Not Dark Yet

2

Zelda called at one of the car rental agencies she had passed earlier and managed to rent an old grey Skoda with a starfish crack on the windscreen and so many dents and scratches the young man at the counter didn’t even make her sign off on them.

It was an easy drive to Suruceni, and after the outskirts of Chișinău — more ruined buildings and half-built tower blocks — she drove through pleasant, rolling countryside on E581, encountering very little traffic.

It was early evening when she pulled up in front of William Buckley’s house in the southwest of the village, not too far from the lake. It was a small, detached bungalow of beige stucco with a matching pantile roof and white mouldings around the arched windows. The house was slightly raised, and there were four steps up to the side porch and door. The small garden was untended, with not much but stones, dirt, and a few blades of parched grass. Even the weeds were struggling against the heat. Two fat crows sat on the pantiles. They didn’t move as Zelda walked up the steps and knocked on the door.

At first, she thought there was no one home. The silence was resounding. But she knocked again and heard a slow shuffling sound from behind the door. Eventually, it opened, and a white-haired old man with what could only be called a ‘lived-in’ face peered out at her in some surprise. A book-jacket photo she had seen of W.H. Auden came to mind. His face was a road map of a life hard lived, but his eyes were a startling childlike blue, and by far his liveliest feature. They could have been the eyes of someone her own age, Zelda found herself thinking.

‘Yes?’ he said, speaking Moldovan. ‘Can I help you?’

Zelda spoke English. ‘Perhaps. Are you William Buckley?’

‘Ah, a compatriot,’ Buckley said. ‘Yes. I am he. And call me Bill. Please, charming lady, do come in. Don’t be afraid. I’m a harmless, toothless old man.’

Zelda smiled and followed him inside, taking in the framed Japanese-style paintings and drawings on the wall and the sunlight through the arched windows. Buckley shuffled ahead of her, a hunched figure, walking stick in his right hand. The bungalow was small inside, just a living room, one bedroom, and kitchen/dining area, Zelda guessed, but it was cosy. Bookcases lined two of the living-room walls, and each was so stuffed with books they lay on their sides on top of other books. All in English.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Buckley asked, indicating that she should sit in a damask armchair at right angles to the matching sofa which, judging by the little table holding a tea mug and a copy of Phineas Finn, was his spot. ‘May I fetch you a cup of tea?’

‘I don’t want to trouble you.’

‘It’s no trouble. As a matter of fact, I just made some. It should still be hot. Milk and sugar?’

‘Just a little milk, please, then.’

Buckley shuffled off and Zelda glanced around at the books. They covered all subjects — fiction, history, poetry, music, art, literary criticism, theatre, architecture — and were of all shapes and sizes, from dog-eared paperbacks that looked as if they had been bought in used bookshops, to recent hardcovers in shiny dust jackets and oversized coffee table volumes.

She was still reading titles, her head slightly tilted, when Buckley came back with the tea. ‘A keen reader, are you?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Zelda.

Buckley nodded slowly and handed her the tea, his wrinkled hand shaking slightly.

Zelda smiled. The room was stifling, and there was a slightly unpleasant smell of neglected hygiene and spoiled food, but she could put up with it. If Buckley lived here alone, it would be hard for him to deal with the myriad daily matters of simply keeping things ticking over.

As if reading her thoughts, he said, ‘I do have a local lady who comes in once a week and cleans for me, but I’m afraid she’s not due next until tomorrow. I do apologise for the air of neglect.’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Zelda.

Buckley half reclined on the sofa and grimaced, as if the movement caused him pain. ‘You wanted to see me for some specific reason? Do I know you?’

Now that she was here facing him, Zelda wasn’t sure how to get things started. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I mean, no, you don’t know me, but I do want to see you. It’s about the orphanage.’

‘St. George’s?’

‘That’s the one.’

Buckley narrowed his eyes. ‘Don’t tell me you were there.’

‘I was.’

‘You poor thing.’

‘Oh, no!’ Zelda cried. ‘Don’t think that. I had a wonderful life there. Everyone was so kind. The books and...’ She found herself on the verge of tears. Was this man truly her benefactor? Or could he have been her destroyer?

‘I meant to lose your parents at such an early age. But I’m glad St. George’s was good to you. That was certainly the idea behind it. Yes, I do believe it was a place where much good was done in a time when such things were the exception rather than the rule. But how did you find out about me? I did my best to remain an anonymous donor.’

