After You Die (19 page)

Ferreira spun away from her desk, wired looking and fizzing with nervous energy. The computer screen behind her showed a Twitter page, Holly’s he guessed. ‘No, I just wanted to get an early start.’

‘How early?’

‘I’ve been here about an hour. Do you want a doughnut?’ She gestured towards the counter where a bright pink bag sat next to the coffee machine. ‘First batch, they’re always the best ones. I got jam.’

‘Not for breakfast.’

She shrugged and it was like an electric shock passing through her body. Full of caffeine and sugar, he thought. Nicotine too, judging by the smoky smell in the office. She smoothed her palm over her hair, pulled back into a low ponytail, and he noticed her hand drop down to her calf, not scratching, just toying at something with her fingertips. She stopped when she realised he was looking and he turned away, biting down – yet again – on the instinct to ask what was wrong, if maybe she was overdoing it.

‘Do you want to see what I found on here then?’ she asked.

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Oh, yeah. You might want to get a chair.’

‘Coffee first.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’ve had enough.’ He went over to the machine, saw that she’d already downed half a pot, and when he poured his own the strength of it was overpowering, bitter and blacker than anyone else in the office brewed it.

The board taunted him as he walked past and he ignored it, knowing he’d have to face it later.

‘So, Luke Gibson gave me admin access to the back end of Holly’s blog,’ she said, as he pulled another chair up to her desk. ‘Basically, that means we can see all the posts she didn’t finish or the ones she chose not to publish.’

‘And that’s useful because …’

‘I know, shouldn’t be, right?’ She switched tabs and a dashboard came up. More information than Zigic wanted to trawl through at half past seven in the morning. ‘I mean, Holly’s living very publicly, she’s informed, opinionated. So what
wouldn’t
she publish?’

Ferreira clicked into the deleted posts, selected one titled ‘Cripple’. It opened in a small box, not even large enough to show the entirety of the image that headed it up but Zigic recognised the photograph, the silver paintwork of Dawn’s people carrier, the black spray-paint lettering.

‘Where did Holly get this photo?’ he asked.

‘Someone sent her it,’ Ferreira said, scrolling down in the draft box. ‘Look – “To the person who emailed me this, I hope you die alone, in agony, knowing how much I fucking hate you.”’

Zigic blew out a fast, hard breath. ‘That doesn’t sound like her other posts.’

‘No, that’s pure, unadulterated fury. Honestly, I’m amazed she had the self-control not to hit Publish and regret it later.’

‘She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they’d got to her.’

‘It’s not the worst thing anyone’s ever said to her.’

‘But it’s at her house,’ Zigic said. ‘They were virtually under her bedroom window.’

Ferreira twisted where she sat, a thin smile on her lips. ‘I think it’s someone in the village.’

‘Or local, certainly. We thought that already, though.’

‘You don’t see this as an escalation?’ Ferreira asked. ‘All of those threats, then this – actually emailing her evidence of what they’ve done. They’re making damn sure she knows they can get to her whenever they want.’

He sipped his coffee, eyeing her across the rim of the cup, seeing the certainty glowing behind her face. She’d not left this alone last night, he realised, she’d been probing and researching and she’d formulated a motive which made perfect sense to her even if the evidence didn’t fit. And she wasn’t going to give up until she’d voiced it.

‘I’m not arguing with you,’ he said. ‘It’s outright harassment. But how does it lead to Dawn’s murder?’

Ferreira went back to the Twitter tab. ‘Look, we’ve got lots of perfectly nice, supportive people, great. Good for her. But we’ve also got a significant amount of threats and abusive messages.’ She pointed to one. ‘“Who died and made you queen of the cripples?” It’s about cutting Holly down to size. All of this is. They want to take the one outlet she’s got and cut it off.’

‘Where does Dawn’s murder come into this?’

‘Holly won’t interact with them,’ Ferreira said, getting exasperated with him. ‘Okay, don’t think of this as a hate crime for a minute, pretend you got given this when you were in Anti-Stalking. What happens when a stalkee refuses to answer the phone calls and the text messages?’

‘The stalker changes tack. Steps up to physical confrontation.’

