Not Dark Yet

by Peter Robinson

  “I suppose we were,” Zelda agreed. “Like free-range chickens being fed and readied for the slaughter.”

  “But what could I do?”

  Zelda sat up and leaned towards him, half standing, her palms on the arms of the chair. “You could have stopped it! You could have gone to the police. You . . .” She shook her fist at him. Then she made an effort and calmed herself down, subsided deep into the armchair again. “I think it would be better if you confessed before your punishment, don’t you?”

  “Why? What punishment? What are you going to do to me? I’m an old man. I’m sick. I’ve got health problems. Heart. Diabetes.” Lupescu’s eyes darted about the room, as if searching for a way out or for someone to come to his aid.

  “You should have thought about your health problems back then,” said Zelda. “Though I doubt anybody could have done anything about your heart, however hard they tried.”

  Lupescu tried to get to his feet, but age had slowed him. In one smooth movement Zelda stood up, picked up the infinity sculpture from the table beside her and hit him on the side of the head. He sagged back in his chair, then slid to the floor, a trail of blood spoiling the symmetry of his comb-over.

  “IF THERE’S more,” said Banks, “I think I’ll need another pint. You, too? My shout.”

  “Go on, then,” said Burgess. “You’ve twisted my arm. It’s just a bloody boring security roster meeting this afternoon. I can easily sleep through that and nobody will notice.”

  Banks went to the bar, his head still whirling with Burgess’s story, connections spinning like plates on sticks. He wasn’t quite as brash as Dirty Dick, but the bar wasn’t too crowded, and he managed to get served quickly enough. As usual in London, he was gobsmacked at the price of two pints.

  “You realise that we’ve probably consumed our entire weekly allowance of alcohol units this one lunchtime,” Burgess said when Banks got back. Then he contemplated the remains of the roast beef burger. “Not to mention you being responsible for a few more icebergs melting in Antarctica.”

  “It always puzzled me, that,” said Banks.

  “What?”

  “If cow farts are bad for the environment, how would stopping eating beef help?”

  “If we didn’t eat beef, we wouldn’t need cows, stupid.”

  “So what would we do with them to stop cow farts for ever? Kill them all and burn their bodies?”

  “Well, no. Burning that many cows might cause environmental problems, too. Carbon emissions.”

  “Not to mention that we’d be guilty of the genocide of a species. Bovicide. That can’t be good, surely?”

  “Talk to David Attenborough. I’m sure he’d put you right on the matter.”

  “Or perhaps we should put them all in a big building where they can fart to their hearts’ content, and we can use the gas to run the country.”

  “We’ve already done that,” said Burgess. “It’s over there.” He pointed out of the window towards the Houses of Parliament.

  Banks laughed.

  “As I was saying,” Burgess went on, “there’s more. But first off, remember, I’m trying to do you a favour.”

  “What’s that?”

  Burgess sighed and ran his hand over his lank hair. “Danvers and Debs don’t trust your Zelda for a number of reasons. You have to admit, she has a very shady past.”

  “Shady?” said Banks. “She was snatched off the street at the age of seventeen and forced to work as a prostitute for nearly ten years before she escaped the life.”

  “I know that. But do you know how she escaped?”

  “It’s all a bit vague,” Banks admitted. “Something happened in Paris, something big, something to do with the government, and it was hushed up. She obviously helped some very influential people with a problem. That’s how she got her freedom and her French passport.”

  “No details?”

  “No.”

  “Me, neither,” said Burgess. “But don’t you think it all sounds as fishy as that sandwich I just finished? Maybe she didn’t help anyone; maybe she blackmailed them. You have to see it from the NCA’s point of view. And from that of immigration. She has lived a nomadic life—she’s never filled in any appropriate immigration or residence forms, she’s filed no tax returns, her passport was not exactly official issue, and she spent most of her working life as a prostitute, which could reasonably be conceived as criminal. All in all, she’s not the kind of person Britannia Unchained wants. We have plenty of prostitutes of our own without importing them from Europe, or anywhere else, thank you very much.”

  “That’s not her fault,” Banks argued. You make it sound as if it was her choice. She wasn’t working as a prostitute, she was a sex slave, subject to rape, to violent beatings. Ever since she was abducted outside that orphanage, her life hasn’t been her own. Until she came here. And now you’re trying to take that life away from her.”

  “I know all that, Banksy. And I’m not trying to take anything away from her. I’m just telling you how Danvers and Debs and their mates at the NCA and Immigration Enforcement might view things differently. She’s on their radar now. I’m trying to keep her out of their hands and let you deal with it. I’m trying to do you both a favour, mate. But we need some answers from somewhere.”

  “OK, so now I know. What am I supposed to do?”

  “It’s awkward,” Burgess said. “And getting more so. They want to bring her in for questioning.”

  “Danvers and Debs?”

  “Yes. And someone else. There’s more.”

  Banks frowned. “All right. Go on.”

  “Ever heard the name Faye Butler?”

  “I can’t say as I have.”

