Not Dark Yet

by Peter Robinson

  “Or what? Or you’ll kill me? You’re going to kill me, anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Perhaps. But whatever happens, I want to hear you admit what you did to me and the others first.”

  Lupescu paused, as if weighing his chances, determining which direction to go. He licked his lips. “All right, then. Say I did what you’re accusing me of. What then?”

  “Don’t you think you deserve punishment?”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” Lupescu said. “I’m not a monster or a pervert. They forced me to do it.”

  “Forced you? How?”

  “They threatened my family.”

  Zelda felt as if a trickle of icy water had run down her spine. “They did what?”

  “They threatened me. My daughters. The twins. They were thirteen at the time. Thirteen. And the man said if I didn’t do what he asked, he would take them and my wife instead and put them in brothels so bad they would be dead within a week.”

  Zelda let her knife hand drop, though she held on to the handle. She had known brothels like that but survived to tell the tale. Lupescu was shaking now, with tears in his eyes. If he was lying, she thought, he was a good actor. But how could she tell? She had assumed that Buckley had nothing to do with what happened, but she could even be wrong about that. Was she judging the man who gave the books against the man who sat in the office? But no. She must stop second-guessing herself. William Buckley had nothing to do with St. George’s apart from donating the boxes of books. Zelda had never seen or heard of him before yesterday. But Lupescu was there all the time, handled the day-to-day running of the place, knew who was leaving, when and how, where they were going. Maybe he was forced into it, as he claimed, but he was certainly guilty of it.

  “What did they ask you to do?” she went on.

  “Tip them off when a pretty girl was leaving. I didn’t know what they were going to do with you.”

  “I’ll bet you had a good idea.”

  “I didn’t ask. I couldn’t let myself think about it. My lovely twins . . . my wife . . .” Lupescu hung his head. “Please believe me.”

  Zelda passed him the water again. “How many girls?”

  He looked up, horrified, and after a brief silence whispered, “Twelve.”

  Zelda froze. Twelve girls. Sold into slavery like her. How many hadn’t survived? How many had killed themselves or tried to escape and been beaten to death? How many had died of disease, drugs, or violence? It hardly bore thinking about. How could Lupescu live with himself? She felt the anger rise in her, and her hand tightened around the knife handle as she raised it. Lupescu shuddered and cringed like a frightened reptile, edging away as best he could. “No!” he said. “It wasn’t my fault. I had to do it. You must understand. I had to! For my family.”

  “You could have gone to the police.”

  “That wouldn’t have stopped them. You know that. There are always more. And they buy the police.”

  “This man who came to you. What was his name?”

  “I don’t know. Honestly. He was Hungarian. He was in charge. I just called him The Hungarian.”

  “What about the money?”

  “What money?”

  Zelda gestured around the house with the knife blade. “Come on. All this. The house, the works of art. Like I said before, you couldn’t afford it on your orphanage director’s salary. How much did they pay you?”

  Lupescu hung his head again, and when he spoke he muttered so softly that she could barely hear him. “Five thousand dollars for each girl.”

  Zelda felt her muscles tense and the breath tighten in her throat. So that was what her life had been worth. Five thousand dollars. They had made more than that out of her in the first few months. Multiply that by twelve. And the years. She couldn’t stop herself from slapping him backhanded across the face, hard. He grunted and his top lip split, spilling blood on to his chin. She hit him again.

  “Stop,” he pleaded. “I told you. They threatened my family. I’m sick. You’ll kill me.”

  “And I had no family,” Zelda said. She didn’t know why she said it; the words just seemed to come out of nowhere. It hardly mattered whether she had a family or not. But she couldn’t help herself. “Like I wasn’t worth anything to anyone except men like that. You bastard. You selfish, evil bastard!” She punctuated each syllable with another slap until his skin was raw and his nose was broken and bleeding.

  “Please stop,” he sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. My heart.”

  “You took their money. Admit it.”

  “Yes. But only later. When they made me.”

  “What do you mean? You told me they threatened your wife and your daughters.”

