Long Way Home (10 page)

‘Look at what that girl’s done to my hair.’

‘It looks perfect.’

‘Maybe it’ll be better when I wash it.’

‘It’s perfect.’ He brushed it off her face, the spotlights glinting on the streaks of blonde. ‘Where’re the boys?’

‘In bed.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Why don’t you jump in the shower and I’ll make some supper?’

Zigic trudged upstairs and stripped his smoke-stained clothes off, left them where they dropped on the bedroom floor and got the water running hot before he stepped into the shower. The cubicle filled with the smell of ashes and he turned his face into the jets, eyes closed, thinking of that house on Burmer Road and the one just like it he’d spent six months in, years ago now, out in Wisbech.

He’d done his gap year there – cutting vegetables in the unending black fields. His friends and family thought he was mad to do it and he still didn’t know exactly why he’d gone himself. The money was pretty good and there was no question that he needed it if he was going to get through university without masses of debts, but there were easier ways.

At eighteen it held an allure which seemed ridiculous to him now and he realised it had been an act of solidarity as much as anything else. Mid-nineties and the first wave of new migrants were coming over in numbers, Polish and Portuguese, the Spanish who had been missed by the boom at home. There was a stirring sense of unrest locally, minor but vocal, and he began to notice that his name had gone from being exotic to problematic. People were surprised how good his English was suddenly, as if he’d choose this accent.

In retrospect it may have been an overreaction to throw himself into a situation like that, all for the sake of making a point it wasn’t his place to argue.

He regretted it the second he closed the door of the room he was renting in the Wisbech backstreets, a ten by twelve cell with a bright red carpet which didn’t quite fill the floor, and flock wallpaper imperfectly painted out in burnt orange. He had an air mattress which leaked the damp coming up through the uninsulated floor and a wardrobe with a broken door.

Nobody else complained about the place, though, so neither did he.

Two days in he got into his first fight and even though he’d been expecting the man to pull a knife it still surprised him to see one that large so close to his face. The English boy in him thought somebody would step in, hold the man back, but the Serb in him was already reacting, smashing the bottle he was drinking from against the side of the man’s head.

There were no more fights for a while after that.

There was just work. Sixteen hours a day, unremitting grind. He got lean and hard during the summer, humping boxes in the fields, tanned a colour he had never achieved since. He started eating the black bread he refused at home, drank beer for breakfast with the other men, went for days without speaking English, getting by on the rudimentary Polish he was picking up.

Three weeks in he lost his virginity to a Spanish woman whose name he never knew. All he had of her now was a vague sense of bulk and heat moving above him as he stared drunkenly at her open mouth, thinking, I should remember this, I have to remember this.

The next morning, waiting for the van, his rudimentary Polish got augmented with a lot of language he’d not found much use for since, and he discovered that two of the men he shared the house with had been watching through the street window where he hadn’t closed the curtains.

When he went home for Christmas everyone said he’d changed and he saw it himself. The boy was gone.

Walking back from midnight mass, holding his father upright and trying to keep him from singing, he realised for the first time that he was stronger than his old man, and the realisation drove the last of the drink out of his system, and what he did remember now, perfectly, was his father turning to him in the middle of Romany Gardens, his breath fogging when he said, ‘It’s made a man of you, Dushan.’

The water ran cold across his back and Zigic stepped out of the shower.

It was another life, but part of him missed it, and on days like this, mindless, repetitive work seemed very appealing. When you packed your last crate that was it, your errors didn’t follow you home, you didn’t obsess about missing vital clues or go to bed replaying interrogations, searching for some half-perceived nuance or allusion.

In the kitchen he took a bottle of Zubrowka from the freezer and poured a double shot while Anna told him about her day, relating the conversation she’d had with her hairdresser in forensic detail, the trouble she was having with her boyfriend and the new house they were buying on Hampton. He topped his glass up and nodded in what he hoped were the right places, thinking about the expression on Andrus Tombak’s face when he shoved him into the back of the patrol car. Arrogance and contempt – what a guilty man looked like when he was sure of his alibi.

