‘Is it...’
‘It’s just head and shoulders.’
Mrs. Sedgwick nodded and Annie took out the photo and showed it to her. She put it down. ‘It could be anyone, couldn’t it?’
Her husband picked it up. ‘Francine’s right,’ he said, tossing it back towards Annie. ‘This doesn’t prove anything.’
‘We think it was Marnie,’ Annie went on, ‘and we think that was why people say she was behaving strangely after that party. Mood swings. Depression. Shutting herself away. She couldn’t concentrate on her job at Pizza Express, so she left, then came home. That’s when you were briefly reunited.’
‘Did she know she was pregnant?’ Francine asked, moving the hankie away from her face.
‘We don’t know,’ said Annie. ‘We don’t even know for certain that the rape caused her pregnancy. If she knew, she never mentioned it to anyone we’ve talked to. All we can say is that she might have known, might have sensed the change in herself, even after just a month or so, while she was back with you. A missed period, perhaps, cramps, nausea, bloating, mood swings. And she was certainly upset enough by the rape itself for that to affect her behaviour. Do you know if she saw anyone in the two weeks she was down here? Old friends, perhaps?’
‘They’ve all moved away. There’s not much for young people to do around here. Most of them leave. Besides, she hardly ever went out.’
‘Only the walks,’ said Dennis.
‘Yes, that’s true. She went for long walks sometimes. Disappeared for hours. We were quite worried about her.’
‘A witness saw her walking and talking to a man on the cliffs the day she died,’ Annie said. ‘Do you know who that might have been?’
‘The police mentioned that to us, too,’ said Dennis. ‘We have no idea. Could it be important? Could it be the man who... who raped her?’
‘There’s no evidence that he had anything to do with what happened to her,’ Annie said. ‘And we don’t know who raped her. But it’s always good to talk to people who...’ She paused. ‘Well, I don’t suppose we’ll manage that now. Whoever he is, he’ll be long gone. It probably isn’t relevant.’
‘We always told her not to talk to strangers,’ said Dennis.
‘It wasn’t a stranger,’ Francine said. ‘That’s what they’re saying. If she was walking and talking with him, he was probably someone she knew.’
‘We don’t know,’ said Annie. ‘Did Marnie have any siblings, brothers or sisters?’
The Sedgwicks looked at one another in silence for a moment, then Francine said, ‘No. Marnie was an only child I... you see, we couldn’t have children of our own, and...’
‘Marnie was adopted?’ said Annie, giving Gerry a puzzled glance.
‘Well, yes. I assumed you knew.’
‘Nobody told us.’
‘It didn’t make her any less our own. We couldn’t have loved her more if I’d given birth to her myself.’
‘No, of course,’ said Annie. ‘It’s just that we didn’t know. It never came up in any of our investigations.’
‘There’s no reason why it should, is there?’ said Dennis.
‘I suppose not. You just took us by surprise, that’s all. How old was she when you adopted her?’
‘Just a baby,’ said Francine. ‘They had to keep her in a while longer than usual because she was born early. But she was a beautiful, tiny, perfect baby.’ She collapsed into sobs, and her husband embraced her.
Annie sat thinking and Gerry scribbled away in her notebook.
15
Banks felt a lot better the following morning after his first night at home. He was even hungry enough to scorch some toast to eat with his coffee. The headache was almost gone, as was most of the nausea. The dizziness still came and went, but the main thing was that he had got his memory back, or most of it, and had even managed to shuffle it into what seemed like the right chronology. The problem was what to do with it.
The missing fragments had fallen into place. He remembered Keane telling him that Zelda was being kept in the same building, and that she was with Petar Tadić, who was settling a score of some kind. Then Keane went on to tell him about Tadić torturing and killing Faye Butler, and his killing Hawkins, who was double-crossing the Tadićs. And he saved the best for last: Zelda had killed Goran Tadić, just as she had written in her notebook. So it wasn’t fantasy. Now Banks really could be charged with aiding and abetting the murder, should it all come out.
Banks thought again of the severed arm Burgess had mentioned. What had Petar Tadić done with his brother’s body? Could it be his? It wasn’t every day they found severed arms in recycling plants, even in London, nor was it unknown for gang members to chop up dead colleagues and scatter the parts over a large area. No time for ritual or honour when you’ve got a body to get rid of. So it could be Goran’s arm. On the other hand, there were other Croatian criminal gang members in the country, so it wouldn’t do to jump to conclusions without more evidence.
Banks also now remembered Zelda yelling for him to run as the fire flared up. He had done so instinctively, without looking back, but when he got outside and turned to see her, she wasn’t there. He had gone back to the doorway, he remembered, to see if she was still inside and whether he could get to her. The place was an inferno by then, and there was nothing he could do without sacrificing his own life, and his instinct for self-preservation had kicked in. He got the hell out of there. He had staggered away, half choked, then fallen in the weed-filled reservoir, hit his head on the bottom and passed out.
Now he was convinced that he should have waited for Zelda, even though the flames were quickly spreading, or at least made sure she went before him, instead of just running off without thinking. If she had been trapped by a falling beam or something and burned to death, he would never be able to forgive himself. He vaguely remembered brief snatches of consciousness, the firefighters picking him up, paramedics loading him on to a gurney, someone shining a light in his eyes, someone gently shaking him in the night, but most of it was blank until he woke up in the hospital bed.
But now that he had his memory back, he was stuck with a serious dilemma. He still didn’t know where Zelda was, or even if she was still alive. Newry had simply said there were two bodies in the burned-out treatment plant. Keane was certainly one of them, but the other could be Zelda’s or Petar Tadić’s. It was also possible that there was a third body the search team hadn’t yet found, and that all three were burned to a crisp in there. Burned human remains sometimes went undetected, or were damaged by firefighting and recovery operations. Fire scene investigators often couldn’t tell the human remains from other fire- and water-damaged debris.
If Zelda had survived, though, she had probably run off through a different exit and gone somewhere she thought was safe. But things had changed. Now he knew she was a murderer — at least an alleged murderer, according to Keane — and he was a cop. He was supposed to catch murderers and see that they went to trial and, if found guilty, received their due punishment. But this was Zelda. Nelia Melnic.
He had read parts of her notebook, but he had brushed them off as fantasy at the time. What if it was true, as Keane had said? What if Zelda had killed Goran Tadić? What was he going to do about it? He had seen her kill Keane with his own eyes. A good argument for self-defence could be made for that killing. But Goran Tadić? Perhaps the same was true, but he knew nothing about the circumstances of what happened. Maybe Keane was lying; it wouldn’t be the first time. But he had thought Banks was about to die, so why bother lying to him? To send him to his grave thinking a woman he cared for was a killer? Was Keane that cruel? Perhaps. The sensible, logical, moral thing to do was report what he knew to AC Gervaise, or Superintendent Newry, and leave it to others to track down Zelda, and to the jury and judge to decide on her fate.