‘I’ve been back there,’ Zelda said. ‘Just now. It’s in ruins, but there was a box of books in a storeroom, and your name and address were on them.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid St. George’s closed its doors in 2009. A real tragedy. In Moldova, as I’m sure you know, everything no longer used is simply left to decay at its own rate.’ A mischievous smile crossed his features, giving Zelda a glimpse of what he might have been like as a young man. And while he wasn’t exactly toothless, he wasn’t far off. ‘Even many things which are still in use are falling apart. We are great believers in entropy. We have a very cavalier attitude towards progress and development.’

‘You say “we,” ’ Zelda said, ‘but you’re English, aren’t you?’

‘If you want to be accurate, I’m Welsh, but as I’ve been here nearly thirty years now, the matter of my origins is quite academic. I have certainly retained my interest in British culture, if that’s of any interest to you.’

‘Thirty years? B-but, how? I mean... what...?’

‘What have I been doing all that time? Why am I here?’

‘Yes. All that.’

‘It’s a very dull story. I was what’s called a cultural attaché to the Romanian embassy in Bucharest. A diplomat and cheerleader for the British Council. I moved here to Moldova during the civil war, after the Soviets left in the early nineties. I suppose the long and the short of it is, I fell in love.’

‘With?’

‘With the country, and with a woman. Cherchez la femme. It was a second chance for me, you see. My first wife had died some years earlier, and I had never expected to fall in love again. I was fifty four years old. She became my wife. Sadly, she, too, died, five years ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He waved his hand. ‘Not for you to be sorry, my dear. Though I know what you mean, and I thank you for the sentiment. I’m surprised you don’t ask me why I fell in love with the most undesirable country in Europe.’

Zelda laughed. ‘Love is blind?’

Buckley smiled his approval. ‘Yes. That would be the easiest response, and perhaps the most accurate. But there’s a simplicity to the place, to life here, once you know the ins and outs. I’m happy to end my days here in Suruceni. There’s still corruption everywhere, I know, but the people have a spirit and a strong sense of stoicism. We always managed to get by. We lived in Chișinău then, my wife and I, and our house was always full of artists, writers, musicians. I taught English whenever I was allowed to do so. I also supplemented my income by writing books and reviews.’

‘Would I know your work?’

Buckley laughed. ‘I hope not. No. I wrote under many pseudonyms. Potboilers in every genre you could imagine. Novelisations of movies or TV series, romance, crime, horror, science-fiction. You name it. I seem to have a talent for ventriloquism but no real voice of my own. But you’re not here to talk about me.’

‘I am in a way,’ said Zelda. ‘Besides, it’s an interesting story.’

‘Probably not half as interesting as yours.’

Zelda looked away. ‘You wouldn’t...’ she said. ‘You don’t want to...’

‘I’ve upset you, my dear. I apologise. It was a flippant remark. I can see there has been much grief in your life.’

Zelda shook her head. ‘It’s not... Oh, never mind. It’s about the orphanage.’

‘What about it?’

‘The books, for a start. Did you send them?’

‘I did. For many years. I suppose I was trying to spread my culture to a heathen land. No, that’s not strictly true. Forgive me, I was arrogant. Moldova has her own poets. I wanted people — I wanted the charges at St. George’s in particular — to experience the same pleasures I myself experienced when I read those books as a child.’

‘Were you an orphan, may I ask?’

‘You may. And, yes, I was. Am. My parents were both killed during the Blitz, in London. I have no brothers or sisters or any other living relatives as far as I know. It gave me more freedom than I knew what to do with. I don’t mean to belittle the grief and terrible sense of loss and aloneness, but did you have that experience yourself, a kind of odd relief that there was no one else to satisfy, to please, no one to make demands on you, to tell you what to do or in which direction to push?’

‘I’m afraid I never got to experience the positive side of being an orphan. At least, not in that way. Kind as they were, the nuns were always all too willing to make demands and tell us what to do!’

Buckley smiled. ‘Of course. I meant later.’

‘There was no later.’ Zelda leaned forward and clasped her hands on her knees. ‘But the books. I must... I have to thank you. Without them, I don’t know what I would have done.’

‘I’m happy my gifts didn’t fall on stony ground.’

