Not Dark Yet

7

Lit by Banks’s headlights, the B-road to Lyndgarth unfurled like a ribbon over the moorland, passing by fast-flowing becks and grassy hillocks, until the lights of the village came into view, nestled in a hollow and scattered around the lopsided village green. It stood at the junction of Swainsdale and Lyndsdale, where the river Lynd joined the Swain. Just a couple of miles to the north, the valley sides rose steeply on either side to form two curved limestone scars. It never got completely dark at that time of year, and a three-quarter moon made the scars stand out like bands of light floating above the darkness of the valley.

Banks drove along the high street, beside the green, past the chapel, two of the village’s three pubs and the Spar general store, then turned left and carried on west for another mile or so until he pulled up at the short turn-off for Ray Cabbot’s cottage. All the lights were on. Ray must have heard the car coming, or seen its lights, as he was standing in the doorway smoking and waiting.

When they went inside to the living room, Ray stubbed out his cigarette and poured himself a generous measure of single malt. He offered the bottle, but Banks declined. Ray’s hands were shaking as he lifted the glass to his mouth.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘I should never have left her.’

‘Calm down and tell me what happened,’ said Banks.

‘I don’t know what happened. All I know is she’s gone.’

‘There’s no note or anything?’

‘No.’

‘What time did you get back from Leeds?’

‘Around half ten. The lecture finished at nine so I headed straight back after a few questions. I was worried about Zelda. I told you we’d parted on bad terms. She was upset, angry. I wanted to... I mean...’ He put his glass down and hung his head in his hands. ‘Oh, Christ, Alan, what am I to do?’

Banks touched his shoulder. ‘Try to stay calm, Ray. Did she take anything with her? A suitcase, clothing?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t checked. But her car’s still here, round back.’

‘She can’t have got far then. Are you sure she isn’t at a friend’s house in the village? Or in the pub?’

‘She wouldn’t do that. I mean, she doesn’t really have any close friends in the village. People are still a bit frosty. We do go to the pub. Mick Slater, the landlord, is a decent guy. But I don’t think she’d go there by herself, especially not at night. You don’t understand, Alan. When I said she was gone, I didn’t mean gone as in she’d left of her own free will. I meant she’s gone as in she’s been taken.’

‘How do you know?’

Ray jerked his head towards the back of the house. ‘Her studio. It’s a mess. Like... I don’t know.’ He put his hand to his chest.

‘OK?’ Banks asked.

‘Fine. I just get a bit breathless sometimes, a bit of tightness in the chest, especially when I’m upset.’

‘You should go see a doctor.’

‘Bah. Waste of time.’

Banks brought him a glass of water from the kitchen, touched his shoulder and said, ‘Stay here. Take it easy.’

Then Banks walked out back and across the stretch of grass to the large garden shed that served as Zelda’s studio. The door was wide open and the lights on. Inside, there was enough room for her to set up an easel to paint, or tools to sculpt, and a workbench where she crafted jewellery, but not much more.

In the far corner, undamaged, stood a stack of canvases and sketches, mostly imitations of famous artists — Magritte, Modigliani, Hockney, Dali. They were good copies, though mostly unfinished. Zelda was a skilled imitator, but she wasn’t a forger. She had never tried to pass any of them off as originals. On the other hand, if you wanted a competent version of A Bigger Splash or a Modigliani nude to hang on your wall, she could knock one off for you, for a price.

Banks saw what Ray meant about the mess. There had clearly been some sort of struggle near the door. A wine glass lay shattered on the floor, its contents splattered all over the threadbare carpet. The easel had been knocked over, paints spilled, a work in progress ruined, and Banks saw what he thought to be a smear of blood on the workbench, though he supposed it could be paint or red wine. There was a smell of turpentine and oil. On her workbench, Zelda had a small vise and set of tiny engraving tools for her delicate jewellery work. He leaned forward and examined the vise closely. There was no blood on it, and it didn’t appear as if it had been used to crush her fingers or toes. That was something to be grateful for. Banks left the workshed as it was and went back to the main house.

‘See what I mean?’ Ray said. ‘Someone took her against her will.’ He was smoking another roll-up, taking short, nervous drags.

‘Are you sure you didn’t have a fight and throw stuff around and she walked out?’

‘Of course not. Don’t be so bloody silly. You saw the state of her studio. You surely can’t believe I did that? Or Zelda herself? I told you we had an argument earlier, but not a stand-up, drag-down fight. I’ve never once been violent towards her.’

