Author: Peter Robinson
Category: Other
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Also by Peter Robinson
Caedmon’s Song
No Cure for Love
Before the Poison
INSPECTOR BANKS NOVELS
Gallows View
A Dedicated Man
A Necessary End
The Hanging Valley
Past Reason Hated
Wednesday’s Child
Dry Bones that Dream
Innocent Graves
Dead Right
In a Dry Season
Cold is the Grave
Aftermath
The Summer that Never Was
Playing with Fire
Strange Affair
Piece of my Heart
Friend of the Devil
All the Colours of Darkness
Bad Boy
Watching the Dark
Children of the Revolution
Abattoir Blues
When the Music’s Over
Sleeping in the Ground
Careless Love
SHORT STORIES
Not Safe After Dark
The Price of Love
Many Rivers to Cross
Peter Robinson
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Peter Robinson 2019
The right of Peter Robinson to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover image: Oliver Wintzen/Getty Images
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 9781444787023
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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www.hodder.co.uk
To Sheila
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Two beautiful women sat talking and sipping chilled white wine in a garden high on a hillside overlooking the Adriatic. Behind them stretched the jagged monochrome mountains of the Dinarides, the peaks so pale as to appear snow-capped. Below, the sea stretched out before them, greenish water in the shallows close to shore, darkening to deep blue further out. The water was dotted with yachts and small islands, and the southern tip of the Istrian Peninsula was visible to the north. At the bottom of the hill lay the village, with its narrow higgledy-piggledy streets and red pantile roofs. A small beach hugged the curve of the bay where the waves broke in white foam against the yellow sand. Instead of a town square, there was a marina surrounded by cafes, where the locals and people who came shopping from the outlying islands moored their small boats.
The youngest of the two women, barely turned thirty-one, went by the name of Zelda, though on her passport she was called Nelia Melnic. Her friend, aged sixty-three, was Jasna Slavić on all her documents, but everyone called her Mati, for mother.
Zelda’s lustrous dark hair cascaded over her shoulders and a jagged fringe fell over her forehead, framing her oval face. She had high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes with a slight Eurasian tilt, black as Whitby jet, full lips and a small nose, slightly crooked where it had clearly been broken. Below her graceful neck was a lissom body, slender arms with a violinist’s hands, and the shapely long legs of a catwalk model.
The older woman, Mati, had a different kind of beauty, perhaps better described as elegance, with her short silver hair, pale blue eyes, an expressive, lined face and a strong, wiry body, with the hands of someone who had done far too much manual labour. She had a powerful presence and radiated authority, compassion and intelligence.
Though it was only early May, the weather was already almost too hot for comfort. Fortunately, a light ocean breeze helped to mitigate the heat and humidity. Zelda had a sketch book on the table before her, and as they talked she drew Mati.
Mati poured more wine. ‘So, what did you tell your policeman friend about your boss meeting this man he is looking for?’ she asked.
Zelda stared out at the water, which rippled like a sheet of the purest blue silk. When she spoke, her voice was unexpectedly deep. ‘Nothing,’ she answered.
‘Why not?’
‘I had second thoughts as soon as I walked into the pub and saw him with his friends and colleagues. They were celebrating catching a murderer. I was going to tell him I’d seen this man he’s looking for, Keane, meeting with Mr Hawkins, my boss, but I changed my mind.’
‘Why?’
‘I realised that if I said anything about what I had found out, they would take over. The police.’
‘But aren’t you police now?’
‘No. I’m a civilian. They make that quite clear. I have no police powers. Not that I want any.’
‘Surely they’re the best people to do the job? Unless you want your own revenge?’
Zelda put down her pencil, offered her pack of Marlboro Gold to Mati, and both women lit cigarettes. Zelda took a drag and watched the swifts swoop and circle over the rooftops below. The tiles reminded her of Whitby, one of her favourite places in England, home of the famous jet that her partner Raymond had compared her eyes to. ‘Yes. Partly,’ she admitted. ‘I do. But it’s not just that. Don’t get me wrong, Mati. I like Alan Banks. I believe that he is a good man and an honest cop. But he’s still a policeman. It’s still the system, isn’t it? An institution with its own rules, procedures and codes of conduct. The force.’ She paused. ‘And I can’t say the police have ever done me any great favours over the years.’
Mati tapped some ash off her cigarette and made a face. ‘True enough. Me, neither.’
