Long Way Home (23 page)

He saw Zigic back out to his car, the dog loping along behind them, until it spotted a rabbit on the grass, then it bolted, crossing the ground quicker than Zigic thought was possible, its long stride closing in on the rabbit in a few seconds. The rabbit froze and Cassius pounced on it. There was a weak cry and a shake and Cassius returned to his master with the animal clamped in his massive jaw.

Zigic drove away with the image stuck in his mind, picturing the small bones in the rabbit’s neck snapped and splintered.

WAHLIA AND FERREIRA
were eating lunch when Zigic got back to the office, fatly stuffed ciabatta rolls from the Italian deli on Queen’s Street filling the room with the smell of toasted bread and garlic, an antiseptic hit of thyme.

‘Yours is on your desk,’ Ferreira said, going for her Coke.

He shook the rain out of his parka before he hung it up and went into his office, found the brown paper bag sitting squarely at the centre of his desk, stapled closed and oozing olive oil onto a sheet of paper covered in doodles of chain link and cross-hatched bars.

Next to it was a copy of the coroner’s report into Viktor Stepulov’s death and he took both out into the main office, sat down at one of the spare desks and opened up his lunch. Parma ham and artichoke hearts, slivers of pecorino.

Ferreira and Wahlia were talking about some fight his cousins were doing security for on Saturday, debating going, but it was in Manchester and they couldn’t seem to sort out the logistics to their liking. Ferreira didn’t want to drive because it meant not drinking, Wahlia suggested they train it, leave early enough to catch the full undercard. Was it worth the haul though? A northern area title fight? Even for ringside seats?

Zigic took a bite of his sandwich and started on the coroner’s report.

There wasn’t much to it.

‘Have you looked at this?’

Wahlia nodded. ‘Half-arsed, right?’

‘Is there anything on the system?’

‘DI Hawkes was dealing with it,’ Wahlia said.

Zigic remembered the whip-round and the Get Well Soon card he’d signed for the man he hardly knew. How long ago was that? A month or more. They were cut off from CID up in Hate Crimes and he’d heard nothing of Hawkes’s progress since.

‘I’ll talk to Riggott about it.’

He took another bite of his sandwich, felt something gritty between his back teeth but swallowed it, and returned to the scant findings in the report.

Viktor Stepulov’s body was found by a farmer and his labourer working in the field next to the railway tracks. They were clearing away lumps of bog oak which had risen to the surface over the autumn, pulling them out with chains and stacking them to be burned. The farmer’s spaniels were running around while they worked and their barking alerted him to the arm lying in the long grass. A few yards further along he saw the torso and a leg.

The emergency services found Viktor Stepulov’s head in a clump of nettles.

They had a vague time of death, a seventeen-hour window between the farmer’s discovery and the reports of a line maintenance team which had been through the day before, checking rivets and making repairs, but it wasn’t much to go on.

Sometime between 4 p.m. on Sunday, the eighteenth of November, and 9 a.m. on Monday the nineteenth, a train drove through Viktor Stepulov. The drivers who worked the route had been questioned but none reported seeing him, or being aware of hitting someone. Of course. They would have reported it if they had.

Zigic imagined Viktor stumbling onto the line in the pitch black of a winter evening, breathing frost, disorientated, maybe drunk, maybe hurt already, feeling the line shudder underfoot . . . wouldn’t he have moved? Thrown himself out of the way of the lights bearing down on him?

No.

He thought of the break in his shin. Viktor hadn’t walked anywhere. He definitely hadn’t walked onto a train track in the back end of beyond on a Sunday night.

‘We need him post-morteming,’ Zigic said. ‘Bobby, get it sorted, quick as possible. And get Irwin to do it. They’ve fucked up over there once already, I want it doing properly this time.’

‘Yes, boss.’

Wahlia picked up the phone and started to dial.

‘What did Drake say?’ Ferreira asked.

‘He was cagey but I don’t think Viktor was working there,’ Zigic admitted. ‘I’m not saying he’d be above doing it but he knows we’d go to him first, he’d have been more careful where he dumped the body.’

Ferreira opened a fresh pouch of tobacco and began to shred it into the tin, pulling apart the damp clumps.

‘Maybe whoever did it liked the idea of implicating him.’

‘A rival gangmaster?’

