Long Way Home (31 page)

‘You need to tell him where they are, Paolo. You want this to stop, don’t you? You don’t want anyone else to die.’

‘They didn’t let us out. I don’t know where we were.’ He looked helpless. ‘I didn’t even know how long I’d been there until I saw the date on this newspaper. I thought it was years.’

Ferreira met his gaze, saw the fear filling his black eyes. ‘How long was it?’

‘Ten months.’

‘How did you cope?’

‘I didn’t. It was hell,’ he said, eyes dropping. ‘I tried not to think about my family but there was nothing else to do but think. Marco says my girlfriend is getting married very soon.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I hoped she would wait but everyone thought I was dead. Why wait for a dead man?’

‘She might feel differently when she sees you.’

‘She wouldn’t want me now. Look what they have done to me.’

‘You’ll recover, Paolo. A couple of weeks, some good food, plenty of rest.’ Ferreira smiled. ‘Shave that beard off maybe . . . you’ll look fine.’

‘I am not the man she loved any more. That man is gone.’

Adams came back in, clutching his mobile. Something had sent a bolt of energy through him, good news on the nurse or a verbal thrashing from Riggott, Ferreira thought.

Late-afternoon now and the DCS would want progress made before the hacks set up shop on the station steps at half past five.

‘Right.’ He took his car keys out of his jacket pocket and tossed them to Ferreira. ‘Road map’s in the glovebox. Let’s see if we can’t work out where these fuckers had Mr Perez interned, shall we?’

ZIGIC TRIED THE
garage on the Eastern Industrial Estate first, found out that Clinton Renfrew had called on Friday morning to let them know he’d been offered a better job. He didn’t say what and the owner didn’t push him, there were plenty of decent mechanics out there who’d be grateful for the work, especially the way things were. The man asked what Renfrew had done and Zigic walked away without answering.

He drove over to the brother’s house in Old Fletton, arrived as Renfrew’s sister-in-law was unloading her kids from the back of a people carrier, weighed down with gym bags and lunch boxes, shouting for her little girl to stay away from the road. The girl retreated from the kerb and climbed onto the pebble-dashed front wall, started pirouetting on the gatepost’s broad concrete cap.

‘What do you want?’ she asked and looked away before he could answer. ‘Keeley, get off there right now.’

The girl jumped down and landed in a heap on the front lawn.

‘Is Clinton at home?’ Zigic asked.

‘No.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Fuck should I know?’

‘He’s quit his job at the garage.’

‘More like they fired him.’ She opened the front door and hustled the kids inside, threw their bags down at the foot of the stairs. ‘Lazy bastard’s not got a day’s work in him. Been asking him to fix the tap in the kitchen since he got here, he ain’t bothered.’

‘He’s come into some money recently,’ Zigic said.

‘Well, I’ve not seen any of it.’ She put a sharp eye on him. ‘What’s he done? Second time you come round here, he’s done something wrong.’

‘I just need to talk to him.’ Zigic gave her his card. ‘How about you ring me when he gets home?’

She tapped the card against her fingernails, looked back into the house at her kids emerging from the kitchen with crisps and cans of drink, sliding across the laminate floor in their socks like they were skating. The boy, five or six, had a fresh bruise under his left eye, and maybe it was from a playground scuffle or the usual boisterous tumbling of kids that age, but Zigic could easily imagine Renfrew’s temper getting the better of him.

‘Was Clinton here Wednesday morning?’

‘I told you already.’

A car pulled onto her neighbour’s driveway, another woman bringing her kids home from school.

‘Mrs Renfrew, please.’

‘He was here, alright?’ Her neighbour waved and she waved back, shot her a smile which might have passed for genuine at that distance, but Zigic saw the strain. ‘What do you want me to say?’

Inside the kids started fighting and she went to deal with them without saying another word, slamming the door in Zigic’s face.

When he got back to Thorpe Wood Station, the press pack was setting up in the car park, vans from
Look East
and
Anglia
blocking off the front steps, their side panels thrown back as their crews unloaded cameras and set up lamps, wires trailing out across the tarmac. They should have been in the press suite, everyone warm and settled, drinking bad coffee and talking shop, but obviously Riggott had decided that a brief statement would be enough. They were playing their cards close for now.

