Careless Love

by Peter Robinson

“So they were just friends?” Winsome said. “What happened?”

  “Mia just disappeared.”

  Exactly the way Adrienne’s Mia did, Winsome thought.

  “When?”

  “Around the middle of October. Poof. She was gone.”

  “Did she drop out?”

  “I don’t think she was ever in,” said Erik. “She told us she was studying English, had transferred after doing her first year in Sussex because she wasn’t happy down south. But I never saw her with a book in her hand.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything, idiot,” said Fiona. “You’re studying engineering but I don’t see you running around with a spanner in your hand.”

  “It’s electrical engineering.”

  “All right, a spark plug, then.”

  Erik laughed and broke the tension. “A spark plug. The woman’s crazy.”

  “Back to Mia,” said Winsome. “Can you describe her for me?”

  They thought for a moment, then Fiona said, “She’s about my height—that’s five foot six—wavy reddish brown hair, medium length, oval face. Brown eyes, I think.”

  “How did she dress?”

  Fiona shrugged. “Just like any student, really. Jeans, denim jacket. I didn’t really notice. She didn’t dress to show off her body, though. Most of her clothes were fairly loose.”

  “She had a great body though,” said Erik. “You could tell. She certainly had a decent pair of tits.”

  “Oh, you. Typical male. Always the breasts.”

  Winsome thought she had enough without going further into the ins and outs of Mia’s breasts. What she had heard so far matched almost exactly the description given by Colin Fairfax of the Mia who had befriended Adrienne Munro, and under much the same sort of circumstances. As far as Winsome was concerned, they were one and the same. What she needed to do next, she realized, was to get Ray Cabbot, if he was available, to work on a sketch with Colin Fairfax, then perhaps show it to Fiona, Fatima and Erik to check for accuracy, and to get their input.

  “Did Mia ever come here, to the house?” she asked.

  “Not that I know of,” said Fiona, still scowling at Erik.

  “No,” said Fatima. “None of us hang out here, anyway. It’s mostly just for working and sleeping and eating. We go out when we want to see people.”

  “OK,” said Winsome, putting away her notebook. She slipped a card from her purse and dropped it on the table. “If any one of you thinks of anything else, especially anything that might help us find this Mia, then please call me.”

  They all nodded.

  “And again,” said Winsome as she got up to leave. “I’m really sorry about your friend. She sounds like a truly special person.”

  Winsome saw Fatima’s eyes mist up before she turned and headed for the door.

  THE BUSINESSMAN across the aisle was staring at Zelda. It didn’t bother her; it happened a lot. Over time, she had learned to differentiate a lascivious stare from a suspicious one. This man wanted to fuck her. That was all. She gave him a look that told him she knew exactly what he was thinking. He immediately blushed and turned guiltily away, perhaps plagued by a mental image of the wife he had been dreaming of deceiving. Zelda smiled to herself and glanced out of the window. It worked every time. Well, almost.

  Zelda enjoyed the train journey to London from Northallerton, just as she had from Penzance. She had always traveled first class and tried to book a single seat so that she wouldn’t be bothered by any nuisance neighbors who wanted to talk. Men like the one across the aisle undressed her with their eyes, certainly, and perhaps wished they were sitting next to her, or more, but she found it easy to deal with them. She enjoyed a sandwich and a glass of wine as she traveled, looking out at cooling towers shaped like huge stiff corsets across dark muddy fields. Horses wandered here and there, sheep grazed and cows lay in close groups or munched what little grass there was. Occasionally the sun would reflect on a stretch of water or a car windscreen; a town would flash by, terraced housing, children playing in a schoolyard, church towers or spires, the station with a nameplate they were always traveling too fast to read. She liked to watch the people getting on and off at the different stops, wondered where they were going, what they were going to do, who they were going to meet. She made up stories about them in her mind.

  Sometimes, if it was a dull day, or if she simply felt like it, she would read through most of the journey. This time, though, as soon as the train left the north, the weather was good, the sky blue and filled with white fluffy clouds casting swift-moving shadows as they scudded on the wind over the fields, and her attention moved in and out of Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness, which she had read several times before. Mostly she didn’t think about the tasks that lay ahead of her—the time for that would come soon enough—but luxuriated in being suspended in an eternal now.

