Not Dark Yet

4

By the time Lupescu came around, Zelda had him trussed up on the sofa. As soon as he realised the predicament he was in, he asked for a glass of water and a bottle of pills from the kitchen table. Zelda checked the pills. They were sublingual nitroglycerin, for angina. He drank the water first then put a pill under his tongue. She used a damp cloth to wipe the blood from the side of his head. He winced as she did so.

‘What is it you want?’ he said. ‘Money?’

Zelda took out her knife and glanced around at the paintings. ‘Seems as if you have plenty to spare,’ she said. ‘It must have been hard buying all this artwork on an orphanage director’s salary.’ Zelda touched the knife to his throat. He flinched. ‘You can cut the lies and excuses. We both know what you did. You sold me to the Tadić brothers. Me and the other girls.’

‘Who?’

Zelda was thrown. Was she wrong about all this? Had she jumped to the wrong conclusion? ‘The Tadić brothers,’ she repeated. ‘Petar and Goran.’

‘I don’t know them.’

Of course not. ‘Just the drivers,’ Zelda whispered, almost to herself. Then she prodded him again and drew a bead of blood. ‘You dealt with their boss, didn’t you? Who was he?’

‘I still don’t know who you’re talking about.’ She could tell from his eyes that he was lying now.

‘The man you sold us to. Would you rather I went to the authorities and told them my story? Then they could investigate your actions and your finances, find other girls to testify against you. Send you to jail. Confiscate everything you own.’

‘Or what? Or you’ll kill me? You’re going to kill me, anyway, aren’t you?’

‘Perhaps. But whatever happens, I want to hear you admit what you did to me and the others first.’

Lupescu paused, as if weighing his chances, determining which direction to go. He licked his lips. ‘All right, then. Say I did what you’re accusing me of. What then?’

‘Don’t you think you deserve punishment?’

‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Lupescu said. ‘I’m not a monster or a pervert. They forced me to do it.’

‘Forced you? How?’

‘They threatened my family.’

Zelda felt as if a trickle of icy water had run down her spine. ‘They did what?’

‘They threatened me. My daughters. The twins. They were thirteen at the time. Thirteen. And the man said if I didn’t do what he asked, he would take them and my wife instead and put them in brothels so bad they would be dead within a week.’

Zelda let her knife hand drop, though she held on to the handle. She had known brothels like that but survived to tell the tale. Lupescu was shaking now, with tears in his eyes. If he was lying, she thought, he was a good actor. But how could she tell? She had assumed that Buckley had nothing to do with what happened, but she could even be wrong about that. Was she judging the man who gave the books against the man who sat in the office? But no. She must stop second-guessing herself. William Buckley had nothing to do with St. George’s apart from donating the boxes of books. Zelda had never seen or heard of him before yesterday. But Lupescu was there all the time, handled the day-to-day running of the place, knew who was leaving, when and how, where they were going. Maybe he was forced into it, as he claimed, but he was certainly guilty of it.

‘What did they ask you to do?’ she went on.

‘Tip them off when a pretty girl was leaving. I didn’t know what they were going to do with you.’

‘I’ll bet you had a good idea.’

‘I didn’t ask. I couldn’t let myself think about it. My lovely twins... my wife...’ Lupescu hung his head. ‘Please believe me.’

Zelda passed him the water again. ‘How many girls?’

He looked up, horrified, and after a brief silence whispered, ‘Twelve.’

Zelda froze. Twelve girls. Sold into slavery like her. How many hadn’t survived? How many had killed themselves or tried to escape and been beaten to death? How many had died of disease, drugs, or violence? It hardly bore thinking about. How could Lupescu live with himself? She felt the anger rise in her, and her hand tightened around the knife handle as she raised it. Lupescu shuddered and cringed like a frightened reptile, edging away as best he could. ‘No!’ he said. ‘It wasn’t my fault. I had to do it. You must understand. I had to! For my family.’

‘You could have gone to the police.’

‘That wouldn’t have stopped them. You know that. There are always more. And they buy the police.’

‘This man who came to you. What was his name?’

‘I don’t know. Honestly. He was Hungarian. He was in charge. I just called him The Hungarian.’

‘What about the money?’

‘What money?’

Zelda gestured around the house with the knife blade. ‘Come on. All this. The house, the works of art. Like I said before, you couldn’t afford it on your orphanage director’s salary. How much did they pay you?’

Lupescu hung his head again, and when he spoke he muttered so softly that she could barely hear him. ‘Five thousand dollars for each girl.’

