Strange Affair

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The sun was up by the time the operation had been approved by the brass in SO19, the Metropolitan Force Firearms unit at Scotland Yard, and the team had been assembled and briefed. Annie and Brooke gathered with the specialist firearms officers outside the house near King’s Cross, in the narrow streets around Wharfdale Road. The house was part of a terrace, and the SO19 team leader had acquired a set of plans. Young girls had been seen by neighbors coming and going, sometimes with men, at all hours. There were eight officers in the team, all wearing protective headgear and body armor and carrying Glock handguns and Heckler and Koch MP5 carbines. Each man had been briefed on what section of the house he was to secure. Three more men watched the back of the house.

It was an eerie sight, Annie thought, and there was something slightly unreal about it. One or two onlookers had gathered at the street corners, held back by the uniformed officers stationed there. It was a humid morning and a light mist hung in the air. There was little traffic in the immediate area but Annie could hear horns and engines in the distance. Another day in the big city was beginning.

In a way, Annie wished that Banks had been granted permission to attend; she would have liked him by her side. But these operations were strictly regulated and there was no way they were letting Roy Banks’s brother be a part of it. She had talked to him on the phone late the previous evening, and he had told her about his visit to the Albion Club. In exchange, Annie had told him what Dr. Lukas had told her about the late girls and Carmen Petri.

On the prearranged signal, the SO19 team battered down the front door and stormed into the house. Annie and Brooke, unarmed, had instructions to wait outside until the place was secured, then they would be allowed in to question any witnesses or suspects. Brooke was unusually quiet. Annie felt herself tense up as she heard sounds from inside the house – shouts, commands, a woman’s scream, something thudding on the floor.

But there were no shots, and she took that as a good sign.

She had no idea how long it took, but eventually the team leader emerged and told them the house was secured. There had been one guard armed with a baseball bat and three other men, none of them armed. The rest of the occupants were young women. They had best take a look for themselves, he told them, shaking his head in disbelief.

Annie and Brooke went inside. It was a shabby place, in poor repair, with old wallpaper stained and peeling off in places, no stair carpet and only dirty linoleum on the ground floor. The smells of stale sex and cigarette smoke permeated the air. Little light got in through the windows, so the officers had turned on all the lights they could find, mostly bare bulbs, and they hardly flattered the scene, just gave it an extra harsh edge.

The seven girls were all in a small room upstairs. Probably more lived there, Annie guessed, but they would be out working the streets around King’s Cross. No matter what the time of day, business never stopped. The area had had a bad reputation for years, and Annie remembered how the girls were once called Maggie’s Children because they came down on the trains from the north when all the jobs disappeared up there. These days they might be known as Putin’s Children, Iliescu’s or Terzic’s.

The SO19 officers searched the place as Annie and Brooke went over to the girls. The sparsely furnished room smelled of sweat and cheap perfume and the girls were all dressed in skimpy clothing – tight hot pants, micro skirts, thigh-highs, see-through tops – and their faces were garish with lipstick and eye makeup. Some of them looked high; none looked much older than fifteen. Beyond the fear in their expressions Annie could see only resignation and despair. This was truly the generation of lost girls Dr. Lukas had described, she thought. Christ, she wanted to take them home and scrub the makeup off and feed them a decent meal. Most of them were skinny, and some had sores on their lips. Several of them were smoking and that added to the cloying atmosphere of the room.

Other rooms in the house were equipped with beds and washbasins, but this seemed to be a general sitting room. The four men the SO19 team had found had all been handcuffed and bundled out into the van. The girls had been checked for weapons as a matter of routine, then left alone, a guard on the door.

“Ma’am?” One of the team stood at the door and beckoned to Annie. “I think you should see this.”

He led Annie to a room no bigger than a cupboard. Inside was a young girl, naked but for the thin sheet another officer was wrapping around her. She was painfully thin and blood crusted the cleft between her nose and upper lip. She was alive, but her eyes looked dead. The only other thing in the room was a bucket, its stench abominable.

“Get an ambulance,” Annie said. She helped the girl to her feet, keeping the sheet wrapped around her, and slowly took her back to the others. One of the girls ran forward and took the newcomer in her arms, mumbling endearments, and helped her sit in an armchair, perching on the arm beside her.

“Can you speak English?” Annie asked.

The girl nodded. “A little.”

“What happened to her?”

“She’s new,” the girl told her in heavily accented English, still stroking her friend’s hair. “She would not do what they tell her so they lock her up and beat her. She has not eaten for three days.”

Brooke was trying to talk to the other girls, but it didn’t appear they spoke English. Whatever the reason, they all seemed afraid of him and no one would say a word. Most of them wouldn’t even look at him. Annie thought she understood why. She took him aside. “Look, Dave,” she said, seeing his crestfallen expression. “It’s not your fault, but they don’t know you’re a decent man. They don’t know any decent blokes. It might be best if you went down and questioned the men.”

Pale, Brooke nodded. “You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll manage,” said Annie. She touched him gently on the shoulder and he left.

“What will happen to us?” asked the girl on the chair arm, who seemed to have taken charge. She had dark hair down to her shoulders, thin arms and a pale complexion.

It was a good question and Annie wasn’t sure she knew the answer. The object of the raid had been to take Happy Harry Mazuryk and, with any luck, find Carmen Petri. Annie didn’t know if Harry had been one of the four men arrested, though from what she had seen in passing, none of them matched his description.

“You’ll all be taken good care of,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Veronika.”

“Right, Veronika. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I can’t tell you anything. He will kill me.”

“No, he won’t,” said Annie. “We’ll put him in jail.”

“You don’t understand. He wasn’t here, only his stupid guard. Those other men are here for…” She made an obscene gesture with her hips.

“Where is Hadeon Mazuryk?”

She flinched at the sound of his name. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” said Annie. “What about Carmen? Do you know Carmen Petri?” She looked around at the frightened girls. “Is she here?”

They all shook their heads. One started crying. Annie turned back to Veronika. “Do you know Carmen?”

Veronika nodded.

“Where is she?”

“She is not here. Carmen is one of the special girls.”

“What do you mean?”

“She is very beautiful. She speaks very good English. She does not have to go out to the street. Men come to her. Pay more.”

This was what Annie had heard from Dr. Lukas. Still she wondered whether Carmen had been killed. “Do you know where she is, Veronika? I really need to talk to her.”

Veronika turned to the girl in the sheet and stroked her hair again, then she looked back at Annie, her face stern. “There is another house,” she said. “I have talked to Carmen. She has told me. She is there.”

