Ray swallowed. ‘What now?’ he asked.
‘I don’t suppose you want to go to sleep?’
‘No way. I need to stay awake. Someone might call. A ransom demand or something. Or maybe Zelda herself. Annie. My God, I should call Annie.’
Banks stood up. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘I need to talk to her. The officers should be here soon. I’ll head to the station and start organising things from there.’
‘No,’ said Ray, reaching out and grabbing his elbow. ‘Don’t go. Stay here with me, Alan. Please. I’m at my wits’ end and I can’t be alone. I want you to head the investigation. I need to know you’re on this a hundred per cent.’
Banks disengaged his arm gently. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do my best. I don’t think my being a friend will disqualify me from trying to find Zelda, and it may even give me an advantage in any search, but there’s always a possibility my bosses might think I’m too close to things. I’ll stay here for now and talk to the team when they arrive. There’s one condition.’
‘Anything.’
‘Seeing as I won’t be driving home for a while, you can clear some space on your sofa and pour me a large glass of that fine Highland Park right now.’
After he finished the whisky, sleep didn’t seem to be an immediate possibility, so Banks left Ray and went to check out the studio again. This time he took a pair of latex gloves from the crime scene kit in the boot of his car so as not to disturb any evidence that the attackers might have left there.
First, he picked up Zelda’s leather satchel-style shoulder bag, the one she always carried, from the chair. Its contents were as one would expect: mobile phone, keys, purse, and cigarettes — but in addition she also carried a small digital camera, a black Moleskine notebook, a Kindle, and a little white case of AirPods. There were a few other inconsequential odds and ends — paper tissues, tampons, a combination penknife/corkscrew, hairbrush, lipstick, a couple of rollerball pens, and a charger for the iPhone.
Zelda had a desk in the far corner of the studio, which seemed untouched by the struggle, and on it sat her MacBook along with a small flat-top printer. Banks knew better than to touch the computer, even with his protective gloves on. The CSIs would rush it to tech support for a thorough check. It was easy to lose data inadvertently if you didn’t know what you were doing, and Banks would have been the first to admit that he didn’t. He wasn’t tech-illiterate or a Luddite by any means, but the inner workings of the CPUs and vagaries of internal architecture and configurations of computers were way beyond his grasp.
He glanced over at the titles on the bookshelf above the desk. As he would have expected with Zelda, there were a lot of literary classics — Dostoevsky, Kafka, Dumas, Flaubert, Dickens, Hardy — along with an odd selection of children’s books, mostly by Enid Blyton, Jacqueline Wilson, and Roald Dahl, and a few Modesty Blaise novels by Peter O’Donnell. There was also, he discovered on further investigation, a half row of non-fiction books concerned with the stories of women trafficked and raped by terrorist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram, especially Yazidi and Rohingyan women, including The War on Women by Sue Lloyd-Roberts, Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar, and Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl.
One of the desk drawers was filled with printer paper and spare cartridges, another with a selection of pens and pencils, rulers, and other stationery items. But this drawer also contained some more personal items — photos of her and Ray in happier days, a few sentimental souvenirs from trips they had made together. There was a newspaper clipping about the discovery of Faye Butler’s body, which made sense now that Banks knew Zelda had met Faye. There were also some official papers, including her French passport. It still had a few years left on it, and when he examined the stamps he noticed the most recent was from Chișinău, dated the previous Friday. He knew that was where she had grown up, and where she had first been abducted from, and he wondered what she had been doing back there so recently.
When he had finished, Banks stood at the centre of the room and opened the notebook. It wasn’t a diary or a journal, but more of a catch-all. There were fragmentary shopping lists, titles of books she wanted to read, quotations from books she had been reading, and memos to herself, as well as poems and story ideas, passages of self-analysis, descriptions of dreams and fantasies. There were also several lengthy descriptions of landscapes: an unnamed stretch of the Croatian coastline, the moorland around Windlee Farm, a view of London from somewhere on the South Bank near Blackfriars Bridge, a London hotel called the Belgrade.
There were flashes of memory, too, mostly bad — a vicious beating in Ljubljana, a john who threatened her with a knife in Pristina, a failed suicide attempt in Minsk. It made for harrowing reading. In addition, several pieces read very much like fantasies of revenge against people who had harmed her: a pimp in Paris called Darius, Goran Tadić, and someone called Vasile Lupescu. These sections might also be notes towards a story, or stories, she intended to write someday. Zelda was an artistic type and a keen reader; perhaps she had ambitions towards fiction and this was a record of her imaginings.
Banks hoped the notebook might offer some clues to Zelda’s whereabouts, and he would study it further for that very reason. But it also put him in a difficult position. At the moment, he was the only one in possession of these private musings; if he didn’t include the notebook with the rest of Zelda’s possessions, he would be guilty of withholding evidence. But evidence of what? he reasoned. Fantasising about a murder isn’t the same as committing one. Jotting down notes for a mystery story isn’t a crime.
Besides, he couldn’t, in all conscience, create more problems for Zelda when she was probably living in terror of her life. He would ask her about the notebook when he found her.
Without further thought, Banks slipped the notebook in the inside pocket of his jacket and went back to the main house.
Dawn broke early over Lyndgarth Moor, and by the time the sun was up, a semicircle of officers moved slowly west from the isolated cottage. Seen from afar, they could have been grouse-beating but for the police uniforms most of them were wearing.
Back in the house, Banks and Ray Cabbot sat drinking strong coffee with a fresh-faced AC Gervaise, who had only just arrived smelling of soap and shampoo. Banks had had a fitful night on the sofa and wondered if he looked as bad as he felt, while Ray, he imagined, hadn’t slept at all. His clothes were wrinkled, his eyes blurry and red. Two detectives from the Northallerton HQ at Alverton Court — DS Flyte and DC Bharati — had appeared with the search team and CSIs, and they had already questioned Ray. No wonder the poor bloke was exhausted, Banks thought.
No one was yet any nearer to finding Zelda or to working out what had happened to her. She hadn’t been seen by any of the night patrols, and though her description had gone out nation-wide, the general thinking was that she couldn’t be that far away. No one would want to risk a long journey with a kidnapped woman and all the possible encounters with police cars and CCTV cameras that might occur. Whoever took her had probably planned it all out in advance and had a place already prepared somewhere in the Dales. Perhaps a deserted farmhouse or ruined barn, Airbnb, or a remote cottage rental. It wasn’t as if there was any scarcity of isolated spots and abandoned buildings out there. It depended on what her abductors planned to do with her, of course. And when they planned to do it.
The CSIs agreed there had been a struggle in the studio but found no immediate evidence of harm being done to Zelda. The suspect bloodstain turned out to be paint. They were still working out there, collecting trace evidence, fingerprints, and anything else that seemed relevant. The search team had first gone through the house and grounds, even though Ray assured them he had already done so. They were just doing their jobs, Banks told him, and it paid to be thorough, but Ray complained anyway. He must have smoked a whole pouch of Drum, and the front room stank of smoke.