Not Dark Yet

by Peter Robinson

  “Oh, why’s that?”

  “Marnie Sedgwick was raped at a party held by Connor Clive Blaydon. A party you organised, no doubt attended by a number of famous faces and up-and-coming Jack-the-Lads that Blaydon had some reason to want to impress. Now, if Blaydon himself didn’t rape Marnie, the actual rapist probably has a great deal to lose if he’s caught. We don’t know who he is. Not long after this party, Blaydon and his so-called butler Neville Roberts were murdered in a particularly nasty manner. I’d worry about that, for a start. We were thinking that maybe it was Gashi’s gang, or even Tadić’s—after all, they’re both international gangsters with about as much respect for human life as Godzilla—but what if it wasn’t them? What if it was something to do with what happened to Marnie Sedgwick? Revenge? Self-protection? What if her rapist killed Blaydon? If you do know something you’re not telling us, that could put you in a rather dangerous position, couldn’t it?”

  Charlotte had paled. “Are you telling me that my life is in danger?”

  “We’re just warning you to be careful, that’s all,” said Gerry. “Seeing as you employed Marnie and supplied her for the party, another possibility is that some people might have got the impression—the wrong impression, of course—that she was part of the entertainment, and that what happened to her was partly your fault, that you should share some of the blame with the rapist and with Blaydon himself. Maybe Marnie told her father, or her boyfriend, what happened? Maybe one of them killed Blaydon? People jump to conclusions sometimes and act before they think. That’s what makes our job so difficult.”

  “So what are you suggesting? That you give me police protection?”

  “Love to,” said Annie, “but we’re stretched to the limit right now. Still waiting for those twenty thousand new coppers we’ve been promised.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “OK, here’s the deal,” Annie said. “You go away and have a good think. A good long think. And you see if you can remember what you haven’t told us, then come back and put that right. Especially if you’ve heard rumours of anyone Marnie may have hung around with at the party, or anyone who’d been bothering her. Say, perhaps, one of the other girls working that night noticed something. If it was Blaydon who raped Marnie, you can tell us. You don’t have to worry about him. He’s dead. But if it was someone else, someone still alive . . . well, time becomes an issue.”

  “But how can I? I don’t know anything.”

  “You know some of the characters involved. Names. Maybe some of the same people were at previous parties? Maybe you noticed someone expressing an unusual interest in Marnie when you dropped by? Perhaps this person asked Blaydon for a special favour, and Blaydon had good reason to grant him his wishes. Who was he trying to win over, or impress? Perhaps you stood in the way? Maybe that’s why he sent you to Costa Rica, to get you out of the picture, clear the decks so to speak. Have you ever thought of that?”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Charlotte. “But thanks for putting the idea in my mind. I can try to think back, if you like, but what about in the meantime? What am I supposed to do?”

  “In the meantime,” said Gerry, “you can send us the information we asked for, then take our advice and be very careful.”

  ON THE second visit, Tadić stood over Zelda. “You know why you’re here?” he asked.

  “No,” said Zelda. “I don’t even know where here is.”

  Tadić laughed, a hoarse, phlegmy sound. “That doesn’t matter. Do you know who I am?”

  Again, Zelda shook her head.

  “My name is Petar Tadić. Does that help?”

  Again, Zelda said, “No. I’m hungry and thirsty. Can I have—”

  With surprising speed, Tadić gave her a backhander that sent her head sideways into the cast-iron radiator. She could taste blood and her head was ringing, starting to throb with pain. She thought she could feel blood oozing into her hair and over her ear.

  “Does that help your memory?”

  She was about to say no again, but realised what would happen if she did, so she kept quiet. Tadić was a man who liked the sound of his own voice, she remembered.

  “Let me tell you, then,” he said, squatting in front of her. “You’re the bitch who murdered my brother.” He put his face so close to hers that she could smell curry on his breath. It almost made her sick. “Eh, my beauty? Am I right?” He caressed the side of her face where he had just hit her. “Am I right?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Zelda said. “I haven’t—”

  But before she could say any more, he hit her again, in the same place. Her head reeled, and she tasted burning bile in her throat. Luckily, this time her head didn’t crash into the radiator.