A couple of journalists from the local papers were standing smoking near the fire door, talking to a WPC who should have known better than to tell them anything. She was laughing though, and gesturing across to some distant point in the east.

‘Clarke,’ Zigic shouted. ‘Over here.’

Her face froze and the hacks looked on with evident delight as she dropped her cigarette butt in a shower of sparks and walked over to him, puffing out her chest and rearranging her radio on her shoulder.

‘Sir.’

‘Has the PO briefed you on the official line?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And did she tell you to answer any stupid questions those jackals asked?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So get inside and keep your mouth shut.’

He followed her in through reception, where a couple of her fellow officers were trying to restrain a lanky young woman with heroin pallor and a black eye as she twisted and spat at them. The desk sergeant folded his arms across his ample gut and gave her a withering look, told her that kind of attitude wouldn’t get her anywhere.

Zigic met Adams in the stairwell, the press officer walking in front of him, talking across her shoulder, her heavily made-up face drawn in the grey-blue light.

‘Just don’t let them sucker you, say what you’ve got to say and scarper. I’ll deal with the rest.’

Adams stopped on the half-landing and the PO kept going, slamming the door into the stairwell wall.

‘We got the woman who took Perez to A&E,’ he said.

‘Lucky break. Did she come forward or did you have to hunt her down?’

‘Perez gave us a semi-solid ID. She works at City General, that’s how come she managed to avoid the cameras, I guess, knows where the blind spots in the ambulance bay are.’

‘Why didn’t she go in with him?’

‘Scared shitless,’ Adams said. ‘Can’t blame her, can you? They chased her for about five miles, let a couple of shots off at her car.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Exactly.’ He ran his fingers back through his hair, checking his reflection in the glass. He seemed to like what he saw. ‘So we’ve got a location now.’

‘Where was he?’

‘A compound over on the Wisbech Road.’

‘You going tonight?’

‘
We’re
going tomorrow. First light.’ Adams grinned. ‘Be good to kick some doors in, won’t it?’

He took off down the stairs, almost running.

Zigic headed up to Hate Crimes. As he passed the CID floor he saw Ferreira standing in the middle of the office talking to Riggott, hands on her hips, giving the DCS hard eye contact while he spoke.

He kept walking, got a Coke out of the machine along the hall, took the last Mars bar left in the rack, thinking about Riggott trying to poach his officers back over into CID. He’d lost two of his team in last April’s budget cuts. Wells moved down to Huntingdon, taking a place on their Domestic Terrorism Unit, Harris was promoted to sergeant and relocated to Cardiff, leaving his wife and young daughter in Peterborough. She had a job at the university she wasn’t prepared to give up and when Harris laid down an ultimatum he didn’t get the decision he was expecting. Zigic wondered if they’d managed to patch things up, imagined they hadn’t. Harris was no loss. To his wife and daughter or the team, but Wells was a grafter.

If Ferreira went too, where did that leave them? Two people wasn’t a department.

There were already rumours of more lay-offs, suggestions from on high that the administrative staff could be outsourced to private contractors. The uniform division was being slowly eroded, fully trained officers pensioned off in favour of civilian support, pointless, power-crazed wannabes who were nothing more than jumped-up security guards in high-visibility jackets.

Twenty per cent budget cuts. It didn’t take a genius to work out where they would bite hardest. Anything voters didn’t care about could go. Domestic violence, anti-stalking, hate crimes. Women and foreigners. They could be ignored without the world falling down around the council’s ears.

In the office Wahlia was standing on his chair fiddling with the strip light over his desk.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Fucking thing keeps flickering, it’s doing my head in.’

‘I don’t think tapping it’s going to help,’ Zigic said.

He popped his Coke and took a long drink, watching Wahlia overstretch, waiting for the chair to roll out from under him. Abruptly the light went dead.

‘Result?’

‘It’s less irritating now anyway.’

Wahlia stepped down and the chair flew away from his heel, struck the empty desk behind him.

All of the desks were empty and there was a desolate feel to the office again.

‘What happened to my fresh troops?’

‘Riggott called them back to the fort. They’ve had a break in the shooting.’

‘Yeah, I heard.’

