Strange Affair

by Peter Robinson

  “When did you tell her this?”

  “Last time I go to clinic. Not long. Monday, I think.”

  “Did Artyom know you’d been talking?”

  “He took me back in the car and told Hadeon. They could not hurt me to make me tell them anything. I knew that. But…”

  “I think I know,” said Annie. “They threatened to harm your parents back home, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” Carmen whispered.

  “So you told them.”

  “Yes.”

  Annie nodded. “That house in King’s Cross,” she said. “We’ve just come from there. Those girls were treated terribly. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  “I have been there. Hadeon always tells me I have been very lucky. For me men pay hundreds of pounds a night, for those girls they must have many men to make such money. Hadeon makes his girls work very hard. He tells me if I am not good he will send me there, too. I am happy he is dead.”

  “Do you think he would have people killed who found out what he was doing?”

  Carmen nodded. “Harry once killed a girl with his bare hands for refusing to have sex with him.”

  “Did Artyom work for him?”

  “Yes. And Boris.”

  “With the cropped blond hair?”

  “That is Boris.”

  The driver, Annie thought. “There was another man downstairs.” Annie described him. “Do you know who he is?”

  “All I know is that his name is Max and that he brings new girls for Harry. He is not always here. I have never talked to him.”

  Annie imagined that when Mazuryk knew Carmen had talked, he or Max had brought Lambert in to handle damage control, and that was what had been going on all week. Mazuryk had also sent Artyom and the driver to keep an eye on Jennifer, watch where she went. Perhaps Lambert had talked to Roy and managed to assure Mazuryk that no one would be ringing the police, but negotiations were tense; then something else happened, something that changed it all.

  “Do you know a man called Lambert?” Annie asked.

  “Lambert? No,” said Carmen.

  Annie gestured toward her stomach. “What’s going to happen to you?”

  “I’m going to have my baby. It makes them take good care of me. I get food and they leave me alone. I get bored sometimes. The only times I can go out is to see Dr. Lukas, and then Artyom usually takes me. But it is much better than before.”

  “Do you know who the father is?”

  Carmen gave her a scornful look.

  “And what about the baby? Dr. Lukas told me it was going to be adopted.”

  “Yes. They want to sell the baby to a rich man. She will go to a good family and have a good life. That is why they treat me well, to keep the baby healthy. Harry always jokes when he sees me, how he must keep me healthy for Mr. Garrett.” A sudden anxiety came into her voice. “But Harry is dead. What is going to happen me now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Annie. “I really don’t know.”

  Banks remembered something on his way out and opened the door to Roy’s garage. The Porsche still stood there gleaming and immaculate. He opened the driver’s door and sat down, reaching into the side pocket for the AA road atlas. It was still open to the same page as it had been before, and this time Banks spotted Quainton on the top right. Well, he thought, it was hardly conclusive, but a bit of a coincidence nonetheless. Perhaps Quainton had been Roy’s port of call before he got home, rang Banks and went off to the Albion Club with Lambert. What had he found out there that had disturbed him so?

  Banks took the AA atlas, locked up the car, garage and house behind him and headed for the M41 and Quainton. As far as he could gather, after a number of diversionary maneuvers, there was no one on his tail. He had his mobile on the seat beside him and just beyond Berkhamsted Annie rang and told him about the raids, the deaths of Hadeon Mazuryk and Artyom, and about her interview with Carmen Petri. It put a few things in perspective and persuaded Banks that he was certainly heading in the right direction.

  An hour and a half after leaving London, he was there.

  Quainton stood at the bottom of a hill, a straggling sort of place scattered around a village green. Banks parked there, near the George and Dragon. He paused a moment and glanced at the brick windmill at the top of the hill, then went into the pub. He hadn’t got an address from Dieter Ganz, just the village name, but he guessed the place was small enough that they would probably know Lambert and his Spanish wife at the local pub.

  It looked like a good place to eat. Blackboards offered steak and Stilton pie, French country chicken and Thai red curry. Maybe he’d come back after talking to Lambert and his wife. The barman knew the Lamberts and told him they lived in a big house on the Denham Road, and he couldn’t miss it. Banks thanked him and set off.

