‘So the son exaggerated?’
‘Yes.’
‘Think he had anything to do with it? Ronald? Was he laying a false trail for us?’
‘Possibly.’ Gerry chewed the end of her pencil.
‘But?’
‘I think it was more a matter of bad blood. At least that’s the impression I got from DI Cabbot. But somebody I spoke to mentioned that if I wanted to know who was the real crook in the Hadfield family, I should look more closely at Ronald.’
‘And you did?’
‘Yes. There’s nothing proven, no charges brought, but there’s a strong suspicion going about that he’s been involved in money-laundering.’
‘I see,’ said Banks. ‘So he won’t like the attention his father’s suspicious death has brought?’
‘Not at all.’
‘And it would make sense for him to have us think we were searching for some Somalian hit man, or some such mythical killer.’
Gerry smiled. ‘Exactly.’
Banks folded his arms. ‘Excellent. Good work.’
‘Thank you, sir. Shall I keep plugging away?’
Banks glanced at his watch. ‘No, not tonight. You deserve a drink. My treat. Besides, Ronald Hadfield’s business practices aren’t our concern unless they have some connection to his father’s death. And after what you’ve just told me, they probably don’t. We’ll let the fraud squad deal with him. I think we need to look a bit closer to home. Where’s Annie?’
‘Gone to see her dad, sir, about working on that sketch of Mia. DS Jackman said Sarah Chen and her housemates knew Mia, too.’
‘The sooner we find her, the better. Just you and me, then.’
Gerry got up and reached for her coat from the rack, and as Banks helped her on with it he noticed a photograph on Annie’s desk and went over to see what it was.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, holding it up for Gerry.
‘Oh, that. It’s a photo of a treble clef the CSIs found in Laurence Hadfield’s bathroom. Annie had it photographed before she took it down to exhibits. It’s in her report, but I haven’t had time to enter it into HOLMES yet.’
Banks hadn’t read the most recent statements and exhibits reports on the Laurence Hadfield case yet, mostly because he had been distracted by the Sarah Chen case, or by Zelda. ‘It’s not Poppy’s?’
Gerry laughed. ‘According to DI Cabbot, sir, she almost had apoplexy at the mere suggestion.’
Banks stared at the photograph.
‘It’s a charm from a bracelet, sir,’ said Gerry. ‘Pandora, apparently. Very popular.’
‘I’ve heard of them,’ said Banks. But already he felt the thrill of connection, the cogs and wheels in his mind shifting, engaging, grinding out images. Adrienne Munro sitting in the Ford Focus, a charm bracelet loose on her right wrist. Whether it was from Pandora or there had been a missing charm, he couldn’t be certain, but it would be easy enough to find out. It was a treble clef, a musical symbol, and that seemed to suit Adrienne, he thought, with her violin and love of classical music.
Then there was the conversation with Colin Fairfax, who had said at one point that he had bought Adrienne a charm for her bracelet. Again, he hadn’t said what kind of charm, but that could also be easily checked. If it happened to be the same one, then it linked Hadfield with Adrienne, who was already linked with Sarah Chen through the note in her room and, now also through the mysterious Mia. Perhaps this wasn’t about drugs, after all.
‘Let’s postpone that drink for a short while, Gerry,’ Banks said. ‘Come with me. We’ve got work to do.’
Zelda loved walking around London in the evening, especially the West End. She loved the lights and the crowds heading for theatres and restaurants, the narrow streets, the noise from the cafés spilling out into the street.
She left her boutique hotel near Seven Dials at seven o’clock to find somewhere to eat in Covent Garden. Though she never worried about it in Yorkshire, she usually dressed down in London to avoid drawing attention to herself, and tonight was no exception. Her clothes were plain and loose-fitting, though not the kind of loose that simmered like a waterfall over her arse as she walked. She wore a padded jacket and a woolly hat to keep warm. No matter what the temperature, though, the streets were always full of people, some of the young girls very scantily dressed. When she had first come here, she had thought they were prostitutes, but Raymond put her right on that score. Though it was a chilly evening, people sat outdoors at café tables smoking, talking and drinking espresso, or stood outside pubs with pints in their hands, laughing at jokes. Sometimes as she walked around the city, Zelda had the eerie feeling that she had seen every face before, that each one was stored in her memory, and she recognised all of them.
Over the past few years, Zelda had become adept at making herself invisible. She hadn’t followed many people in her life, but it had been necessary on occasion, and her skill of invisibility had come in very useful. It was more a state of mind than anything physical. She didn’t need a disguise, but simple, ordinary clothes in dull colours helped: a brown winter coat, woolly hat, a straightforward gait of someone who knows where she’s going but is in no hurry, no signs of a strut or a wiggle.
She loved the anonymity, how she could walk around by herself without being pestered. Every time she went to London, she stayed in a different hotel, a different part of the city — Chelsea, Kensington, Soho, Piccadilly, even Earls Court, Notting Hill or Swiss Cottage. And it seemed there was nothing odd about a woman eating alone in London. At least not in the kinds of restaurants she sought out. She always managed to find some hidden-away treasure, a little backstreet bistro or trattoria of some kind.
Tonight she spotted a tiny French restaurant off Mercer Street which had a few empty tables, and she went inside. A maître d’ seated her without even asking whether she had a reservation, and she ordered a carafe of claret and studied the menu. When she had decided on the steak frites, she took out her e-reader and propped it up on the table. She had bought the kind with the origami cover, as it folded over and made a stand for itself, which was perfect for reading while eating alone. She had found that people were even less inclined to disturb her when she was reading.
Zelda always liked to get to London the night before she started working; it was a kind of buffer between the beautiful but remote and isolated world of Beckerby and the depressing reality of her job. It was useful and necessary work, but she couldn’t deny that it was often dispiriting, recognising those dreaded faces from her past, from some of the worst times of her life. In this state, tonight, she felt that she floated free of it all, was able to empty her mind of her concerns and concentrate on the words on the screen: Kawabata and the otherworldly Japan.
The waiter brought her meal and poured some more wine for her. She hadn’t thought it was the kind of restaurant where the waiters did that, so she guessed he was a gentleman of the old school. That was the thing about these hidden French restaurants, the waiters were almost always elderly men, much the same as at many of the best restaurants in Paris.
As she ate her steak, sipped her wine and looked up at an antique travel poster showing the Eiffel Tower on the wall, she thought of Paris, where she had spent her last year in servitude. Almost anyone she had known the previous few years would have killed for the life of luxury she had led there. But it was still slavery. She was wined and dined by the rich and powerful. Politicians. Bankers. Oligarchs. Gangsters. But she was still expected to lie on her back and please them. And her enforcers were never far away. They made it clear that she was not free to leave the luxury of the high-price call girl’s life. Slob and Vitch, she called them. They delivered her to the fancy restaurants and five-star hotels and waited while she did her duty, then they drove her to her flat afterwards. Sometimes they insisted on a piece of the action, too, one after the other, just to put her in her place, before they left her alone for the night. And even then, she knew, they were never far away, always watching.