But had her life come to be dominated by revenge, by the need to kill? Where would it end? Any real list would be very long indeed, and she had to ask herself if that was the existence she wanted. Or jail, where she would inevitably end up. She was lucky not to have been caught so far. Alan was no fool. The cops were no fools. They had their methods, and they would uncover her, not cover up, the way they had done with Darius. In killing Darius, she had done the authorities a favor, had done to him exactly what they wanted done. Darius had a lot of dirt on a lot of famous and powerful people. Household names. Government ministers. With Emile’s help, Zelda had done their dirty work for them, had even uncovered his store of blackmail material for them, and they had rewarded her with a passport and her freedom. They couldn’t state that publicly, though, so she had had to leave France. She lost Emile forever, too.

There had been no mention of a body found in a London hotel in the morning paper she had scanned at Banks’s cottage, as there surely would have been if Goran Tadić had been left there after her visit. Back at home, she scoured the Internet news sites and still found nothing. By mid-afternoon, she became certain that what she had thought would happen had happened. They had got there first, before any hotel employees, and they had removed his body, destroyed all traces of his murder. If there was to be any investigation, any retribution, it would belong to them, not to the police.

Now it made sense for her to stop. Let Petar Tadić live to suffer the loss of his brother.

But there was one more, if only she could find him.

In the early years of her enslavement, Zelda had been too distraught to think very clearly about anything, but later she had begun to wonder just how the Tadićs had known to wait for her near the orphanage on the day she left. Then, once or twice, in the brothels, she was certain she saw girls who had been with her in the orphanage. On one occasion, she had the opportunity to ask if this was true, and it turned out to be so. It wasn’t a great leap of logic from there to realize that someone inside the orphanage was providing the information—either selling it or being blackmailed into giving it—and the most logical choice was the orphanage director: Vasile Lupescu. The problem was, she didn’t know where he was. Her sources told her that he had retired and no longer lived in Chişinău, but nobody so far knew where he had moved to. So he was still out there. He would be quite old by now, she realized, perhaps dead, but she would like to find out for certain.