Not Dark Yet

by Peter Robinson

  Banks opened his book and slipped back into Harry Flashman’s version of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade as he sipped some more wine. Colonial Britannia at her best. And so the evening passed, quietly and pleasantly as the sun made its way down in the western sky, below the hills, painting an abstract design first of grey and pink behind the slow-moving strata of long thin clouds, then of crimson, orange and purple under the darker, heavier ones. In the distance, a car’s rear lights followed the winding road over Tetchley Pass into the next dale.

  Banks sat on, sipping his wine and enjoying the nature show, until the evening’s chill made him shiver and there was no longer enough light left to read by. Then he took his wine and moved back inside. He checked his phone to see if he had missed any messages. He hadn’t.

  When the evenings stretched out as they did in summer, he rarely watched television or movies, unless it was raining. He didn’t even listen to much music. Sometimes he played the guitar Brian had bought him, wondering when he would get the fingering of even the basic three chords exactly right. And that reminded him: it was only two days until the Blue Lamps’ farewell concert at the Sage. Tracy and Mark would be going with him, along with Ray and Zelda. It promised to be a fine evening. Maybe they would all manage to get together with Brian for a drink or two over the river afterwards.

  He wondered how Tracy and Mark were getting on in Tenerife, where they had gone for their honeymoon. He was glad they had decided against a destination wedding, unlike so many other young couples these days. It was selfish in the extreme, he thought, going off to Cyprus or Malta to get married when half your family either couldn’t afford to attend, or were too old and ill to travel. Healthy and independent as they were, Banks’s parents wouldn’t have been willing or able to travel so far for their granddaughter’s wedding.

  Tonight Banks felt restless for some reason, and he couldn’t settle down with the guitar. He was sick to death of playing “Bobby Shafto” but seemed unable to move beyond it. He searched through YouTube for interesting music and ended up watching a few Grateful Dead concert clips.

  Halfway through a fine “Scarlet Begonias,” Banks’s mobile played its blues riff. He was in half a mind not to answer, but habit kicked in and he put the TV on pause and picked it up. It was going on for eleven o’clock, and he always felt a tremor of apprehension when the phone rang so late. Had something happened to Tracy? Or Brian?

  He recognised the number as Ray Cabbot’s. Puzzled, he answered, but couldn’t make out what Ray was saying at first. He asked him to repeat it, and this time it came through loud and clear: “She’s gone,” Ray said. “It’s Zelda. She’s gone.”

  7

  LIT BY BANKS’S HEADLIGHTS, THE B-ROAD TO LYNDGARTH unfurled like a ribbon over the moorland, passing by fast-flowing becks and grassy hillocks, until the lights of the village came into view, nestled in a hollow and scattered around the lopsided village green. It stood at the junction of Swainsdale and Lyndsdale, where the river Lynd joined the Swain. Just a couple of miles to the north, the valley sides rose steeply on either side to form two curved limestone scars. It never got completely dark at that time of year, and a three-quarter moon made the scars stand out like bands of light floating above the darkness of the valley.

  Banks drove along the high street, beside the green, past the chapel, two of the village’s three pubs and the Spar general store, then turned left and carried on west for another mile or so until he pulled up at the short turn-off for Ray Cabbot’s cottage. All the lights were on. Ray must have heard the car coming, or seen its lights, as he was standing in the doorway smoking and waiting.

  When they went inside to the living room, Ray stubbed out his cigarette and poured himself a generous measure of single malt. He offered the bottle, but Banks declined. Ray’s hands were shaking as he lifted the glass to his mouth.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I should never have left her.”

  “Calm down and tell me what happened,” said Banks.

  “I don’t know what happened. All I know is she’s gone.”

  “There’s no note or anything?”

  “No.”

  “What time did you get back from Leeds?”

  “Around half ten. The lecture finished at nine so I headed straight back after a few questions. I was worried about Zelda. I told you we’d parted on bad terms. She was upset, angry. I wanted to . . . I mean . . .” He put his glass down and hung his head in his hands. “Oh, Christ, Alan, what am I to do?”

  Banks touched his shoulder. “Try to stay calm, Ray. Did she take anything with her? A suitcase, clothing?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t checked. But her car’s still here, round back.”

  “She can’t have got far then. Are you sure she isn’t at a friend’s house in the village? Or in the pub?”

  “She wouldn’t do that. I mean, she doesn’t really have any close friends in the village. People are still a bit frosty. We do go to the pub. Mick Slater, the landlord, is a decent guy. But I don’t think she’d go there by herself, especially not at night. You don’t understand, Alan. When I said she was gone, I didn’t mean gone as in she’d left of her own free will. I meant she’s gone as in she’s been taken.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ray jerked his head towards the back of the house. “Her studio. It’s a mess. Like . . . I don’t know.” He put his hand to his chest.

  “OK?” Banks asked.

  “Fine. I just get a bit breathless sometimes, a bit of tightness in the chest, especially when I’m upset.”

  “You should go see a doctor.”

  “Bah. Waste of time.”

  Banks brought him a glass of water from the kitchen, touched his shoulder and said, “Stay here. Take it easy.”