  “It’s no use denying it,” Tadić said. “I saw you on the hotel CCTV. The sexy red dress. Yes? Oh, I saw you. My men are very good. They talk to Foley’s girlfriend, Faye Butler. She tells them plenty before she dies. They find restaurant where you saw her with Foley and Hawkins. They find taxi driver who drove you back to your hotel after you kill Goran. They find out your name and where you live from hotel. But not quite, because you give no street and number, do you? Just house name Windlee Farm and that village. Lyndgarth. But we find it. And now we have you. What do you think of that? Good detective work, yes?”

  Zelda vomited down the front of her T-shirt.

  Tadić jumped back up so fast he almost fell over, but he couldn’t escape getting a few flecks on his polished leather Italian shoes.

  His partner lurched towards Zelda, but Tadić held him back. “No,” he said. Then he took a handkerchief from his pocket, cleaned off his shoes and tossed it in a corner.

  “Kill her now, boss,” the man said. “Let me kill her.”

  “No. That is too easy.” Tadić towered over Zelda. “Why did you kill him?” he asked. “Why did you kill Goran?”

  Zelda tried to control her breathing, raised her head, and looked him in the eye. “You and your brother abducted me outside an orphanage in Chișinău many years ago.”

  “I don’t remember you. Or Chișinău. Is that why you killed my brother?”

  “Yes,” Zelda spat.

  Tadić kicked her again, this time in the stomach. She doubled up in pain. They stood looking down on her as she struggled to hold back more vomit. When she could trust herself to speak again, she asked, “What are you going to do to me?” Her voice felt thick. She probed a broken tooth with her tongue, tasted blood and vomit.

  Tadić grinned. “Do? I could sell you to the Albanians. They know what to do with a kurva like you. But no. Like killing you, it is also too easy. No. I have a friend who tell me about special house in Dhaka. Do you know where that is? Bangladesh. Long way. Sick old men who go there like young girls or boys best, but a white woman like you will be novelty. For a while. Do not worry. You will not survive for long. If the diseases don’t rot your pretty little pićka, the drinking water will poison you. But it will be a slow death. Long and slow and painful. You will have much time to remember what you did to Goran.”

  Zelda felt panic rush through her. She jerked and tugged at her chains again and tried to drag her hands apart so much the plasticuffs bit into her skin.

  Tadić and his friend just stood there laughing. “You can scream as loud as you like,” Tadić said. “There is no one to hear you.”

  When the strength went out of Zelda’s struggle, she was aware of the light disappearing and the door closing. She lay in the darkness alone again, her face and her teeth aching, head throbbing, and the thought came to her that she would not be able to bear the future they were planning for her, however short it was likely to be. Not only that, but she couldn’t let it happen. And the only way she knew of stopping it was to kill herself before they got her to Dhaka.

  11

  ACCORDING TO CHARLOTTE WESTLAKE’S RECORDS, MARNIE Sedgwick had lived in York on a cul-de-sac terrace of tall, narrow Victorian brick semis. It wasn’t far from the city centre, and most of the houses w
ere divided into flats and bedsits. Though it was some distance from the university, it looked like student housing, and Annie wondered if Marnie had been a student, working part-time for Charlotte.

  They walked up the steps and Annie rang the bell with the empty nameplate beside it. They had phoned ahead and the landlord said he would meet them there. They heard someone coming down the stairs and Duncan McCrae, the landlord, opened the door for them.

  “Right on time,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

  “We don’t like to disappoint,” said Annie, stepping forward. “Shall we go up?”

  “There’s nothing to see, like I told you on the phone,” said McCrae, “but be my guest.” He led the way to the first floor, at the back, where Marnie’s tiny bedsit overlooked an alley full of wheelie bins and the backyards of the houses opposite. Beyond them lay train tracks. McCrae hovered in the doorway as if he was worried they’d steal the silverware. Only there wasn’t any silverware. There wasn’t anything except an empty three-shelf homemade bookcase built of bricks and boards.