‘It’s a cut-throat business,’ she said.

He thought of what Drake told him, that they hadn’t worked locally for years, and wondered who was taking the jobs from under his nose. Groundwork was lucrative, heavy and dirty but largely unskilled, more about brute force and the right plant than anything else. It attracted criminals too. Always had. For years it had been locked up by firms loosely affiliated to Irish paramilitaries and their gangster offshoots, a good way of cleaning up money and getting rid of bodies. There was a reason why people joked about putting someone under a motorway, why they said flyovers were full of men who’d forgotten who their friends were.

Drake was a small-time operator really but still big enough to be worth fitting up.

‘Did you get anything in town?’ he asked.

‘There’s a girl working at Maloney’s who knew Viktor. I think she’s hiding something.’ Ferreira licked the edge of her cigarette paper and deftly sealed it. ‘He told her he’d got a building job down in London. Some English guy set it up.’

‘Another agency?’

‘I’ve made some calls,’ she said. ‘You want me to go outside with this?’

‘No. Have you got anywhere?’

She went and opened a window, sat on the sill to light up.

‘Pickman Nye no longer handle the construction sector apparently, but I’ve been in touch with some of the smaller firms. No one knows him, but what else are they going to say without a warrant?’ She took a deep drag. ‘I’ll tell you something I find really strange though – Maloney reckons Jaan didn’t ask about Viktor. And when I dropped by Fern House they said the same thing. Not only did he not mention a brother, he told them he didn’t have any family in England at all.’

‘Jaan wasn’t looking for him,’ Zigic said.

‘Then why was he here?’

‘I think he just wanted out and Viktor was the excuse. Mrs Stepulov said he hated working, he wasn’t pulling his weight with the bills and she strikes me as the kind of woman who would have made it clear that was unacceptable.’ He thought of her ambivalence when they informed her of Jaan’s death; she’d grieved for him already, got it all out of the way once she realised he’d walked out on them and didn’t want to come back. He’d made his choice and if it got him killed that was his own fault. ‘What’s happening with the call logs from the Stepulov house?’

‘Bobby was handling it.’

Wahlia glanced up at the mention of his name.

‘We need to know where Viktor called them from.’

Wahlia nodded.

Viktor had told them he was in danger back in October and six weeks later he was dead. It had to be work-related, didn’t it? Migrant labourers were mistreated and disrespected, routinely ripped off, but it was par for the course and most of them knuckled down under the pressure.

Was Viktor the type to fight back, though? Jaan had argued with Andrus Tombak and maybe that got him killed. It wasn’t unrealistic to assume Viktor had a similar streak of obstinacy in him, enough to annoy his new bosses. But if he believed he was in danger why did he hang around? The money couldn’t be that good. Nobody’s was.

Zigic closed the coroner’s report, slapped it on the desk.

‘Start a board, Mel.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Upstairs CID was quiet, a handful of people working diligently at their computers, or doing a good impression of working. Phones rang, keyboards clattered and Zigic felt a surge of envy at the industrious mood. He knew they were probably running into brick walls of their own but the one he faced felt insurmountable, and a niggling, negative voice in the back of his mind told him that even if he managed to scramble over it he would discover another one waiting, taller and wider and with a deep pit on the other side of it.

He pushed away the voice and found a smile for Riggott’s secretary when she glanced up from her typing. She wore a powder-blue twin set and her blonde hair was drawn into an impossibly neat bun. Riggott would appreciate that, he thought, the vintage look, and wondered if there was something going on between them.

‘Is he in?’

‘He’s having lunch,’ she said. ‘Is it important?’

She was like a doctor’s receptionist, weighing the calls on her boss’s time, deciding which ones he could ignore. Zigic forced the smile to stay put, told her it was, and she debated for a moment before announcing him.

He went in, closed the door behind him.

‘You got good news for me, Ziggy?’

‘Depends on your definition of good.’

Riggott was eating a steak sandwich, cuffs turned back, two napkins tucked into the neck of his crisp white shirt and his silk tie thrown over his shoulder. He leaned forward as he took a bite, drops of blood spotting the newspaper on his desk. Reading upside down Zigic saw the article was about some American actress who’d been on a very public bender, and felt a little of his respect for Riggott slip away.