‘It looks like there was some sort of struggle,’ Banks said. ‘Have you checked the rest of the house to see if she’s hiding anywhere? Or hurt.’

‘First thing I did. She’s not here.’

‘Let’s check her clothes,’ said Banks. ‘You can tell me if anything’s missing.’

Ray stubbed out the cigarette. They went upstairs and Ray led him into a small bedroom. ‘This is hers,’ he said.

‘You mean you...?’

‘We have separate bedrooms,’ Ray said.

The room was neat and tidy and showed no traces of a struggle whatsoever. The walls were painted in pastel greens and yellows, hung with random sketches and paintings, and the duvet was burgundy. Banks and Ray searched through the wardrobe and drawers. When they had finished, Ray said, ‘No. As far as I can tell, everything’s where it should be. But I don’t... you know... I didn’t keep an inventory. I’m not saying there isn’t a T-shirt or a pair of knickers missing. But she didn’t have a lot of clothes. It seems normal to me.’

‘What about the surrounding countryside? Have you been out searching for her?’

‘No. I haven’t had a chance yet. I phoned you pretty much straight away, soon as I’d seen the studio and checked the house.’

‘We’d better have a look,’ said Banks. ‘She might be out there, not far away. She may have run off, or simply gone for a walk. She might be hurt. Trapped.’

‘I never thought of that,’ said Ray, jumping at the idea that Zelda might be nearby after all.

‘Got a torch?’

They went downstairs and Ray fetched two torches from the utility room under the staircase. ‘They’re not much cop, I’m afraid, but it’s all I’ve got.’

‘That all right,’ said Banks. ‘The moon’s pretty bright. We might not even need them.’

To the east of the cottage, a grassy slope ran down to the edge of Lyndgarth village, about half a mile away. It was a wide-open space and hardly a likely spot for concealment. As far as Banks could see, it was uninhabited. On the other side, however, the cottage stood on the edge of moorland which stretched for miles to the west. It was rough terrain, covered in heather and gorse, with a number of dangerous bogs, several wooded areas and deep gullies. The natural light was almost enough to see by, but they carried their torches in case they came to a gully or pothole. About a mile to the south-west stood the dark ruins of Devraulx Abbey, suitably Gothic and ghostly in the moonlight.

As they walked, they called out Zelda’s name, but got only silence or the cry of a frightened bird in return. After a while, it became clear that they needed their torches to illuminate the tangle of roots under their feet, which slowed their progress.

After almost an hour’s wandering with no success, they returned to Ray’s cottage and flopped down on the living-room chairs. Ray rolled another cigarette and lit up again. ‘What if she’s further away, bleeding, or she broke her leg or something? Shouldn’t we go out again? Further, this time.’

‘I don’t think it’s very productive to start thinking along those lines, Ray. She’s not bleeding to death. There was no great amount of blood in her studio, if it’s even blood. And if she is out there hurt, it’s a mild night, and she’ll have no trouble lying low until morning. You know how quickly it gets light here in summer. By then I’ll have a search party organised.’

‘I can’t help thinking something terrible’s happened to her. Maybe she’s unconscious. Or dead?’

‘She’ll be fine, Ray. Zelda’s a lot more resourceful and resilient than you imagine. Think what she’s endured over the years. And think about this: if someone wanted to kill her, or hurt her, they could easily have done it here and just left her body in the studio. Don’t you think that’s what they would have done?’

‘Probably. But what’s happening to her? Do you think someone might be hurting her?’

Banks knew that the worst thing about dealing with missing persons was imagining the terrible things they might be suffering, such as torture — right down to fingernails being pulled, teeth extracted, electrodes attached to private parts, limbs smashed, bloody beatings, and, especially when women were involved, rape. There was no way of stopping such images for an empathetic person, which Ray clearly was. Banks felt empathy, too, but he had learned to control it over the years. Such imaginings could cloud his judgement and the procedures that had to be followed in these cases. The thing to concentrate on was finding the missing person alive and not to be distracted by what he or she might be suffering in the meantime. It was hard, but he had learned to do it most of the time. The fears only came back in the dark hours, three or four in the morning, when he lay awake and terrible images crowded his mind. Ray was already at that stage.

‘There’s no evidence that anyone harmed her in the studio,’ Banks said, ‘and I assume if it was information they wanted, they could have got it out of her there.’

‘But who could have done this? Might immigration have taken her?’

‘Well, for a start,’ Banks said, ‘they haven’t yet stooped to abducting people from their homes by force. Even they wouldn’t go that far.’ Though even as he said it, he wondered. Certainly if someone put up resistance, immigration officers might use the same sort of force as the police would to make an arrest in similar circumstances. He still very much doubted that was what had happened.

