Watching the Dark (Inspector Banks Mystery)

by Robinson, Peter

  ‘You don’t believe she might still be alive somewhere?’ he asked.

  She gave Banks a pitying glance. ‘No more than you believe it, Hr Banks. Or you, Pr Passero.’

  ‘It would, indeed, be a miracle,’ Joanna said, and turned a page in her notebook.

  ‘We got most of the details from Hr Rätsepp,’ Banks went on, ‘but we were just wondering if you have a different view of things? Perhaps there were things he didn’t tell us?’

  ‘Toomas Rätsepp was a fine investigator,’ said Ursula Mardna. ‘One of our best. If he could not solve the case, nobody could.’

  ‘What about his team?’

  ‘Fine officers.’

  ‘So in your opinion, everything that could possibly be done was done?’

  ‘Yes. We were most thorough.’

  Banks wondered about that. Rätsepp had said the same thing. He also had to keep reminding himself not to expect too much, that he was talking to a lawyer, basically, however high-ranking and however close her role was to that of the investigator. What was she going to say, that Rätsepp was a sloppy copper and the investigation was a shambles? No. She was going to defend her team, especially to an unwelcome foreign detective. ‘Do you remember DI Quinn?’ he asked. ‘That’s really who I’m here about.’

  She tilted her head to one side. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘What exactly was his role?’

  ‘His role?’

  ‘Yes. The part he played, his function in the investigation.’

  ‘Ah, I see. I think he was ambassador from the British police, no?’

  ‘But he must have got involved somehow?’

  ‘He was here for only one week.’

  ‘But quite soon after Rachel’s disappearance, I understand?’

  ‘Then you will also understand that there were many obstacles in beginning of the investigation. The girls, themselves, they could not remember.’

  ‘I understand that,’ said Banks. ‘Hr Rätsepp said the same thing. But DI Quinn was in at the start?’

  ‘You could say that. He was allowed to accompany a junior investigator to get some feel of the city, to observe the investigations we were starting to make.’

  That was the first Banks had heard of it. Another thing Rätsepp had neglected to mention. In fact, he had told Banks and Joanna that Quinn had played no active role in the investigation, had merely attended meetings. ‘Who was this investigator?’

  ‘I cannot remember his name. It is so long ago.’

  ‘Would it be in your files?’

  Ursula Mardna gave him an impatient glance and picked up the telephone. ‘It would.’

  A short scattershot phone conversation in Estonian followed, and several moments later a young pink-faced man in a pinstripe suit knocked and walked in with a file folder under his arm. Ursula Mardna thanked him and opened the folder. ‘His name is Aivar Kukk. According to this file, he left the police force five years ago.’

  ‘A year after the Rachel Hewitt case. Why?’

  ‘To pursue other interests.’ She pushed the folder away. ‘It happens, Hr Banks. People are sometimes lucky enough to find out that they have made a wrong choice in life early enough to correct it.’

  ‘Do you have his address?’

  ‘I am afraid we do not keep up-to-date information on ex-police officers. Even if we did, there would be much red tape involved in giving it to you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She favoured him with an indulgent smile. ‘We have come a long way since the Soviet era, but red tape is still red tape.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Banks. ‘I’m sure we’ll be able to find him if we need to.’

  Ursula Mardna gave him an assessing glance, as if trying to work out whether he would be able to, or perhaps whether it mattered.

  ‘What were your impressions of DI Quinn, Ms Mardna?’ asked Joanna.

  ‘He seemed a good man. Very serious. Dedicated.’

  ‘Did he change at all during the course of the week he was here?’

  ‘Change?’

  ‘Yes. His attitude, his feelings about the case, his commitment, his mood. Anything.’

  ‘I did not see much of him after the first two days,’ she said, ‘but I did get the impression that he placed himself more in the background. Is that how you say it?’

  ‘He stood back?’ Joanna said.

  ‘Yes. When he started, he was so full of energy that he did not want to sleep. He just wanted to walk the streets looking for the girl. I suppose he became tired, and perhaps depressed when he realised there was so little he could do here. I think he perhaps lost hope.’