‘Yes, exactly. They want a reaction and they keep doing ever more extreme things until they finally get that reaction. So what’s the next logical move after being outside the house?’

‘You think they went inside?’

‘Say they did. Say there’s a confrontation with Dawn. She wants to know what the hell they’re doing in her house. She’s scared, she reacts. They react.’ Ferreira’s hands wheeled in the air in front of her, building it up. ‘We know this probably wasn’t a premeditated killing. The murder weapon’s one of her own knives. It’s been grabbed out of the block on the spur of the moment.’

‘I think they’d be expecting to run into Dawn in her own home, don’t you?’

‘Maybe we’re looking for a complete whack-job.’

‘Says the woman with a psychology degree.’

‘I’m tailoring this to my audience,’ she said, a teasing sting in her voice.

‘If they’ve gone there to get at Holly, why don’t they even go in her bedroom?’

‘We don’t know they didn’t go in there,’ she said. ‘All we know for sure is that they didn’t go in there
after
Dawn was murdered. Maybe she caught them as they were leaving. Now that situation has blow-up potential.’

‘I don’t know.’ Zigic scratched his beard. ‘You’re making a hell of a lot of assumptions, Mel.’

‘I think it’s a mistake to rule out the possibility,’ she said. ‘Especially when Riggott’s looking to move this back into CID because you can’t convince him it’s a hate crime.’

She was right.

‘Riggott’s going to want more than tweets,’ he said.

‘I’ll get more.’ Her fingers twitched across the keyboard. ‘This bastard’s been so active, he’ll have made a mistake somewhere.’

‘You can’t spend too long on this.’ Zigic got up and wheeled the chair back around to Wahlia’s side of the desk. ‘I need you to talk to Holly’s doctors today, find out what the situation with her physical therapy was. If there was any hint of neglect from Dawn.’

‘Okay. I’ll run this lot up to the tech department now. Ethan gets in early, I’ll grab him before someone else does.’ She fetched the bag of doughnuts and left the office with them, hoping a combination of insistence and bribery would keep him focused on their case for a few hours.

Zigic finished his coffee standing in front of the murder board, seeing how the case had changed since yesterday morning’s briefing. The builder – Westman – had been alibied by his wife and the staff at the pub where they’d gone for dinner. His labourer, Dean Carter, was out of the picture now too. They were always unlikely suspects, Zigic told himself, so their loss from the column wasn’t quite such a blow.

The lack of a murder weapon was bothering him almost as much as their current lack of credible suspects. The missing second knife was downright weird.

It was possible Dawn had thrown it out months ago for some reason but the block looked very new.

Why had the murderer taken it with them?

Easier to wipe your fingerprints off it and drop it there at the scene. No worries about where to dispose of it. No need to throw it into a river or bury it in the back garden.

He thought of how much effort they’d put into cleaning up after afterwards, the bloody towels they’d left behind in the bathroom and the smears up the banister to wipe away their fingerprints. All of that care but they walked out of the house with a six-inch knife in their hand?

Ferreira came back into the office, still holding her doughnuts.

‘No takers?’ Zigic asked.

‘Ethan’s “eating clean” this month. Whatever the hell that means.’ She dumped the bag on the counter. ‘He’s just sent over the info from Dawn’s phone. Apparently there’s a lot of interesting stuff on there. Sounds like she was heavily into the hook-ups.’

Zigic went to check his emails and found the report from Ethan sitting at the top.

He scanned the attached files, seeing that Ferreira wasn’t exaggerating. Ethan had extracted the dating profiles Dawn had set up, two sites, both using the same photograph, a smiling headshot, carefully posed; she looked approachable but not overtly sexual, just a woman looking for fun.

She’d certainly found it.

Her text messages revealed meetings arranged with thirty-nine men during the previous year, mostly at their places, sometimes hotels, lay-bys, car parks, different times of day. A couple of months ago that changed and she started having them over to her house, some in the day but most in the evening; a smaller pool of men, ones she must have trusted to have in her home. Several messages suggested they’d had sex in the unfinished extension or the garden – the men treated it like a kink, obviously didn’t realise she was trying to maintain some separation between them and her child. It would have seemed furtive to them, Zigic thought, exciting, but did Dawn spend the whole time stifling her responses, worried about Holly hearing?