  “No reason why you should have. It’s a case I took an interest in recently. It wasn’t one of ours to start with. It was a Met case, and a Commander Barclay was in charge. I’ve known Ted Barclay for years, and after a few days he called me in. It’s a strange one, all right. Disturbing, too. About a week ago, some young lads playing near the river down Woolwich way found a young woman’s body snagged on a tree branch half out of the water. She hadn’t been in there more than a day or two. At the post-mortem, it was discovered that she had died by drowning, but not in the river. The water in her lungs was tap water, not the Thames variety. It also turned out that she had been tortured. There was evidence of burn marks, as if from electrodes, of cuts, and significant bruising. Three of her teeth were missing and two fingernails. It was also clear to the pathologist that she had been sexually assaulted.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Banks. “The poor girl.”

  “Indeed. Her name was Faye Butler, and she worked at Foyles on Charing Cross Road, in the art section. She was twenty-eight years old. Her body was found on 23 May. That was a Thursday.” Banks remembered. It was the same day he and Gerry Masterson had found Blaydon’s body in the pool. “Her flatmate in Camden Town had reported her missing.” Burgess paused to drink some pilsner. “You know as well as I do, Banksy, what it’s like with missing persons. You do your best to reassure the family or friends that nothing bad’s happened, that it’s perfectly normal for a young woman not to come home one night without phoning or anything. But it fucking isn’t. We know it isn’t. And from the moment you take the first call, you get that cramped feeling in your gut, and you just know that something’s wrong.”

  Banks knew the feeling. Missing persons were some of the hardest cases to handle if you let your imagination run away with you. Especially young girls. You could picture terrible things happening while you were reassuring the rest of the world that she would probably come walking in full of apologies at any moment, tell you that she’d stopped at her boyfriend’s and just forgot to mention it to anyone. “What happened next?” he asked.

  “We made inquiries, but they didn’t lead us anywhere. Naturally, the boyfriend came in for a bit of grief. Bloke called Grant Varney. They’d been together about three months. He said he hadn’t arranged to see her that night and that she hadn�
��t called around at his place. There were some of her things there—clothes, books, cosmetics, toothbrush—and apparently, she spent a fair bit of time there with him. They hadn’t made any final commitment to live together or anything, but he said he was hoping she would agree to a more permanent arrangement. He knew she was still on the rebound at the moment, he said, and he was willing to wait. Varney was devastated. Ted said he thought he was a decent kid, and he was cleared pretty quickly. We did reconstructions of her route home, talked to people who took the same route, had seen her on occasion, but nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

  “How did she travel?”

  “Faye usually walked home as long as it wasn’t pissing down. She’d head up Tottenham Court Road, then Hampstead Road, and on a nice evening she’d cut through St. Martin’s Gardens on Camden Street. One witness thought she saw her talking with a man in the gardens, walking towards the road. She didn’t get a good look at him, so we have no description except that he was stocky and was wearing a black T-shirt and ice blue jeans, but she did say that Faye seemed quite at ease, as if she knew him. You know, she didn’t appear uncomfortable or scared, wasn’t trying to get away. And the man wasn’t in physical contact with her. He didn’t grab her or anything. As far as our witness could tell she was just walking along chatting with a friend.”

  “And that was the last time she was seen alive?”

  “Yes. Except by her killer, of course. And he must have had transport of some kind. Her body was found some distance away from Camden. But nobody saw her getting into a car. We’ve had appeals out and done reconstructions, but no one’s come forward with any new information and we got nothing from CCTV. It was as if she just disappeared into space.”

  “He must have had a car waiting nearby,” said Banks. “And maybe an accomplice.”

  “We thought of that. I think you’re probably right, but nobody remembers anything. It’s also likely she got in the car willingly, if it was someone she knew.”

  “I agree it’s a nasty one,” said Banks, “but where do I come in? And Zelda?”

  “When we made inquiries at Faye’s place of work, one of her colleagues told us that she was working the third floor about a week before the disappearance, and this woman came around asking for Faye. The colleague said she sent her to the ground floor, where we found out that she asked a lad called Lee Wong about Faye. Lee went and fetched her. The two of them chatted, then went upstairs to the cafe. Lee said he didn’t know Faye well, but we talked to some more of her workmates, and they all said the usual. You know, what a fine person she was—nice girl, always cheerful, helpful, and so on. Ask about the dead and you’d think we were all saints. It was the flatmate, Agnes Hall, who told us that Faye had been a bit down in the dumps for a while after splitting up with her previous boyfriend. Apparently, she found him in flagrante with another girl.”

  “Any idea who he was?”

  “We couldn’t get any further questioning Agnes or Faye’s friends at work. No one remembered the ex enough to give more than the vaguest of descriptions. As far as Agnes knew, Faye had never invited him back to the flat. At least not while she was there. Medium height, good-looking, light brown hair, small beard, no particular accent. Rather like the barman’s description from The George and Dragon, I thought. Only she added she thought the hair was maybe just a bit too light brown.”