‘There was one time, I remember, in Priština, when I managed to break free from my captors for a few moments. I was so naive. I ran up to a uniformed policeman and tried to explain that I’d been abducted and forced into prostitution.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Do? Nothing. He just scowled at me as if I was something he’d got on the bottom of his shoe and told me to fuck off. I believe “Fuck off, you filthy whore” were his actual words, as far as I could understand. I must confess, my Serbian language skills weren’t too good then. The pimps took me back, and I got a beating that put me out of action for two days, which earned me another beating. So, no, I’m not too fond of the police. There’s so much corruption. If I passed the information to Alan – that I had seen the man he is looking for meeting secretly with my boss – he would have no choice but to go to his bosses with the information. More people would become involved. Government agencies, police forces. That’s h
ow they operate. It’s hard to believe my boss isn’t corrupt himself – and if I can’t trust him, how can I trust anyone else in the agency?’ She shook her head as she answered her own question. ‘I don’t think I can. The criminals have infiltrated everywhere. There would be every chance that someone with a strong interest in keeping things the way they are would gain control, or achieve a significant and powerful place in the investigation. Either one of the criminals or an incompetent fool.’
‘Do you think they might want you out of the way?’
Zelda scraped her cigarette against the ashtray. ‘I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to cut me into small pieces and feed me to the fish. The men I escaped from, the men who first took me and broke me in, the kind of clients I had in Paris towards the end. Many of them have come to prominence in politics or business, even the church, and they don’t like loose ends.’ She shrugged. ‘But that was Paris. Men like that are expected to go with high-class call girls. It’s de rigueur, sort of an initiation en route to becoming one of the lads, as the English say. I don’t really suppose they’d wish me harm.’
‘Still . . .’ Mati persisted. ‘Someone now in a high position, with something he may regret in his past, some indiscretion, maybe . . . or someone suddenly vulnerable?’
‘It’s possible. But if an American president can get away with all the things he says and does where women are concerned, I doubt if any of my little peccadillos will give anyone much to fear. No, it’s the ones I betrayed who hate me the most. My captors. They lost money because of me.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, I want to investigate this Phil Keane person myself. I want to find him. After all, he was with Petar Tadić in the photograph I saw, and we all know what pigs Tadić and his brother are. Keane also tried to kill Alan a few years ago.’
Petar Tadić was the brother of Goran, and the two of them had abducted Zelda in the street when she left the orphanage at seventeen, shoved her in a car, punched her in the face and spilled all her worldly possessions across a street in Chi¸sina˘u. And that was only the start of a very long journey. The Tadić brothers had made their way up in the organisation since then, she had heard. No longer mere transporters, they had moved into the realm of overseas exploitation and were now close to the top, giving orders rather than taking them, extending their operations from sex trafficking and drugs to money laundering.
‘What will you do when you find this Keane person?’ Mati asked.
‘Try to get him to lead me to the people he works for, then pass on the information to Alan.’
‘You would trust the police then?’
‘To deal with Keane? Yes. Alan wants him. It’s personal. I’m assuming he has evidence he has no desire to hide.’
‘And the people Keane works for?’
‘A different proposition altogether. I have my own plans for them.’
‘Isn’t this a dangerous game you’re playing?’
‘It’s not a game,’ said Zelda.
‘But you could get hurt.’
Zelda gave a harsh laugh. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘Killed, even.’
‘Well, that would be something new.’
‘When will it be over, this mission of yours?’
‘I don’t know.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve got a little list.’
‘You and Ko-Ko.’
They laughed, and Mati let it go. That was one of the things Zelda loved about her; like Raymond, she wasn’t judgemental. But unlike Raymond, Mati knew exactly where Zelda was coming from. And she knew her Gilbert and Sullivan.
‘For this revenge, you would risk everything? The life you have made for yourself with Raymond in Yorkshire? Your freedom?’
‘I don’t know, Mati. All I know is that I have to try. It may be the only way to stop the nightmares, the flashbacks, the despair, the numbness I feel sometimes.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it. How far have you got with your search for this man Keane?’
Zelda sighed. ‘Nowhere.’
‘How long has it been?’
‘Four months. The department has only called me in once a month so far this year, for two or three days each time. I’ve watched Hawkins closely, even followed him after work when I knew I could get away with it.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. He either met his wife for drinks, or he went straight to the tube. I didn’t follow him there. I recognised his wife from the photo of them he keeps on his bookshelf. I also met her once, very briefly, at his house.’ Zelda was a super-recogniser – she never forgot a face – which was one reason why she worked as a consultant helping to build a database for facial recognition of sex traffickers. The other reason was that she had seen a lot of them to remember.