Banks didn’t regret too much being barred from the King’s Cross raid. He had been on such operations before and generally found the paramilitary elements quite tedious. He did, however, want to know the results, which was why he was sitting anxiously at the kitchen table early with his morning coffee and newspaper, mobile beside him at the ready.

He was still puzzling over what had happened between Roy and Lambert at the Albion Club that Friday, and the best he could come up with was that Lambert had proposed something Roy didn’t approve of and became worried he’d give the game away. Their friendship went back to university days and they had got up to all sorts of things together. They had been out of touch for a long time, though, and Lambert probably didn’t know that Roy had redrawn his moral lines.

If Lambert wanted Roy to come in on importing abducted teenage girls for the sex trade, as Annie suggested was happening, then Roy would probably have balked at that, Banks thought. If he had been ignorant of the true way in which the girls were forced into prostitution, as Dr. Lukas had told Annie she was, then he would have found out via Jennifer, who had talked with Carmen Petri and learned something of the truth on the Monday of the week she died. The timing was important here. Roy might have been on the verge of getting involved when he found out the truth after Carmen told Jennifer, and Lambert spent the next few days trying to convince him it was okay. Then something else must have tipped the balance, something Roy found out on the day he disappeared.

Banks guessed that when Roy left the bar for the casino, Lambert went into the toilet and phoned someone – maybe Max Broda – and told him the situation was critical. After that, Broda took control and had a car ready to pick Roy up outside the club and take him to the abandoned factory in Battersea. Ponytail and his crony must also have been working for Broda, and they had been assigned to watch Jennifer and keep an eye on her movements. Banks could imagine the mobile conversations back and forth between the Mondeo, following Jennifer, and the factory, where Roy had been taken, culminating in the order to kill her. Perhaps Roy had also intended to head up to Banks’s cottage when he realized things had gone too far, but he hadn’t had the chance. They’d got to him first.

As Banks thought about it all, a number of things came together in his mind, the way it sometimes happened when he felt most lost. Annie had told him that Dr. Lukas had said the baby was going to be adopted by a “Mr. Garrett.” He remembered Dieter Ganz saying “Gareth” with his slight accent yesterday, and imagined that the men Carmen Petri had heard saying it also had accents, as she no doubt did herself. In Ganz’s case, it had come out sounding like “Garrett” and that was exactly what Dr. Lukas had said, that the men were taking good care of Carmen and her baby for “Mr. Garrett.”

Was that it, then, the new thing that Roy had discovered? Was Lambert himself adopting Carmen’s baby, buying it, and was that why it was so important for him to stop Roy from blowing the whistle? There was one way to find out, one person he could ask.

Banks went up to Roy’s office, where he thought he had seen an atlas. He pulled it down and found that Quainton was in Buckinghamshire, not too far from Aylesbury. It was a nice day for a drive in the country, he thought, and it would be interesting to meet the elusive Mrs. Lambert. He grabbed his jacket and his mobile and set off for the car.

The second house was about a mile away, in Islington, but light-years away in comfort. It was a detached house with a small garden, the curtains all shut tight against the morning light. If the SO19 team leader hadn’t verified that it belonged to Mr. Hadeon Mazuryk, Annie would have thought it the home of a perfectly normal family with a couple of kids, a dog and a people carrier.

The team had had to move fast, before Mazuryk found out about the King’s Cross raid, and the SO19 team had reassembled in the van for a quick briefing. The layout of the house was similar to many others in the area, including the house one of the men lived in, and between them the officers were able to sketch out a likely floor plan. Then they quietly evacuated the houses on either side and sealed off the street at both ends.

Annie sat across the street in the car with DI Brooke, who had got nowhere talking to the men at King’s Cross, and watched. She could hear faint music from one of the downstairs rooms, a bass line of some pop song she didn’t recognize. Then she heard a man cough and someone laugh.

“You’re very quiet, Dave,” she said, turning to Brooke, who was staring down the street.

“I was warned off,” he said, without looking at her.

“What?”

“I was warned off, Annie.” Now he looked her in eye and she could see his self-disgust. “Orders from the top. Gareth Lambert’s part of an international investigation. If the police swarmed over him, all the major players would disappear into the woodwork for years. That’s what I was told. If I valued my promotion… well, I think you can fill in the rest. Oliver Drummond and William Gilmore seemed likely leads.”

“I’m sorry, Dave,” Annie said, feeling embarrassed for him. “You were only following orders.”

He gave her an ironic glance. “Isn’t that what the Germans said?”

“This is different. What else could you do?”

Brooke shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t like the feeling, that’s all. I doubt they’d warn off your pal Banks so easily.”

Annie smiled. “DCI Banks is a law unto himself,” she said. “Partly because he doesn’t feel he has anything to lose. It’s not necessarily a position to envy.” She gestured to the SO19 officers in the street. “Anyway, for better or for worse we’re getting some action now.”

Brooke nodded. “It’s gone too far. Even the brass couldn’t justify leaving vulnerable underage girls in captivity like that for one night longer than they had to. Besides, we still don’t know if or how Lambert is connected. Maybe it’s something completely different.”

“Whatever it is, we’ll find out soon,” said Annie. “They’re going in.”

Half the men went around the back and the rest prepared to enter through the front door. Annie held her breath as one of them slammed the battering ram and the wood splintered, then they were in. She heard similar sounds from the back.

This time, in addition to the shouting and screaming, Annie heard shots. So did the neighbors farther down the street, who soon appeared at windows and in doorways, only to be kept at bay by the uniformed officers deployed on crowd duties. After an agonizing period of silence, the team leader stepped out and waved Annie and Brooke inside.

“Everybody all right?” Annie asked.

“We are,” he said. “Eddie took one on the chest but the body armor worked fine. He’s feeling a bit sore, that’s all. Look, we’re waiting for the ambulance and for the brass to get here. You know what it’s like whenever shots are fired. Forms in triplicate. Questions. You feel more like a criminal than a copper.”

Annie and Brooke followed the grumbling team leader into the front room. Four men had been sitting around playing cards at a folding table. Two of them were handcuffed and two of them were slumped against the wall with holes in their chests, covered in dark bibs of blood. Blood had also sprayed on the walls and carpeting. Annie felt a bit sick. She hadn’t seen many gunshot victims before and hadn’t been prepared for the smell of the exploded ammunition mingled with that of fresh blood in the room.

One of the dead men resembled the description she had heard of Hadeon “Happy Harry” Mazuryk, and the other one had a bodybuilder’s physique, long greasy hair tied back in a ponytail and a thick gold chain around his neck. One of the bullets must have severed the chain because it snaked in one long piece down his bloody chest.