‘Oh, not at all! Those were some of the happiest times of my life, curled up in bed reading Enid Blyton or Charlotte Brontë. I felt as if I had always known English, as if it were my first language. I don’t remember working hard to learn it. Even later, in my darkest times, when I couldn’t make time to read, I always tried to summon up those memories. Peggotty. Jane. Julian, Dick, Anne, and George. And Timmy, of course. And Modesty Blaise. I loved Modesty Blaise. She became my benchmark if ever I was in trouble. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes they made me feel safe again, but...’

‘It’s a hard, cruel world out there, my dear. I know,’ said Buckley. ‘And there’s rarely a Willie Garvin to charge in and rescue you.’

Zelda stared down at her clasped hands. She felt the tears struggling for release again. Held them back. This man could not have been her destroyer; she was certain of it.

‘So you were born here?’ Buckley asked.

‘Dubăsari.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘There’s nothing to know. It’s a small place. In Transnistria. Near the Ukraine border. There’s an amusement park.’

‘And your parents?’

‘Both killed in the civil war. They weren’t participating, you understand. Just civilian casualties.’

‘Indeed. There was plenty of “collateral damage.” You must have been very young.’

‘I was four.’

‘And so you arrived at St. George’s.’

‘Yes. It was very new at the time. Only in its second year, I think.’ Zelda laughed. ‘You could still smell the fresh paint.’

‘For all that you have to thank a man called Klaus Bremner.’

Zelda frowned. ‘Klaus Bremner. I’ve never heard the name.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ said Buckley. ‘Besides, he’s long dead now. But for a while, in the uncertain days of the late 80s, when the Russian Empire was collapsing and a new Eastern Europe was struggling to be born, we were the best of friends. It was Klaus who put up the money for the orphanage and established the St. George’s Trust to keep it running even after his death. For a while, at any rate.’

‘But why? Was he an orphan, too?’

‘Klaus? No. And he was much older than me. He was a German soldier during World War Two. He fought in the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive.’

‘I remember learning about that in history class.’

‘It was an important battle. 1944. The Russians defeated the occupying German army and drove them out of Moldova. It was what Klaus witnessed in Kishinev, as it was known then — especially the number of orphaned children wandering the streets — that stayed with him. The guilt. He had never been a fully-fledged Nazi. Like many Germans, he was just doing his duty to save himself from being shot. He didn’t do it with as much relish as some.’

‘But what has that to do with St. George’s?’

‘After the war, Klaus went to America, where he made his fortune in the engineering industry. I don’t know all the details, but he was a very clever man, an industrial engineer before the war, and he came up with a few new ideas that were embraced by the new West Germany. I imagine he took a few of those secrets with him to share with the Americans. That way they could easily overlook his having been on the other side during the war. By the end of the Soviet era, when the Wall came down, Klaus, now called Claude, was a very rich man. He travelled to Moldova and Romania often and he even owned a winery here, near Cricova, but less famous.’

‘When you were the cultural attaché?’

‘Towards the end of my time in Bucharest. But that was where we first met, yes. Klaus was a very cultured man. We shared a passion for opera and symphony concerts. He and I travelled from Bucharest to Kishinev together on several occasions. He told me about the devastation he had witnessed, the scale of human suffering, the misery of the war. You won’t remember, but there were also terrible stories about Romanian orphanages then, too. Abuse and neglect. I suppose you could say he had an epiphany. And he hatched a plan.’

‘For an orphanage?’

‘Yes. St. George’s.’

‘Whose idea was the books?’

‘Both of us. Believe it or not, Klaus was an anglophile. Teaching English was to be a priority. Other languages, too, of course, but particularly English. Your English is excellent, by the way, my dear. He saw it as the future, and none of us knew what lay ahead for Moldova or Romania. We both loved the English classics, and I was still able to get my hands on as many books as I wanted through my connection with the British Council and the newspapers I reviewed for. Also, I don’t know if you’re aware, but this village is famous for its monastery, the Monastery of St. George. It’s been here since 1785 and is home to a group of Orthodox nuns. Even the Soviets tolerated them. They still farm the land on the edges of the village. I had been coming here for years to get away from city life in Bucharest, for peace and quiet to write, and I had got to know some of them.’

‘The nuns?’

‘You remember, of course. Yes. These nuns helped with the orphanage. They taught lessons, cooked the food, did the cleaning, took care of you children.’

‘I never knew,’ Zelda said. ‘Where they came from, I mean. Why they did what they did.’

‘They did it because it was in their nature to do good.’

‘They were kind. Distant, but kind.’

‘So I heard. Not always the case with nuns, as I understand. Ask the Irish. So that was your lucky childhood.’