  He found the house easily enough on the outskirts of the village. It looked the sort of place that had had a few additions over the years—gables, an extra wing, a garage—so it was hard to tell in what period the original building had been erected. Banks pulled into the gravel drive, parked out front and went to ring the doorbell.

  In no time at all a young woman answered, smiled at him and asked what he wanted. Banks didn’t want to alarm her, so he showed her his warrant card but told her that he was Roy Banks’s brother.

  The woman made a sympathetic face. “Poor Mr. Banks,” she said. “Please come in. Gareth is still in London at the moment, but you are welcome to a cup of tea. I know you English love your tea. I am Mercedes Lambert.” She held out her hand and Banks shook it lightly.

  Her accent matched her sultry Mediterranean looks and Banks could indeed believe that she had been a Spanish actress and pinup girl. She still had a fine figure, shown to advantage in the shorts and sleeveless green top she was wearing. Her olive skin stretched taut over an exquisite bone structure and her long chestnut hair fell in waves over her shoulders.

  When they got inside she led Banks to a large living room, big enough to hold a grand piano along with a damask three-piece suite. Every inch the English country lady, she called the maid and asked her to bring tea. Banks should have known she wouldn’t be taking care of a place as big as this by herself. He wondered if she was bored being stuck out in the country and whether she often stayed at the Chelsea flat with her husband. She looked a good few years younger than Lambert, but not as young as Corinne or Jennifer. Banks pegged her at mid-to-late thirties.

  “I understand you were an actress in Spain?” he said, sitting in a chair with carved wooden arms.

  She blushed. “Not very good. I was in…what do you call them, films where monsters come after me and I scream a lot?”

  “Horror films?”

  “Yes. Horror films.” She shrugged. “I do not miss it.”

  I’ll bet you don’t, thought Banks, glancing around the room. French windows opened on a patio beyond the piano, and Banks could see sunlight shimmering on the blue surface of a swimming pool like a Hockney painting. “Did you know Roy well?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I met him only once, last week, when he came here. But Gareth told me what happened. It is terrible.”

  She pronounced the name “Garrett,” too.

  “When did you meet him?” Banks asked.

  “I think it was last Friday.” She smiled. “But sometimes the days all seem the same here.”

  “What did he want?”

  At that moment, the maid came in with the tea and set the tray down on the table between Banks and Mercedes Lambert. After she had added milk and poured, she left as soundlessly as she had entered. Banks didn’t usually take milk, but it didn’t bother him.

  Mercedes frowned. “I don’t really know why he came,” she said. “He wanted to talk to me about a girl called Carmen and her baby, but I said I didn’t know her. Carmen sounds very Spanish, I know, but you also find it in other countries.”

  “What did he say next?”

  “He told me this Carmen was pregnant and he understood that
she was selling her baby to me for adoption.” Mercedes frowned. “He said Gareth told him this was so.”

  “Are you adopting Carmen’s baby, Mrs. Lambert?”

  “No, of course not. That’s what your brother asked me. I didn’t understand why he would think such a thing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, as I told your brother. Then a very strange thing happened.”

  “What?”

  “Little Nina cried, and I showed her to him and told him all about her, and Mr. Banks said he was sorry he’d made a mistake, and he left very quickly.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Banks. “I don’t understand. Who’s little Nina?”

  And then he heard it himself. A baby crying upstairs. Mercedes Lambert smiled. A few moments later, a nanny brought the baby down—it couldn’t have been more than three months old—and Mercedes held the tiny bundle, tears in her eyes.

  “She is sick,” she explained to Banks. “This is what I told your brother. There is a problem with her heart. It is, what do you say? Con…con…”

  “Congenital?”

  “Yes. Congenital. And if she does not get a new one very soon, she will die.” Then her expression brightened. “But Gareth says we are high on the list. He has arranged with a clinic in Switzerland—the best in the world, he says—to be ready at a moment’s notice. So maybe my Nina will be lucky, yes?”

  “Are you sure you have no intention of adopting another baby?” Banks asked, feeling his blood start to turn cold.