Annie didn’t recognize the other two men. Both were looking sullen, handcuffed and guarded by SO19 officers with their Heckler and Kochs at the ready. One of the men might have been the driver of the Mondeo, but all the descriptions she had of him were vague. The more she looked at the other one, the more he seemed familiar: the spiky hair, goatee beard. Then she remembered: the photograph Banks had shown her, the one his brother apparently took just days before he died. This was the man who had been sitting with Gareth Lambert at an outdoor café. Now there was a connection, whatever it meant.

An ambulance arrived and men filled the room. Annie and Brooke followed one of the officers upstairs. There were three bedrooms, all of them occupied by beautiful young girls, who were more than a little unnerved by the shooting. SO19 officers dealt with the other two and Brooke hung back as Annie entered the room and walked over to the pregnant girl, who was lying on the bed looking frightened.

“Carmen?” she said. “Carmen Petri?”

The girl nodded, seeming surprised that Annie knew her name. She looked a little older than the girls in the King’s Cross house, perhaps as old as nineteen or twenty, and she wore much less makeup. It was difficult to tell what her figure had been like because she was about six months pregnant, but she had a beautiful face: full lips with a Bardot pout, a perfectly proportioned nose, flawless complexion – apart from a beauty spot by the side of her mouth – and deep dark blue eyes damp with tears. Annie couldn’t read her expression and guessed that Carmen was a girl who had become adept at hiding her feelings and thoughts for the purposes of self-preservation.

“What happened?” Carmen asked.

“I’ll explain it all later,” Annie said. “I’m happy to meet you at last. I’m Annie Cabot. Will you answer some questions?”

“Where’s Hadeon?”

“Dead.”

“Good. And Artyom?”

“Who’s he?”

“Big man. Ponytail.”

“He’s dead, too.”

“That is also good,” she said, shifting on the bed slightly. Annie could see an expression of discomfort cross her features as she moved. Probably the baby kicking.

“What happened to you?” Annie asked. “How did you get here?”

“Is a long story,” she said. “And a long time ago. I was taken from street when I was a young girl.”

“How young?”

“Sixteen.”

“By who?”

She shrugged. “A man.”

“Where?”

“A village near Craiova, in Romania. You will not have heard of it.”

“You went to see Dr. Lukas at the Berger-Lennox Centre?”

“Yes. She was good to me.” Carmen reached for a cigarette. “She wanted me to stop smoking, but I tell her a girl must have one vice. I don’t drink and I don’t take drugs.” Her English was remarkably good, Annie thought, and she could see what Veronika meant about her being beautiful. There was a sophistication about her beyond her years, and Carmen had the kind of class you don’t usually associate with people in her profession.

Annie wondered how on earth she could stand the life without some form of escape, but what did she know? And what could she presume to know about someone who had been through what Carmen had been through.

“Do you remember Jennifer Clewes?”

“Yes. She works with Dr. Lukas.”

“She’s dead, too, Carmen. Someone killed her.”

Carmen looked alarmed. “Why?”

“We don’t know. We think it might have to do with something you told her. Jennifer and her boyfriend seemed to know something about what was going on here. Did you say anything to her when you were talking last week?”

Carmen looked down at her swollen belly. “The doctor think we do this because we want to,” she said. “I tell her she does not know how bad things are, that none of us are here because we want. I tell Jennifer, too. Some stories of what happen to girls. I should not have said that. But I think I was feeling brave because they were treating me well, different from the others.”

“When did you tell her this?”

“Last time I go to clinic. Not long. Monday, I think.”

“Did Artyom know you’d been talking?”

“He took me back in the car and told Hadeon. They could not hurt me to make me tell them anything. I knew that. But…”

“I think I know,” said Annie. “They threatened to harm your parents back home, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” Carmen whispered.

“So you told them.”

“Yes.”

Annie nodded. “That house in King’s Cross,” she said. “We’ve just come from there. Those girls were treated terribly. I’ve never seen anything like it.

“I have been there. Hadeon always tells me I have been very lucky. For me men pay hundreds of pounds a night, for those girls they must have many men to make such money. Hadeon makes his girls work very hard. He tells me if I am not good he will send me there, too. I am happy he is dead.”

“Do you think he would have people killed who found out what he was doing?”

Carmen nodded. “Harry once killed a girl with his bare hands for refusing to have sex with him.”

“Did Artyom work for him?”

“Yes. And Boris.”

“With the cropped blond hair?”

“That is Boris.”

The driver, Annie thought. “There was another man downstairs.” Annie described him. “Do you know who he is?”

“All I know is that his name is Max and that he brings new girls for Harry. He is not always here. I have never talked to him.”

Annie imagined that when Mazuryk knew Carmen had talked, he or Max had brought Lambert in to handle damage control, and that was what had been going on all week. Mazuryk had also sent Artyom and the driver to keep an eye on Jennifer, watch where she went. Perhaps Lambert had talked to Roy and managed to assure Mazuryk that no one would be ringing the police, but negotiations were tense; then something else happened, something that changed it all.

“Do you know a man called Lambert?” Annie asked.

“Lambert? No,” said Carmen.

Annie gestured toward her stomach. “What’s going to happen to you?”

“I’m going to have my baby. It makes them take good care of me. I get food and they leave me alone. I get bored sometimes. The only times I can go out is to see Dr. Lukas, and then Artyom usually takes me. But it is much better than before.”

“Do you know who the father is?”

Carmen gave her a scornful look.

“And what about the baby? Dr. Lukas told me it was going to be adopted.”

“Yes. They want to sell the baby to a rich man. She will go to a good family and have a good life. That is why they treat me well, to keep the baby healthy. Harry always jokes when he sees me, how he must keep me healthy for Mr. Garrett.” A sudden anxiety came into her voice. “But Harry is dead. What is going to happen me now?”

“I don’t know,” said Annie. “I really don’t know.”

Banks remembered something on his way out and opened the door to Roy’s garage. The Porsche still stood there gleaming and immaculate. He opened the driver’s door and sat down, reaching into the side pocket for the AA road atlas. It was still open to the same page as it had been before, and this time Banks spotted Quainton on the top right. Well, he thought, it was hardly conclusive, but a bit of a coincidence nonetheless. Perhaps Quainton had been Roy’s port of call before he got home, rang Banks and went off to the Albion Club with Lambert. What had he found out there that had disturbed him so?

Banks took the AA atlas, locked up the car, garage and house behind him and headed for the M41 and Quainton. As far as he could gather, after a number of diversionary maneuvers, there was no one on his tail. He had his mobile on the seat beside him and just beyond Berkhamsted Annie rang and told him about the raids, the deaths of Hadeon Mazuryk and Artyom, and about her interview with Carmen Petri. It put a few things in perspective and persuaded Banks that he was certainly heading in the right direction.

