Peter Robinson - Watching the Dark

Banks followed the signs to what he thought was the entrance, all the while keeping his eyes open for a tail. But he saw no one. Eventually he came to the entrance. Beside it stood a small ticket office in which an old woman sat alone. She took some euros from him, gave him a guidebook, then smiled, showing a relatively toothless mouth, and pointed the way in. Banks thought she was probably the first Estonian he had met who didn’t seem to speak English. Perhaps she didn’t speak at all.

Though it was warm and sunny outside, the interior of the old prison was dank and chilly. There were puddles on the floors and damp patches had discoloured the walls and ceilings. In places, the whitewash and plaster on the arched roof and the institutional green paint on the walls had peeled away to expose red brick underneath.

And the place smelled. Probably not as bad as when it was a functioning prison, but it smelled. Damp. Rot. Sweat. Fear.

Banks was alone, or so he thought until he walked into one of the cells to get a better look and saw a young couple already there, guidebook in hand. They might have been a honeymoon couple, handsome young man and pretty girl, and Banks wondered what the hell they were doing visiting such a place. They smiled, and he smiled back.

On the wall of the cell were head-and-shoulders shots of young girls, along with a few nude models. Further along the corridor, Banks passed what must have been an office. It was impossible to get in the doorway now, as it was piled almost to the top with rubbish, mostly old telephones, radio parts, bits of desks and chairs, papers, various broken circuit boards, and in front of it all, a rusty old mechanical typewriter. Banks crouched and saw that the keyboard was in Cyrillic script.

The next floor seemed to be have been devoted almost entirely to the prison hospital. The cells were larger, more like wards for ten or twelve people, with tubular-metal frame beds and thin stained mattresses. It reminded him of Garskill Farm. In the doctors’ offices, medical forms, sheets of handwritten figures and old newspapers still littered the desks, next to old typewriters, again everything in Russian. One of the newspapers had a colour photograph of a beach and palm trees on the bottom corner, and Banks guessed it was probably an advert for vacations in the sun.

Worst of all were the operating theatres. Metal gurneys slatted like sinister beach recliners stretched under huge bug-eyed lamps beside old-fashioned machines with obscure dials and buttons, like something from a 1950s science-fiction movie. The glass-fronted cabinets still housed bottles of pills, phials, potions and boxes of ampoules and syringes. The tiles had come away from the walls in places to reveal damp stained plaster. The dentist’s chair with the old foot-pedal drill just about did it for Banks. He moved along quickly, tasting bile.

He had been wandering for about fifteen minutes and was standing in an eerie room with splotchy brown and red walls when it happened. The sudden but surprisingly gentle voice came from behind him.

‘They say it was used as a pre-trial holding facility, but have you ever seen an execution room in a pre-trial facility?’

Banks turned. The man behind him was youngish, mid-thirties perhaps, prematurely balding, with a goatee beard and moustache. He was slightly taller than Banks, and skinny, and he didn’t seem in the least threatening. Banks recognised him immediately as the man who had been following him around Tallinn.

‘You get my message, then?’ he said, in heavily accented English.

‘Who are you?’ Banks asked.

‘My name is Aivar Kukk. I was policeman many years ago.’ Even though he spoke softly, his voice still echoed in the cavernous corridors of the decaying prison.

‘Why have you been following me?’

‘To make certain that you were not being followed by Hr Rätsepp or his men.’

‘And am I?’

‘Not that I have seen. Perhaps he does not see you as much of a threat.’

‘To him? I’m not.’

‘But you may be when we have finished talking. Even so, I do not think it is Hr Rätsepp you need to fear. Shall we be tourists? This is an interesting place. The execution room was used before it became a pre-trial holding facility, of course. It was first a sea fortress, but is most famous as Soviet-era prison. Many were executed and tortured here. Now art students work on projects, and there are exhibition openings and many other functions. People even get married here. It was to be an art college, but nobody can get rid of the damp.’

There seemed to be no one else around except the young couple about fifty yards down the corridor, Banks thought as he walked along with Aivar Kukk. He wondered if the young couple were thinking of getting married here. The arched corridors seemed to stretch on and on ahead for miles, and the chilly damp had seeped into his bones. Banks gave an involuntary shudder. ‘I can believe it. So what’s all the cloak-and-dagger stuff about?’

‘I do not understand.’

‘I mean why the note, and following me. And why meet here?’

‘We will not be disturbed. You were not followed here. Patarei has just opened again for the tourist season. Nobody will come here at this time. Do you not think it is an interesting place?’

‘All prisons give me the creeps.’

‘This one certainly should.’

As they walked and talked, Banks wasn’t paying quite as much attention to the crumbling decor and the claustrophobic cells, but in some places he noticed there was so much graffiti and paint splashed over the walls and floors, as if someone had let loose a bunch of drunken art students. ‘How did you know I was here in Tallinn?’ Banks asked.

‘I read what happened to Bill Quinn in the English newspaper, and then Mihkel Lepikson. I knew it would be a matter of time. If nobody came soon, I would have sent a message. I still have friends in the department and at newspapers. We meet, drink beer, gossip, and they keep me informed. Tallinn is small city. Estonia is small country. Is not too difficult to know when a policeman comes from England, or what he is doing here.’

‘And what am I doing here?’

‘You are looking for killer of Bill Quinn and Mihkel Lepikson.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Is not difficult. You have talked with Toomas Rätsepp, Ursula Mardna and Erik Aarma.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. You are looking for Rachel Hewitt.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I saw you go in club, remember? Club with no name.’

Banks tried not to show how perplexed he was by all this. ‘Seeing as you know so much of my business,’ he said, ‘perhaps you can tell me where Rachel is?’

‘I am afraid I cannot. I do not know.’

‘Then why are we here?’

‘Please come here,’ Aivar said, entering another open cell with rows of bunk beds in it. Banks followed him over to the window and saw through the bars the beautiful pale blue waters of the Baltic dancing with diamonds of sunlight, the undulating line of a distant shore across the bay. It made him think what the view must have been like from Alcatraz. He had looked out on the prison island from Fisherman’s Wharf just last year, but he hadn’t taken the boat out and seen the San Francisco skyline from the inside. He hated prisons, and he wouldn’t have come here today if he hadn’t been curious about the note.

‘I think that must have been the greatest punishment of all,’ said Aivar. ‘To look on a view like that and to be locked in a cell.’

They remained silent, admiring the view that had represented unattainable freedom to so many. ‘I can help you,’ Aivar said finally. ‘I was junior investigator. I work with Bill Quinn on original case.’