Zelda felt her muscles tense and the breath tighten in her throat. So that was what her life had been worth. Five thousand dollars. They had made more than that out of her in the first few months. Multiply that by twelve. And the years. She couldn’t stop herself from slapping him backhanded across the face, hard. He grunted and his top lip split, spilling blood on to his chin. She hit him again.

‘Stop,’ he pleaded. ‘I told you. They threatened my family. I’m sick. You’ll kill me.’

‘And I had no family,’ Zelda said. She didn’t know why she said it; the words just seemed to come out of nowhere. It hardly mattered whether she had a family or not. But she couldn’t help herself. ‘Like I wasn’t worth anything to anyone except men like that. You bastard. You selfish, evil bastard!’ She punctuated each syllable with another slap until his skin was raw and his nose was broken and bleeding.

‘Please stop,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. My heart.’

‘You took their money. Admit it.’

‘Yes. But only later. When they made me.’

‘What do you mean? You told me they threatened your wife and your daughters.’

‘They did! This was later. They made me take their money.’

‘Why would they do that if they could force you to do what they wanted for nothing?’

‘To make me complicit,’ Lupescu said. He licked the blood from his lips and lifted his tied hands up to wipe his nose on his forearm. His voice was hoarse. ‘Don’t you understand? There was always a chance I might go to the police and tell them everything in exchange for protection for me and my family. Or that they might come around to St. George’s asking questions. I wouldn’t have told the police anything, of course, but they didn’t know that. I was too scared for my daughters. If they paid me, I couldn’t tell the authorities without implicating myself. Don’t you see? The payments went into my bank account. It was their insurance, their way of making certain I did what they wanted, that I was no different from them. There’s not a day gone by when I haven’t regretted it, but what could I do?’

‘Well, you bought the house, didn’t you?’ Zelda flopped back in her chair and looked at Lupescu, shaking her head. The money they had paid him was her insurance, too, that he wouldn’t talk. She had killed Goran Tadić, one of the brothers who had abducted her in Chișinău, and she had killed Darius, her vicious French pimp, and she didn’t regret either murder for a moment. But she didn’t consider herself a cold-blooded murderer. And this time, she just couldn’t do it. Or didn’t want to. She felt dirty and cowardly for beating this pathetic tied-up old man, whether he was telling the truth about his motives or not, and the whole encounter was fast making her feel disgusted and empty, even of hatred.

Lupescu had been responsible for her abduction from the street and her subsequent years as a sex slave, but she couldn’t bring herself to kill him. He wasn’t the one who had abducted her and sold her; he had only tipped off The Hungarian when she would be leaving the orphanage. That was the extent of his participation. She was still angry, twisted up in knots inside, but if she believed him — that they had threatened his family — what man wouldn’t have done what he did in that situation? It wasn’t that she forgave him; she could never do that. Twelve girls in his charge had been sold into lives of unbelievable humiliation, pain, and terror at his say-so. But would it have been better if his thirteen-year-old daughters and his wife had suffered that fate instead? What kind of a bargain was that? How could you reckon such a calculation? No matter how you played the figures, they came out wrong.

So Zelda put her knife back in her bag, glanced down in contempt at the sobbing, bleeding old man hunched on the sofa, and left. Someone would find him and free him, or he would work his own way free eventually. Or maybe he would die of a heart attack. It was all the same to her. One thing she knew was that, if he lived, he could never breathe a word to another soul about what had happened here today without implicating himself.

‘So what did this cost you?’ DI Annie Cabbot asked, fingering the picture Gerry had laid out on her desk.

‘More than you could ever know.’

‘Seriously? Oh, get away with you. You didn’t, did you?’

Gerry laughed. ‘No, I’m joking.’

‘So, what? You don’t get this kind of service for free, in my experience.’

‘He asked me out to dinner, that’s all.’

‘And you agreed?’

‘Well, I had to, really, didn’t I?’

‘That’s coercion, Gerry. You don’t have to put up with it, you know. Haven’t you heard of #MeToo? You should report him.’

Gerry blushed. ‘No, it’s fine. He’s quite nice, actually.’

‘Quite nice?’ Annie rolled her eyes. ‘That sounds like the beginning of a torrid love affair.’

‘I’m not after a torrid love affair, but I’ll be quite happy to go out for dinner with him. He didn’t coerce me. As a matter of fact, I’ve had my eye on him for a while, so there.’