An hour and a half after leaving London, he was there.

Quainton stood at the bottom of a hill, a straggling sort of place scattered around a village green. Banks parked there, near the George and Dragon. He paused a moment and glanced at the brick windmill at the top of the hill, then went into the pub. He hadn’t got an address from Dieter Ganz, just the village name, but he guessed the place was small enough that they would probably know Lambert and his Spanish wife at the local pub.

It looked like a good place to eat. Blackboards offered steak and Stilton pie, French country chicken and Thai red curry. Maybe he’d come back after talking to Lambert and his wife. The barman knew the Lamberts and told him they lived in a big house on the Denham Road, and he couldn’t miss it. Banks thanked him and set off.

He found the house easily enough on the outskirts of the village. It looked the sort of place that had had a few additions over the years – gables, an extra wing, a garage – so it was hard to tell in what period the original building had been erected. Banks pulled into the gravel drive, parked out front and went to ring the doorbell.

In no time at all a young woman answered, smiled at him and asked what he wanted. Banks didn’t want to alarm her, so he showed her his warrant card but told her that he was Roy Banks’s brother.

The woman made a sympathetic face. “Poor Mr. Banks,” she said. “Please come in. Gareth is still in London at the moment, but you are welcome to a cup of tea. I know you English love your tea. I am Mercedes Lambert.” She held out her hand and Banks shook it lightly.

Her accent matched her sultry Mediterranean looks and Banks could indeed believe that she had been a Spanish actress and pinup girl. She still had a fine figure, shown to advantage in the shorts and sleeveless green top she was wearing. Her olive skin stretched taut over an exquisite bone structure and her long chestnut hair fell in waves over her shoulders.

When they got inside she led Banks to a large living room, big enough to hold a grand piano along with a damask three-piece suite. Every inch the English country lady, she called the maid and asked her to bring tea. Banks should have known she wouldn’t be taking care of a place as big as this by herself. He wondered if she was bored being stuck out in the country and whether she often stayed at the Chelsea flat with her husband. She looked a good few years younger than Lambert, but not as young as Corinne or Jennifer. Banks pegged her at mid-to-late thirties.

“I understand you were an actress in Spain?” he said, sitting in a chair with carved wooden arms.

She blushed. “Not very good. I was in… what do you call them, films where monsters come after me and I scream a lot?”

“Horror films?”

“Yes. Horror films.” She shrugged. “I do not miss it.”

I’ll bet you don’t, thought Banks, glancing around the room. French windows opened on a patio beyond the piano, and Banks could see sunlight shimmering on the blue surface of a swimming pool like a Hockney painting. “Did you know Roy well?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I met him only once, last week, when he came here. But Gareth told me what happened. It is terrible.”

She pronounced the name “Garrett,” too.

“When did you meet him?” Banks asked.

“I think it was last Friday.” She smiled. “But sometimes the days all seem the same here.”

“What did he want?”

At that moment, the maid came in with the tea and set the tray down on the table between Banks and Mercedes Lambert. After she had added milk and poured, she left as soundlessly as she had entered. Banks didn’t usually take milk, but it didn’t bother him.

Mercedes frowned. “I don’t really know why he came,” she said. “He wanted to talk to me about a girl called Carmen and her baby, but I said I didn’t know her. Carmen sounds very Spanish, I know, but you also find it in other countries.”

“What did he say next?”

“He told me this Carmen was pregnant and he understood that she was selling her baby to me for adoption.” Mercedes frowned. “He said Gareth told him this was so.”

“Are you adopting Carmen’s baby, Mrs. Lambert?”

“No, of course not. That’s what your brother asked me. I didn’t understand why he would think such a thing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, as I told your brother. Then a very strange thing happened.”

“What?”

“Little Nina cried, and I showed her to him and told him all about her, and Mr. Banks said he was sorry he’d made a mistake, and he left very quickly.”

“I’m sorry,” said Banks. “I don’t understand. Who’s little Nina?”

And then he heard it himself. A baby crying upstairs. Mercedes Lambert smiled. A few moments later, a nanny brought the baby down – it couldn’t have been more than three months old – and Mercedes held the tiny bundle, tears in her eyes.

“She is sick,” she explained to Banks. “This is what I told your brother. There is a problem with her heart. It is, what do you say? Con… con…”

“Congenital?”

“Yes. Congenital. And if she does not get a new one very soon, she will die.” Then her expression brightened. “But Gareth says we are high on the list. He has arranged with a clinic in Switzerland – the best in the world, he says – to be ready at a moment’s notice. So maybe my Nina will be lucky, yes?”

“Are you sure you have no intention of adopting another baby?” Banks asked, feeling his blood start to turn cold.

Mercedes smiled. “No. Of course not. Nina will have her new heart and she will become strong. I know it. Do you think so?”

Banks looked at Mercedes Lambert, saw the desperate hope in her face, and he looked at the pale face buried in the blankets. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, maybe she will.”

The train ride did Annie good, and when she got back to Eastvale around lunchtime she didn’t feel quite so depressed as she had after the raids. Before leaving for the station, she had tried to console Brooke over what he perceived to be a lack of backbone in giving in to “orders from above,” but in the long run she knew it was something he would have to live with and get over by himself. For reasons of their own, the powers that be, maybe through Burgess, had hampered the official police investigation and encouraged Banks to go stirring things up by himself, no doubt in the hope of luring more players out into the open rather than causing them to disappear. And no one had given a damn whether Banks got killed in the process.

When Annie got to the station, Gristhorpe, Stefan, Winsome and Rickerd were all in the squad room and there was an air of celebration around the place. It seemed appropriate. After all, Jennifer Clewes’s killer was dead, along with his boss, and the accomplices were in custody. Case solved.

“I hear you’ve been in the wars,” Gristhorpe said, looking up as she entered.

Annie sat at her desk and automatically turned on the computer. “More like doing battlefield triage,” she said. “Anyway, DI Brooke and the SO19 guys have got it all under control now. My job’s done down there.”

“Congratulations,” said Gristhorpe.

“Anything new, Stefan?” Annie asked.

“I was just telling the superintendent here that we got a quick match on the fingerprints found on DCI Banks’s door: Artyom Charkov. He doesn’t have a record but the prints match the body in the mortuary in London, the one who was shot this morning in the second raid. And they also match the partial we found on the door of Jennifer Clewes’s car. London say they found a gun on Charkov, too, a twenty-two. It’s being checked out.”