  Or he gave up when someone showed him the compromising photos, Banks thought.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Joanna. ‘It must also have been intimidating, a foreign city, different customs, different language.’

  ‘As you can see, the language is not much of a problem here, but the other things . . . yes. I think he came to feel, how you say, out of his depth? That things were best left to us. The locals.’

  ‘That would explain it,’ said Joanna, making a note.

  Ursula Mardna seemed a little alarmed. ‘Explain what?’

  ‘The change in him.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Banks showed her a photograph of the girl who had been with Quinn. He hadn’t shown her image to Rätsepp because he hadn’t trusted him. While he thought Ursula Mardna might well be erring on the side of caution and self-protection in all her responses, he took that as the reaction of a canny lawyer, not a bent copper. But he still didn’t want her to see Quinn and the girl together. There was something rather too final and damning about that. ‘Do you recognise this girl?’ he asked.

  She studied the photograph closely then shook her head and passed it back. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have never seen her. Who is she?’

  ‘That’s something we would very much like to find out,’ said Joanna.

  ‘I am sorry I cannot help.’

  ‘Was there any possibility that Rachel Hewitt’s disappearance was connected with drugs?’ Banks asked.

  ‘Naturally, it was a direction we explored. We found no evidence of such a connection, but that does not mean there was none. Perhaps back in England. I do not know . . . Why do you ask?’

  ‘I suppose you kept, still keep, pretty close tabs on the drug-trafficking business around here?’

  ‘Tabs?’

  ‘Keep an eye on. Watch.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And there was no link between Rachel or her friends and drug smuggling?’

  ‘We did not reveal any such link.’

  ‘Could it be possible that any . . . er . . . uncovering of such a link might have been, shall we say, diverted, suppressed, avoided altogether?’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  Banks leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. ‘Ms Mardna,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked as a police officer for more years than I care to remember, most of that time as a detective. I have worked undercover, vice, drugs, just about anything you would care to name, and if there is one thing I have learned, it is that there is always the possibility of corruption and intimidation, especially when drugs are involved, mostly because of their connection with organised crime. Now, can you honestly sit there and tell me there has never been a whiff of corruption in the Tallinn police?’

  Her face reddened. ‘I cannot tell you that, Hr Banks,’ she said. ‘But I can tell you that in this case, the possibility of drugs was thoroughly investigated by Investigator Rätsepp and his team, and reviewed by myself. The girl had no connections with any of the known drug-traffickers at that time, and as far as I know, investigations back in Britain found no hints of any such a connection there either. All of which led us to believe,’ she went on, ‘even in the absence of a body, witnesses or forensic evidence, that we were dealing with a sex crime.’

  ‘Stands to reason,’ said Banks. ‘Attractive young girl, alone in a strange city. Odds are someone might t
ake advantage of her. But why kill her?’

  ‘We worked on the assumption that whoever abducted her – or whoever she arranged to meet during the evening – also killed her to avoid identification and disposed of the body somehow.’

  ‘Why should somebody she arranged to meet do that?’

  ‘I can only speculate. Perhaps things went too far? Something went wrong? The girl became nervous, tried to back out? Protested, struggled. I do not know. There could be many explanations.’

  ‘And the body?’

  ‘Estonia is a small country, but there are many places to get rid of a dead body. Permanently. And before you ask, we did search as many of them as we could.’

  Banks scratched the scar by his right eye. ‘It seems the most convincing scenario,’ he said. ‘In which case we’re probably wasting our time here.’ He gestured to Joanna and they both stood up.

  Ursula Mardna stood up with them, leaning over the desk to shake hands. ‘You would never waste your time in Tallinn, Hr Banks. Especially as we have such wonderful weather this week. Goodbye. Enjoy yourselves.’

  That, Banks thought, was what Rätsepp had wanted them to do, too. Have a holiday, don’t bother chasing ghosts. But it only made Banks all the more suspicious.

  ‘Since when have we been arresting people for begging in the street?’ Annie asked PC Geordie Lyttleton, who had just nipped into the Major Crimes office to report an incident.