  “They did! This was later. They made me take their money.”

  “Why would they do that if they could force you to do what they wanted for nothing?”

  “To make me complicit,” Lupescu said. He licked the blood from his lips and lifted his tied hands up to wipe his nose on his forearm. His voice was hoarse. “Don’t you understand? There was always a chance I might go to the police and tell them everything in exchange for protection for me and my family. Or that they might come around to St. George’s asking questions. I wouldn’t have told the police anything, of course, but they didn’t know that. I was too scared for my daughters. If they paid me, I couldn’t tell the authorities without implicating myself. Don’t you see? The payments went into my bank account. It was their insurance, their way of making certain I did what they wanted, that I was no different from them. There’s not a day gone by when I haven’t regretted it, but what could I do?”

  “Well, you bought the house, didn’t you?” Zelda flopped back in her chair and looked at Lupescu, shaking her head. The money they had paid him was her insurance, too, that he wouldn’t talk. She had killed Goran Tadić, one of the brothers who had abducted her in Chișinău, and she had killed Darius, her vicious French pimp, and she didn’t regret either murder for a moment. But she didn’t consider herself a cold-blooded murderer. And this time, she just couldn’t do it. Or didn’t want to. She felt dirty and cowardly for beating this pathetic tied-up old man, whether he was telling the truth about his motives or not, and the whole encounter was fast making her feel disgusted and empty, even of hatred.

  Lupescu had been responsible for her abduction from the street and her subsequent years as a sex slave, but she couldn’t bring herself to kill him. He wasn’t the one who had abducted her and sold her; he had only tipped off The Hungarian when she would be leaving the orphanage. That was the extent of his participation. She was still angry, twisted up in knots inside, but if she believed him—that they had threatened his family—what man wouldn’t have done what he did in that situation? It wasn’t that she forgave him; she could never do that. Twelve girls in his charge had been sold into lives of unbelievable humiliation, pain, and terror at his say-so. But would it have been better if his thirteen-year-old daughters and his wife had suffered that fate instead? What kind of a bargain was that? How could you reckon such a calculation? No matter how you played the figures, they came out wrong.

  So Zelda put her knife back in her bag, glanced down in contempt at the sobbing, bleeding old man hunched on the sofa, and left. Someone would find him and free him, or he would work his own way free eventually. Or maybe he would die of a heart attack. It was all the same to her. One thing she knew was that, if he lived, he could never breathe a word to another soul about what had happened here today without implicating himself.

  “SO WHAT did this cost you?” DI Annie Cabbot asked, fingering the picture Gerry had laid out on her desk.

  “More than you could ever know.”

  “Seriously? Oh, get away with you. You didn’t, did you?”

  Gerry laughed. “No, I’m joking.”

  “So, what? You don’t get this kind of service for free, in my experience.”

  “He asked me out to dinner, that’s all.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “W
ell, I had to, really, didn’t I?”

  “That’s coercion, Gerry. You don’t have to put up with it, you know. Haven’t you heard of #MeToo? You should report him.”

  Gerry blushed. “No, it’s fine. He’s quite nice, actually.”

  “Quite nice?” Annie rolled her eyes. “That sounds like the beginning of a torrid love affair.”

  “I’m not after a torrid love affair, but I’ll be quite happy to go out for dinner with him. He didn’t coerce me. As a matter of fact, I’ve had my eye on him for a while, so there.”

  “You and Jared Lyall from tech support? Well, I never. Who’d have guessed it.” Annie paused. “Still, I suppose he is rather cute, in a Justin Bieber sort of way.”

  Gerry punched her arm lightly. “Anyway,” she said, “he told me there wasn’t a lot he could do. The tech was right, there was some fault with the minicam. Something to do with fields and pixels and so on. Like sound sampling, missing bits out, only you can’t always put them back. I’m afraid I’m not very well up on the technical language, but he said what he had done was mostly guesswork, trying to imagine what might be missing and replacing it. That’s why it took him so long. It’s quite a work of art. There was nothing he could do with the rapist. He never showed his face, or anything else, like one of those faces on TV they have to blank out.”

