‘What?’
‘Mandrax. Methaqualone.’
‘Yes, I know what Mandrax are. I just haven’t heard the term for a long time. I very much doubt that was what he took. They’ve been banned here for years.’
Gerry passed her pad over again. Annie looked at her and nodded. ‘Almost done, Mr Randall,’ said Annie. ‘Just a few more questions.’
Randall grunted.
‘Have you ever heard of a girl called Adrienne Munro?’
Randall frowned. ‘Munro. No. Hang on, isn’t that the... you know, the girl you mentioned earlier?’
‘Yes,’ said Annie. ‘The one who was found dead in an abandoned car.’
‘Mandrax?’
‘I didn’t say that, sir, and you’d be ill-advised to tell anyone I did.’ Annie had known she was flying a bit close to the wind mentioning Mandrax, but she had to see if she could get a reaction out of him. He was a doctor, after all, and he might have had access. The last thing she, or Banks, wanted was for that to become public knowledge.
Randall smirked ‘Well, to answer your question, no, I didn’t know the dead girl.’
‘You never met her?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘And your friend, Mr Hadfield?’
‘If he had, he never told me.’
‘And Sarah? Sarah Chen?’
‘No.’
Did he hesitate, Annie asked herself, just for a second? ‘Did Mr Hadfield ever mention her?’
‘Not that I recall.’
‘How about a girl called Mia?’
‘I’m sure I would remember.’ Randall turned towards Liversedge.
‘She’s the only one left alive,’ said Annie.
‘I don’t see the relevance of that remark,’ said Randall.
‘Just an observation,’ said Annie. ‘If she had anything to do with whatever’s been going on, three people are dead while you and Mia are still alive.’
Randall glared at her.
‘I think that’s about it, don’t you?’ said the solicitor. ‘We’ve been very patient, but you’ve obviously wandered into territory that means nothing to my client.’ They both stood up.
‘Maybe the question is,’ Annie said slowly, ‘would your name mean anything to her? Maybe she’ll be able to tell us what’s been going on when we find her?’
Still glaring, Randall followed Liversedge out of the interview room. Gerry dropped her pencil and Annie exhaled. ‘He’s lying,’ she said. ‘The slimy bastard. He’s lying.’
The archives on the floor below were always a few degrees colder than the office upstairs. Mrs Pryce, a large woman of indeterminate age, sat as she usually did, hunched over her desk in her ill-fitting grey cardigan, big glasses enlarging her eyes as she looked up from the computer screen.
‘Ah, Miss Zelda,’ she said. ‘And what can we do for you today?’
‘Nothing to trouble yourself about,’ said Zelda waving the folder of photographs. ‘I just need to go over some of my last month’s filings.’
‘You know where they are.’ Mrs Pryce went back to her spreadsheet, or her game of Candy Crush, for all Zelda knew.
The archive was a large area divided into rows of shelving, much like a library, with filing cabinets of index cards against the walls. Eventually everything was digitised, of course, but the originals remained there, everything in its place, until a file was closed. The place smelled of old photo processing fluids from before digital days, and burnt coffee from the pot Mrs Pryce kept on the boil all day, every day.
The archive was divided into sections according to processor, so it was easy for her to go over to her own section and locate the file. Rather than taking the folder back to the front desk, near where Mrs Pryce worked, Zelda thought it more prudent to do what she had to do right where she was, in the stacks.
It didn’t take her long to locate the photograph, one of a series taken by a field agent who had been following the man in the photo with Keane, the one she hadn’t told Banks about. His name was Petar Tadić, a Croatian thug, and his story began with war crimes, involvement in massacres, ethnic cleansing and systematic rape, then progressed to trafficking in young women for the sex trade, and eventually rising to the dizzy heights of serving in the private army of a Russian oligarch-cum-gangster called Zhigunov Tsezar Pavlovich, or ‘Ziggy’ for short.
As Zelda knew all too well, Tadić, was a cruel and violent man who liked to torture his victims, especially the women, before dispatching them to the hereafter or sending them off to work in his string of brothels. Zelda had had him in her sights for a while, but he could wait. For the moment, it was Keane who interested her. He was handsome, looked intelligent, well mannered, cultured even. She wondered exactly what his role was in the trafficking world. Who did he work for? Zhigunov Tsezar Pavlovich? And what was he doing with a clod like Tadić? Zelda had to assume that it was something to do with documents or provenance, as that seemed to be his area of specialty. But it wouldn’t do to forget that, according to Banks, he was a stone killer, too.
The two of them made quite a pair, Tadić and Keane, and not only because of the physical contrast — Tadić small and barrel-chested with a shiny bald head and a snake tattoo running down his neck. She wished she could have been a fly on the wall during that conversation. The field agent hadn’t recorded them speaking, or if he had, Hawkins had decided that what they were talking about was on a need-to-know basis, and he didn’t think Zelda needed to know. That happened often enough. He was suspicious of her, not quite convinced, she could tell, as men like him always were about women who had suffered in the way she had. Well, they would both have to live with that.
She found the folder she was looking for easily enough and flipped through the images, picking the best one. It was unlikely that anyone would be checking, but she still decided it wouldn’t be safe to take the original. Instead, she rested it on an empty space in the shelf, took out her mobile and snapped a couple of images, making sure that Tadić wasn’t included.
She had just put her phone back in her pocket and was about to return the photograph to its rightful place when she sensed a presence behind her. She turned quickly and saw that Hawkins was standing at the end of the stack, watching her. She hadn’t heard him enter the archive, and she didn’t know how much he had seen.
‘Zelda,’ he said, walking towards her. ‘What is it? Anything I should know about?’
Flustered, Zelda tried to shove the photo back among the others as she talked, but she didn’t have time. ‘No. Just something I wanted to look up, that’s all.’
‘Can I help?’ he asked, coming close enough to see what she was holding. ‘Ah, our friend Tadić and the mystery man.’
‘Yes.’
‘Decided you recognise him after all?’
‘No. I just wanted to check and make sure.’
Hawkins frowned. ‘It’s not like you to be mistaken,’ he said. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Did you recognise him?’
‘No. Still a blank.’
Hawkins studied the photo, shrugged and said, ‘Well, you can’t win them all, can you?’ Then he headed off to the filing cabinets.
It was just a coincidence, Zelda told herself, but why was her heart still thudding and her hands shaking as she stuffed the photographs back in their folder?
It was another late finish for the core team, and when Banks suggested a drink in the Queen’s Arms at about half past seven, nobody objected. The pub was quiet that Wednesday evening, and the four of them found a table easily enough. Cyril had finished serving food but offered to serve up sandwiches for anyone one who wanted them — which was everyone. The plate duly arrived on the table, a mixture of prawn, ham and cheese and salad, and turned out to be just enough to take the edge off their hunger. Only Banks and Annie were drinking pints of Timothy Taylor; Gerry and Winsome stuck to diet tonic. Cyril’s playlist seemed to centre around 1966 tonight, like the Jon Savage book on that year in music Banks had just read. Sir Douglas Quintet were doing ‘She’s About a Mover’.