  “Exactly when did she leave?” Annie asked.

  “End of April.”

  That worked out at a couple of weeks after the rape, Annie reckoned. “Did she take all her stuff with her?”

  “There wasn’t much to take. That’s the thing. She just left one day and left the mess to me. As far as I could tell, she probably didn’t take more than a suitcase with her. Clothes and some personal stuff. She left the rest. A few books. Some cutlery, dishware, pots and pans. Household things. That’s about all. Here one day, gone the next. But her rent was up to date.”

  Annie managed to hold her tongue before saying how happy she was to hear that. “What about a forwarding address?”

  McCrae just shook his head.

  “Previous address?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t ask for her details?”

  McCrae shifted from foot to foot. “Well . . . er . . . no.”

  “What happened to her things?”

  “Bin bag in the cellar. I thought I’d keep it a little while, you know, in case she called back for it.”

  “We’ll look at it when we’re done here,” Annie said as she started wandering about the small room. She peeled back a moth-eaten curtain and saw the hot plate with two shelves above it, both bare. There was nothing else in the room.

  “Where did she sleep?” Gerry asked.

  “Mattress on the floor, under the window there, and a ratty old sleeping bag,” said McCrae. “I threw them both out.”

  Annie sniffed the air. It was stale and foisty, as one would expect in a room shut up so long in warm weather. She tried to open the window but couldn’t budge it.

  “Bloody painters,” said McCrae. “Only painted it shut, didn’t they?”

  “What was Marnie like?” Gerry asked.

  “Like? Well, just ordinary really. Quiet. She never said much. Seemed a serious sort of girl. Used to have posters on the walls—save the planet, that sort of thing. Always polite, though. A smile and a hello. Well brought up. You could tell. I never had much to do with her, really, so there’s not a lot I can tell you beyond that.”

  “What happened to the posters?” Annie could see the bare patches where they used to be.

  “I took them down, dumped them.”

  “Did you notice any changes in her behaviour or demeanour?”

  “Eh? Come again.”

  “Anything different about her around the time she left?”

  “I didn’t talk to her much the last few weeks she was here. I don’t live here, of course, so I wouldn’t know. But I don’t think she went out much. I mean, if I was around fixing something, I didn’t see her coming or going. Like I said, she left at the end of the month.”

  “Did you see her at all?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “How did she seem on those occasions, the last two or three weeks?”

  McCrae seemed stumped by the question. “Tired, mostly,” he said. “Her eyes, you know. Puffy. With bags under. As if she hadn’t been getting enough sleep.”

  “Or crying?” said Annie.

  “Aye, maybe that, too.”

  That made sense, Annie thought, given what Marnie had been through. Why had she not sought help? What had been going on in her mind? “Was she a student?” she asked.

  “Miss Sedgwick? No, I don’t think so. You’d have to ask the others, though.”

  “How did she get around?”

  “She had a car. A Fiat, I think.”

  “So Marnie was wealthy?”

  “No, I’d hardly say that. You wouldn’t, either, if you saw the car. But she had a paying job. Two, actually.”

  “What jobs?”

  “A cafe in town. Waitress. One of those chains. Ask. Zizzi. Pizza Express. Something like that.”

  “You can’t remember which one?”

  “I think it was Pizza Express, but I can’t be certain. She gave me a slice once. Pizza, that is. She brought some home from work with her and I happened to be in the hall. I think the box was Pizza Express but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  “And the other?”

  “Catering of some sort, or helping caterers. That one was occasional. Just when she was needed, like.”

  “Did she have any close friends among the other tenants?”

  “I did see her chatting with that Chinese lass from 3b once or twice. They seemed quite close.”

  “OK. I think we’ve seen enough here,” said Annie. “Can we go and see the stuff she left behind her now?”

