‘And Samir was still living in the council house with the others when you left?’
‘Yeah. They was all set to move somewhere else, though. Kit’s dad was due to come out of jail.’
‘Do you know where they moved to, or where the new centre for the lines is?’
‘No, man. That was after I’d gone. Didn’t know, didn’t want to know. I didn’t look back. I can’t tell you anything more.’
‘When did this all happen?’
‘It all started about a month ago.’
‘And Samir was still working the Malton line when you left?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Any idea when they might have moved him over to Eastvale?’
‘No. But it takes time to make the changes and redo the set-up. You need the lines, the trap houses, the cuckoos. I mean, most of it was already there, in place, but whenever someone new comes in they like to do it their own way, don’t they? And I might not have been the only one who split. I’d say at least two or three weeks to get everything reorganised and back in smooth running order. Maybe a month.’
‘Can you direct us towards anyone who’s still working out there?’
‘No. I told you, I don’t know how the Albanians have reorganised it all. I don’t know nothing about them. I don’t stay in touch. And I won’t shop my old mates.’
Banks wasn’t certain that he believed Greg knew nothing, but he didn’t think he was likely to get much more out of him. The kid was clearly scared and desperate to hold on to the fragile new life he had made for himself. ‘It seems as if Samir got your old gig, Greg. We’re pretty sure he was working the Eastvale line out of Howard Stokes’s house when he was killed — or he was about to take it on, at any rate.’
‘What’d they do to him?’
‘Stabbed,’ said Banks.
‘Poor sod. But I thought you said Howard was dead?’
‘We’re not quite sure of the sequence of events, but we believe they both died around the same time. A week ago Sunday.’
‘The Albanians?’
‘Maybe. But why?’ Banks asked.
Greg shrugged. ‘Dunno. Maybe Sammy was skimming, though I’d have thought he’d know better than that after being trained by Lenny G.’
‘Did Samir take drugs?’
‘He did a little coke. I think it was mostly a matter of being like one of the big boys, you know, to fit in, be one of the lads. I mean, I don’t think he had a serious habit or anything.’
‘Might he have stolen from the new boss?’
‘Samir? I don’t think so. Maybe he threatened to tell or something? Or they did it as a warning, or to teach someone else a lesson? I don’t know. I’ve got to go now.’
They watched him walk across the Asda lot and go back into the garage. ‘I’ll talk to him later,’ Blackstone said. ‘I don’t think he’s going anywhere.’ Then he glanced at his watch and looked at Banks. ‘How convenient. Time for an early dinner.’
Zelda hadn’t slept very well the previous night, either, but it had nothing to do with Banks’s proximity. She liked Alan well enough, but not in that way. If truth be told, she never thought of men in that way at all. Even Raymond, though she had gone to his bed of her own free will. She had been living alone in a caravan at the artists’ colony he had invited her to join for three months before she went to him for the first time. She didn’t know why. He was old, but he wasn’t fat, and he didn’t smell of fried chicken, sweat and cheap cigars. He smelled of paint and turpentine. That first night, she slid between the sheets beside him, and he put his arm around her and held her to him. She fell asleep with her head resting on his shoulder and, for the first time in weeks, she had no nightmares. She would have been happy just to lie down with him and talk and cuddle for ever, but, later, things took their natural course. Now she felt lucky that even though they were together in that way, Raymond was gentle and undemanding in his lovemaking, and it was far from the be-all and end-all of what kept them together. With Raymond, that was probably down to age; with Zelda it was experience.
The memories, the associations, were simply too disturbing. When your body becomes a plaything for monsters, you come to hate it. A lot of the girls she had met self-harmed. The masters didn’t like that. Their punishments were severe but never left marks. Some girls even succeeded in committing suicide, and there was nothing the masters could do about that except take it out on the ones still left alive.
Without thinking too deeply about it, Zelda knew that in that way could never work for her with anyone else but Raymond. Not after all she had been through. It might have worked with Emile, but he was dead. She knew she was damaged, that a part of what she was — her womanhood — had been taken from her. And two of the men who had taken it were now dead at her hand. But she could live with that. She knew that other women’s lives were different, but she could live with what she was, and what she had done. And living had to be enough. People sometimes asked if she felt she could ever be the same after her experiences, but she always replied that there was nothing for her to be the same as; they had taken everything from her before she even got it herself.
But had her life come to be dominated by revenge, by the need to kill? Where would it end? Any real list would be very long indeed, and she had to ask herself if that was the existence she wanted. Or jail, where she would inevitably end up. She was lucky not to have been caught so far. Alan was no fool. The cops were no fools. They had their methods, and they would uncover her, not cover up, the way they had done with Darius. In killing Darius, she had done the authorities a favour, had done to him exactly what they wanted done. Darius had a lot of dirt on a lot of famous and powerful people. Household names. Government ministers. With Emile’s help, Zelda had done their dirty work for them, had even uncovered his store of blackmail material for them, and they had rewarded her with a passport and her freedom. They couldn’t state that publicly, though, so she had had to leave France. She lost Emile for ever, too.
There had been no mention of a body found in a London hotel in the morning paper she had scanned at Banks’s cottage, as there surely would have been if Goran Tadić had been left there after her visit. Back at home, she scoured the Internet news sites and still found nothing. By mid-afternoon, she became certain that what she had thought would happen had happened. They had got there first, before any hotel employees, and they had removed his body, destroyed all traces of his murder. If there was to be any investigation, any retribution, it would belong to them, not to the police.
Now it made sense for her to stop. Let Petar Tadić live to suffer the loss of his brother.
But there was one more, if only she could find him.
In the early years of her enslavement, Zelda had been too distraught to think very clearly about anything, but later she had begun to wonder just how the Tadićs had known to wait for her near the orphanage on the day she left. Then, once or twice, in the brothels, she was certain she saw girls who had been with her in the orphanage. On one occasion, she had the opportunity to ask if this was true, and it turned out to be so. It wasn’t a great leap of logic from there to realise that someone inside the orphanage was providing the information — either selling it or being blackmailed into giving it — and the most logical choice was the orphanage director: Vasile Lupescu. The problem was, she didn’t know where he was. Her sources told her that he had retired and no longer lived in Chişinău, but nobody so far knew where he had moved to. So he was still out there. He would be quite old by now, she realised, perhaps dead, but she would like to find out for certain.