‘Your books and Klaus Bremner’s epiphany. Yes.’

‘And the nuns.’

‘And the nuns.’

Zelda swallowed. She felt overwhelmed by the information and the emotion it generated. But she knew she had to steel herself to find out what she had come for, even though the thought of doing so made her feel duplicitous. From all she had heard and observed so far, she was convinced that neither William Buckley nor Klaus Bremner had anything to do with her fate. She knew she might be wrong, of course. Often the nastiest of monsters lurk behind the most pleasing facades, and Nazis, of course, were among the nastiest. The whole orphanage, for example, could have been a scheme to raise young virgins for the sacrifice. But she didn’t think so. Nor did she think they knew what went on. After all, both Buckley and Bremner had only distant connections with St. George’s. She had never heard of either of them the entire time she was there. They weren’t involved in the day-to-day management of who was coming or going. That would have been Vasile Lupescu.

‘Do you remember Vasile Lupescu?’ she asked. The name almost turned to stone on her lips.

‘Vasile? Of course. He was director from the beginning until the end.’

‘Do you know what happened to him?’

‘Nothing happened to him, my dear. It was 2009, the wake of the great financial crisis, the collapse of so many economies. The trust Claude had set up failed. Apparently, it wasn’t quite as inviolable as he had intended it to be. It was all a terrible tragedy, a very sad time for us all. But there was nothing we could do. When the orphanage closed, Vasile was just about ready to retire. So that was what he did.’

‘And now?’

‘As far as I know he lives in Purcari. It’s in the far south-east, not too far from the Ukraine border. Odessa. Good wine country. I think he has family down there.’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Zelda. ‘Do you ever see him?’

‘Not often. I rarely see anyone these days. You’re probably the first person I’ve spoken to in ages, except for my cleaning lady, and certainly the first I’ve had any sort of conversation with in weeks, maybe months. And we weren’t close friends, Vasile and I, even when we were both in Chișinău. The last time I saw him was when he travelled up to the city on business, and we met for lunch. But that was over a year ago. Why do you ask?’

‘I just wondered, that’s all. He was an important presence in our lives.’

‘He certainly was. He took care of all the administrative details — admissions, transitions, and everything. I’m sure he’d be very pleased if you were to tell him that. Are you planning on going to see him, too?’

‘Yes, I might do. Can you give me his address? Would that be all right?’

‘Of course. I don’t see why not.’ Buckley had a small diary on his table, and he leafed through it, then gave her an address in Purcari. Zelda glanced at her watch and realised she wouldn’t be able to make it down there until well after dark. Instead, she decided to go back to the Radisson Blu in Chișinău and try to get a good night’s sleep, if such a thing were possible after the conversation she had just had. She had one more day left in Moldova before her flight left at 5:35 the following evening, so she might as well spend it in Purcari.

At the door, they shook hands, and Buckley said, ‘I don’t know why you came here, my dear, and why you wanted to hear an old man’s ramblings, but I sense some sort of mission on your part, some desire to reacquaint yourself with your roots, make peace with the past. Is that it?’

‘Something like that,’ said Zelda, hating herself for misleading him.

‘Then let me thank you for your company and your conversation. And I wish you good luck in your quest.’

Zelda thanked William Buckley again for the books, for giving her a childhood and early adolescence, at least, then she took her leave.

Banks knew he shouldn’t have done, but he drove home from the reception when the whole thing was fast becoming an endless DJ ego trip to a soundtrack of bad nineties synth-pop and electropop music.

Brian and two fellow band members who were with him had performed a brief unplugged set earlier, including ‘Blackbird,’ one of Banks’s favourite Beatles songs, even though it was McCartney and he had always regarded himself as a Lennon man.

The music had started to go downhill soon after Brian and his friends had left. Banks said farewell to his own and Mark’s parents, all four still bravely soldiering on, and to Sandra and Sean, who were themselves just about to leave. Then he walked over to Tracy and Mark, embraced his daughter and shook her husband’s hand. Tracy thanked him for his cheque, and he could tell by her tone that it had been enough. That was a relief.

Before leaving, he took Mark aside and said, only half joking, ‘Break her heart and I’ll break your neck.’

‘Don’t worry, sir. Mr. Banks,’ Mark replied nervously, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

‘Alan,’ said Banks, patting him on the back. ‘You’re family now. But remember what I said, or you’ll have me to answer to.’