  ‘Well we don’t usually,’ said Lyttleton, ‘but she was getting quite aggressive, ma’am. She scared the living daylights out of one old lady, following her down the street shouting some sort of gibberish after her.’

  ‘And what sort of gibberish did it turn out to be?’

  ‘Polish gibberish, ma’am. She can’t speak English. Jan from Traffic speaks a bit of Polish, though. His mum’s family’s from Warsaw. Anyway, he got it out of her that she has hardly eaten since last Wednesday. She lost her home and left her job. She was in a bit of a state. What she actually meant was that she was squatting up at some ruined farm and—’

  ‘Garskill Farm?’

  ‘She didn’t know what it was called. I just thought, with the murder and all . . . well, there might be a link of some sort.’

  ‘Excellent thinking, PC Lyttleton. Good work. We’ll make a detective of you yet. Where is she now?’

  ‘Well, ma’am,’ said Lyttleton, scratching his head. ‘She was bit, erm, aromatic, if you catch my drift, rather ripe, so I took her down to the custody suite and got WPC Bosworth to show her to the showers and fix her up with one of those disposable Elvis suits.’

  Annie smiled. He meant the coveralls they gave to prisoners while their clothes were being examined for trace evidence. A bit of embroidery in the right places and they might look a bit like the jumpsuits Elvis Presley wore in his Las Vegas shows. The basement had been modernised recently, and there were decent shower facilities for the use of anyone being held there. Letting the girl use them was stretching it a bit, but if Lyttleton was right, it beat sitting in a small warm room with her as she was. ‘Did you arrest her? Charge her?’

  ‘No. Not yet. I thought I—’

  ‘Well done, lad.’ She thought of the starving girl, set the vestiges of her vegetarianism aside, put some money on the table and said, ‘Go and get her a Big Mac, large fries and a Coke, will you, and get someone to send DS Stefan Nowak over from next door, if he’s not too busy. I know he speaks Polish.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. What shall I—’

  ‘When she’s finished with the shower, take her up to interview room two and let her eat there. Try to put her at ease. Tell her she’s nothing to be frightened of.’

  ‘She doesn’t understand English, ma’am.’

  ‘Do your best, Constable. A kind smile and gentle tone go a long way.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Interview room two was no different from any of the others, except that it had a viewing room beside it, with a one-way mirror. Annie wanted to see what sort of shape the girl was in before Stefan arrived, so she installed herself in the tiny room and waited there.

  The girl was shown into the interview room. A lost, pathetic figure in the overlarge jumpsuit, small and frail, skinny as a rail, clearly scared, wide-eyed, starving and exhausted, damp brown hair clinging to her cheeks and neck, she seemed no older than fourteen, though Annie estimated she was probably eighteen or more. When the door closed and the girl thought she was alone, she flicked her eyes around the room as if checking for monsters in the corners, and then just sat there and started to cry. It made Annie want to cry herself, it was so bloody heartbreaking. Just a frightened, hungry kid, and there was no one here to comfort her, to hold her and tell her that she was loved and everything would be all right. You didn’t have to be a Guardian reader to raise a tear or two for that predicament.

  Lyttleton entered the interview room and handed over a McDonald’s package. Before Annie even had the chance to feel guilty and wish she’d sent her a salad sandwich or a tofu burger instead, the girl fell on it and ripped off the wrapping paper. Annie had never seen anything quite like it, but it reminded her of one of those nature shows on BBC with David Attenborough. In a matter of moments, burger, fries and Coke were gone. Lyttleton had been decent enough to leave her alone to eat – he must have suspected it would not be a pretty sight – and Annie now felt guilty that she had been riveted to the spot by such a personal degradation as someone eating like there’s no tomorrow. She felt like a voyeur, or a participant in a sick reality TV show.

  When the girl had finished, she carefully picked up all the scattered wrapping paper and put it in the wastepaper basket, then she used one of the serviettes to wipe the table where it was stained with grease or ketchup. Christ, Annie thought.