‘Do you think she might have been kidnapped?’

‘Maybe. The thing is, we don’t know. All we know is that she’s gone and that it looks as if someone took her against her will.’

‘I’ve got money. I can pay the ransom. Up to a point. I can sell more paintings.’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Ray.’

Ray stood up and started pacing. ‘But we have to do something. We can’t just sit here.’

‘I need to call it in,’ said Banks. ‘Get a team set up. Lines of inquiry. Time can be crucial in these cases, and we’ve already wasted too much.’ He didn’t want to tell Ray that most murders occur soon after a person goes missing. On the other hand, it had made sense to check the house and the surrounding countryside thoroughly before gearing up for a full missing person investigation. ‘Did you touch anything in the studio?’ he asked.

Ray shook his head. Banks hadn’t either. He had deliberately kept his hands in his pockets.

‘Did you leave it exactly as you found it?’

‘Yes. The door was open, the lights on.’

Banks reached in his pocket for his mobile. Nobody would appreciate such a call in the early hours, but it had to be done. When he connected with the comms room he asked for the duty officer and explained in clear terms what had happened, stating that, in his opinion, Zelda had been forcibly abducted by persons unknown and that AC Gervaise should be informed at once. All patrol officers should keep their eyes open for a woman matching Zelda’s description, which he gave them, with a little help from Ray. He also asked that they organise a search team for the immediate moors as soon as it was daylight, and have AC Gervaise alert the CSIs to come and search the victim’s premises. ‘And tell them to be careful driving in,’ he added. ‘There might be tyre tracks and Lord knows what else out there. Fingerprints and trace evidence in the studio.’

Ray sat pale and shaking as Banks talked on. When he’d finished, Banks put his phone away and made some notes about timing. ‘You need to know they’ll be a lot harder on you than I’ve been,’ he said. ‘The first suspect in a missing persons case is always the one who reports it, along with the missing person herself.’

‘But you know I’d never do anything like that,’ pleaded Ray. ‘Isn’t it obvious? I love Zelda. I could never harm her.’

‘Doesn’t matter what I think. And to an objective interviewer, it won’t be obvious. People kill for love as often as they do for profit or hatred. You need to tell them absolutely everything you think will help us find Zelda. And I mean everything. Don’t gloss over the row you had because thinking about it makes you feel bad, or you think it’ll make them suspect you more. Tell them. They’ll also want to know her habits, haunts, friends, and so on. Any problems or worries, too. Whether you thought she was having an affair. I know we think she was abducted from her studio after a struggle, and that’s what it looks like, but she may have run off and gone to hide somewhere, or to be with someone. Maybe she wrecked the studio herself in a fit of rage, or she decided to disappear and the mess is a red herring or a cover-up.’

‘She wouldn’t do that,’ Ray said. ‘And there’s nobody else. I’d know.’

‘The point is that we don’t know what happened. All we have to go on is guesswork. Just tell them what you know about the work she did and the people who abused and enslaved her. Her fears about Immigration Enforcement, her relationship with Annie. I know you say she didn’t tell you much about her past, and it’s possible I can fill in a few blanks myself, but tell them everything you do know. It may all be connected.’

Ray swallowed. ‘What now?’ he asked.

‘I don’t suppose you want to go to sleep?’

‘No way. I need to stay awake. Someone might call. A ransom demand or something. Or maybe Zelda herself. Annie. My God, I should call Annie.’

Banks stood up. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘I need to talk to her. The officers should be here soon. I’ll head to the station and start organising things from there.’

‘No,’ said Ray, reaching out and grabbing his elbow. ‘Don’t go. Stay here with me, Alan. Please. I’m at my wits’ end and I can’t be alone. I want you to head the investigation. I need to know you’re on this a hundred per cent.’

Banks disengaged his arm gently. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do my best. I don’t think my being a friend will disqualify me from trying to find Zelda, and it may even give me an advantage in any search, but there’s always a possibility my bosses might think I’m too close to things. I’ll stay here for now and talk to the team when they arrive. There’s one condition.’

‘Anything.’

‘Seeing as I won’t be driving home for a while, you can clear some space on your sofa and pour me a large glass of that fine Highland Park right now.’

After he finished the whisky, sleep didn’t seem to be an immediate possibility, so Banks left Ray and went to check out the studio again. This time he took a pair of latex gloves from the crime scene kit in the boot of his car so as not to disturb any evidence that the attackers might have left there.