Despite having had a couple more glasses of wine on top of the pint, enough time had elapsed that Banks felt perfectly sober as he got in the car. As a cop in the Eastvale region for many years, he knew well enough that there weren’t any patrol cars out in the dale at this time of night, but he drove carefully. Not so much so that it seemed as if he were trying to drive carefully, but sticking to the speed limits and signalling properly. He made it back home in one piece, without incident.

There was a chill in the air, so instead of going out into the garden, he poured himself a glass of claret, sat in the conservatory, and put on Dylan’s Time Out of Mind to counteract the DJ’s music that lingered like the aural equivalent of a bad smell.

Burgess’s call intrigued him, and he wondered what it could be about. It was true that he didn’t have a lot on his plate at the moment, but what he did have, the Blaydon case, had become much more complex and frustrating over the past few days.

A crooked property developer called Connor Clive Blaydon and his factotum Neville Roberts had been found murdered by Banks and DC Gerry Masterson in the swimming pool area of Blaydon’s mansion just over a week ago. The post-mortem revealed that both had been shot and that, while Roberts had died of his wound, Blaydon had subsequently been sliced open from the groin to the breastbone and his body dumped in the pool. Technically, he had drowned to death because the bullet hadn’t hit any major organs and he had been using his hands to hold his intestines inside rather than to swim to safety.

The major suspect, Leka Gashi, a member of the Shqiptare, the Albanian Mafia, was a ‘business partner’ of Blaydon’s. The ‘business’ included money laundering and county lines drug dealing, two activities that could easily result in violence. The MO matched Gashi’s style, too. He was suspected of being behind the murder of a Leeds dealer called Lenny G, also gutted, who had previously managed a county line.

There was no clear motive, but Gashi and Blaydon were old partners in crime. Gerry had recently discovered that the two had met in Corfu some twenty years ago, much earlier than she had originally thought. Blaydon had owned a villa there since about 2002, and he had kept his yacht, the Nerea, moored at a marina near Kavos for a few years before that. A falling-out among thieves was not unusual, in Banks’s experience.

Because Gashi and his cronies had an alibi and were now thought to be hiding out in the Albanian countryside, the case would have been languishing in limbo until they found him, as they had no other leads. But just a couple of days ago a cache of MiniSD cards and a wad of cash amounting to £30,000 had been found hidden in a special compartment at the back of the wardrobe in the factotum’s cubbyhole. Apparently, what none of the guests at Blaydon’s famous parties had realised was that several of the bedrooms were fitted with minicams, which were motion- or sound-activated. This discovery, of course, raised the possibility that it was Neville Roberts, and not Blaydon, who was the intended victim. On further investigation, it turned out that Roberts used to be an audio and video technician until he was jailed for his part in the illegal surveillance of a client’s business rival.

DI Annie Cabbot and DC Gerry Masterson, Banks’s ‘team,’ were patiently going through and logging the material on the cards. So far, they had found that Roberts’s victims included judges, a local MP, one ex-chief constable, a pop singer, an American evangelist keen to make property investments, an award-winning film director, a bishop, a premier league footballer and a Scottish rugby international, among others. No royalty appeared to be involved, except a minor baronet, who didn’t really count. All had enjoyed Blaydon’s parties, fuelled by vast amounts of alcohol and cocaine and the loving attentions of hordes of beautiful young women, many of them probably too young.

But the most recent development had occurred just the previous day, when they came across what appeared to be a video recording of a rape among a number of films that Annie Cabbot called ‘married-men-who-should-know-better shagging young girls.’ There was something wrong with the recording, a technical fault it seemed, and the images were dark and blurred. Neither the rapist nor his victim was recognisable. A video technician Gerry knew at County HQ was working on an enhancement. And that was where things stood. Two separate cases, perhaps, but occurring in the same house and separated in time by only five weeks: Blaydon and Roberts had been killed on 22 May and the rape footage was dated 13 April.

Banks ran his hand over his hair and stopped thinking about the case for a few moments to listen to ‘Cold Irons Bound,’ then checked his watch and headed for bed. He needed to be up bright and early in the morning to catch his train.

Before he fell asleep, snapshots of Tracy, from childhood to the present, flashed through his mind, and the last image that came was of her beaming in her wedding dress just as the ceremony ended. She was beaming at Mark. Banks had given her away, and then, as he had stood beside her, he had felt that he had lost something, though his heart was filled with happiness.