Peter Robinson - Not Dark Yet

Lupescu seemed to freeze. He might have turned pale, but Zelda couldn’t tell, as he was so ashen to start with. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he said, a quiver in his voice.

‘Well, when I left St. George’s, two men were waiting for me at the street corner. They hit me and bundled me into a car and drove me across Romania, raping me all the way, until they dropped me off at a breaking house in Serbia. Do you know what a breaking house is?’

‘But that’s got nothing to do with me,’ Lupescu spluttered. ‘How can you assume I had anything to do with that?’

‘It’s a house where they break in the new girls. That means rape, day and night, beatings, humiliation, starvation, until you toe the line.’

‘No!’ said Lupescu, shaking his head so that his jowls wobbled, and half rising from his chair. ‘I won’t listen to this. That wasn’t me. You can’t blame that on me.’

‘I’m not saying you’re the one who did it, just that you’re the one responsible. You’re the one who made all the arrangements, who knew all the details, the one who spotted the pretty girls. I met others over the years, you know. In Pristina. In Zagreb. In Ljubljana. In Sarajevo. Girls who suffered the same fate in the same way as I did. Girls from the orphanage who were marked, chosen. One of them even saw you out on the street, watching as it happened. But you didn’t call the police. You did nothing. That was Iuliana. Do you remember her? She killed herself. Slit her wrists. Nobody ever came looking for any of us.’

Lupescu shrank back into his chair. ‘What could I do?’ he said. ‘These men were powerful gangsters. They had guns. You have no idea. You had a good life at the orphanage, didn’t you? You were well taken care of. Taught. Fed. Coddled.’

‘I suppose we were,’ Zelda agreed. ‘Like free-range chickens being fed and readied for the slaughter.’

‘But what could I do?’

Zelda sat up and leaned towards him, half standing, her palms on the arms of the chair. ‘You could have stopped it! You could have gone to the police. You...’ She shook her fist at him. Then she made an effort and calmed herself down, subsided deep into the armchair again. ‘I think it would be better if you confessed before your punishment, don’t you?’

‘Why? What punishment? What are you going to do to me? I’m an old man. I’m sick. I’ve got health problems. Heart. Diabetes.’ Lupescu’s eyes darted about the room, as if searching for a way out or for someone to come to his aid.

‘You should have thought about your health problems back then,’ said Zelda. ‘Though I doubt anybody could have done anything about your heart, however hard they tried.’

Lupescu tried to get to his feet, but age had slowed him. In one smooth movement Zelda stood up, picked up the infinity sculpture from the table beside her and hit him on the side of the head. He sagged back in his chair, then slid to the floor, a trail of blood spoiling the symmetry of his comb-over.

‘If there’s more,’ said Banks, ‘I think I’ll need another pint. You, too? My shout.’

‘Go on, then,’ said Burgess. ‘You’ve twisted my arm. It’s just a bloody boring security roster meeting this afternoon. I can easily sleep through that and nobody will notice.’

Banks went to the bar, his head still whirling with Burgess’s story, connections spinning like plates on sticks. He wasn’t quite as brash as Dirty Dick, but the bar wasn’t too crowded, and he managed to get served quickly enough. As usual in London, he was gobsmacked at the price of two pints.

‘You realise that we’ve probably consumed our entire weekly allowance of alcohol units this one lunchtime,’ Burgess said when Banks got back. Then he contemplated the remains of the roast beef burger. ‘Not to mention you being responsible for a few more icebergs melting in Antarctica.’

‘It always puzzled me, that,’ said Banks.

‘What?’

‘If cow farts are bad for the environment, how would stopping eating beef help?’

‘If we didn’t eat beef, we wouldn’t need cows, stupid.’

‘So what would we do with them to stop cow farts for ever? Kill them all and burn their bodies?’

‘Well, no. Burning that many cows might cause environmental problems, too. Carbon emissions.’

‘Not to mention that we’d be guilty of the genocide of a species. Bovicide . That can’t be good, surely?’

‘Talk to David Attenborough. I’m sure he’d put you right on the matter.’

‘Or perhaps we should put them all in a big building where they can fart to their hearts’ content, and we can use the gas to run the country.’

‘We’ve already done that,’ said Burgess. ‘It’s over there.’ He pointed out of the window towards the Houses of Parliament.

Banks laughed.

‘As I was saying,’ Burgess went on, ‘there’s more. But first off, remember, I’m trying to do you a favour.’

‘What’s that?’

Burgess sighed and ran his hand over his lank hair. ‘Danvers and Debs don’t trust your Zelda for a number of reasons. You have to admit, she has a very shady past.’

‘Shady?’ said Banks. ‘She was snatched off the street at the age of seventeen and forced to work as a prostitute for nearly ten years before she escaped the life.’

‘I know that. But do you know how she escaped?’

‘It’s all a bit vague,’ Banks admitted. ‘Something happened in Paris, something big, something to do with the government, and it was hushed up. She obviously helped some very influential people with a problem. That’s how she got her freedom and her French passport.’

‘No details?’

‘No.’

‘Me, neither,’ said Burgess. ‘But don’t you think it all sounds as fishy as that sandwich I just finished? Maybe she didn’t help anyone; maybe she blackmailed them. You have to see it from the NCA’s point of view. And from that of immigration. She has lived a nomadic life — she’s never filled in any appropriate immigration or residence forms, she’s filed no tax returns, her passport was not exactly official issue, and she spent most of her working life as a prostitute, which could reasonably be conceived as criminal. All in all, she’s not the kind of person Britannia Unchained wants. We have plenty of prostitutes of our own without importing them from Europe, or anywhere else, thank you very much.’

‘That’s not her fault,’ Banks argued. ‘You make it sound as if it was her choice. She wasn’t working as a prostitute, she was a sex slave, subject to rape, to violent beatings. Ever since she was abducted outside that orphanage, her life hasn’t been her own. Until she came here. And now you’re trying to take that life away from her.’

‘ I know all that, Banksy. And I’m not trying to take anything away from her. I’m just telling you how Danvers and Debs and their mates at the NCA and Immigration Enforcement might view things differently. She’s on their radar now. I’m trying to keep her out of their hands and let you deal with it. I’m trying to do you both a favour, mate. But we need some answers from somewhere.’

‘OK, so now I know. What am I supposed to do?’

‘It’s awkward,’ Burgess said. ‘And getting more so. They want to bring her in for questioning.’

‘Danvers and Debs?’

‘Yes. And someone else. There’s more.’

Banks frowned. ‘All right. Go on.’

‘Ever heard the name Faye Butler?’

‘I can’t say as I have.’

‘No reason why you should have. It’s a case I took an interest in recently. It wasn’t one of ours to start with. It was a Met case, and a Commander Barclay was in charge. I’ve known Ted Barclay for years, and after a few days he called me in. It’s a strange one, all right. Disturbing, too. About a week ago, some young lads playing near the river down Woolwich way found a young woman’s body snagged on a tree branch half out of the water. She hadn’t been in there more than a day or two. At the post-mortem, it was discovered that she had died by drowning, but not in the river. The water in her lungs was tap water, not the Thames variety. It also turned out that she had been tortured. There was evidence of burn marks, as if from electrodes, of cuts, and significant bruising. Three of her teeth were missing and two fingernails. It was also clear to the pathologist that she had been sexually assaulted.’