by the occasion. Some waved banners saying ‘PLEASE DON’T TURN OFF THE LAMPS!’ but everything was good-natured, including the band members, and no one felt cheated when the show ended after the fifth encore.

Banks kept checking his mobile during the performance, but nothing new came in. When the show ended, surprised by how the music had allowed him to put Zelda out of his mind for a short while at least, he nipped outside to phone Annie, who had been in charge during his absence, and told her about a derelict hunting lodge he had remembered on the fells above Swainshead. It turned out that the place had already been searched and found to be empty. As had the Blaydon properties they had searched so far. The only news was that Burgess had come up with a good photograph of Petar Tadić, and Adrian Moss had pasted it all over the media.

Cursing their lack of success and his own inability to come up with any better ideas, Banks made his way to the backstage area, where Tracy and Mark were already waiting for him with Brian and the rest of the band. The dressing room was crowded with lucky fans, hangers-on, and a few journalists. After all, the demise of the band was a major event. There were two more dates left on the ‘farewell’ tour before the absolute final performance, back in London again, but this one was close enough to home ground to make the news.

Banks managed a few brief words with Brian, who regretted being unable to come and spend the night at Newhope Cottage because the tight schedule called for an early start to Edinburgh the following morning. It was a pity, as Banks had looked forward to spending some time alone with him, listening to old blues and Bob Dylan and talking about everything under the sun. Banks would have driven him to Edinburgh in the morning under normal circumstances, but he couldn’t take the time off, either. After London, Brian said, when the tour was over, he would have some time off before starting a trainee sound-recording job he had set up at a studio down there, so he would come up for a few days then. Banks was no lover of big noisy parties, no matter what their purpose, so he said his goodbyes to the other band members and made his way towards the exit. Tracy and Mark said they would stay on just a little longer and take a taxi home. They had just got back from Tenerife that day and were feeling tired.

In the afterglow of ‘Visions of Johanna,’ Banks played Blonde on Blonde on the way home, arriving in the middle of ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.’ He felt lonely when he pulled up outside his dark cottage. Normally, living alone never bothered him much, but spending even a little time with Brian and seeing Tracy so happy with her new husband reminded him of when he had a family, when home was a place of love and comfort, where there would always be someone waiting for him. These days, his life seemed to lack purpose — or at least any purpose other than putting bad guys away. Zelda haunted him, too. Not only what might be happening to her now, but what the future might hold. Not very much, he suspected, and none of it pleasant. They had to find her.

The outside light usually came on automatically when he approached the front door, but tonight it didn’t. He made a mental note to replace the bulb tomorrow. He used the light from his mobile, managed to get his key in the lock, and open the door. He stepped over the threshold, looking forward to a quick nightcap, but before he could shut the door behind him, he sensed a sudden movement, then felt something hard hit the back of his head. He pitched forward into the cottage, and after that, he felt nothing.