“That’s what got him shot,” said Annie. “Opening fire on an armed police officer.”

“Well, I’d have used something with a bit more stopping power than a twenty-two.”

“It’s just as well for the officer concerned that he didn’t. Anyway, it’s all a bit academic now he’s dead, isn’t it?” said Annie.

Stefan looked disappointed.

“Oh, Stefan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to belittle your efforts. There’s always the other one, Boris, the driver.”

“Essex technical support got his print from the crashed Mondeo,” said Stefan, suppressing a smile. “From inside the glove box.”

“Excellent. Things have been happening, then.”

“How’s Alan?” asked Gristhorpe.

“He’s doing okay, as far as I know, sir,” said Annie. “I think he’ll be heading back to Peterborough later today to spend a bit more time with his parents and help organize the funeral. At least he’ll be able to tell them some sort of justice has been done.”

The door opened behind Annie and she saw Gristhorpe get to his feet, a big grin on his face. “Well, if it isn’t Susan Gay,” he said, advancing toward the slightly stocky woman with the tight blond curls who stood in the doorway, Kev Templeton beaming beside her. “Come on in, lass. Join the party.”

“We’ve got him,” Susan said. “Cropley. He’s down in the custody suite under arrest for the murder of Claire Potter. All by the book. We’ve taken a DNA swab and it’s on its way to Derby. We’re also getting three DCs to do the motorway service stations with his photo. But the DNA itself will be enough.”

Templeton was beaming, too, Annie noticed. “Congratulations, Kev,” she said. “Good one.”

Templeton grinned. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Right, then,” said Gristhorpe. “Seeing as we’ve got two reasons to celebrate, who’s going for the beer?”

Banks worked most of it out on his drive back from

Quainton, but he still needed some answers. He tracked Gareth Lambert down at the travel agency on Edgeware Road, leaving his Renault parked outside. Lambert seemed surprised and more than a bit put out at being manhandled into the street as his staff looked on openmouthed, but he went without putting up a struggle.

Banks opened the passenger door and shoved him in. “Buckle up,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“I’ve got something to show you.” Banks made his way through the traffic down the side of Hyde Park to Chelsea Bridge, then across the river and along to the old Midgeley’s Castings factory. If Lambert realized where they were going or recognized the place when they arrived, he didn’t show it.

Banks pulled up on the weed-cracked concrete in front of the door and got out. He opened Lambert’s door and practically dragged him out. Lambert was heavier, but he was in poor shape, and Banks’s wiry strength was enough to propel him toward the factory door.

“What the hell’s going on?” Lambert protested. “There’s no need to rough-handle me this way. Roy’s brother or no, I’ll bloody report you.”

Banks pushed Lambert through the door and into the factory. Birds took off through the holes in the roof. The police had finished with the scene, and the chair and ropes were gone, but there were still bloodstains visible on the floor. Roy’s bloodstains. The lab had confirmed it. Banks stopped and shoved Lambert down on a pile of broken pallets and rusty, twisted scrap metal. Lambert groaned as something sharp stuck into his back.

“I’ll have your fucking job for this,” he yelled, red-faced, struggling to get up.

Banks put a foot on his chest and pushed him back. “Stay there,” he said. “And listen to me. This is where they brought Roy. You can still see his bloodstains here.” Banks pointed. “Look at that, Gareth; that’s my brother’s blood.”

“That’s nothing to do with me,” said Lambert, sitting up and rubbing his back. “I’ve never seen this place before. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re rambling.”

He tried to get to his feet, but Banks pushed him down again.

“That’s a good one,” said Banks. “Let me be perfectly clear about it, Gareth. After you and Roy had your little talk in the Albion Club, you rang Hadeon Mazuryk or Max Broda on your mobile from the club’s toilet and asked for help. I’m sure your mobile records will bear this out. You needed to get Roy out of the way. Mazuryk came himself or sent someone else, and they got him in a car outside the club and brought him here. They tortured him, you know, Gareth, to find out how much he knew, what my address was and what I knew. Maybe they even got our parents’ address out of him, because they’ve made threats in that direction, too. He was tied up on a chair just over there, bleeding, knowing he was probably going to die at the end of it all.” Banks felt close to tears of rage as he talked and it was all he could do to hold himself back from thrashing Lambert. He found an iron bar on the floor, picked it up and slapped it against his palm.

Lambert cringed. “I told you,” he said. “It’s nothing to do with me. Why would I do that? The girl and your brother were a danger to Mazuryk, not to me.”

“But you’re connected with Mazuryk. You arranged to get the girls to him after Max Broda bought them at markets in the Balkans.”

“You’ll never find any evidence of anything like that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Banks, “because that wasn’t what it was really all about. At first I thought it was about the girls you and Max Broda conspired to smuggle in for Mazuryk. Girls who had been lured by false job offers or abducted from the street. You wanted Roy in it with you, didn’t you, just like old times, and you’d been talking about it for a while, a couple of months. Roy didn’t know the whole story at first, and he might even have shown a flicker of interest if there was enough money in it for him. Lord knows, church or no, my brother was no saint.

“Then Carmen Petri let slip to Roy’s girlfriend that these girls were not willing participants. Jennifer told Roy and that changed things for him. I’d guess at that point he wanted nothing to do with it. I imagine he gave you a chance, though, for old time’s sake. I think on the Tuesday, the day after Carmen told Jennifer, Roy had lunch with you and Max Broda and you both tried to convince him everything was aboveboard. But he wasn’t convinced. That’s when he took the photograph of the two of you. He left the café first, didn’t he?”

Lambert said nothing.

“Maybe he wouldn’t have turned you in to the police,” Banks went on, “no matter how much what you were doing sickened him. I doubt that my brother had a very healthy regard for the boys in blue, given his track record. But there was his girlfriend to consider, too, wasn’t there? And she was even more outraged, being a woman. Roy must have told you at lunch on Tuesday that he’d persuaded her to keep quiet for the time being, not to contact the police, and that you needn’t harm her. But Mazuryk set Artyom and Boris to watch her just in case, to see where she went and who came to see her. If she had rung the police, they wouldn’t be content with just some anonymous voice over the phone; they’d want to visit her, or have her visit their station. That’s what Artyom and Boris were looking out for. Then, when things came to a head that Friday night in the Albion Club and Roy told Jennifer to drive up to see me, they followed her and killed her on a quiet country road.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Lambert, a condescending smirk on his face. “If only you could hear yourself. You can’t prove any of this. When I get out of here I’m going to-”

Banks kicked him hard in the stomach. Lambert groaned and rolled over, clutching his midsection and retching. “Bastard,” he hissed.