  A few moments later, DS Stefan Nowak arrived in the viewing room. Annie explained the situation. ‘Can you help?’ she asked him.

  Nowak looked through the one-way mirror at the girl. ‘I can speak the language, if that’s what you mean. I’m not a translator, though. It’s a special skill I don’t have.’

  ‘This isn’t official,’ Annie said. ‘We’ll get a statement and all the rest the correct way later. Right now, I need information.’

  ‘Does AC Gervaise know?’

  ‘I’m sure she would agree if she were here.’

  Stefan grinned and held up his hands. ‘OK, OK. Only asking. Come on, then. Let’s have at it.’

  The room still smelled of McDonald’s, and it made Annie feel slightly queasy. Fish and chicken she could handle, but she always avoided red meat. The girl jumped up when they entered, but she stopped short of running away and curling up in the corner. Instead, she regarded them sullenly and fearfully and sat down again slowly. She had a sulky, downturned mouth, lips quivering on the verge of tears and dark chocolate eyes. Her fingernails were badly bitten down, some showing traces of blood around the edges. All in all, she was probably a very pretty girl under normal circumstances, Annie thought, whenever she was lucky enough to experience them.

  ‘Could you ask her name, please, Stefan?’ Annie said.

  A brief conversation followed. ‘She says it’s Krystyna,’ Nowak said. ‘After her grandmother. She wants to know when you are going to let her go and what she is accused of doing.’

  ‘Tell her she’s got nothing to be afraid of,’ Annie said. ‘I just want to ask her a few questions, and then we’ll see what we can do to help her.’

  Nowak translated. Lyttleton came in with a pot of hot coffee and three styrofoam cups, powdered milk and artificial sweetener. Annie guessed the girl might crave real sugar, but then she’d just had a large Coke. It was a wonder she wasn’t bouncing off the walls.

  ‘Ask her how old she is,’ Annie said.

  Stefan talked with Krystyna and said, ‘Nineteen in July.’

  She’s of age, then, Annie thought. Though of age for what, she didn’t know. For the life she had been leading? ‘Where does she come from?’

  Nowak spoke to Krystyna,
and the answer came slowly, hesitantly.

  ‘She from a small town in Silesia,’ he said. ‘Pyskowice. Industrial. Coal mining.’ He paused. ‘She . . . I mean, she doesn’t speak very good . . . Her Polish is very . . . provincial. She’s not well educated.’

  ‘Spare us the Polish class distinctions, Stefan. Just do the best you can, OK?’

  Nowak’s eyes narrowed. ‘OK.’

  Annie had always thought Stefan could be a bit of a stuck-up elitist prick at times. He was well educated and probably descended from some Polish royal family. Maybe he was a prince. She’d heard there were a lot of Polish princes about. Maybe it was a good line for getting laid. Stefan did all right in that department, she’d heard. She wondered if a line like that would have worked on Rachel, with her dreams of wealth and opulence. Then she got back to the matter at hand. ‘Ask her why she came here.’

  Annie watched Stefan translate. Krystyna’s expression turned from puzzlement to surprise.

  ‘For a better life,’ was the answer Stefan translated. There was no irony in Krystyna’s voice or her expression. ‘Why do they all think we owe them a better life?’ Stefan added.

  Annie ignored him and paused for a moment, then asked, ‘Where was the farm she lived on?’

  ‘In a wild place,’ came the answer. ‘There was nothing to do. No shops. No movies. No television.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Cold. The roof leaked. The garden was all overgrown with weeds and nettles. There was no proper place to wash and no real toilet.’

  ‘It sounds like Garskill to me,’ Annie said. ‘Can you ask her when and why she left?’

  ‘Wednesday morning,’ the answer came. ‘They were all told to pack up their belongings – not that they had any, apparently – and that they wouldn’t be coming back there after work.’

  ‘Where was she working?’

  Nowak and Krystyna conferred for a while, then he said, ‘A yeast factory. There was a sign outside that said “Varley’s” she said. I think I know the place. They make yeast products for animal feed and for prisoners, diet supplement pills and suchlike.’