  Sometimes, though, she couldn’t help but think about the past. She hadn’t told Ray the half of it, or Banks. She thought perhaps Banks could guess, but even his imagination might fall somewhat short of the full horror. She remembered the street in a suburb of Chisinau, with Soviet-era tenements, the tobacconist’s shop, the little bar on the corner where the menfolk gathered to watch football. Until that day her life had been good. It was true that she had no parents, no family—they had all been wiped out in the war—but that was a long time ago, and the orphanage had given her a sense of belonging, had been a good place to grow up, even when the government money ceased to come and they had to make do with what little charity they could get.

  Zelda had been very lucky. She had been a good student; she had loved learning. Before most of the children could stumble through a sentence of English, if she could get to them before the nuns caught her, she was reading books by Charles Dickens and Beatrix Potter and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and whatever strange English language titles turned up in the boxes people donated. She loved reading in English, and now, so many years later, it was the language she dreamed in, too, though even in her dreams she couldn’t always find the right word. Even more than in languages, though, she shone in art. But she was not well versed in the ways of the world and was a very naive, inexperienced girl for someone of her age.

  In that one day, when she was eighteen and it was time to leave the orphanage, her whole life changed in a split second. Nobody was throwing her out; they didn’t do things like that. Zelda had done very well in all her exams; her teacher had sent out samples of her best work, and she had been accepted into a prestigious art college in Bucharest in neighboring Romania. She was walking to the train station with her small suitcase of worldly possessions, a few leu in her pocket, an introduction to the head of the college and her ticket to Bucharest, feeling a little sad because she had to leave her friends behind, but happy and excited about the future because . . . well, because she was young and fearless, and she had the whole world ahead of her.

  Just around the corner, two scruffy, unshaven men lounged against the wall smoking. Zelda had never seen them before, though she had walked the area often with her friends. The nuns had always warned the girls to be careful, especially of the men who frequented the bar. Zelda moved towards the edge of the pavement, stepping down into the road to give the men a wide berth. There was a black car parked just in front of her, and before she could react, the men had taken her by her arms and pushed her into the back. One of them got in beside her, and the other got in the front to drive. The car smelled of tobacco and sweat and Zelda was scared. She tried to scream but the man beside her put his hand over her mouth while the other drove the car away. The hand tasted nasty and she bit it as hard as she could. The man snatched his hand away with a grunt and then punched her hard in the face. Her head swam. She slumped back in her seat. Blood flowed from her nose. The car bumped over cobbles and she was tossed around while the man she had bitten held her down with one hand and sucked his damaged hand, cursing under his breath.

  And that was how it all began.

  The last thing she saw in th
e neighborhood of her childhood was that her small suitcase had fallen to the ground and broken open, spilling her few meager possessions and articles of clothing over the road surface, along with the scrapbook she had kept so diligently for so long, the well-thumbed copy of Bleak House that she had been reading, and the small music box that held all that was left of her mother, a few cheap rings and necklaces. She wore the golden heart with her mother’s photo inside, and as she sat there bleeding and crying, she fingered it, as if it was a talisman and would give her strength to endure whatever was to come. But nothing could have given her the strength to endure all that, nothing but the ability she developed to absent herself from her experiences, to be elsewhere, in the world of the imagination, her own fantasy, looking down on her misused and abused body while what happened, happened.

  Zelda felt her chest tighten as if her very breath was turning to stone.

  “Are you all right, miss?”

  She looked up, startled by the voice, and saw the ticket inspector standing over her.

  “Are you all right?” he repeated.

  Zelda tried to smile. She patted her chest. “Yes. Yes, thank you. I must have dozed off for a moment. A bad dream.”

  “As long as you’re all right.”

  “Yes. No problem. It’s very kind of you.”