Banks swung the iron bar and hit him on the shoulder. Lambert screamed. “But it wasn’t even about the girls, was it?” Banks went on. “That was just the start of it. Oh, I’m sure you tried to convince Roy how they had a better life here, away from their war-torn countries, away from the poverty and disease and death. Maybe he even wanted to believe it. Then, in a final bid to enlist his sympathy, you told him that you were adopting Carmen Petri’s baby yourself. You probably gave him some sob story about how your wife couldn’t bear children and desperately wanted a family. You told him you’d give the child a much better life than it could have hoped for in Romania, or as the child of a prostitute in London. That was supposed to be the clincher. How benevolent of you. He’d hardly stand in the way of his old mate adopting a child privately, would he? It might not be strictly legal, but people do it all the time, don’t they? How can it be that much of a crime, to give a child hope? And even Roy had to see that any child you adopted had far more advantages than most. Financial advantages, that is.”

“So what?” Lambert argued. “So what if I was adopting her child? It’s true. The kid would have a much better life with us. Any fool can see that.”

“Maybe so,” said Banks. “But that wasn’t the real intention, was it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know why Roy had to die,” said Banks.

“What are you talking about?” Lambert’s voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

“Because of where he went earlier that day, before you came to call on him. He found out the truth.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s where I’ve just been. Quainton.”

Lambert said nothing. He seemed to shrink into himself.

“Roy went to see your wife to ask her about the adoption,” Banks went on. “They’d never met before. If it was true, he would probably have agreed to keep quiet about it all and keep Jennifer quiet, too. But Roy found out what I found out. That you and your wife have a baby girl called Nina and she needs a new heart. And the only heart that can help a baby in need of a transplant is the heart of another baby. You know what the chances are of getting your hands on one by normal routes, so when you found out one of Mazuryk’s girls was pregnant – not just any girl, mind you, but Carmen, intelligent, healthy and clean – you struck a deal. You’d pay Mazuryk for the privilege of adopting Carmen’s baby. That way he wouldn’t be out of pocket when she couldn’t work during her pregnancy. But you weren’t adopting the baby, were you? You were buying the baby’s heart. I don’t know if Mazuryk was in on it with you, but one way or another, as soon as that baby was born, it was going to be on its way to Switzerland. Were you going to kill it yourself, or have you paid a crooked doctor to do that for you?”

“Don’t be absurd. This is pure fantasy.”

“Is it? My guess is that you had someone lined up, a crooked doctor from your Balkan days, probably. You wouldn’t have the stomach to do it yourself. And then there’s the Swiss clinic, all ready to go at a moment’s notice, no questions asked. Got it all organized, haven’t you?”

Lambert squirmed like a toad on his bed of broken wood and twisted metal. At some point, he had cut his lip and the blood welled up as he spoke. “Look, you’re obviously off your rocker, Banks. Let me go and we’ll say no more about this.”

He made to get up again but Banks kicked him down and swung the bar dangerously close to his head.

“Stay where you are. Don’t you realize it’s over? Do you think that even your wife will want to know you after what you had planned?”

“She doesn’t know,” said Lambert. “If you’ve-”

“I haven’t. Not yet. Tell me the truth, Gareth. How could you be sure you had a match? Who did the tests?”

“What tests?” Lambert paused and rubbed his shoulder.

“Come on, Gareth. Humor me. Tell me all about it.”

Lambert was quiet for several moments, then he spoke. “The blood groups matched,” he said. “That’s the best you can hope for with babies, and even the blood group doesn’t matter if they’re newborn. Do you think I haven’t researched it? The heart only survives six hours outside the body, so you do the transplant first and ask questions later. A chance. It was all I asked for.”

Though Banks had pieced it all together after seeing Mercedes and Nina, he could still hardly believe it now that he was actually hearing it, that this man had cold-bloodedly bought a baby and planned to use its heart to save his daughter’s life. “Do you have even the slightest idea what you’re saying?” he said.

“Look,” said Lambert. “What chance did it have with a mother like that? Huh? Tell me. Look at her. A common prostitute. A slut. This way at least the baby could serve some purpose in being born. These people give birth in fields and think nothing of it. You haven’t seen them, Banks. You haven’t been there. I have. I know them. I’ve lived with them. They’re animals. Their filthy children wander the streets and beg and steal and grow up to be criminals and prostitutes, just like their parents. The orphanages are full of abandoned children and none of them has a chance. My child will have a chance. She can make a difference in life. Achieve something. Contribute something.”

Banks shook his head in disgust. “I wondered where Roy drew the line,” he said, “and now I know. He’d turn a blind eye to most things for the sake of money and an old friendship. To the girls. To the illegal adoption. But not to this, not to the murder of an innocent baby for its heart. What did you do on Friday at the Albion Club? Offer him money to keep quiet or try to convince him you were morally right?”

“We’d been talking all week about the girls, the adoption. Seeing Mercedes and finding out… well, that was the last straw for him.”

“Why not tell the police straightaway? Why did he bother to meet with you?”

“He wasn’t going to tell the police. He was going to tell you.”

“What? But I am the police,” said Banks.

Lambert shook his head. “You don’t understand. You’re his big brother. He expected you to handle it.”

Banks felt stunned. He hadn’t realized Roy had been calling on him as much, if not more, as a brother than as a policeman: the brother who defended him from bullies. It made a difference. Roy always shied away from the police and he would expect Banks to sort the situation without letting it become official. Banks didn’t know if he could have done that even if they hadn’t killed Roy and Jennifer, even if he’d wanted to. Things had probably gone too far already.

“So what happened at the club?” Banks asked.

“He said he’d give me an hour to think about it, for friendship’s sake. He’d be in the casino if I wanted to talk. He also told me that he already had someone on her way to see you, but he could ring her mobile and bring her back if I agreed to drop my plans.”

“What did you say after the hour was up?”

“Nothing.”

“You could have lied, told him you’d drop the plans.”

“He would still have known. Do you think he’d have let it go, not kept checking?”

“I suppose not,” said Banks. “So you sent him to his death?”

“I had to. What else could I do? I couldn’t abandon Nina and Mercedes. He was going to ruin everything. Mazuryk’s business, my Nina’s life. Mercedes’ life. Everything. Don’t you understand? I couldn’t give in to him. Without a new heart my daughter will die.”

Blood dribbled over Lambert’s lower lip and bubbled as he spoke. Banks felt like hitting him again, but he knew if he started he might never stop.

“So you had Roy killed.”

“Not me. Mazuryk.”

