Talk of Keane had brought back memories of the night it happened. Much of it was blurred, as he had been drugged, but he remembered the sensation of being unable to move a muscle while also being aware that the flames were rising all around him. He remembered “Death and the Maiden” playing on the stereo and thinking it was the last music he was ever going to hear. He had thought it was all over, then he felt himself being manhandled, and the next thing he knew he was lying on the gravel drive with Annie and Winsome bending over him.

He came back to the present at the sound of a night bird in one of the trees that lined the banks of the beck further down the slope, toward Helmthorpe. He thought of what Burgess had told him and wondered whether Zelda—and therefore Ray—really was in danger. Nobody in the trafficking organization would know she was doing the job for the NCA, or where she lived, unless there was an informer working there. And if that informer had been Hawkins, he could easily have tipped off Tadić that Zelda was working there, with her special knowledge and skills. But if he had done that, why hadn’t something happened already? Couldn’t they find her? Was it more to their advantage to have her doing that job? The devil you know . . .

Burgess wanted to know how much Zelda knew, or suspected, and perhaps when Banks knew that, he would be better able to gauge any danger to her. Burgess was right, though; neither he nor Ray could protect her full-time, and they couldn’t expect the police to do it. He could only hope that she was not in danger. If she was, it was probably his fault for bringing Phil Keane to her attention in the first place. But that photograph of Keane with Tadić, if that was who it was, hadn’t led to anything. Surely Hawkins would have had nothing to report about her, even if he had been working for the traffickers. Zelda wasn’t the only one in her office, the only threat to them, and Tadić’s gang could hardly murder them all. The thought calmed him down a little, but even then, he couldn’t get rid of that nagging worry at the back of his mind. He would call her tomorrow, find out when she was coming home.