  The inspector nodded and walked away, glancing back anxiously. The man across the aisle sneaked a quick glance to see what all the fuss was about. Zelda sipped the last of her wine and breathed slowly, melting the stone back to air again. It was talking to Alan that had brought the past so clearly into focus again. She looked out of the window. They were on the edge of a town. The railway lines ran beside a canal, where brightly painted houseboats lay moored along the towpath. On the opposite bank was a pub where some people were sitting outside in their overcoats on wooden benches. Beyond them were a school, a small housing estate, and high on the hill far in the background, over the fields, a stately home. This was England, then. Not Moldova. Not Croatia. Not Romania. Not Belarus. She was safe. She picked up her book and carried on reading.

  IT WAS almost the end of another day, and Banks felt no closer to finding out what had happened to Adrienne Munro than he had the moment he first saw her body. Despite his walk with Zelda at lunchtime, he felt restless and cooped up in his office. He decided to go out and check the secondhand bookshops for a copy of Doctor Zhivago, then return and see about having a quick meeting with his team about where to go next.

  When he stepped into the market square it was dark, though it wasn’t yet five o’clock. It started to get dark shortly after three at this time of year. Shopkeepers took it as a sign to close up early and go home, and that was what had happened at the first secondhand bookshop, built into the side of the church. The market square, usually thriving in late afternoon, was almost deserted. The charity shop was still open, though, and Banks walked through to the back where the books were. They had a pretty good stock of literary classics, including lots of Dickens, Jane Austen and Henry James. They also had an old Penguin classics edition of War and Peace in one hefty volume, but there was no sign of the Pasternak novel. Banks bought War and Peace. He had never read it, though every year he had sworn to himself that this would be the year. He didn’t know why he had put it off so long, as he had really enjoyed Anna Karenina.

  Luckily, the other secondhand bookshop, down the narrow street beside the police station, was still open, and even better still, on its shelves was a paperback copy of the book he was after in relatively fine condition. It even had a still from the movie on the cover—showing Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, of course. He bought it, chatted briefly with the bookseller, who extolled its merits over a more recent translation, and headed back to the station, pleased with his success.

  He checked his pigeonhole and found nothing but a printed copy of the budget approved by the ACC that morning. Still no tox results. If they didn’t turn up by tomorrow morning he would drop by the lab and see if Jazz could hurry things up a bit.

  Gerry was the only one in the squad room. Banks knew that she had been working on HOLMES most of the day. Annie was out on the Laurence Hadfield case, and Winsome was in Leeds liaising with Blackstone’s team on the Munro-Chen cases and trying to track down the mysterious phone number. She had had so little success with it so far that Banks was beginning to wonder whether it was a phone number after all. At least she had heard from the bank and told him that Adrienne’s recent hefty deposits were all cash, which meant they couldn’t be traced.

  “Finished with HOLMES?” Banks asked Gerry, leaning back against Winsome’s desk.

  “For today, sir.”

  “It went well?”

  Gerry smiled. “Well enough. Ken’s man, Jared, is pretty good. I think we’ve got everything covered. I’ve also been doing a bit of digging into Laurence Hadfield’s business practices.”

  Banks remembered his conversation with Linda on Saturday about Hadfield’s business. “And?”

  Gerry swiveled to face him and put the end of her pencil to her lips. “It’s all a bit confusing, sir,” she said. “Earlier this afternoon, Ronald, the son, gave DI Cabbot to believe that his father was the next worst thing to that character Hugh Laurie played in The Night Manager.”

  “The worst man in the world?”

  “That’s right. Gave the impression he brought down governments for profit, sold weapons to the bad guys, had corrupt leaders in his pockets, and so on.”

  “But?”

  “From what I can gather—mostly from newspaper and magazine and Internet articles, and talking to a few of his close colleagues on the phone, that wasn’t the case at all. Hadfield was tough, drove a hard bargain, but he was also a pretty straight businessman. At least for the business he was in, which was high finance, venture capital, emerging markets, that sort of thing.”

  “I can’t say I understand any of it, myself,” said Banks.

  “Me, neither,” said Gerry. “That’s why I had a chat with Cath from the fraud squad. I still don’t understand it, but it comes down to the fact that Hadfield was pretty honest and well liked in his world. He didn’t have a lot of enemies screaming for him to be hanged, drawn and quartered.”

  “So the son exaggerated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think he had anything to do with it? Ronald? Was he laying a false trail for us?”