Zigic remembered the disgusted way Julia’s nose hitched when she discussed Dawn’s relationships, and wondered why she’d withdrawn her help so suddenly, forcing Dawn to make a decision that the tone of the messages suggested she wasn’t entirely comfortable with. She needed these men but she didn’t want them in her home. Not really. When she had an alternative she took it, when it was no longer available she tried to contain them.

It must have gnawed at her. The guilt fighting the need.

He put the thought aside – all parents obsessed about not being good enough and it wasn’t what mattered right now – and went back to the paperwork.

There were several men she’d slept with on multiple occasions across an extended period and that was who they would focus on, the ones she’d built relationships with, who might have cause to kill her. It was going to be a mammoth task tracking them all down. The dating sites she’d used could stump up their details but that might take time, the mobile phone numbers would probably be the fastest way to get behind the usernames but there was a high probability that the SIM cards would be pay-as-you-gos, especially if the men were already in relationships.

They’d try those options first and only as a last resort would he have the men cold-called and asked to come into the station. It was never wise to give suspects a head start but sometimes there was no alternative.

Through his office door Zigic saw Parr arrive, followed a few minutes later by Colleen Murray, who was carrying a stainless-steel thermos and the fragile air of someone who’d hit the bottle pretty hard the night before. Wahlia was already at his desk, computer on, Ferreira at his shoulder, and Zigic could hear him protesting as she expounded her theory a second time, trying to drum up support for it because she liked being told she was right even when she already had the necessary go ahead.

If Riggott wasn’t on their backs he’d have shut down her line of inquiry, saw nothing at the end of it beyond a particularly vile parade of bullies.

And yet … could she be right?

Dawn’s murder was frenzied but the clean-up operation after-wards was cool headed and thorough, suggesting a calculating mind, a stalker’s mentality. He thought of the stalking cases he’d worked where the victim went unharmed while their friends, lovers and family members bore the brunt of the aggression, and wondered if that’s why Dawn was dead. She’d got between Holly and her attacker.

Ferreira had nothing but conjecture, though, and he knew she’d work harder if he didn’t openly acknowledge the potential of her theory. She wanted to prove him wrong and he hoped she could.

But today was about these men.

It was a journey Ferreira thought she was finished with. Past the reception desk at City Hospital, then follow the lines marked on the floor to the lift which had taken her up to the occupational therapy unit. Twice a week, through the spring and into early summer, she’d struggled on crutches, forcing herself to keep moving while her mother fussed at her elbow, telling her off in Portuguese so colourful that the Brazilian cleaners in the corridors laughed into their chests. And each time she’d felt a little stronger, a little more impatient, until she realised she didn’t need it any more and could stop pretending she was comfortable with being coddled and instructed and patronised.

Did Holly feel that way, she wondered, so thoroughly infantilised by the process?

The first entry in her blog was bold and defiant, a girl prepared to fight for her recovery no matter how dire the prognosis was. Something had changed, at some point she’d given up.

Ferreira had seen her medical records, knew who was treating Holly and just how good he was. If anyone could have helped her through to some greater mobility, it was Ray Deacon.

He was tough and honest.
You do the work, you feel the benefit
.

The double doors slid open as Ferreira approached and she hesitated for a brief second, a pinprick tweaking the ligament in her right leg. A remembered pain, she decided, brought on by the specific slant of morning sun across the large, open room and the sounds of exertion which filled it, low encouraging voices and the scuffing of trainers against crash mats as palms slapped down on the parallel bars.

One more step, Mel. Come on. And another, keep going, pet
.

She used to hear Ray’s voice in her sleep, urging her on as she dreamt her recovery to its ultimate end. Still heard it sometimes when she was on the treadmill, the sessions when each stride burnt.

Across the room he was working with a young man in khakis, all ripped upper body and buzz-cut hair, as he tried to find his balance on a prosthetic leg. This time of morning it was mostly injured servicemen, the ones who wanted an early start. To maintain the hours and the discipline the army had given them before it took their limbs.