  Then Banks walked out back and across the stretch of grass to the large garden shed that served as Zelda’s studio. The door was wide open and the lights on. Inside, there was enough room for her to set up an easel to paint, or tools to sculpt, and a workbench where she crafted jewellery, but not much more.

  In the far corner, undamaged, stood a stack of canvases and sketches, mostly imitations of famous artists—Magritte, Modigliani, Hockney, Dali. They were good copies, though mostly unfinished. Zelda was a skilled imitator, but she wasn’t a forger. She had never tried to pass any of them off as originals. On the other hand, if you wanted a competent version of A Bigger Splash or a Modigliani nude to hang on your wall, she could knock one off for you, for a price.

  Banks saw what Ray meant about the mess. There had clearly been some sort of struggle near the door. A wine glass lay shattered on the floor, its contents splattered all over the threadbare carpet. The easel had been knocked over, paints spilled, a work in progress ruined, and Banks saw what he thought to be a smear of blood on the workbench, though he supposed it could be paint or red wine. There was a smell of turpentine and oil. On her workbench, Zelda had a small vise and set of tiny engraving tools for her delicate jewellery work. He leaned forward and examined the vise closely. There was no blood on it, and it didn’t appear as if it had been used to crush her fingers or toes. That was something to be grateful for. Banks left the workshed as it was and went back to the main house.

  “See what I mean?” Ray said. “Someone took her against her will.” He was smoking another roll-up, taking short, nervous drags.

  “Are you sure you didn’t have a fight and throw stuff around and she walked out?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be so bloody silly. You saw the state of her studio. You surely can’t believe I did that? Or Zelda herself? I told you we had an argument earlier, but not a stand-up, drag-down fight. I’ve never once been violent towards her.”

  “It looks like there was some sort of struggle,” Banks said. “Have you checked the rest of the house to see if she’s hiding anywhere? Or hurt.”

  “First thing I did. She’s not here.”

  “Let’s check her clothes,” said Banks. “You can tell me if
anything’s missing.”

  Ray stubbed out the cigarette. They went upstairs and Ray led him into a small bedroom. “This is hers,” he said.

  “You mean you . . . ?”

  “We have separate bedrooms,” Ray said.

  The room was neat and tidy and showed no traces of a struggle whatsoever. The walls were painted in pastel greens and yellows, hung with random sketches and paintings, and the duvet was burgundy. Banks and Ray searched through the wardrobe and drawers. When they had finished, Ray said, “No. As far as I can tell, everything’s where it should be. But I don’t . . . you know . . . I didn’t keep an inventory. I’m not saying there isn’t a T-shirt or a pair of knickers missing. But she didn’t have a lot of clothes. It seems normal to me.”

  “What about the surrounding countryside? Have you been out searching for her?”

  “No. I haven’t had a chance yet. I phoned you pretty much straight away, soon as I’d seen the studio and checked the house.”

  “We’d better have a look,” said Banks. “She might be out there, not far away. She may have run off, or simply gone for a walk. She might be hurt. Trapped.”

  “I never thought of that,” said Ray, jumping at the idea that Zelda might be nearby after all.

  “Got a torch?”

  They went downstairs and Ray fetched two torches from the utility room under the staircase. “They’re not much cop, I’m afraid, but it’s all I’ve got.”

  “That all right,” said Banks. “The moon’s pretty bright. We might not even need them.”

  To the east of the cottage, a grassy slope ran down to the edge of Lyndgarth village, about half a mile away. It was a wide-open space and hardly a likely spot for concealment. As far as Banks could see, it was uninhabited. On the other side, however, the cottage stood on the edge of moorland which stretched for miles to the west. It was rough terrain, covered in heather and gorse, with a number of dangerous bogs, several wooded areas and deep gullies. The natural light was almost enough to see by, but they carried their torches in case they came to a gully or pothole. About a mile to the south-west stood the dark ruins of Devraulx Abbey, suitably Gothic and ghostly in the moonlight.

  As they walked, they called out Zelda’s name, but got only silence or the cry of a frightened bird in return. After a while, it became clear that they needed their torches to illuminate the tangle of roots under their feet, which slowed their progress.

  After almost an hour’s wandering with no success, they returned to Ray’s cottage and flopped down on the living-room chairs. Ray rolled another cigarette and lit up again. “What if she’s further away, bleeding, or she broke her leg or something? Shouldn’t we go out again? Further, this time.”

  “I don’t think it’s very productive to start thinking along those lines, Ray. She’s not bleeding to death. There was no great amount of blood in her studio, if it’s even blood. And if she is out there hurt, it’s a mild night, and she’ll have no trouble lying low until morning. You know how quickly it gets light here in summer. By then I’ll have a search party organised.”

  “I can’t help thinking something terrible’s happened to her. Maybe she’s unconscious. Or dead?”

  “She’ll be fine, Ray. Zelda’s a lot more resourceful and resilient than you imagine. Think what she’s endured over the years. And think about this: if someone wanted to kill her, or hurt her, they could easily have done it here and just left her body in the studio. Don’t you think that’s what they would have done?”

  “Probably. But what’s happening to her? Do you think someone might be hurting her?”