  “Possibly.” Gerry chewed the end of her pencil.

  “But?”

  “I think it was more a matter of bad blood. At least that’s the impression I got from DI Cabbot. But somebody I spoke to mentioned that if I wanted to know who was the real crook in the Hadfield family, I should look more closely at Ronald.”

  “And you did?”

  “Yes. There’s nothing proven, no charges brought, but there’s a strong suspicion going about that he’s been involved in money-laundering.”

  “I see,” said Banks. “So he won’t like the attention his father’s suspicious death has brought?”

  “Not at all.”

  “And it would make sense for him to have us think we were searching for some Somalian hit man, or some such mythical killer.”

  Gerry smiled. “Exactly.”

  Banks folded his arms. “Excellent. Good work.”

  “Thank you, sir. Shall I keep plugging away?”

  Banks glanced at his watch. “No, not tonight. You deserve a drink. My treat. Besides, Ronald Hadfield’s business practices aren’t our concern unless they have some connection to his father’s death. And after what you’ve just told me, they probably don’t. We’ll let the fraud squad deal with him. I think we need to look a bit closer to home. Where’s Annie?”

  “Gone to see her dad, sir, about working on that sketch of Mia. DS Jackman said Sarah Chen and her housemates knew Mia, too.”

  “The sooner we find her, the better. Just you and me, then.”

  Gerry got up and reached for her coat from the rack, and as Banks helped her on with it he noticed a photograp
h on Annie’s desk and went over to see what it was.

  “What’s this?” he asked, holding it up for Gerry.

  “Oh, that. It’s a photo of a treble clef the CSIs found in Laurence Hadfield’s bathroom. Annie had it photographed before she took it down to exhibits. It’s in her report, but I haven’t had time to enter it into HOLMES yet.”

  Banks hadn’t read the most recent statements and exhibits reports on the Laurence Hadfield case yet, mostly because he had been distracted by the Sarah Chen case, or by Zelda. “It’s not Poppy’s?”

  Gerry laughed. “According to DI Cabbot, sir, she almost had apoplexy at the mere suggestion.”

  Banks stared at the photograph.

  “It’s a charm from a bracelet, sir,” said Gerry. “Pandora, apparently. Very popular.”

  “I’ve heard of them,” said Banks. But already he felt the thrill of connection, the cogs and wheels in his mind shifting, engaging, grinding out images. Adrienne Munro sitting in the Ford Focus, a charm bracelet loose on her right wrist. Whether it was from Pandora or there had been a missing charm, he couldn’t be certain, but it would be easy enough to find out. It was a treble clef, a musical symbol, and that seemed to suit Adrienne, he thought, with her violin and love of classical music.

  Then there was the conversation with Colin Fairfax, who had said at one point that he had bought Adrienne a charm for her bracelet. Again, he hadn’t said what kind of charm, but that could also be easily checked. If it happened to be the same one, then it linked Hadfield with Adrienne, who was already linked with Sarah Chen through the note in her room and, now also through the mysterious Mia. Perhaps this wasn’t about drugs, after all.

  “Let’s postpone that drink for a short while, Gerry,” Banks said. “Come with me. We’ve got work to do.”

  ZELDA LOVED walking around London in the evening, especially the West End. She loved the lights and the crowds heading for theaters and restaurants, the narrow streets, the noise from the cafés spilling out into the street.

  She left her boutique hotel near Seven Dials at seven o’clock to find somewhere to eat in Covent Garden. Though she never worried about it in Yorkshire, she usually dressed down in London to avoid drawing attention to herself, and tonight was no exception. Her clothes were plain and loose-fitting, though not the kind of loose that simmered like a waterfall over her arse as she walked. She wore a padded jacket and a woolly hat to keep warm. No matter what the temperature, though, the streets were always full of people, some of the young girls very scantily dressed. When she had first come here, she had thought they were prostitutes, but Raymond put her right on that score. Though it was a chilly evening, people sat outdoors at café tables smoking, talking and drinking espresso, or stood outside pubs with pints in their hands, laughing at jokes. Sometimes as she walked around the city, Zelda had the eerie feeling that she had seen every face before, that each one was stored in her memory, and she recognized all of them.