IT WAS LIKE
driving into oblivion this morning. The countryside a yawning grey maw on either side of the van, the headlights illuminating a narrow, winding road ahead of them, just two cones of weak light, no catseyes, no markings.

Paolo closed his eyes.

The heat of the van and the throaty rumble of the engine lulled him into light sleep and he was running across the beach towards Maria, feeling the warm sand between his toes and the sun beating down on his bare skin. She was smiling, standing with her arms open wide, wearing the spotted red dress he liked so much, the material stirring in the sea breeze. He could smell salt in the air and when he reached her, and buried his face in her neck, his brain recovered the scent of her skin and the sensation of her thick black hair as it tickled his nose.

His head struck the window and he came round again.

He slipped her photograph from his pocket – her twenty-third birthday and she was wearing the spotted red dress, standing on the balcony giving him
that
smile. He took other photos that afternoon, but this was the one he had printed up to keep close to him, and before he left she kissed the back of it, leaving a pillowy red O for him to remember her by.

It had been a long time since he pressed his lips to it. At some point, he couldn’t say exactly when, he began to feel ridiculous doing it. Not the gesture – he always knew that was stupid and boyish of him – but what it implied. He kissed it knowing she was thinking of him and would kiss him back if she could.

The van passed through more small villages, red-brick cottages and white-painted houses with long front gardens, pubs and churches, post offices with old red telephone boxes outside and schools behind iron railings.

The sun was climbing slowly, throwing weak, grey light across the fields. In the distance he saw a bank of wind turbines turning lazy revolutions, dozens of them lined up in ranks and then they were gone and the van was slowing at a bump in the road, a sign flashing to warn the driver about his speed.

They passed a village shop where the same woman he had seen every morning this week was arranging boxes of fruit and vegetables on trestle tables. She had long blonde hair tied in a ponytail and gloves with no fingers. Then she was gone and they were crossing a river by a narrow metal bridge which clanked under the van’s wheels, the sound brash enough to wake the man sitting next to him.

The site was only a few miles away now.

Paolo rubbed his hands together, feeling how rough his skin had become. No matter how often he washed them there was this dusty residue, crescents of dirt under his fingernails. He had always worked in bars before, kept himself clean and well groomed. He prided himself on having soft hands – just like a woman’s, Maria joked – now they were cracked and scarred, filth ground into the creases. Would she still want them on her body?

He saw another man’s hands running up her thighs, his fingers in her hair, on her neck. He saw another man unzip the spotted red dress and slip the straps from her shoulders as she gave him
that
smile.

The van turned off the main road onto a bumpy farm track. Ahead of them the weak sunlight hit the perimeter fence, glinting on the razor wire on top of it. Paolo pushed Maria away, rubbed his hands together again, feeling the roughness which would get a little worse today as he worked, and worse again tomorrow, and the day after that, until they were no longer his hands.

PHIL BARLOW WAS
still in his dressing gown when he answered the front door but he’d shaved and showered, and there was smell of charred toast coming from the kitchen.

The television was playing loud, zingy breakfast voices bouncing around.

‘Who is it?’ Gemma called down from the bedroom.

‘Inspector Zigic,’ Phil shouted back, closing the door. ‘When can we clear the rest of shed away?’

‘Not yet,’ Zigic told him. ‘We might need to take another look at it.’

‘Well, how long?’

‘Mr Barlow, I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this situation. A man has been murdered in that shed and you’re talking about destroying evidence. Are you arrogant or just very stupid?’

Barlow’s jaw tightened.

‘If you are innocent –’

‘We didn’t have anything to do with it.’

‘
If
you are innocent the last thing you’d want is for us to miss a vital piece of evidence which might lead to his killer.’

Barlow rubbed the back of his neck.

‘We’re just sick of the sight of it.’