  Banks knew that the worst thing about dealing with missing persons was imagining the terrible things they might be suffering, such as torture—right down to fingernails being pulled, teeth extracted, electrodes attached to private parts, limbs smashed, bloody beatings, and, especially when women were involved, rape. There was no way of stopping such images for an empathetic person, which Ray clearly was. Banks felt empathy, too, but he had learned to control it over the years. Such imaginings could cloud his judgement and the procedures that had to be followed in these cases. The thing to concentrate on was finding the missing person alive and not to be distracted by what he or she might be suffering in the meantime. It was hard, but he had learned to do it most of the time. The fears only came back in the dark hours, three or four in the morning, when he lay awake and terrible images crowded his mind. Ray was already at that stage.

  “There’s no evidence that anyone harmed her in the studio,” Banks said, “and I assume if it was information they wanted, they could have got it out of her there.”

  “But who could have done this? Might immigration have taken her?”

  “Well, for a start,” Banks said, “they haven’t yet stooped to abducting people from their homes by force. Even they wouldn’t go that far.” Though even as he said it, he wondered. Certainly if someone put up resistance, immigration officers might use the same sort of force as the police would to make an arrest in similar circumstances. He still very much doubted that was what had happened.

  “Do you think she might have been kidnapped?”

  “Maybe. The thing is, we don’t know. All we know is that she’s gone and that it looks as if someone took her against her will.”

  “I’ve got money. I can pay the ransom. Up to a point. I can sell more paintings.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Ray.”

  Ray stood up and started pacing. “But we have to do something. We can’t just sit here.”

  “I need to call it in,” said Banks. “Get a team set up. Lines of inquiry. Time can be crucial in these cases, and we’ve already wasted too much.” He didn’t want to tell Ray that most murders occur soon after a person goes missing. On the other hand, it had made sense to check the house and the surrounding countryside thoroughly before gearing up for a full missing person investigation. “Did you touch anything in the studio?” he asked.

  Ray shook his head. Banks hadn’t either. He had deliberately kept his hands in his pockets.

  “Did you leave it exactly as you found it?”

  “Yes. The door was open, the lights on.”

  Banks reached in his pocket for his mobile. Nobody would appreciate such a call in the early hours, but it had to be done. When he connected with the comms room he asked for the duty officer and explained in clear terms what had happened, stating that, in his opinion, Zelda had been forcibly abducted by persons unknown and that AC Gervaise should be informed at once. All patrol officers should keep their eyes open for a woman matching Zelda’s description, which he gave them, with a little help from Ray. He also asked that they organise a search team for the immediate moors as soon as it was daylight, and have AC Gervaise alert the CSIs to come and search the victim’s premises. “And tell them to be careful driving in,” he added. “There might be tyre tracks and Lord knows what else out there. Fingerprints and trace evidence in the studio.”

  Ray sat pale and shaking as Banks talked on. When he’d finished, Banks put his phone away and made some notes about timing. “You need to know they’ll be a lot harder on you than I’ve been,” he said. “The first suspect in a missing persons case is always the one who reports it, along with the missing person herself.”

  “But you know I’d never do anything like that,” pleaded Ray. “Isn’t it obvious? I love Zelda. I could never harm her.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think. And to an objective interviewer, it won’t be obvious. People kill for love as often as they do for profit or hatred. You need to tell them absolutely everything you think will help us find Zelda. And I mean everything. Don’t gloss over the row you had because thinking about it makes you feel bad, or you think it’ll make them suspect you more. Tell them. They’ll also want to know her habits, haunts, friends, and so on. Any problems or worries, too. Whether you thought she was having an affair. I know we think she was abducted from her studio after a struggle, and that’s what it looks like, but she may have ru
n off and gone to hide somewhere, or to be with someone. Maybe she wrecked the studio herself in a fit of rage, or she decided to disappear and the mess is a red herring or a cover-up.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Ray said. “And there’s nobody else. I’d know.”

  “The point is that we don’t know what happened. All we have to go on is guesswork. Just tell them what you know about the work she did and the people who abused and enslaved her. Her fears about Immigration Enforcement, her relationship with Annie. I know you say she didn’t tell you much about her past, and it’s possible I can fill in a few blanks myself, but tell them everything you do know. It may all be connected.”

  Ray swallowed. “What now?” he asked.

  “I don’t suppose you want to go to sleep?”

  “No way. I need to stay awake. Someone might call. A ransom demand or something. Or maybe Zelda herself. Annie. My God, I should call Annie.”

  Banks stood up. “I’ll do that,” he said. “I need to talk to her. The officers should be here soon. I’ll head to the station and start organising things from there.”

  “No,” said Ray, reaching out and grabbing his elbow. “Don’t go. Stay here with me, Alan. Please. I’m at my wits’ end and I can’t be alone. I want you to head the investigation. I need to know you’re on this a hundred per cent.”

  Banks disengaged his arm gently. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do my best. I don’t think my being a friend will disqualify me from trying to find Zelda, and it may even give me an advantage in any search, but there’s always a possibility my bosses might think I’m too close to things. I’ll stay here for now and talk to the team when they arrive. There’s one condition.”