“Did Mazuryk know what you planned to do with Carmen’s baby?”

“Are you crazy? Nobody knew except me and the doctor I was paying. And the doctor owed me. I helped him out of a jam once. You can’t prove anything, you know. I’ll deny it all. I’ll tell them you beat me up and made me admit to things I haven’t done. Look at me, I’m all bruised and bleeding.”

“Not nearly enough,” said Banks. “You made a call to Mazuryk from the Albion Club about Roy being a loose cannon, and Mazuryk came himself, or sent Broda to pick up Roy outside and bring him here.”

“I told him Roy was threatening to tell everything. All Mazuryk cared about was the girls, the profits they made for him.”

“So Mazuryk protected his interests, and you protected yours?”

“What else could I do? What would you do if it was your daughter?”

Banks didn’t want to think about that one. “Why did they go back and take Roy’s computer? Who did that? There couldn’t be anything on it about the baby because he’d only just got back from seeing Mercedes when you arrived.”

“Mazuryk’s men. Not Artyom and Boris. Others. Not very bright. We thought he might have information on it. About me. About Mazuryk’s operation, the girls. We had talked a lot that week. I really thought he was interested at one time. I told him things. Roy used his computer a lot.”

And they hadn’t taken the mobile because they hadn’t been in the kitchen, hadn’t even known it was there, Banks guessed. Not that it mattered. Roy and Lambert had been careful not to use mobiles in their communications. They knew how wide open and incriminating such phone use could be. That was why most criminals used stolen ones. And Banks doubted that Roy had ever been in direct telephone contact with Mazuryk or Broda. Later, of course, Broda had used the mobile to send his calling card, his sick joke. “What changed things in the first place?”

“If that stupid whore hadn’t told Roy’s girlfriend that some girls had been abducted and badly treated, I don’t think any of this would have happened,” said Lambert, “and your brother and me would have been partners. I spent that week trying to convince Roy it was still the right thing to do but he didn’t like the idea that the girls were working against their will. That’s when I told him about the adoption. I thought he would see what a good thing it was.”

“And did he?”

“He wasn’t convinced. Obviously. But it softened him a bit. Until he went to see Mercedes.”

Roy a pimp, or procurer? Banks found it hard to imagine. He would probably have described himself as an investor in an escort agency, or perhaps as a travel consultant. At least his spiritual and moral conversion hadn’t cut into his desire to make a profit from just about anything, short of illegal body parts. “And to threaten my parents? Whose idea what that?”

“Mazuryk’s. When the digital photo they sent didn’t scare you off, they had to try stronger measures. They could have killed you, but I told them the last thing they needed right then was a dead policeman hot on the heels of his brother. I told them that, Banks. I saved your life. These people are not always reasonable, but I have spent time with them. I can talk to them. They followed you home and back and showed themselves on the road, to frighten you off.”

“I don’t frighten that easily. And Jennifer Clewes?”

“They were already worried about her. At first she was happy enough to help Dr. Lukas take care of the girls, but she got too friendly and Mazuryk was worried someone might actually let something slip about how they really came to be there. They thought Carmen was getting too cocky because she didn’t have to turn tricks anymore, and when Artyom saw them talking together, Carmen and Jennifer Clewes, he got suspicious and told Mazuryk. They made Carmen tell them what she had said. Without hurting her physically, you understand. They couldn’t risk harming the baby.”

“Don’t tell me. They threatened to harm her parents back home.”

“Possibly. But Artyom and Boris had been keeping an eye on Roy’s girl for a few days, then when she took off like that at the same time I told Mazuryk that Roy was out of control… Look, I wasn’t there… I don’t know for sure how it happened. But it wasn’t me.”

“But you know what happened. You set it in motion.”

“Max told me after it was done. They found out where she was going. Roy told Mazuryk when they were beating him and he phoned Artyom in the car. As soon as she got to a quiet spot on the road, they killed her. Artyom was going to kill you, too, just in case, but you weren’t there. He’s not very bright.”

“It’s a pity he didn’t,” said Banks, “because now Mazuryk is dead, Artyom is dead and the rest are going to jail. And you…”

“What about me?”

“I can’t decide whether to kill you or turn you in.”

And it was true. Banks had never in his life felt like killing someone as much as he felt like killing Gareth Lambert at that moment. If he’d had a gun, he might have done it. He hefted the iron bar, heavy in his hand, and smacked it against his palm again. That would do it. One swift blow. Crush his skull like an eggshell. Lambert was looking at him, fear in his eyes.

“No!” he said, holding his hands out to protect his face. “Don’t. Don’t kill me.”

It wasn’t just revenge for Roy, but also because he had never come across anyone so loathsome he’d even contemplate doing what Lambert was doing, let alone defend it and justify it. He could not have imagined such a thing if he hadn’t gone to see Mercedes Lambert, as Roy had, and heard poor Nina cry. Mercedes Lambert obviously knew nothing about her husband’s unholy scheme. The disgust Banks felt churned the bile in his stomach and he could bear to look at Lambert no longer.

“What are you going to do? Are you going to hurt me?” Lambert whined.

Banks hurled the iron bar. It clanged into the tangled metal about two inches above Lambert’s head. Then Banks walked away, bent over and vomited on the floor. When he had finished, he took a few deep breaths, hands on his knees, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took out his mobile.

One evening a few days later, Banks crossed the old pack-horse bridge at the western end of Helmthorpe High Street and turned right on the riverside path. It was a walk he had often enjoyed before. Flat and easy, between the trees and water, no hills to climb, and he’d end up back in Helmthorpe, where there were three pubs to choose from.

As he walked he thought about the events of the past month, how it had all started that night he saw Penny Cartwright in the Dog and Gun singing “Strange Affair.” He thought about Roy, Jennifer Clewes, Carmen Petri, Dieter Ganz and the rest.

And Gareth Lambert.

Now it was just about over. Artyom and Mazuryk were dead. Gareth Lambert was in custody, along with Boris and Max Broda, and the odds were good that they would get very long sentences. Banks’s actions had forced his hand, but Dieter Ganz seemed to think his team had enough evidence to convict them on charges of trafficking in underage girls across international borders for the purposes of prostitution. Unfortunately, raids on similar houses in Paris, Berlin and Rome had netted only minor players, as word of what had happened in London spread fast. In the Balkans, guides, drivers, kidnappers and traders had scattered. They would be back, though, Dieter had told Banks, and he would be waiting for them.