  “Could it have been?” Annie asked. “Tampered with? Blanked out?”

  “Jared says not. It’s all to do with his position and what little light there was. Besides, it would have been difficult for someone to get just the rapist’s face blanked out and his victim’s visible, no matter how distorted she is. I still think he’s done a pretty good job with the girl. Jared also ran this reconstruction through our facial recognition software, too, but he came up with nothing. Still, we’d hardly expect her to be in the system.”

  “Maybe it was because of the poor image quality,” Annie said. “Couldn’t Jared just enhance it more? I’ve seen them do it on TV. You make a square around the bit you want enlarged and keep pressing enter.”

  Gerry laughed. “Yeah, we tried that.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “The bit we marked out got bigger and bigger and in the end you couldn’t tell what it was. It was just a bunch of dots with spaces between them, like a piece of abstract art. Jackson Pollock or something.”

  “Ray likes Jackson Pollock. Oh, well. So much for TV. I’ll never believe anything I see in future.”

  “It’s not a video recording,” Gerry said. “It was recorded on to a microSD card through a high-end mini spy-cam working on a motion sensor. The problem is that the bedroom was very dark, a room without windows, or so it seems. Usually the cams compensate for that, especially the expensive ones, but this one wasn’t doing a good job. It just wasn’t working properly.”

  “I’m surprised Roberts didn’t return it to Amazon.”

  Gerry rolled her eyes. “Jared worked from the original SD card, and he did his best with what he had.”

  “I’m sure he did.” Annie held the image at arm’s length. “I think we may have a possible recognisable likeness here. It wouldn’t stand up in court, but . . . maybe her own mother might recognise her.”

  “As I said, it’s the best Jared can do. I think we have to go with it. He said we could send the card away to a tech lab in London, and they might be able to salvage a sharper image, but that would take weeks, for a start, and cost a fortune, with no guarantee. What we’ve got now is a hell of a lot better than what we had. I’m pretty sure I could recognise her from that, if I saw her. If I knew her. We need to show it around to people who might have been at that party.”

  “When we find out who they are,” said Annie.

  The enhanced image showed a young girl in semi-profile. It was a segment from after the rape, when the rapist had gone and she had turned over on to her side and curled up in the foetal position. Her eyes were glazed and her jaw slack, but there was just enough definition to her features to make identification possible. The waifish look and the short hair were clear enough, and they had already estimated from the original footage, measuring her against the length of the bed, that she was maybe five foot seven or eight in height, or about 170 centimetres. It was impossible to tell her age beyond estimating that she was probably in her late teens.

  Annie and Gerry watched the recording again, and it was even clearer that the girl was being raped, perhaps because they had a stronger idea of what she looked like. She had no chance. The man threw her down on the bed, ripped off her clothes and raped her. It didn’t last long. Her struggles were weak and ineffective because she was clearly drunk or drugged, and after a while she didn’t resist at all. There was no sound, so it was impossible to tell if she had screamed or called out, but when he left her half-naked among the rumpled bedsheets, she appeared to be sobbing.

  And there the recording ended.

  “Do you remember seeing the girl in any of the other videos?” Annie asked.

  “No. Those women were all Tadić’s hookers. Or at least we assume they were. None of them resembled her, at any rate, and they seemed to at least pretend they liked what they were doing.”

  “It’s true she doesn’t look like a classy hooker.”

  “Maybe she was working behind the scenes?”

  “Possible,” said Annie. “We need to find out how the parties were set up and organised. How people got invited. I know we’ve already recognised a few prominent figures from what we’ve watched, but there must have been other people there, ones we wouldn’t recognise. Ones who might be more likely to talk to us. Someone must have seen something. Were any of the other films taken at the same party?”

  “Only two,” said Gerry. “I checked them out, and they were both fine as far as quality goes. Different rooms, too. So it was clearly just that one defective camera.”

  “Who have we got?”

  “One of them I recognise, but it’s a woman.”

