“Why?”

“I realized that if I said anything about what I had found out, they would take over. The police.”

“But aren’t you police now?”

“No. I’m a civilian. They make that quite clear. I have no police powers. Not that I want any.”

“Surely they’re the best people to do the job? Unless you want your own revenge?”

Zelda put down her pencil, offered her pack of Marlboro Gold to Mati, and both women lit cigarettes. Zelda took a drag and watched the swifts swoop and circle over the rooftops below. The tiles reminded her of Whitby, one of her favorite places in England, home of the famous jet that her partner Raymond had compared her eyes to. “Yes. Partly,” she admitted. “I do. But it’s not just that. Don’t get me wrong, Mati. I like Alan Banks. I believe that he is a good man and an honest cop. But he’s still a policeman. It’s still the system, isn’t it? An institution with its own rules, procedures and codes of conduct. The force.” She paused. “And I can’t say the police have ever done me any great favors over the years.”

Mati tapped some ash off her cigarette and made a face. “True enough. Me, neither.”

“There was one time, I remember, in Priština, when I managed to break free from my captors for a few moments. I was so naive. I ran up to a uniformed policeman and tried to explain that I’d been abducted and forced into prostitution.”

“What did he do?”

“Do? Nothing. He just scowled at me as if I was something he’d got on the bottom of his shoe and told me to fuck off. I believe ‘Fuck off, you filthy whore’ were his actual words, as far as I could understand. I must confess, my Serbian language skills weren’t too good then. The pimps took me back, and I got a beating that put me out of action for two days, which earned me another beating. So, no, I’m not too fond of the police. There’s so much corruption. If I passed the information to Alan—that I had seen the man he is looking for meeting secretly with my boss—he would have no choice but to go to his bosses with the information. More people would become involved. Government agencies, police forces. That’s how they operate. It’s hard to believe my boss isn’t corrupt himself—and if I can’t trust him, how can I trust anyone else in the agency?” She shook her head as she answered her own question. “I don’t think I can. The criminals have infiltrated everywhere. There would be every chance that someone with a strong interest in keeping things the way they are would gain control, or achieve a significant and powerful place in the investigation. Either one of the criminals or an incompetent fool.”

“Do you think they might want you out of the way?”

Zelda scraped her cigarette against the ashtray. “I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to cut me into small pieces and feed me to the fish. The men I escaped from, the men who first took me and broke me in, the kind of clients I had in Paris toward the end. Many of them have come to prominence in politics or business, even the church, and they don’t like loose ends.” She shrugged. “But that was Paris. Men like that are expected to go with high-class call girls. It’s de rigueur, sort of an initiation en route to becoming one of the lads, as the English say. I don’t really suppose they’d wish me harm.”