‘You and Jared Lyall from tech support? Well, I never. Who’d have guessed it.’ Annie paused. ‘Still, I suppose he is rather cute, in a Justin Bieber sort of way.’

Gerry punched her arm lightly. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘he told me there wasn’t a lot he could do. The tech was right, there was some fault with the minicam. Something to do with fields and pixels and so on. Like sound sampling, missing bits out, only you can’t always put them back. I’m afraid I’m not very well up on the technical language, but he said what he had done was mostly guesswork, trying to imagine what might be missing and replacing it. That’s why it took him so long. It’s quite a work of art. There was nothing he could do with the rapist. He never showed his face, or anything else, like one of those faces on TV they have to blank out.’

‘Could it have been?’ Annie asked. ‘Tampered with? Blanked out?’

‘Jared says not. It’s all to do with his position and what little light there was. Besides, it would have been difficult for someone to get just the rapist’s face blanked out and his victim’s visible, no matter how distorted she is. I still think he’s done a pretty good job with the girl. Jared also ran this reconstruction through our facial recognition software, too, but he came up with nothing. Still, we’d hardly expect her to be in the system.’

‘Maybe it was because of the poor image quality,’ Annie said. ‘Couldn’t Jared just enhance it more? I’ve seen them do it on TV. You make a square around the bit you want enlarged and keep pressing enter.’

Gerry laughed. ‘Yeah, we tried that.’

‘Well, what happened?’

‘The bit we marked out got bigger and bigger and in the end you couldn’t tell what it was. It was just a bunch of dots with spaces between them, like a piece of abstract art. Jackson Pollock or something.’

‘Ray likes Jackson Pollock. Oh, well. So much for TV. I’ll never believe anything I see in future.’

‘It’s not a video recording,’ Gerry said. ‘It was recorded on to a microSD card through a high-end mini spy-cam working on a motion sensor. The problem is that the bedroom was very dark, a room without windows, or so it seems. Usually the cams compensate for that, especially the expensive ones, but this one wasn’t doing a good job. It just wasn’t working properly.’

‘I’m surprised Roberts didn’t return it to Amazon.’

Gerry rolled her eyes. ‘Jared worked from the original SD card, and he did his best with what he had.’

‘I’m sure he did.’ Annie held the image at arm’s length. ‘I think we may have a possible recognisable likeness here. It wouldn’t stand up in court, but... maybe her own mother might recognise her.’

‘As I said, it’s the best Jared can do. I think we have to go with it. He said we could send the card away to a tech lab in London, and they might be able to salvage a sharper image, but that would take weeks, for a start, and cost a fortune, with no guarantee. What we’ve got now is a hell of a lot better than what we had. I’m pretty sure I could recognise her from that, if I saw her. If I knew her. We need to show it around to people who might have been at that party.’

‘When we find out who they are,’ said Annie.

The enhanced image showed a young girl in semi-profile. It was a segment from after the rape, when the rapist had gone and she had turned over on to her side and curled up in the foetal position. Her eyes were glazed and her jaw slack, but there was just enough definition to her features to make identification possible. The waifish look and the short hair were clear enough, and they had already estimated from the original footage, measuring her against the length of the bed, that she was maybe five foot seven or eight in height, or about 170 centimetres. It was impossible to tell her age beyond estimating that she was probably in her late teens.

Annie and Gerry watched the recording again, and it was even clearer that the girl was being raped, perhaps because they had a stronger idea of what she looked like. She had no chance. The man threw her down on the bed, ripped off her clothes and raped her. It didn’t last long. Her struggles were weak and ineffective because she was clearly drunk or drugged, and after a while she didn’t resist at all. There was no sound, so it was impossible to tell if she had screamed or called out, but when he left her half-naked among the rumpled bedsheets, she appeared to be sobbing.

And there the recording ended.

‘Do you remember seeing the girl in any of the other videos?’ Annie asked.

‘No. Those women were all Tadić’s hookers. Or at least we assume they were. None of them resembled her, at any rate, and they seemed to at least pretend they liked what they were doing.’

‘It’s true she doesn’t look like a classy hooker.’

‘Maybe she was working behind the scenes?’

‘Possible,’ said Annie. ‘We need to find out how the parties were set up and organised. How people got invited. I know we’ve already recognised a few prominent figures from what we’ve watched, but there must have been other people there, ones we wouldn’t recognise. Ones who might be more likely to talk to us. Someone must have seen something. Were any of the other films taken at the same party?’

‘Only two,’ said Gerry. ‘I checked them out, and they were both fine as far as quality goes. Different rooms, too. So it was clearly just that one defective camera.’