Whether Lambert would be tied to the conspiracy to kill Roy Banks and Jennifer Clewes was another matter. Lambert’s more sinister intentions couldn’t be proved. And as he had said, only he and the doctor knew what they intended to do with Carmen’s baby, and neither was talking. Banks had received a reprimand for his treatment of Lambert at the abandoned factory, which would also tend to discredit anything he claimed Lambert had told him. Still, there was a good chance that Max Broda would implicate him in the conspiracy rather than take the fall alone. And Lambert’s mobile phone records for that Friday, the eleventh of June, at the Albion Club, showed a call to Mazuryk’s number at about eleven o’clock.

As for the rest, Banks wasn’t quite sure how things would turn out. Mazuryk’s girls would eventually be processed and sent home, but who was going to repair their lives, heal their broken spirits? Perhaps some would recover in time and move on, but others would drift back into the only life they knew. Carmen Petri, Annie had told Banks, was to be reunited with her parents in Romania, where, contrary to what Gareth Lambert thought, there was a good chance that her baby might end up with a decent crack at life. Carmen had been abducted from the street three years ago and in all that time her parents hadn’t given up hoping she was still alive.

Of all of them, perhaps Mercedes Lambert had come out of it worst of all, and Banks felt deeply for her. Not only was her husband probably going to jail for a long time, but in all likelihood, short of a miracle, her baby, Nina, was going to die soon. The police were investigating Banks’s accusation and had questioned her about it, so now she also had to live with the knowledge of what her husband had been about to do. Banks could only imagine how knowledge like that might tear a mother apart and haunt her dreams forever. What might have been. The nameless, faceless issue of a Romanian prostitute she had never met measured against the life of her daughter.

His mind turned to other thoughts. He had just got back from Roy’s funeral in Peterborough. Needless to say, it had been a sad and tearful affair, but at least he had spent some time with Brian and Tracy, who had come in for the occasion, and it had given his parents some sense of that closure they valued so much. Banks never really got it. For him there was no closure.

The good news was that his mother had managed to get speedy results on the medical tests. Her colon cancer was operable and her chances of making a full recovery were excellent. She also seemed to be coping a bit better with the loss of her son, though Banks knew she would never fully recover from it, never be her old self again.

Brilliant green dragonflies hovered above the water’s surface and clouds of gnats and midges gathered above the path. The sun had almost set and the water was dark blue, the sky streaked with blood orange. Banks could hear the calls of night birds from the trees and the sounds of small animals scuffling in the under-growth. Across the river he could see the backs of the shops and houses on Helmthorpe High Street. People were sitting outside in the beer garden of the Dog and Gun and he could hear muffled conversations and music from the jukebox. It should have been Delius’s “Summer Night on the River,” he thought, breathing in the perfumed air, but it wasn’t even “Strange Affair,” it was Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives.”

Banks paused to light a cigarette and saw a figure walking toward him from the other direction. He couldn’t make out any more than a dark shape, but when it got closer he saw it was Penny Cartwright. He stood aside to let her pass. The overhanging leaves brushed the back of his neck and made him shiver. It felt as if a spider had slipped under his collar and was making its way down his back.

As she passed, Banks nodded politely and said hello, making to hurry along, but her voice came from behind him. “Wait a minute.”

Banks turned. “Yes?”

“Got a light?”

As Banks flicked his lighter she leaned in toward him, cigarette in her mouth, and her eyes were on his as she inhaled. “Thanks,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yes. Fancy. Good night, then.”

“Don’t go. I mean, wait a sec. Okay?”

She sounded nervous and edgy. Banks wondered what was wrong. They stood and faced each other on the narrow path. An owl hooted deep in the woods. Elvis continued to watch the detectives. It was almost dark now, only a few streaks of purple and crimson in the sky, like some great god’s robes.

“I was sorry to read about your brother,” she said.

“Thank you.”

Penny pointed to the beer garden. “Do you remember that night?” she said. “All those years ago?”

Banks remembered. He had sat in the garden with his wife, Sandra, and Penny and her boyfriend, Jack Barker, explaining the Harry Steadman murder. It had been a warm summer evening, just like tonight.

“How’s Jack?” he asked.

Penny smiled. She wasn’t a woman who smiled easily, and it was worthwhile when she did. “I’m sure Jack’s doing fine,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in ages. He went off to live in Los Angeles. Does a bit of TV writing. You even see his name on the screen sometimes.”

“I thought you two were…?”

“We were. But it was a long time ago. Things change. You ought to know that.”

“I suppose so,” said Banks.

“Kath behind the bar told me about the fire, about what happened to your cottage, after she saw us talking. I’m really sorry.”

“Water under the bridge,” said Banks. “Besides, I’m having it restored.”

“Still… Anyway,” she went on, not looking at him, “I was rude that night, and I’m sorry. There, I’ve said it.”

“Why did you react the way you did?”

“It wasn’t deliberate, if that’s what you mean.”

“What, then?”

Penny paused and stared into the river. “You really don’t know, do you? All those years ago,” she said finally, “the way I felt. It was like some sort of violation. I know you saved my life and I should thank you for that, but you treated me like a criminal. You actually believed that I killed my best friend.”

At one point, that was probably true, Banks thought. It was just a part of his job, and he had never stopped to think how it might have made Penny feel. Everyone gets tainted by a murder investigation. Roy had wanted his big brother, Banks remembered, not a policeman. But where does the one end and the other begin?

“And there you were,” she went on, “asking me out to dinner, casual as anything, as if none of it had ever happened.”

“People aren’t always what they seem,” he said. “When the police come around asking questions, people lie. Everyone’s got something to hide.”

“So you suspect everyone?”

“More or less. Anyone who might have motive, means and opportunity.”

“Like me?”

“Like you.”

“But I cared about Harry Steadman.”

“That’s what you told us.”

“I could have been lying?”

“As I remember it, that case was full of lies.”

Penny took one last drag on her cigarette and flicked the stub into the river. “Oops,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that. The river police will be after me.”

“Don’t worry,” said Banks. “I’ll put in a good word for you.”

She favored him with another flicker of a smile. “I’d better be going,” she said, edging away. “It’s getting late.”

“All right.”

She started along the path, paused and half-turned to face him. “Good night, then, Mr. Policeman. And I’m sorry I reacted so badly. I just wanted to tell you why.”

“Good night,” said Banks. He felt a tightness in his chest, but it was now or never. “Look,” he went on, calling after her, “maybe I’m being insensitive again, and I’m sorry I got off on the wrong foot, but is it at all within the bounds of possibility, you know, what I asked you about the other night, maybe the possibility of us, of you and me, you know… having dinner sometime?”

She turned briefly. “I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “You still don’t get it, do you?” And she walked off into the shadows.