Peter Robinson - Not Dark Yet

‘Stop,’ he pleaded. ‘I told you. They threatened my family. I’m sick. You’ll kill me.’

‘And I had no family,’ Zelda said. She didn’t know why she said it; the words just seemed to come out of nowhere. It hardly mattered whether she had a family or not. But she couldn’t help herself. ‘Like I wasn’t worth anything to anyone except men like that. You bastard. You selfish, evil bastard!’ She punctuated each syllable with another slap until his skin was raw and his nose was broken and bleeding.

‘Please stop,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. My heart.’

‘You took their money. Admit it.’

‘Yes. But only later. When they made me.’

‘What do you mean? You told me they threatened your wife and your daughters.’

‘They did! This was later. They made me take their money.’

‘Why would they do that if they could force you to do what they wanted for nothing?’

‘To make me complicit,’ Lupescu said. He licked the blood from his lips and lifted his tied hands up to wipe his nose on his forearm. His voice was hoarse. ‘Don’t you understand? There was always a chance I might go to the police and tell them everything in exchange for protection for me and my family. Or that they might come around to St. George’s asking questions. I wouldn’t have told the police anything, of course, but they didn’t know that. I was too scared for my daughters. If they paid me, I couldn’t tell the authorities without implicating myself. Don’t you see? The payments went into my bank account. It was their insurance, their way of making certain I did what they wanted, that I was no different from them. There’s not a day gone by when I haven’t regretted it, but what could I do?’

‘Well, you bought the house, didn’t you?’ Zelda flopped back in her chair and looked at Lupescu, shaking her head. The money they had paid him was her insurance, too, that he wouldn’t talk. She had killed Goran Tadić, one of the brothers who had abducted her in Chișinău, and she had killed Darius, her vicious French pimp, and she didn’t regret either murder for a moment. But she didn’t consider herself a cold-blooded murderer. And this time, she just couldn’t do it. Or didn’t want to. She felt dirty and cowardly for beating this pathetic tied-up old man, whether he was telling the truth about his motives or not, and the whole encounter was fast making her feel disgusted and empty, even of hatred.

Lupescu had been responsible for her abduction from the street and her subsequent years as a sex slave, but she couldn’t bring herself to kill him. He wasn’t the one who had abducted her and sold her; he had only tipped off The Hungarian when she would be leaving the orphanage. That was the extent of his participation. She was still angry, twisted up in knots inside, but if she believed him — that they had threatened his family — what man wouldn’t have done what he did in that situation? It wasn’t that she forgave him; she could never do that. Twelve girls in his charge had been sold into lives of unbelievable humiliation, pain, and terror at his say-so. But would it have been better if his thirteen-year-old daughters and his wife had suffered that fate instead? What kind of a bargain was that? How could you reckon such a calculation? No matter how you played the figures, they came out wrong.

So Zelda put her knife back in her bag, glanced down in contempt at the sobbing, bleeding old man hunched on the sofa, and left. Someone would find him and free him, or he would work his own way free eventually. Or maybe he would die of a heart attack. It was all the same to her. One thing she knew was that, if he lived, he could never breathe a word to another soul about what had happened here today without implicating himself.

‘So what did this cost you?’ DI Annie Cabbot asked, fingering the picture Gerry had laid out on her desk.

‘More than you could ever know.’

‘Seriously? Oh, get away with you. You didn’t, did you?’

Gerry laughed. ‘No, I’m joking.’

‘So, what? You don’t get this kind of service for free, in my experience.’

‘He asked me out to dinner, that’s all.’

‘And you agreed?’

‘Well, I had to, really, didn’t I?’

‘That’s coercion, Gerry. You don’t have to put up with it, you know. Haven’t you heard of #MeToo? You should report him.’

Gerry blushed. ‘No, it’s fine. He’s quite nice, actually.’

‘ Quite nice?’ Annie rolled her eyes. ‘That sounds like the beginning of a torrid love affair.’

‘I’m not after a torrid love affair, but I’ll be quite happy to go out for dinner with him. He didn’t coerce me. As a matter of fact, I’ve had my eye on him for a while, so there.’

‘You and Jared Lyall from tech support? Well, I never. Who’d have guessed it.’ Annie paused. ‘Still, I suppose he is rather cute, in a Justin Bieber sort of way.’

Gerry punched her arm lightly. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘he told me there wasn’t a lot he could do. The tech was right, there was some fault with the minicam. Something to do with fields and pixels and so on. Like sound sampling, missing bits out, only you can’t always put them back. I’m afraid I’m not very well up on the technical language, but he said what he had done was mostly guesswork, trying to imagine what might be missing and replacing it. That’s why it took him so long. It’s quite a work of art. There was nothing he could do with the rapist. He never showed his face, or anything else, like one of those faces on TV they have to blank out.’

‘Could it have been?’ Annie asked. ‘Tampered with? Blanked out?’

‘Jared says not. It’s all to do with his position and what little light there was. Besides, it would have been difficult for someone to get just the rapist’s face blanked out and his victim’s visible, no matter how distorted she is. I still think he’s done a pretty good job with the girl. Jared also ran this reconstruction through our facial recognition software, too, but he came up with nothing. Still, we’d hardly expect her to be in the system.’

‘Maybe it was because of the poor image quality,’ Annie said. ‘Couldn’t Jared just enhance it more? I’ve seen them do it on TV. You make a square around the bit you want enlarged and keep pressing enter.’

Gerry laughed. ‘Yeah, we tried that.’

‘Well, what happened?’

‘The bit we marked out got bigger and bigger and in the end you couldn’t tell what it was. It was just a bunch of dots with spaces between them, like a piece of abstract art. Jackson Pollock or something.’

‘Ray likes Jackson Pollock. Oh, well. So much for TV. I’ll never believe anything I see in future.’

‘It’s not a video recording,’ Gerry said. ‘It was recorded on to a microSD card through a high-end mini spy-cam working on a motion sensor. The problem is that the bedroom was very dark, a room without windows, or so it seems. Usually the cams compensate for that, especially the expensive ones, but this one wasn’t doing a good job. It just wasn’t working properly.’

‘I’m surprised Roberts didn’t return it to Amazon.’

Gerry rolled her eyes. ‘Jared worked from the original SD card, and he did his best with what he had.’

‘I’m sure he did.’ Annie held the image at arm’s length. ‘I think we may have a possible recognisable likeness here. It wouldn’t stand up in court, but... maybe her own mother might recognise her.’

‘As I said, it’s the best Jared can do. I think we have to go with it. He said we could send the card away to a tech lab in London, and they might be able to salvage a sharper image, but that would take weeks, for a start, and cost a fortune, with no guarantee. What we’ve got now is a hell of a lot better than what we had. I’m pretty sure I could recognise her from that, if I saw her. If I knew her. We need to show it around to people who might have been at that party.’