Long Way Home (15 page)

‘We live in Spalding.’

‘So why was Jaan in Peterborough?’

‘He came to find his brother,’ Raadik said.

‘Viktor?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did he find him?’

‘No.’

‘Then why did he stay?’

Raadik looked away. ‘This is what we think. He does not come home for three month. Why not?’

Behind the bar a young blonde woman was clearing up the broken glass with a dustpan and brush, taking her time about it, and Zigic waited until she moved away before he continued.

‘You went to the hostel where Jaan was staying – that’s right, isn’t it?’ Raadik nodded. ‘But he didn’t want to speak to you. He ran off.’ Another nod and his eyes stayed fixed on the polished wood counter. ‘Why did he do that?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Has there been an argument between you?’

‘No,’ Raadik said sharply. ‘We wanted him to come home. That is all. Arina is scared he is living badly. She wanted me to bring her papa back.’ Raadik closed his eyes and mumbled something which sounded like a prayer. ‘Now I have to tell her he is dead.’

‘We haven’t positively identified the body yet,’ Zigic said.

Raadik’s eyes widened for moment but the hope was short-lived and he crumpled where he sat. ‘How did he die?’

‘The shed he was sleeping in was set fire to.’

‘Then it must be Jaan.’

‘You went there, didn’t you?’

‘I asked him to come home with me. He would not leave.’

‘Why?’

‘He said he must find his brother. It is a matter of family. I tell him he has family who need him but he will not leave.’ Raadik shook his head. ‘We are having baby, next month is due, now he will never see his grandchild.’

ZIGIC DROVE, RAADIK
next to him, silent and increasingly tense, Ferreira in the back. He glanced in the rear-view mirror a couple of times and saw her staring out across the sprawling black fenland, thousands of acres of uniformly flat ground punctuated by an occasional farmhouse or a bank of wind turbines turning much slower than the wind buffeting the car suggested that they should. She was chewing on her knuckle and he couldn’t decide if it was nicotine withdrawal or a reluctance to return to a place she’d told him she loathed on more occasions than he could count.

There was something oppressive about the magnitude of the landscape. It made you feel small and inconsequential to be surrounded by so much empty space, that massive unending sky reaching away to a distant horizon. In Zigic’s memory it was always summer here, the sky perfectly blue, not a shred of cloud for weeks on end and the sound of irrigators snickering all around them as they worked. To a boy who grew up in a terraced house, with a handkerchief of back garden and neighbours on every side, it had felt like freedom.

Today though he could see why Ferreira hated it. Ahead the sky was pregnant with rain, sheets of it strafing the farmland where the workers were no more than dots, moving up and down the rows, the waiting lorries toy-looking. To the north the clouds were almost black, huge, rolling boulders closing in on the town.

Zigic slowed as a crosswind slammed the car, forcing it onto the verge. The dykes here were steeply cut and deep enough to swallow them up. He felt Ferreira’s knee hit his seat and wrestled the car back into the middle of the road, narrowly missing a van coming the other way. It swerved but didn’t slow and the driver threw his hand up in disgust.

He made the rest of the journey at forty miles an hour, gathering a long line of traffic behind him until they reached the edge of Spalding. Raadik directed him in a weak voice, up here, turn left, the house with the white car on the drive, then they were climbing out, the smell of rotten earth and rain on the air, and a few spots hit Zigic’s face as he stood on the front doorstep, waiting for Raadik to find his keys.

The door opened as he fumbled them out of his pocket.

Arina Raadik was sharper than her husband. She knew they were police instantly and she faltered where she stood, hanging onto the door just long enough for Tomas to catch her under the arms and keep her upright. It was an awkward manoeuvre, hampered by her belly, which looked further along than eight months, stretching her floral tunic to its limit.

‘You have found Papa?’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Raadik –’

‘He is dead, Arina,’ Tomas said.

She fell against her husband and cried into his chest, pulling at his T-shirt and thumping his shoulder with her small fist, trying to punch her grief out into him. Finally Tomas guided her into the living room, eased her onto the sofa. There was a bowl of chocolate ice cream left balanced precariously on the arm. Tomas moved it away and she shouted at him to leave it.

‘I’ll go and make some tea,’ Ferreira said, escaping into the kitchen.