First, he picked up Zelda’s leather satchel-style shoulder bag, the one she always carried, from the chair. Its contents were as one would expect: mobile phone, keys, purse, and cigarettes — but in addition she also carried a small digital camera, a black Moleskine notebook, a Kindle, and a little white case of AirPods. There were a few other inconsequential odds and ends — paper tissues, tampons, a combination penknife/corkscrew, hairbrush, lipstick, a couple of rollerball pens, and a charger for the iPhone.

Zelda had a desk in the far corner of the studio, which seemed untouched by the struggle, and on it sat her MacBook along with a small flat-top printer. Banks knew better than to touch the computer, even with his protective gloves on. The CSIs would rush it to tech support for a thorough check. It was easy to lose data inadvertently if you didn’t know what you were doing, and Banks would have been the first to admit that he didn’t. He wasn’t tech-illiterate or a Luddite by any means, but the inner workings of the CPUs and vagaries of internal architecture and configurations of computers were way beyond his grasp.

He glanced over at the titles on the bookshelf above the desk. As he would have expected with Zelda, there were a lot of literary classics — Dostoevsky, Kafka, Dumas, Flaubert, Dickens, Hardy — along with an odd selection of children’s books, mostly by Enid Blyton, Jacqueline Wilson, and Roald Dahl, and a few Modesty Blaise novels by Peter O’Donnell. There was also, he discovered on further investigation, a half row of non-fiction books concerned with the stories of women trafficked and raped by terrorist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram, especially Yazidi and Rohingyan women, including The War on Women by Sue Lloyd-Roberts, Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar, and Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl.

One of the desk drawers was filled with printer paper and spare cartridges, another with a selection of pens and pencils, rulers, and other stationery items. But this drawer also contained some more personal items — photos of her and Ray in happier days, a few sentimental souvenirs from trips they had made together. There was a newspaper clipping about the discovery of Faye Butler’s body, which made sense now that Banks knew Zelda had met Faye. There were also some official papers, including her French passport. It still had a few years left on it, and when he examined the stamps he noticed the most recent was from Chișinău, dated the previous Friday. He knew that was where she had grown up, and where she had first been abducted from, and he wondered what she had been doing back there so recently.

When he had finished, Banks stood at the centre of the room and opened the notebook. It wasn’t a diary or a journal, but more of a catch-all. There were fragmentary shopping lists, titles of books she wanted to read, quotations from books she had been reading, and memos to herself, as well as poems and story ideas, passages of self-analysis, descriptions of dreams and fantasies. There were also several lengthy descriptions of landscapes: an unnamed stretch of the Croatian coastline, the moorland around Windlee Farm, a view of London from somewhere on the South Bank near Blackfriars Bridge, a London hotel called the Belgrade.

There were flashes of memory, too, mostly bad — a vicious beating in Ljubljana, a john who threatened her with a knife in Pristina, a failed suicide attempt in Minsk. It made for harrowing reading. In addition, several pieces read very much like fantasies of revenge against people who had harmed her: a pimp in Paris called Darius, Goran Tadić, and someone called Vasile Lupescu. These sections might also be notes towards a story, or stories, she intended to write someday. Zelda was an artistic type and a keen reader; perhaps she had ambitions towards fiction and this was a record of her imaginings.

Banks hoped the notebook might offer some clues to Zelda’s whereabouts, and he would study it further for that very reason. But it also put him in a difficult position. At the moment, he was the only one in possession of these private musings; if he didn’t include the notebook with the rest of Zelda’s possessions, he would be guilty of withholding evidence. But evidence of what? he reasoned. Fantasising about a murder isn’t the same as committing one. Jotting down notes for a mystery story isn’t a crime.

Besides, he couldn’t, in all conscience, create more problems for Zelda when she was probably living in terror of her life. He would ask her about the notebook when he found her.

Without further thought, Banks slipped the notebook in the inside pocket of his jacket and went back to the main house.

Dawn broke early over Lyndgarth Moor, and by the time the sun was up, a semicircle of officers moved slowly west from the isolated cottage. Seen from afar, they could have been grouse-beating but for the police uniforms most of them were wearing.

Back in the house, Banks and Ray Cabbot sat drinking strong coffee with a fresh-faced AC Gervaise, who had only just arrived smelling of soap and shampoo. Banks had had a fitful night on the sofa and wondered if he looked as bad as he felt, while Ray, he imagined, hadn’t slept at all. His clothes were wrinkled, his eyes blurry and red. Two detectives from the Northallerton HQ at Alverton Court — DS Flyte and DC Bharati — had appeared with the search team and CSIs, and they had already questioned Ray. No wonder the poor bloke was exhausted, Banks thought.

