Peter Robinson - Many Rivers to Cross

‘You know this for certain?’ said McLaughlin. ‘About the car?’

‘According to Criminal Intelligence and ANPR surveillance,’ said Banks. ‘There’s nothing specific against Blaydon, except one of his properties was recently used as a pop-up brothel in Scarborough. Unbeknownst to him, or so he says. There could also be this Albanian connection. But it’s all speculative right now. We can’t even prove Blaydon was in the car that night, but I’ll be having a chat with him later today as a matter of course.’

‘Tread carefully,’ said Gervaise.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Banks, ‘I’m not going to go accusing him of anything.’

‘Watch out that you don’t.’ Gervaise put her coffee mug down. ‘Golf or not, he’s not without influence. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about handling the East Side case. I suppose you know it’s already high profile?’

‘Yes,’ said Banks. ‘I’ve got a morning meeting planned with my team.’

‘I’ll organise a press conference for noon,’ said Gervaise. ‘Make sure you brief me fully before then. I’ll be having a meeting with Adrian first.’

Banks nodded. Adrian Moss was a bit of a drip as far as he was concerned, but he did the useful and thankless job of media liaison officer, placing himself as a kind of buffer between the police and the media, translating the needs of one into something acceptable for the other. ‘Any chance of more officers?’ Banks asked. ‘We could do with a lot more help on the house-to-house inquiries, and I need to set up a murder room.’

‘I don’t want us to be seen to be sparing any expense on this one,’ said ACC McLaughlin. ‘I know things have been tight recently, and it might seem like a cynical move, releasing more resources for what we know to be a high-profile case, but that’s the way these things go.’

‘I can’t see anyone objecting, sir,’ said Banks. ‘It is the murder of a child, after all.’

McLaughlin nodded and turned to Gervaise. ‘Catherine?’

‘Plainclothes officers are rather thin on the ground,’ said Gervaise, ‘but I can let you have civilian staff to man a murder room here at the station. We can also find a few more uniformed officers to help with the door-to-doors and so on. You, DI Cabbot and DC Masterson will be working the case full-time, and I hardly need tell you there’ll be no leave until the matter is settled. You can also use our CID resources as you need. Just come and ask. They can also take over general duties day-to-day while you’re occupied with this business.’

It was nothing less than Banks expected, though he did feel he could do with another detective on his team. With DS Winsome Jackman away on maternity leave, expecting her first child at any moment, and his second DC, Doug Wilson, having recently left the force, he was lower than he had ever been on staff. The extra uniformed officers would help, of course, but there would still be a lot of work for the three detectives. ‘I suppose I can manage with Gerry and Annie for the time being, but I’ll want a major trawl for information, especially possible sightings. As of now, we don’t know where the lad came from, or how he got here. Someone must have seen him. We doubt he’s from around here — nobody on the estate admits to recognising him — and when we found him he had nothing but a small stash of coke in his pocket. No money, no belongings, no identification, no keys. Nothing. That stuff must be somewhere, and someone must have seen him coming and going. Bus station. Taxi ranks. Trains.’

Gervaise nodded. ‘We’ll get extra uniformed officers and PCSOs out on it today.’

McLaughlin cleared his throat. ‘You should also perhaps liaise with drugs squad officers at County HQ, as you require.’

‘Thanks, sir,’ said Banks, though after his conversation with DI MacDonald the previous evening he wasn’t sure which drugs squad detectives he should be trusting.

McLaughlin stood up and straightened his uniform. ‘Right. I’d better get back. Catherine. Alan.’ He nodded to them, put his cap on and left the office.

‘Well...’ said AC Gervaise, visibly relaxed after her boss’s departure. ‘That went well. What do you think about the drugs angle?’

‘We only found a small amount. Just enough for personal use. As yet, there’s no reason to think the boy’s murder was drug-related.’

‘Come on, Alan. If you take into account that his body was found on the East Side Estate and that DI MacDonald felt it necessary to let you know Connor Clive Blaydon was in the area at the time, I think we can live with the assumption that something might have been going on. It has county lines written all over it.’ Gervaise stood up. ‘I have to go. Don’t forget, Alan, brief me after your morning meeting.’

Zelda sat by the window of her hotel room and gazed over the river at the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by cranes and half-built modern structures that would soon, along with the gherkins, cheese graters, shards and tulips, dominate the entire city skyline. She had had a difficult night, and she was still recovering, feeling tired and numb. It had started, as it usually did, with a nightmare at about three o’clock in the morning, the details of which scurried back into the dark recesses when she woke, leaving only vague impressions of unbearably slow journeys across darkening post-industrial landscapes, through crumbling ruins and over mud as sticky as treacle. There was always someone, or some thing , chasing her, or hiding in the shadows, and she could never get far enough ahead to feel safe. She also felt that there was nowhere she would feel safe, for the place she was seeking didn’t exist, and if it should suddenly be conjured into existence, she wouldn’t be able to find it, or she would have to swim so far underwater that she wouldn’t have enough breath to get there.

As usual, she woke gasping for air, her heart thudding, and that was when things got worse, when she started remembering the real terrors of her years as a sex-slave: the pain of her first anal rape, a broken nose, a messy abortion in a cheap backstreet clinic in Belgrade, all in excruciating detail, faces included.

So she did what she always did: got up, took two of the tranquillisers her doctor had prescribed and made a cup of chamomile tea. Then she took out her Moleskine notebook and jotted down what she could remember of her dreams. The doctor had told her it would help her come to terms with her experiences, but she didn’t think it had done much good so far. Nevertheless, she persevered.

When she had written down as much as she could remember, she put on her headphones. Zelda had three favourite symphonies — Beethoven’s ‘Pastorale’, Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ and Dvořák’s ‘New World’ — and she always turned to one of them at such times. She didn’t care how corny they were, or how many times she had listened to them. This morning she chose the Dvořák and settled by the window to watch the daylight gently nudge away the darkness as the city came to life in all its quotidian glory, from the first joggers on the embankment to the quickly multiplying hordes of pedestrians heading for work, the rumbling and clattering of commuter trains over Blackfriars Bridge, then the first tourist boats cutting their wakes along the Thames to Greenwich.

And by then the world was beginning to feel bearable again.

That day, the dawn had begun with an unusually rosy glow. Rust-stained tugboats and overloaded barges passed by below her window. The broad dark river fascinated her. It was like a living being, with its swirling oil slicks and currents like ropes of muscle twisting in the wake of the boats. Sweet Thames .

Sometimes her head felt almost as stuffed full of random quotes as it was of faces. The words all came from the boxes of books people donated to the orphanage, of course. There weren’t only lurid potboilers, detective stories, thrillers and romances, but also hefty Victorian novels and poetry collections, too — Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Hardy, Keats, Wordsworth, Spenser — as well as children’s books by Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson. Zelda had read them all, from cover to cover. Her recollection of words wasn’t as good as it was of faces — she certainly didn’t have a photographic memory — but it was probably better than average, and she remembered a lot. She was hungry to learn, and those hours spent reading in a foreign language that was becoming more her own every day, were the happiest times of her life. Until the day that life came to an abrupt end.