Arina snatched a handful of tissues out of a box on a side table and dried her eyes. She had her father’s hard-boned face, softened slightly by baby weight but the lines were the same, high cheekbones and a pronounced jaw, the same striking blue eyes big with tears.

‘Was it an accident?’

‘He was murdered,’ Tomas said.

She pressed the tissues to her mouth and cried for a few minutes, while Tomas stroked her hair and cupped her belly, speaking to her quietly, words Zigic couldn’t understand. He should have brought a translator but it would have taken time and he felt the case slipping away from them already, didn’t want to waste another hour.

He looked around the small, bright living room, trying to picture Jaan Stepulov in it, this man who’d been dossing at a hostel then finally in the Barlows’ garden shed, a beggar and a petty thief, a drunk and a gambler. Had he chosen the bright acidic green on the walls? Had he and Tomas taken a day off to paint the room while the women kept them supplied with tea and sandwiches? He tried to imagine the man who had broken Andrus Tombak’s wrist pushing an uncooperative trolley around Ikea, picking out the floating shelves and the paper floor lamps, arguing with his wife over which prints would look best behind the sofa.

The two lives seemed impossibly remote from each other.

Zigic went to the fireplace, a gas flame dancing over white pebbles, and picked up a framed photograph standing pride of place at the centre of the wooden mantel, Arina and Tomas outside a registry office, a heavy-set woman who must be her mother on one side and on the other Jaan Stepulov in a smart grey suit, his hair barbered and his cheeks clean-shaven, the picture of respectability.

That
man had refused to come home when his family begged him?

Zigic sat down in a wicker armchair, a snapped strand poking into the back of his thigh. Ferreira was clattering around in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors as the kettle came to a boil.

Outside half a dozen children were playing in the cul-de-sac, kicking a ball about, going into the open front gardens to retrieve it when they lost it. Their voices were distant and high-pitched, an occasional scream breaking through the front window.

‘How did he die?’ Arina asked.

‘There was a fire –’

‘That man on the news? That is Papa?’

Zigic nodded. ‘At least we think so. We’re still waiting for the DNA results, they should be through in the next forty-eight hours, but we think so, yes. I’m sorry.’

‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘We were hoping you could help us with that,’ Zigic said. ‘Your father was in Peterborough looking for his brother. How long has Viktor been missing?’

‘Since November. Papa thought something bad had happened to him.’

‘Maybe he went back to Estonia,’ Zigic suggested.

Arina’s face darkened. ‘He would not leave without telling us.’

‘When did you last hear from Viktor?’

‘He was to come to our wedding in August but he did not arrive. Papa phoned him and he said they would not let him have time off from work. Two or three weeks after this he came to the house and after that we did not see him again. Papa called him and he did not answer his phone.’

‘Where was Viktor living at that point?’ Zigic asked.

‘In Peterborough, in a house with some other men.’

‘Did he mention a man named Andrus Tombak?’

She nodded. ‘Uncle Viktor was working for this Tombak. He is a gangmaster.’

‘Jaan knew him too,’ Tomas said. ‘He went to Tombak’s house to look for Viktor but he was gone.’

Arina turned to her husband. ‘Why did you not tell me this?’

Tomas squirmed where he sat, inching away from her, and when he answered he directed it at Zigic. ‘Jaan thought Tombak knew where Viktor was. When he was here the last time Viktor said he was going to start a new job. A big money job he said.’

‘Where?’

‘I do not know.’

Ferreira came into the living room carrying a wooden tray with white mugs filled to the brim and a plate of sugar-glazed biscuits which looked home-made. She set it down on the coffee table and retreated to an armchair in the window with her cup. Nobody else touched theirs.

Zigic shifted his weight in the uncomfortable chair, a second strand of snapped wicker spiking his buttock.

‘If your father was so concerned about Viktor why didn’t he call us and report him missing?’

‘Papa does not trust the police,’ Arina said.

‘This isn’t Estonia, Mrs Raadik.’

‘You would look for him? Some immigrant?’

‘If there was evidence he was in danger, yes, of course we would.’ The heat from the fire was burning across his face, and he felt stifled inside his parka suddenly. ‘From what we know of how Jaan was living he doesn’t seem to have been looking for Viktor very hard.’