‘Who have we got?’

‘One of them I recognise, but it’s a woman.’

‘Did Blaydon or Tadić supply men for fun, too?’

‘Er... well, maybe,’ said Gerry. ‘But, I mean, it’s not a man she’s—’

‘Another woman?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Rosemary Vale.’

‘No! You mean that actress? The one in that costume drama that’s on at the moment?’

‘That’s the one,’ Gerry said.

‘She’s gay? I don’t believe it.’

‘Well, you would if you watched the video.’

‘OK. Who’s in the other video?’

‘Craig Lonegan.’

‘What, that footballer with the big house out Swainshead way?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘And what’s he doing, or need I ask?’

‘I’d blush if I told you,’ said Gerry. ‘But it involves rubber sheets and cooking oil, and whatever it is, he appears to be enjoying it.’

‘We need to have a crack at them,’ said Annie. ‘One of them might have seen something. At the very least they might be able to fill out the guest list a bit.’

‘Do you think it could have been Blaydon himself?’

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ Annie said, ‘but there’s no way you could even guess from what we’ve got, let alone prove it. It could have been any one of a number of people.’

‘What it amounts to, then,’ said Gerry, ‘is that we don’t know who the girl is or who she was with. She’s definitely quite young, and she’s not the same type as the others, if that’s not a terribly judgemental thing to say. But that’s all we know about her.’

Annie smiled. ‘I wouldn’t worry about being judgemental,’ she said. ‘I’m the last one to judge you on your woke quotient. Besides, it’s our job to make judgements about certain things. No matter what “type” she is, she’s somebody’s daughter, and it’s our job to find out who she is and get the perpetrator behind bars. If there is a connection with Blaydon’s murder, then all well and good, that might come out, too. What about guest lists for the parties? They must be somewhere.’

‘There’s that woman who used to work as Blaydon’s personal assistant,’ Gerry said. ‘Remember her? She’s on our list. Her name’s Charlotte Westlake, and she lives near Leeds.’

‘Right. If she was working for Blaydon back in April, she might be able to point us in the right direction.’

‘Any more ideas?’

Annie shook her head, then said, ‘Except that Zelda knows the Tadić brothers. I know she’s talked to Alan about them, and in the photo of Keane she saw, he was with Petar Tadić. If they supplied the women for the parties, maybe she could shed some light on things?’

‘Where is the super today, by the way?’

‘London,’ said Annie. ‘Left early this morning. And very cagey about it. Some sort of mysterious appointment.’

‘What about Timmy and Tommy Kerrigan?’ Gerry suggested. ‘I know we’ve interviewed them about the murders, but remember those photos taken around the pool in the cache, too? People having fun, letting their hair down. Timmy and Tommy feature in some of them. They don’t seem to be doing anything illegal, unless smoking big cigars and drinking extremely large glasses of whisky is illegal now.’

‘And wearing skimpy thong swimming trunks if you look like Timmy Kerrigan,’ Annie added.

Gerry laughed at the image. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, it seems there are a few directions to follow up on after the weekend. The assistant and the Kerrigans for a start. Maybe the Kerrigans will be able to tell us something about this Charlotte Westlake? First off, though, I want to have another trip to Blaydon’s house and check out the actual room.’

Banks found himself with a lot to think about as he made his way back to Vauxhall Underground station. He had originally intended to do some shopping while he was in London, check out the big Waterstones on Piccadilly, visit FOPP at Cambridge Circus, but he decided he couldn’t face it. Like everyone else, he did most of his shopping online these days. London was too hot and too crowded today; he just wanted to go home.

He wondered how he had managed to become such a recluse and homebody. He had always enjoyed trips to London before, as he had also loved living there with Sandra in Kennington in his early days on the force. The disenchantment seemed to have crept up on him slowly, ever since he had first moved into Newhope Cottage alone, after their divorce. There had been women since then, of course, but nothing that lasted. Commitment had never been a strong point with him after Sandra; he was dedicated to his job, and he tended to take up with women who were similarly dedicated to something other than hanging on to a partner. This meant, inevitably, that they drifted apart before long. Now he had women friends and colleagues, but not lovers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

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

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

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

‘What was the purpose of your visit?’

‘Revisiting childhood places. I was born there.’

He gave her a sharp glance. ‘How long were you away?’

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

‘Not very long to visit childhood places.’

‘It was long enough,’ Zelda said. ‘I had a deprived childhood.’

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

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

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

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

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

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