  “Follow me,” said McCrae. He led them down to the ground floor, where he fumbled for a key in his pockets and opened a door to the cellar. It was more of a basement, really, Annie thought, having imagined a grim and sooty old coal cellar, and she was surprised McCrae hadn’t done it up a bit, given it a lick of paint and rented it out as a basement apartment. Instead, it was full of junk.

  McCrae took them over to a black bin bag in a corner. “This is it,” he said.

  Gerry went back to the car to get the proper bags to store the stuff as evidence. There wasn’t much, as McCrae had said. Books, mostly philosophy and psychology as far as Annie could tell; two plates, cups, glasses, knives and forks; and a pan and kettle she would have heated on the hot plate. That was it. No personal items—notebooks, diaries, lists of addresses, letters, nothing like that.

  “What about post since she left?”

  McCrae walked over to a battered chest of drawers, opened the top one and took out a bundle of envelopes fastened with a rubber band. “I keep the mail of any tenants who leave for a while, if they don’t arrange a forwarding address, just in case there’s something important. You’d be surprised. Over the years I’ve had cheques, passports, you name it. These are just junk mail.”

  Gerry took the bundle. They might hold some clue as to where Marnie had gone. “Thanks,” she said. “We’ll take these, too.”

  After they had carried out Marnie’s stuff and stored it in the boot of the car, they tried the door to 3b, occupied by a student called Mitsuko Ogawa, who was definitely not Chinese, as even Annie’s rudimentary grasp of foreign languages told her. But there was no one home. She scribbled a little note, added her mobile number and said they’d be back later, then she grinned at Gerry. “If you ask me, it’s lunchtime. Fancy a pizza?”

  ZELDA STILL couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. At one time, she thought she could hear traffic beyond the boarded-up windows, or an airplane fly over, but even then she thought she might be imagining things. One thing she wasn’t imagining was that nobody was coming to rescue her. No Willie Garvin. No doubt the police were trying to find her, but they clearly had no more idea where she was being kept than she did. And there was no way she could see of getting a message out.

  She spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways of killing herself before they could take her to that brothel in Dhaka. She tried to wrap the leg chain around her neck to strangle herself, but i
t wasn’t long enough, so she only managed to strain a muscle in her thigh. She tried holding her breath, and swallowing her tongue, but found she could do neither. She always gasped for breath on the verge of passing out and never got as far as putting her fingers in her mouth to push the rolled ball of tongue down her throat. She couldn’t face trying to bash her brains out against the radiator.

  She was a coward, she had to admit. If she were to die, she wanted it to be as easy and painless as possible. Pills, preferably. There was no way she could stand Dhaka, so she had to do it somehow. Maybe there would be more opportunities along the way? Maybe she could even catch somebody’s attention and get free—at an airport, for example, or on a flight. It would be a long journey; they would have to escort her through at least one airport, if not more. She was certain that even Tadić didn’t have a private jet. Or did they plan on travelling overland, smugglers’ routes? No doubt that was why she was being kept here so long, so that they could work out the routes and phoney visas. She had already figured out that the photographs they had taken when she first arrived were for a fake passport, no doubt to be supplied by Keane, the man she thought had killed Hawkins and who had once tried to kill Alan Banks.

  Alan. Raymond. She thought of them often; sometimes she thought she would burst with grief when she pictured Raymond alone and desolate at Windlee Farm. He would be a complete mess. That would be one way to die, she supposed. Grief. And what was Alan doing? He would do whatever he could to find her, of that she was sure. But it was hopeless.

  Despite the fear and the will to suicide, Zelda was hungry again. As long as her body survived, it would demand sustenance, just as it needed movement and air. She could stand up, but she couldn’t move far in her leg iron. She marked time every now and then, just to keep her circulation going.

  After that second visit, Tadić’s sneering sidekick had returned to deliver a chamber pot and throw a plastic bottle of water and a Big Mac at her. She had seen the way he looked at her, and knew that only fear of Tadić stopped him having his way. That and the vomit on her T-shirt, perhaps.