Gemma appeared at the top of the stairs, her pink pyjama top buttoned wrong, sitting askew on her broad shoulders. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I need you to take a look at something for me,’ Zigic said.

She came down at a trudge, feet massive in a pair of shaggy white slippers.

Zigic took out Andrus Tombak’s mugshot and handed it to Phil, who glanced at it for all of two seconds before he passed it to his wife.

‘Who is he?’

‘Don’t you recognise him?’

‘He looks familiar,’ she said slowly. ‘I reckon he might have been one of Stepulov’s mates.’

Zigic showed her his best poker face.

‘I reckon he was here once, yeah.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. The Friday before last maybe.’

She was lying. Without question. But it was something to throw at Tombak.

He tucked the photograph back into his pocket as Phil closed the door on him, and walked down the short stretch of uneven path where a smashed bottle glinted under the street light, its label in Cyrillic, a deep Fabergé blue.

At six thirty Highbury Street was all bustle and he realised how close they had come the day before, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes too late to ask their questions.

Dawn was still little more than a smudge of pink on the horizon beyond the Eastern Industrial Estate but almost every house was lit up, showers to be taken, lunches to be packed. A woman in a silver people carrier was doing her own door-to-door routine, collecting kids from their doorsteps, a sleeping baby she carried out to her car wrapped up in a blanket.

Zigic went over to her as she was strapping the baby into a carrycot on the passenger seat and showed her the photograph of Jaan Stepulov, then another of Tombak. She tilted them into the light and studied them for a few seconds before she shook her head and passed them back to him, told him sorry, no, in Polish, then again in English is case he didn’t understand.

It was becoming a theme of the operation. No,
nic
,
niet
,
nem.

One door after another slammed and the occupants of Highbury Street walked away, down to the transporter vans waiting at the collection points on Lincoln Road, which would take them east into the wide black fenland fields, or to one of the factory units dotted around the city where they’d pack shampoo or bagels or engine parts for twelve hours, welded to the spot, only their hands moving as the conveyor belt hummed and squeaked, going slightly too fast for comfort.

At the far end of Highbury Street he saw a CSO in a high-visibility vest step across the low garden wall between two terraced houses and heard Ferreira shout at him, telling the man to go round, have some fucking respect for people’s property.

Three or four more and that was it. An hour and a half and they had nothing new. Nobody had seen Tombak or the man with the tattooed neck, nobody admitted to knowing Stepulov. Zigic hadn’t expected much but he’d been hoping for something. Stepulov was one of them and he was dead and yet nobody wanted to help.

Phil Barlow backed out of the driveway of number 63 and left his van ticking over at the kerb while he closed and bolted the high wooden gates at the side of the house.

Less than a day had passed and he was returning to work.

Part of Zigic understood the necessity, he had bills, a mortgage, the same demands as everyone else, but a larger part of him wondered if an innocent man under threat of rearrest could manage it. He thought of the old saw, passed on to each new generation of coppers: only a guilty man slept while he was in custody, the innocent were too scared. Barlow was out of custody but he was very far from free.

‘That’s it then,’ Ferreira said. ‘Big fat nada. Could have had a lie-in.’

‘Maybe we’ll get something from the information line. Nobody likes to be seen grassing.’

‘Maybe.’ She nodded towards Barlow’s receding van. ‘He’s up and about very early for someone who does property maintanence, don’t you think?’

‘Commuting?’

‘Tension in the home?’ Ferreira punched her hands into her pockets, shoulders rounding against the wind. ‘You want to get some breakfast before we go back in?’

‘Go on then.’

He gathered the uniforms and dismissed them back to their regular duties, then got into Ferreira’s gleaming red Golf. It smelled of cigarettes and musky perfume, a hint of coffee from the takeaway carton scrunched into a cup holder between the seats. There was an empty condom wrapper in the footwell and a brief image of her and Wahlia flashed in front of his eyes. He dragged the wrapper under the chair with his heel, hoping she wouldn’t realise he’d noticed.