‘Adams is a lucky bastard,’ Wahlia said, dragging his chair back and dropping heavily into it. ‘We got nothing from the canvassing. Couple of sites looked a bit dodgy but no one knew Viktor.’

Zigic walked over to Viktor Stepulov’s board, saw lines through the morning’s avenues of inquiry. It didn’t matter now, he reminded himself. Whoever shot Paolo was almost certainly linked to Viktor and it was just a matter of bringing them in and getting them to an interview room.

He went into his office and called Anna. She was a long time answering the phone and just as he was beginning to worry she picked up.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I was in the garden,’ she said, a hint of annoyance in her voice. ‘Stefan climbed over the fence into next door, he was standing in their pond talking to the bloody koi.’

‘Are they in?’

‘No, thank God. I don’t know what I would have said to them if they were.’

‘Is he alright?’

‘He’s fine.’

In the background he heard Stefan chattering away, telling her about Mr Fishy-Fish. Anna snapped at him and he stopped for about two seconds.

‘You’ve got to talk to him, Dushan. Anything could have happened. He could have drowned.’

‘I’ll explain to him when I get home.’

‘I don’t even know how he got in there. One minute he was on the swing and the next he was just gone.’ Her voice was trembling. ‘What if he’d got out onto the road? He could have been knocked down or abducted or anything. We need to put a higher fence up. And we need to sort out the gate so he can’t reach the latch.’

Zigic rubbed his eyes, they felt gritty and raw.

‘I’ll take care of it, OK, just calm down.’

‘I am perfectly calm,’ she said tersely.

He heard the fridge door open and a bottle rattling.

‘Are you coming home? No, you’re not, or you wouldn’t be ringing me.’

‘I’ll be late,’ he said. ‘But I’ll talk to him. I promise.’

She sighed heavily. ‘OK.’

‘I love you.’

‘You’d better.’ Stefan was still yammering away. ‘I’ve got to go.’

She put the phone down and Zigic looked at the photographs on his desk, Anna and the boys all smiles. They were a lie. All family photographs were. He should replace them with one of Anna standing in the kitchen with a wine glass in her hand, Milan bent over a book and Stefan stationed on the naughty step trying to make himself cry. That would be more representative of what he was missing here nine hours a day.

He went back into the main office.

Ferreira was sitting at Wahlia’s desk, smiling to herself as she watched him talking to someone on his mobile, out in the hallway for privacy, but he hadn’t moved far enough and his voice was carrying.

‘Baby, I can’t tonight . . . no, I got this work thing I gotta do.’

‘That’s Bobby’s sexy voice,’ Ferreira said. ‘The ladies love it.’

Wahlia glanced up and flipped her off.

‘What did Riggott want?’

‘He was just letting me know how much he valued my input.’ She swivelled in the chair to face Jaan Stepulov’s board. ‘Speaking of which, I see you talked to Gemma already. Did she crack and give you a full confession?’

‘No,’ Zigic said. ‘Do you think she would have if you’d been there too?’

‘Maybe.’

She honestly believed it, he realised. She hadn’t failed in enough cases yet, she still believed every suspect could be ground down by sheer force of will, verbally beaten into submission. She’d learn eventually that some people hardened the more you pushed them, and the louder you shouted the quieter they would become, until they finally stopped talking altogether. At least he hoped she’d learn.

‘How did it go with Paolo?’

‘The things he said . . .’ Her face darkened. ‘Do you know what they did when someone complained? They set a pack of dogs on them. Dogs. It’s fucking barbaric.’

‘We’re going to get them, Mel.’

‘You know, I was leaving the hospital and they’re building the new wing there, right? And I suddenly realised Paolo and the others were working on jobs like that, there must have been delivery men and engineers coming onto the sites, why didn’t they notice something was wrong?’

‘Because they don’t care to notice,’ Zigic said.

She went round to her side of the desk and started to roll a cigarette, shredded tobacco onto the paper and packed it tight, rolling it between her fingers and thumbs, her face set in concentration which wasn’t for the cigarette.

‘They should have fought back.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Forty workers being held in slavery by five or six English. They’d got the numbers. They’d got tools in their hands. It
is
simple.’ She licked the paper and sealed it. ‘Paolo was the only one to speak up when they killed the Chinese guy. The rest just stood around watching. Then they went right back to work like nothing happened.’