‘You want something,’ he said, around a mouthful of meat and bread.

‘We’ve found Stepulov’s brother.’

‘And?’

‘He’s dead too.’

‘Popular boys, those two.’ Riggott put his sandwich down and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘I take it he didn’t pass quietly in his sleep.’

Zigic filled him in on what they knew.

‘And you’re assuming it’s linked with your case?’

‘It’s got to be more than a coincidence.’

‘Who’s dealing with it?’

‘Hawkes was.’

Riggott’s face twisted briefly, annoyance or sympathy. ‘Well, he won’t be back for a good while yet.’

‘How’s he doing?’

‘Last I heard they were running more tests.’

He didn’t really know, Zigic suspected. While you were in the station, at the centre of things, you were important, but the second you slipped, through illness or stress or suspension, you were as good as dead. If Hawkes did make it back Riggott would shake his hand, drag him into a bear hug like they were long-lost brothers; if not, he’d stick fifty quid in the collection for the wreath and get on with his day.

The phone on Riggott’s desk began to ring and he gave it a cursory glance, just long enough to check it wasn’t coming from up the ladder, and let it go.

‘Alright, Ziggy. You take this one, but keep me informed.’ He picked up his sandwich again and gestured at Zigic with it. ‘Closely informed, right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

KATE JENKINS WAS
fighting the vending machine in the corridor outside the lab, pounding it with the heel of her hand. She was five foot four and slightly built; Zigic didn’t fancy her chances against it.

‘Bloody thing’s robbed me again.’ She squatted down in front of it, her corkscrew red hair falling across her face. ‘Don’t look, Ziggy, you won’t approve.’

She slipped her hand into the tray at the bottom and Zigic winced as her arm disappeared after it, watching her twist and huff, snaking up into the rows of chocolate bars and cans, wiggling her fingertips.

‘Why don’t I get you something from downstairs?’

She grunted. ‘It’s not beating me.’

‘You’ll need cutting out of it the way you’re going.’

‘I’m nearly there.’ She slammed her body into the curved plastic front and swore under her breath. ‘Come on, you bastard.’

‘Just take something from the bottom row.’

‘No. I want a KitKat. I’ve paid for a KitKat.’ Her middle finger hooked one and she made a final push, flexing to tip it out from its holder. It hit the tray with a thunk and she grinned at him.

‘Shit.’ The smile died on her face.

She tried to pull her arm out but it wouldn’t budge.

‘Shit, I can’t –’

‘Just relax,’ Zigic said. He dropped the bag with Viktor Stepulov’s clothes in but didn’t know what to do next, stood stupidly looking at her. ‘Alright . . . OK . . . don’t tense up. Just let me think.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘I’ll call maintenance, they can take the front off or something.’

‘No, pull me out.’

‘It’ll break your arm.’

She pressed her face against the machine. Closed her eyes. ‘I don’t want to lose my arm.’

‘You won’t.’ Zigic crouched next to her, took hold of her free hand. ‘You’re going to be alright, I promise.’

‘I need it. This is the hand I hit my kids with.’

He straightened up as Jenkins laughed at him.

‘Nice, Kate.’

She disengaged her arm from the vending machine, came up brandishing the KitKat.

‘What are you, five?’ Zigic snatched at the bag of clothes.

‘It’s been a slow morning.’ She unwrapped her chocolate and offered him half of it. ‘To the hero the spoils.’

‘No, you earned it.’

Jenkins nodded at the bag, her nose twitching. ‘That for me, is it?’

‘Don’t say I never bring you anything.’

They went into the lab, a large, square room with stark white walls and blue lino floor scrubbed almost to its underlay, bleached in places and stained in others, the damage worst around the pair of long, stainless-steel tables which dominated the space. They reminded him of the mortuary he’d just come from, but where there would have been a body a set of clothes was laid out, arranged as they would have been worn, a woman’s grey pinstripe suit, the jacket at the top, then a shirt, then the pencil skirt with a splash of red wine down the front, tights ripped at the knees and a pair of shoes with uncomfortably high heels and sweat-smudged inners.

‘What happened to her?’ Zigic asked.

‘Her boyfriend happened. She got in a bit later than he liked so he strangled her,’ Jenkins said. ‘Put the bag down there, I’ll just fetch some gloves.’