  “Did Blaydon or Tadić supply men for fun, too?”

  “Er . . . well, maybe,” said Gerry. “But, I mean, it’s not a man she’s—”

  “Another woman?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Rosemary Vale.”

  “No! You mean that actress? The one in that costume drama that’s on at the moment?”

  “That’s the one,” Gerry said.

  “She’s gay? I don’t believe it.”

  “Well, you would if you watched the video.”

  “OK. Who’s in the other video?”

  “Craig Lonegan.”

  “What, that footballer with the big house out Swainshead way?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “And what’s he doing, or need I ask?”

  “I’d blush if I told you,” said Gerry. “But it involves rubber sheets and cooking oil, and whatever it is, he appears to be enjoying it.”

  “We need to have a crack at them,” said Annie. “One of them might have seen something. At the very least they might be able to fill out the guest list a bit.”

  “Do you think it could have been Blaydon himself?”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Annie said, “but there’s no way you could even guess from what we’ve got, let alone prove it. It could have been any one of a number of people.”

  “What it amounts to, then,” said Gerry, “is that we don’t know who the girl is or who she was with. She’s definitely quite young, and she’s not the same type as the others, if that’s not a terribly judgemental thing to say. But that’s all we know about her.”

  Annie smiled. “I wouldn’t worry about being judgemental,” she said. “I’m the last one to judge you on your woke quotient. Besides, it’s our job to make judgements about certain things. No matter what ‘type’ she is, she’s somebody’s daughter, and it’s our job to find out who she is and get the perpetrator behind bars. If there is a connection with Blaydon’s murder, then all well and good, that might come out, too. W
hat about guest lists for the parties? They must be somewhere.”

  “There’s that woman who used to work as Blaydon’s personal assistant,” Gerry said. “Remember her? She’s on our list. Her name’s Charlotte Westlake, and she lives near Leeds.”

  “Right. If she was working for Blaydon back in April, she might be able to point us in the right direction.”

  “Any more ideas?”

  Annie shook her head, then said, “Except that Zelda knows the Tadić brothers. I know she’s talked to Alan about them, and in the photo of Keane she saw, he was with Petar Tadić. If they supplied the women for the parties, maybe she could shed some light on things?”

  “Where is the super today, by the way?”

  “London,” said Annie. “Left early this morning. And very cagey about it. Some sort of mysterious appointment.”

  “What about Timmy and Tommy Kerrigan?” Gerry suggested. “I know we’ve interviewed them about the murders, but remember those photos taken around the pool in the cache, too? People having fun, letting their hair down. Timmy and Tommy feature in some of them. They don’t seem to be doing anything illegal, unless smoking big cigars and drinking extremely large glasses of whisky is illegal now.”

  “And wearing skimpy thong swimming trunks if you look like Timmy Kerrigan,” Annie added.

  Gerry laughed at the image. “Right,” she said. “Well, it seems there are a few directions to follow up on after the weekend. The assistant and the Kerrigans for a start. Maybe the Kerrigans will be able to tell us something about this Charlotte Westlake? First off, though, I want to have another trip to Blaydon’s house and check out the actual room.”

  BANKS FOUND himself with a lot to think about as he made his way back to Vauxhall Underground station. He had originally intended to do some shopping while he was in London, check out the big Waterstones on Piccadilly, visit FOPP at Cambridge Circus, but he decided he couldn’t face it. Like everyone else, he did most of his shopping online these days. London was too hot and too crowded today; he just wanted to go home.

  He wondered how he had managed to become such a recluse and homebody. He had always enjoyed trips to London before, as he had also loved living there with Sandra in Kennington in his early days on the force. The disenchantment seemed to have crept up on him slowly, ever since he had first moved into Newhope Cottage alone, after their divorce. There had been women since then, of course, but nothing that lasted. Commitment had never been a strong point with him after Sandra; he was dedicated to his job, and he tended to take up with women who were similarly dedicated to something other than hanging on to a partner. This meant, inevitably, that they drifted apart before long. Now he had women friends and colleagues, but not lovers.