  Mercedes smiled. “No. Of course not. Nina will have her new heart and she will become strong. I know it. Do you think so?”

  Banks looked at Mercedes Lambert, saw the desperate hope in her face, and he looked at the pale face buried in the blankets. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, maybe she will.”

  The train ride did Annie good, and when she got back to Eastvale around lunchtime she didn’t feel quite so depressed as she had after the raids. Before leaving for the station, she had tried to console Brooke over what he perceived to be a lack of backbone in giving in to “orders from above,” but in the long run she knew it was something he would have to live with and get over by himself. For reasons of their own, the powers that be, maybe through Burgess, had hampered the official police investigation and encouraged Banks to go stirring things up by himself, no doubt in the hope of luring more players out into the open rather than causing them to disappear. And no one had given a damn whether Banks got killed in the process.

  When Annie got to the station, Gristhorpe, Stefan, Winsome and Rickerd were all in the squad room and there was an air of celebration around the place. It seemed appropriate. After all, Jennifer Clewes’s killer was dead, along with his boss, and the accomplices were in custody. Case solved.

  “I hear you’ve been in the wars,” Gristhorpe said, looking up as she entered.

  Annie sat at her desk and automatically turned on the computer. “More like doing battlefield triage,” she said. “Anyway, DI Brooke and the SO19 guys have got it all under control now. My job’s done down there.”

  “Congratulations,” said Gristhorpe.

  “Anything new, Stefan?” Annie asked.

  “I was just telling the superintendent here that we got a quick match on the fingerprints found on DCI Banks’s door: Artyom Charkov. He doesn’t have a record but the prints match the body in the mortuary in London, the one who was shot this morning in the second raid. And they also match the partial we found on the door of Jennifer Clewes’s car. London say they found a gun on Charkov, too, a twenty-two. It’s being checked out.”

  “That’s what got him shot,” said Annie. “Opening fire on an armed police officer.”

  “Well, I’d have used something with a bit more stopping power than a twenty-two.”

  “It’s just as well for the officer concerned that he didn’t. Anyway, it’s all a bit academic now he’s dead, isn’t it?” said Annie.

  Stefan looked disappointed.

  “Oh, Stefan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to belittle your efforts. There’s always the other one, Boris, the driver.”

  “Essex technical support got his print from the crashed Mondeo,” said Stefan, suppressing a smile. “From inside the glove box.”

  “Excellent. Things have been happening, then.”

  “How’s Alan?” asked Gristhorpe.

  “He’s doing okay, as far as I know, sir,” said Annie. “I think he’ll be heading back to Peterborough later today to spend a bit more time with his parents and help organize the funeral. At least he’ll be able to tell them some sort of justice has been done.”

  The door opened behind Annie and she saw Gristhorpe get to his feet, a big grin on his face. “Well, if it isn’t Susan Gay,” he said, advancing toward the slightly stocky woman with the tight blond curls who stood in the doorway, Kev Templeton beaming beside her. “Come on in, lass. Join the party.”

  “We’ve got him,” Susan said. “Cropley. He’s down in the custody suite under arrest for the murder of Claire Potter. All by the book. We’ve taken a DNA swab and it’s on its way to Derby. We’re also getting three DCs to do the motorway service stations with his photo. But the DNA itself will be enough.”

  Templeton was beaming, too, Annie noticed. “Congratulations, Kev,” she said. “Good one.”

  Templeton grinned. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Right, then,” said Gristhorpe. “Seeing as we’ve got two reasons to celebrate, who’s going for the beer?”

  Banks worked most of it out on his drive back from

  Quainton, but he still needed some answers. He tracked Gareth Lambert down at the travel agency on Edgeware Road, leaving his Renault parked outside. Lambert seemed surprised and more than a bit put out at being manhandled into the street as his staff looked on openmouthed, but he went without putting up a struggle.

  Banks opened the passenger door and shoved him in. “Buckle up,” he said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ve got something to show you.” Banks made his way through the traffic down the side of Hyde Park to Chelsea Bridge, then across the river and along to the old Midgeley’s Castings factory. If Lambert realized where they were going or recognized the place when they arrived, he didn’t show it.