No one was yet any nearer to finding Zelda or to working out what had happened to her. She hadn’t been seen by any of the night patrols, and though her description had gone out nation-wide, the general thinking was that she couldn’t be that far away. No one would want to risk a long journey with a kidnapped woman and all the possible encounters with police cars and CCTV cameras that might occur. Whoever took her had probably planned it all out in advance and had a place already prepared somewhere in the Dales. Perhaps a deserted farmhouse or ruined barn, Airbnb, or a remote cottage rental. It wasn’t as if there was any scarcity of isolated spots and abandoned buildings out there. It depended on what her abductors planned to do with her, of course. And when they planned to do it.

The CSIs agreed there had been a struggle in the studio but found no immediate evidence of harm being done to Zelda. The suspect bloodstain turned out to be paint. They were still working out there, collecting trace evidence, fingerprints, and anything else that seemed relevant. The search team had first gone through the house and grounds, even though Ray assured them he had already done so. They were just doing their jobs, Banks told him, and it paid to be thorough, but Ray complained anyway. He must have smoked a whole pouch of Drum, and the front room stank of smoke.

One positive outcome was that the CSIs were able to determine the direction in which a car had travelled by the pattern of fresh tyre tracks — and it had turned on to the moorland road, an unfenced track, heading westward, deeper and deeper into the wild heathland dotted with tiny hamlets and remote farms. West wasn’t the best way out of the area if the abductors wanted to link up with any of the major motorways. They would have about a two-hour drive over rough moorland terrain to get anywhere, and they probably wouldn’t want to be so exposed for that long. They could have no idea when the hue and cry over Zelda’s disappearance would go up.

‘So what’s next?’ Ray asked.

Gervaise glanced at Banks. ‘You’re SIO, Alan,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

‘We’ll see if the early search teams turn up anything,’ Banks said, ‘then we’ll start a door-to-door in the village and out in the dale, asking if anybody saw or heard anything unusual. We’ll also talk to Zelda’s friends and try to find out about anyone who might wish her harm. We don’t know what actual time she was taken yet, do we?’

‘You know I was over at your place late yesterday afternoon,’ Ray said. ‘About half five, six. Then I drove to Leeds, gave my talk and got back here by about half past ten.’ He glanced at Gervaise. ‘Soon as I realised something was seriously wrong I phoned Alan and he was here in, what, twenty minutes?’

‘If that,’ Banks said. ‘And it was about a quarter to eleven when Ray phoned.’

‘So any time between about five o’clock and ten-thirty,’ said Gervaise.

Ray nodded.

‘Tell me, why did you call Superintendent Banks rather than the police station?’

‘The other blokes asked me that, too. I would have thought it was a no-brainer. I know him. He lives nearby. He’s a mate. And he’s a detective. Made sense to me.’

‘What about your daughter?’

‘Annie? Dunno. I didn’t think of her at first.’

‘Why not? Just because she lives further away?’

‘Not really.’

‘Because she’s a woman?’

‘No. Because she’s my daughter.’

‘You might as well know,’ Banks said, ‘that Annie and Zelda don’t get along too well.’

‘Oh?’ said Gervaise, glancing at Ray. ‘And why’s that?’

‘None of your—’

Banks cut Ray off. ‘Plenty of reasons,’ he said. ‘You know families. They just got off on the wrong foot, that’s all. It’s hardly relevant. You don’t think Annie had anything to do with this, do you?’

‘It pays to be thorough and not discount anything,’ Gervaise said. Then she smiled. ‘But no, I don’t think DI Cabbot is a suspect. Though I do think she’s too close to the case to work it in an objective manner. She’s a relative.’

‘Zelda and I aren’t married,’ Ray said.

‘A mere technicality,’ said Gervaise. ‘I’m going to keep her on the Blaydon rape case for the time being. DC Masterson, too. You can have DS Flyte and DC Bharati, Alan. Let’s see how this goes today before we have another meeting and decide whether to raise the investigation to another level and bring in more troops.’

‘I think it’s pretty obvious something’s happened to Zelda, don’t you?’ said Ray. ‘Why wait? What do you lot need to get you started, a dead body?’

‘Ray,’ said Banks. ‘Everything that can be done is being done. When we see where we’re going, we’ll know whether we have to allocate extra resources. What we hope is that we’ll have Zelda back safe and sound long before we need to make that decision.’

Ray rolled another cigarette and gave him a look that said, ‘Bullshit.’