‘Of course he was looking,’ Arina said. ‘Why else would he not come home to his family? He must have found something to stay there for so many months.’

She was very young, Zigic realised. Despite the wedding ring and the coming baby, she was still a child who couldn’t accept her father as an individual distinct from his family. Was Stepulov acting like a man on a mission? Drinking all day, shoplifting and begging, bringing a woman to the Barlows’ shed?

‘Did you or your mother go and try to convince him to come home?’

‘No,’ she said, her eyes dropping to her belly. ‘Maybe if we had he would be alive now.’

The letter box snapped and something hit the mat. Through the window Zigic saw a teenaged boy with a fluorescent-orange bag cut across to next door, delivering the local free paper.

‘Do you have a recent photograph of Viktor?’ Zigic asked.

Arina nodded to Tomas and he got up from the sofa, went over to the bookshelves which were lined with candy-coloured paperbacks and a few dozen DVDs. He took down a small floral box and started to sort through the photographs inside.

‘Had your father made any progress? Did he say anything about where he thought Viktor might be?’

‘No.’

‘Tomas?’

‘He would not talk about it.’

‘Doesn’t that seem strange to you?’

‘Of course, that is why we argued. I wanted him to come home – Arina does not need this worry with the baby. Here, this is from the last time he visited.’

Tomas handed Zigic a photograph which had been printed off a phone or a digital camera and he wondered why they had specifically selected this one to preserve. Viktor Stepulov standing at a small portable barbecue with a long-handled fork in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, smiling broadly, all white teeth and crow’s feet. He was shorter than his brother, heavier and darker, and if he’d been asked Zigic wouldn’t have said they were brothers.

A car pulled onto the driveway then and Arina struggled to her feet, pushing Tomas aside as he tried to stop her. Ferreira went for the door and Zigic gestured for her to hang back, this was family business and even though they needed to observe he saw no reason to interfere further.

Mrs Stepulov came in and threw her handbag over the newel post, taking in the scene with a calm eye. Then Arina started crying again and she put her arms around her, shushed her and smoothed her hair.

Finally, when she had settled Arina, she fixed Zigic with a firm look and told him to help her in the kitchen.

She reminded him of his own mother, fifteen years younger at least, but they shared an imperious air, a tone which would brook no argument. In the kitchen she offered him a vodka and when he refused poured a heavy shot into a mug and threw it down.

‘This is Viktor’s doing,’ she said, her hand going to the bottle again, wedding ring chiming against the glass. ‘He is no good that man. I tell Jaan, if he is in trouble I do not want it at my door but he goes, like a dog, he follows him. Ever since they were boys it was that way. Viktor makes fuck-up, Jaan takes the blame.’

She pointed at him with a wavering finger. ‘You will find who killed my husband.’

‘We’re trying, Mrs Stepulov, but you have to understand, how Jaan was living, it’s very difficult to get a clear picture of events.’

‘What does this mean?’ she snapped. ‘You are not trying hard enough.’

DCS Riggott could learn a thing or two from her, Zigic thought, feeling his face flush, a knot twisting in his gut. He wasn’t used to this. The victim’s family was usually shell-shocked, too brittle to answer the most basic questions. He was used to coaxing people round, a soft voice, a gentle approach. That wasn’t going to cut it here.

‘What was Viktor involved in?’

‘I do not know. But it will be bad. Whatever he was doing.’

‘But Jaan thought he was in trouble. Why?’

‘The night before Jaan left Viktor phoned here, he said he was in danger.’ She looked into her cup, a deep frown on her face. ‘I begged Jaan to stay. He said he would not go after him but when I woke up the next morning he was gone. I tried to call Viktor’s mobile phone and there was no answer, only this woman’s voice saying the number was no longer available.’

The bottle of vodka on the worktop looked tempting suddenly.

‘I need you to tell me everything Viktor said to your husband.’

‘He tells me nothing. Jaan was a secretive man. We have been married twenty-one years and I never know what he is thinking.’ Her eyes lost focus. ‘I did not want to come here. Viktor says there is opportuity in England so Jaan decides we will come here too. He said we would work hard, save money, go home and buy business. But he would not work. The agency, they find him job, he went one, two days, is told to leave. Next job is the same.’ Her mouth set into a hard line. ‘We are better off without him.’