Peter Robinson - Not Dark Yet

Before she knew it, she found herself standing in the doorway to the pool area. No traces remained there of Blaydon’s gruesome death or Roberts’s slightly less gory one, but standing there and smelling the ghost of chlorine brought it all back. Roberts had been over the other side of the pool, sprawled against the glass wall, which had been smeared with blood where he had slid down after being shot.

And Blaydon was like nothing she had ever seen before. At first, she had thought his body was some kind of sea monster from those old films she had watched with her parents. The water was tinged dark red around it, and a cloying sweet metallic smell mingled with the sharp chlorine. All she could make out was a dark tangle that looked like tentacles below the body, and his arms stretched out at the sides, like a cross. He was naked, and the whiteness of his skin stood out in contrast to the dark water. She shivered as she relived the sight.

But today, the bodies were gone, the pool empty, the sickening mix of chlorine, blood, and severed bowels no longer cloying the air. Gerry hadn’t expected to find anything new on this visit; she had just wanted to get a feel for the scene. But she hadn’t expected it would have such an effect on her. She stood for a few moments until the waves of nausea and shock the recollection had brought on ebbed, then she went back to her car.

The drive was easy, with very little traffic, and Zelda made it to the airport with time to spare. With any luck, if her flight left on time, and if she took a taxi from Heathrow to King’s Cross, she would be able to catch the last train home to Raymond. She felt nervous as she went through the immigration and security formalities. She had dumped the knife she hadn’t used in a river on her way up from Purcari and was carrying nothing incriminating. She cleared all the airport hurdles without hindrance and settled back in her seat as the plane took off.

Zelda felt edgy and rattled, but she was glad she had handled Lupescu the way she had. Perhaps the guilt was enough, if he felt it as much as he had professed to do. A decent man with a wife and family didn’t do what he had done and sleep easy at night. Perhaps it hadn’t been so difficult at first to avoid thinking too much about what happened to the girls he picked out. They say some people lack empathy and can’t imagine the suffering of others — the kind of thing that permeated Zelda’s nightmares and kept her awake at night — and perhaps Lupescu was one of them. Maybe he did deserve to die, but that was out of her hands now; she would leave his fate to karma.

The plane landed and Zelda made her way through the busy terminal. If there was any air-conditioning it wasn’t doing much good, because the air felt hot and sticky. When she got to the e-gate, she stepped forward when the green light came on, inserted her passport in the slot and looked up at the camera. It seemed to take for ever, and she began to feel nervous. Eventually the light turned red and her progress was barred. Her heart began to beat fast and hard. So much so that she was sure she was shaking. An immigration officer waiting on the other side let her through and led her over to a desk, where he pored over her passport and ran it through his computer.

The wait seemed interminable. Zelda did her best not to appear nervous, but there was nothing she could do about the beads of sweat on her brow. Perhaps Lupescu had called the police, after all, and they had informed immigration. Perhaps they were going to deport her. Or maybe it was nothing to do with Lupescu but something about her French passport, her settlement status. The hostile environment. She knew that she hadn’t lived in France for long enough to gain true citizenship, or lived anywhere else for long since Chișinău, for that matter. But that wasn’t her fault.

The real problem was her past. Danvers and Debs had certainly known that she had been a sex slave. How easy it would be for a hostile government department to translate that into the idea that she had worked as a prostitute. Definitely an undesirable alien. And much worse, she was a murderer. Fortunately for Zelda, nobody knew about Goran Tadić, and the French authorities had even more reason for keeping the demise of Darius secret than she did. He had been pimp to a number of high-priced call girls, Zelda included, and had collected a great deal of compromising material on certain prominent French politicians, material that Zelda had been stealing when he had caught her, and she had killed him.

The fact remained that deep down she felt she didn’t deserve to have a happy life in England with Raymond. Or anywhere. But she wanted it so badly. In her best moments she could justify what she had done — these were evil men who had done terrible things — but there were darker times, when her deeds haunted her and drove her to the brink of despair. Was the past to be her undoing? Could she ever get beyond it and remake herself into a decent, normal human being?

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

‘No problem, Miss. Minor glitch. The machine’s sensitive.’

So am I, she was about to say, but stopped herself. These people weren’t known for their sense of humour. She waited and chewed on her lower lip as the officer continued to study her passport and frown. He asked her where she’d been.

Zelda thought it should be obvious from her passport stamp, but there was no point acting the smart arse. ‘Moldova,’ she said. ‘Chișinău.’

‘What was the purpose of your visit?’

‘Revisiting childhood places. I was born there.’

He gave her a sharp glance. ‘How long were you away?’

Again, she thought of referring him to the stamp on her passport, but dismissed the idea. ‘Three days,’ she said.

‘Not very long to visit childhood places.’

‘It was long enough,’ Zelda said. ‘I had a deprived childhood.’

Oops. Nervous humour. Big mistake . But he simply failed to react. ‘How long are you staying here this time?’

‘For ever, I hope,’ she answered, sounding as cheery and confident as possible. ‘I mean, I live here.’

He didn’t smile. He simply handed her passport back to her and said, ‘Have a nice day.’ She was going to inform him that there wasn’t much of it left, but again her common sense kicked in before she opened her mouth, and she remembered that it was more sensible not to engage an immigration officer in conversation. Just get out of there. Fortunately, she had no checked luggage, so she could head straight for the taxi rank.

Not much more than an hour and a half later, she was settling into a first-class seat on a train heading north. Finally, she was on her way, though she was too tense to read. She still felt unsettled by her experience at immigration. Why had that happened? Was her passport flagged? Had Danvers and Deborah spread the word? Would the immigration police soon be knocking on her door in the small hours? Or would it be someone else, someone far more dangerous, who didn’t even bother to knock?

She had got the passport quickly in Paris because her lover Emile had sway in the government, and because the powers that be had wanted both to reward her and get rid of her. So maybe it was dodgy, even though Emile had assured her it was genuine. But Emile was dead now, and she didn’t think she could count on any further support from the French government. She had given them what they wanted, and they had no more use for her. She should count herself lucky that she had come out of it smelling of roses. There were times when she thought she was also lucky that they hadn’t decided to have her eliminated instead. It must have been an option. And she clearly couldn’t count on the British for anything, the way things were heading. But why now? She had used the passport several times since she had been living in England without any trouble at all.