Not Dark Yet

by Peter Robinson

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

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

  “When you were the cultural attaché?”

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

  “For an orphanage?”

  “Yes. St. George’s.”

  “Whose idea was the books?”

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

  “The nuns?”

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

  “I never knew,” Zelda said. “Where they came from, I mean. Why they did what they did.”

  “They did it because it was in their nature to do good.”

  “They were kind. Distant, but kind.”

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

  “Your books and Klaus Bremner’s epiphany. Yes.”

  “And the nuns.”

  “And the nuns.”

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

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

  “Vasile? Of course. He was director from the beginning until the end.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

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

  “And now?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Something like that,” said Zelda, hating herself for misleading him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  3

  ZELDA GOT UP EARLY TO PREPARE HERSELF FOR HER journey to Purcari. She had never been in the far south-east of Moldova before, though she knew of its reputation for fine wines and beautiful landscapes. As she sat over her breakfast of fruit and yoghurt, she looked at the map she had bought the previous day and checked it against the Google Maps on her laptop. It wouldn’t be an arduous journey. The fastest route would take her straight south-east and should take no longer than a couple of hours. Moldova wasn’t a big country. She also had to check out of her hotel before she left and arrange to leave the rental car at the airport.

  Her visits to the derelict orphanage and to William Buckley had thrown her askew, brought back feelings and memories she hadn’t known she had, but she had enjoyed a good night’s sleep—no nightmares or sweats, for once—and she felt ready to go on and bring her quest to an end. Lupescu would be the last one; she was almost certain of that.

  She finished her breakfast and refilled her coffee cup. Her room was fine, but there wasn’t much of a view except the car park below, so she sat cross-legged on the unmade bed and watched the BBC World News on TV. There was nothing new, and certainly nothing pleasant. She checked her email and sent Raymond a quick upbeat message.

  The address she wanted was on the northern edge of Purcari, which wasn’t a big place. Zelda still had no idea how she would play the confrontation with Vasile Lupescu, and every time she tried to imagine it, it turned out differently. She hadn’t done a great deal of forward planning, and she couldn’t do much now. Nor had she planned any sort of fail-safe escape. If all went well, she would have no problem doing what needed to be done and getting to the airport in Chișinău in time to drop off the car and make her flight to London. If all went well.

  But the best-laid plans, in her experience, often went wrong. She had learned from her past that murder was an unpredictable business. There were too many variables. What if he wasn’t in? What if he was surrounded by family? What if he simply refused to see her, shut the door in her face? What if he lived on a busy street and there were lots of people around? In these circumstances, Zelda realised, she might well have to abort. Or at least postpone. If things went smoothly, then she simply had to make sure that there was no chance of discovery before she was well on the way to London. With a little judicious cleaning up and a certain amount of care in not appearing too conspicuous, or being seen by too many people, that should be easy enough.

  She worried a little about William Buckley. If he heard about anything happening to Lupescu, he would no doubt remember Zelda’s visit. He might tell the police if they asked him, but why would they? And the odds were that he most likely wouldn’t hear about it anyway. Besides, there was nothing she could do about it now. She didn’t know how good the detectives were in Moldova, but she doubted they were up to the same level as Alan Banks and his team; there was surely no way they could trace and arrest her within a couple of hours. They had done nothing to find or help her when she was abducted.

  Zelda showered and dressed, amazed at how calm she was feeling. She held her hands out. No shakes. She didn’t want to get caught. She wanted more than anything for it all to be over so she could get back to Raymond and get on with their life together in Yorkshire. Explore the world of painting and sculpture in more depth. Cook dinners for friends. Learn to enjoy that dreadf
ul sixties music Raymond played. Try to persuade his daughter Annie that she wasn’t such a monster. But then, she realised, she was a monster, wasn’t she? How could she fool herself into believing otherwise? She shrugged off the thought. Lupescu would be the last one. Then she would put it all behind her. But she had to do this. Until she did, the past would keep growing, like a cancer inside her, consuming or blotting out all that was good in her life.

  One thing she had to make sure she didn’t forget, she thought, as she packed her bags ready for checkout, was the knife she had bought in the shopping mall yesterday after her meeting with William Buckley. She held it in her hand, saw the blade glint in the sunlight through the window, then slipped it into her handbag.

  THAT FOLLOWING morning on the train, Banks relaxed in his seat, his mild hangover fading under the ministrations of two extra-strength paracetamol. He listened to Abdullah Ibrahim’s Dream Time as he watched the summer landscape of the English heartland flash by: bright-coloured canal boats, anglers casting their lines from the grassy banks of large tree-lined ponds, farmers out working the fields, distant green woodlands, squat church towers with gold weathervanes catching the light. It could be another age, he thought, another country, not the troubled and troubling one he was living in. He succeeded in relaxing to such an extent that he drifted off to sleep before the music ended, and the sudden arrival at King’s Cross came as a shock to his system.

  Banks took off his headphones as the train disgorged its passengers, and merged with the rushing river of humanity. Unintelligible messages crackled over the loudspeakers, and travellers dashed for connections, dragging enormous wheeled suitcases behind them, running over toes and bumping thighs, oblivious to everyone else. Others stood and stared at signs and noticeboards as if lost.