Mati had not been trafficked, Zelda knew, but she carried the history of her country in the lines of her face, lines Zelda was trying to render on paper: the Tito years, the Balkan wars of the 90s, ethnic cleansing, mass murders and the war crimes trials that followed. Mati had been forced to watch as her daughter was gang-raped by soldiers after she had been raped by them herself. She had seen both her husband and her daughter shot and piled into a mass grave along with most of the population of the village where she lived. The only reason her sons had survived was because they had gone to visit her sister in Italy two days earlier. Mati said she had no idea why she had been allowed to survive. Perhaps the soldiers believed it would be more painful for her to live with what she had seen and what had been done to her. And perhaps they were right. Zelda thought there were times Mati wished she hadn’t survived.
‘So, what are your plans for the future?’ Mati asked.
‘I don’t really know,’ said Zelda. ‘Things just haven’t been the same in the UK since all that Brexit business started.’
‘America?’
‘Oh, no. Definitely not. Not while that dreadful man is in power. He reminds me of too many of my worst abusers.’
‘Where, then?’
‘I’ll probably go to live in France, if the worst comes to the worst. I have a French passport, after all.’
‘Ah, yes. Your mysterious Parisian benefactor.’
Zelda smiled. ‘If only you knew.’
‘But you would be able to stay if you wanted, wouldn’t you? In England? Isn’t there a form you can fill in, an application? Couldn’t you even apply for citizenship?’
‘I suppose so. But I’m not sure I want to stay in a country that doesn’t want people like me.’
‘Surely not all of them are like that?’
‘No. Of course not. Only fifty-two per cent. But apparently that’s all it takes. Still, I don’t think they can have all the foreigners kicked out of the country, no matter what the Leave voters believe. But Brexit has quite destroyed any faith I might have had in England and the English. I remember all those books I used to devour in the orphanage – the Brontës, Jane Austen, Beatrix Potter, John le Carré, Peter O’Donnell, Agatha Christie – and how it was always my dream to live there. But now it’s broken. England is broken. And I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to fix it. At least not in my lifetime. France would hardly be heaven on earth. After all, there’s Macron, but . . .’
‘And Raymond?’
Zelda smiled. ‘Raymond’s an artist. He loves the light in France. He’ll go with me. And the French love artists.’
‘Paris?’
‘No. I couldn’t. Not after . . . But perhaps we could discover some beautiful, hidden little corner of the countryside that hasn’t already been spoiled by foreigners like us. I’m sure I would be able to sneak back in and disappear.’
‘Good luck. And in the meantime?’
‘We’ll stay in Yorkshire. To be honest, we’re pretty isolated from the rest of the country up there. We have no close neighbours, and we’re a couple of miles from the nearest village. Not that there are any foreigners there. It is North Yorkshire, after all. And I’ll just carry on with my work, I suppose. Keep an eye on Hawkins. Look for any signs of this Phil Keane
in photographs or in the street. Find out what he was doing in London with Petar Tadić.’
‘And the policeman?’
‘Alan Banks? We are friends. Raymond and I see him and Annie socially, too. They don’t press me for information every time we meet.’
‘He probably thinks you’ll tell him if you find out anything.’
‘Perhaps. Though sometimes . . .’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think he knows that I’m keeping something back. Just the way he looks at me.’
Mati leaned forward. ‘Be careful, Nelia. You should not need me to tell you that, but I do.’ It was rare that she called Zelda by her given name.
‘What do you think I should do, Mati?’
Mati picked up the bottle and poured them more wine. It was the local grape variety, Malvazija, and very good indeed. Zelda passed the cigarettes again. ‘I think you should have another glass of wine, then you should help me settle in the new girl.’
Mati ran a shelter for trafficked girls fortunate enough to have escaped the sex trade into which they had been forced. It was housed on the slope behind them in a rambling old mansion on an acre or two of land. Mati’s work was her life these days, and the shelter, a place of healing and safety, was always full. There were even some Yazidi women, and their stories never failed to break Zelda’s heart: how their husbands were thrown into pits and shot; how they were forced into marriages with abusive ISIS warriors. Mati’s two strapping sons, known affectionately as Ić and Ićić – ‘Son’ and ‘Son Son’ – both built like heavyweight fighters and armed to the teeth, took care of security. Once or twice various trafficking gangs had launched attacks to try to take their girls back, but Ić and Ićić had fought them off. In the end, the gangs had stopped bothering. The risk wasn’t worth their while; there were plenty more girls for the taking.
Zelda smiled. ‘And after that?’
‘After that, we’ll leave the boys in charge and go down to the village to sample the catch of the day at Martina’s. Then perhaps we’ll go dancing.’