  “Dye job?”

  “Sounds like it. He’d been in the shop a couple of times, apparently, chasing after an art book, and that’s how he and Faye first met. All her workmates knew was that his first name was Hugh. A couple of them told us they thought he was too old for Faye, despite the hair. Naturally, he became a person of interest very quickly.”

  “Any luck?”

  “No. Not at first. But when we searched Faye’s flat, we found some printed selfies of her with a bloke taken in Regent’s Park, and it wasn’t Grant Varney. This bloke was medium height, good-looking, light brown hair, little beard.”

  “Age?”

  “In his mid-forties, maybe, but well preserved. Could’ve been older. Fifty, even.”

  “Hugh?”

  “The roommate confirmed it. The dates matched, too. They’d been taken around Christmas—you could tell by the lights and decorations—a few months after she took up with him, and not too long before they split up. Her mobile went missing with her, but we found her laptop in the flat, and there were emails from a bloke called Hugh Foley. We couldn’t trace him from them, though, and the email address is no longer in use. There was no entry for him in her contacts list.”

  “Anything in the emails?”

  “Plenty,” said Burgess. “All along the lines of, ‘I can’t wait to suck your throbbing—’ ”

  “I catch the drift,” said Banks.

  “That’s from her, by the way. The ones from him seem to involve agricultural metaphors, mostly to do with ploughing and irrigation. No addresses, mobile numbers, or arrangements to meet.”

  “I assume they did all that through texts, or maybe even over the phone. Again, I’m having a bit of trouble working out how I could be involved. Unless you’ve got something up your sleeve. Something you’re not telling me.”

  “Just two things,” Burgess said. “First, the description of the woman asking about Faye Butler in Foyles bears a remarkable similarity to Chris the barman’s description of Zelda, right down to the faint accent, and secondly, well, see for yourself.” Burgess dropped a photograph on the table in front of Banks.

  Banks stared at it and his jaw dropped. Despite a few minor cosmetic changes—hairline and colour, the addition of a light beard—the man in the selfies with Faye Butler, the man who went by the name of Hugh Foley, was a ringer for Phil Keane.

  “Jesus Christ,” Banks muttered, pushing the photograph aside. “And what’s the link with Zelda?”

  “Ted Barclay would like to have her brought in to talk to her, too, and maybe find out the answer to that. Which is where you come in. I managed to persuade Ted to let you have a go first, told him you were familiar with aspects of her background and so on. I also lied a bit. Told him you were an excellent detective, and as you already knew her, and she trusted you, you’d be far more likely to get something out of her. He didn’t like it, but he agreed to give us some leeway.”

  “Why did you do that? Why are you being so helpful to Zelda?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Banksy. I might not be as soft-hearted as you—or maybe I am getting soft in my old age—but I’m not the cold and calculating bastard you sometimes paint me as. I don’t know this Zelda. I’ve never met her. But a woman like her, what she’s been through, what she’s suffered, it almost beggars the imagination. You’ve met her, and you know her. And I trust your judgement, even if I do think it’s a little biased by female pulchritude. God knows, I’ve made enough errors in that direction myself, over the years. But can you imagine the effect that being interrogated might have on her, not to mention any detention and imprisonment that might result? Does it sound so strange that I don’t particularly want her put through the ringer with Danvers and Debs and Ted Barclay? If she’s as fragile as many of the women who’ve been through what she’s been through, it could do her permanent damage. I don’t think she’s killed anyone. Not Hawkins. Not Faye Butler. If I thought she had, I’d have her in before her feet could touch the street. But she knows something. It’s all connected. I’m giving you the chance to find out what that is. And now Keane’s involved, too. You know he is. And don’t forget that photograph of him with Petar Tadić. Petar is certainly a person of interest, along with his brother Goran. These are people from Zelda’s past, and now they’re starting to figure in our present. It’s all tangled up in a knot, and until we manage to sort out one or two threads, your lady friend is going to be a target. You can help her, Banksy. I’m giving you the chance. Talk to her. Loosen her up a bit. Are you going to take it?”

  He was right, Banks knew. Zelda affected a tough veneer, but he had seen beyond th
at to the seething fears, anxieties and conflicting emotions underneath; the guilt and self-loathing, shame, despair, and depression that she tried to suppress and overcome. He saw something else, too, a sort of steely purpose, a sense of quest or mission, perhaps.

  Banks shook his head slowly, reached for his glass and murmured, “Of course I’m going to bloody well take it. Of course I am.”

  4

  BY THE TIME LUPESCU CAME AROUND, ZELDA HAD HIM trussed up on the sofa. As soon as he realised the predicament he was in, he asked for a glass of water and a bottle of pills from the kitchen table. Zelda checked the pills. They were sublingual nitroglycerin, for angina. He drank the water first then put a pill under his tongue. She used a damp cloth to wipe the blood from the side of his head. He winced as she did so.

  “What is it you want?” he said. “Money?”

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

  “Who?”

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

  “I don’t know them.”

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

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

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