  Banks pulled up on the weed-cracked concrete in front of the door and got out. He opened Lambert’s door and practically dragged him out. Lambert was heavier, but he was in poor shape, and Banks’s wiry strength was enough to propel him toward the factory door.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Lambert protested. “There’s no need to rough-handle me this way. Roy’s brother or no, I’ll bloody report you.”

  Banks pushed Lambert through the door and into the factory. Birds took off through the holes in the roof. The police had finished with the scene, and the chair and ropes were gone, but there were still bloodstains visible on the floor. Roy’s bloodstains. The lab had confirmed it. Banks stopped and shoved Lambert down on a pile of broken pallets and rusty, twisted scrap metal. Lambert groaned as something sharp stuck into his back.

  “I’ll have your fucking job for this,” he yelled, red-faced, struggling to get up.

  Banks put a foot on his chest and pushed him back. “Stay there,” he said. “And listen to me. This is where they brought Roy. You can still see his bloodstains here.” Banks pointed. “Look at that, Gareth; that’s my brother’s blood.”

  “That’s nothing to do with me,” said Lambert, sitting up and rubbing his back. “I’ve never seen this place before. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re rambling.”

  He tried to get to his feet, but Banks pushed him down again.

  “That’s a good one,” said Banks. “Let me be perfectly clear about it, Gareth. After you and Roy had your little talk in the Albion Club, you rang Hadeon Mazuryk or Max Broda on your mobile from the club’s toilet and asked for help. I’m sure your mobile records will bear this out. You needed to get Roy out of the way. Mazuryk came himself or sent someon
e else, and they got him in a car outside the club and brought him here. They tortured him, you know, Gareth, to find out how much he knew, what my address was and what I knew. Maybe they even got our parents’ address out of him, because they’ve made threats in that direction, too. He was tied up on a chair just over there, bleeding, knowing he was probably going to die at the end of it all.” Banks felt close to tears of rage as he talked and it was all he could do to hold himself back from thrashing Lambert. He found an iron bar on the floor, picked it up and slapped it against his palm.

  Lambert cringed. “I told you,” he said. “It’s nothing to do with me. Why would I do that? The girl and your brother were a danger to Mazuryk, not to me.”

  “But you’re connected with Mazuryk. You arranged to get the girls to him after Max Broda bought them at markets in the Balkans.”

  “You’ll never find any evidence of anything like that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Banks, “because that wasn’t what it was really all about. At first I thought it was about the girls you and Max Broda conspired to smuggle in for Mazuryk. Girls who had been lured by false job offers or abducted from the street. You wanted Roy in it with you, didn’t you, just like old times, and you’d been talking about it for a while, a couple of months. Roy didn’t know the whole story at first, and he might even have shown a flicker of interest if there was enough money in it for him. Lord knows, church or no, my brother was no saint.

  “Then Carmen Petri let slip to Roy’s girlfriend that these girls were not willing participants. Jennifer told Roy and that changed things for him. I’d guess at that point he wanted nothing to do with it. I imagine he gave you a chance, though, for old time’s sake. I think on the Tuesday, the day after Carmen told Jennifer, Roy had lunch with you and Max Broda and you both tried to convince him everything was aboveboard. But he wasn’t convinced. That’s when he took the photograph of the two of you. He left the café first, didn’t he?”

  Lambert said nothing.

  “Maybe he wouldn’t have turned you in to the police,” Banks went on, “no matter how much what you were doing sickened him. I doubt that my brother had a very healthy regard for the boys in blue, given his track record. But there was his girlfriend to consider, too, wasn’t there? And she was even more outraged, being a woman. Roy must have told you at lunch on Tuesday that he’d persuaded her to keep quiet for the time being, not to contact the police, and that you needn’t harm her. But Mazuryk set Artyom and Boris to watch her just in case, to see where she went and who came to see her. If she had rung the police, they wouldn’t be content with just some anonymous voice over the phone; they’d want to visit her, or have her visit their station. That’s what Artyom and Boris were looking out for. Then, when things came to a head that Friday night in the Albion Club and Roy told Jennifer to drive up to see me, they followed her and killed her on a quiet country road.”