Long Way Home (36 page)

‘Would you mind, Mel?’ She pointed at Ferreira’s feet. ‘Cream carpets, they’re a nightmare.’

Ferreira braced her hand against the wall and kicked off her boots. She was wearing mismatched socks with grubby toes and she half expected the woman to tell her to remove them too before she’d let her any further.

‘You’ve been out in the wilds,’ Anna said, eyeing the dirt on the floor.

‘We’ve been looking for a body.’

‘Did you find it?’

‘Yeah. Eventually.’

A small boy with a mop of dark brown hair ran out of the kitchen and slid to a halt in front of Ferreira. He was holding a wooden dinosaur in one hand and a stuffed white rabbit in the other.

‘This must be Milan.’

‘Stefan,’ Anna said.

He looked up at Ferreira with big green eyes full of sparky energy.

‘Who are you?’

‘This is Sergeant Ferreira, sweetheart. She works with Daddy.’

‘Do you shoot people?’

‘No.’

‘Daddy got shot.’

Ferreira glanced at Anna. Her cheeks were flushed through her make-up and she ran a nervous hand over her hair, the strain of what-might-have-been momentarily closing her eyes.

‘Your daddy’s very brave,’ Ferreira said.

Stefan shoved the wooden triceratops at her and she took it from him.

‘Thanks.’

‘His name’s Max.’

‘That’s a good name for a dinosaur.’

‘You don’t need to be scared. He only eats plants.’

‘OK.’

Stefan darted off and disappeared into the cupboard under the stairs, talking to himself in different voices which echoed in the small space.

‘He’s got a lot of imagination,’ Ferreira said.

‘Yes, he’s very creative.’

Anna opened the door to the living room and went in ahead of her.

‘Visitor for you, darling.’

The curtains were closed and the room was dimly lit by the glow from the flat screen in the corner, a bike race playing out on Eurosport. Zigic was lying on the brown leather chesterfield in his pyjamas, a hot-water bottle in a knitted cover clutched to his chest. The station doctor had sealed the cut above his left eye with a butterfly stitch but the skin was swollen and wet-looking now, giving him a slight squint when he smiled.

‘Thought I heard you.’

‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Like I’ve been shot in the chest.’

Anna switched a lamp on and Zigic blinked at the light.

‘Can I get you a drink, Mel?’

‘Coffee would be great, thanks.’

‘I’ll have another one,’ Zigic said.

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

‘A small one.’

Ferreira sat down in an armchair opposite him. There was a half-eaten sandwich on the table, blister packs of pills and a book splayed cover up. Anna cleared the mess and took his hot-water bottle to refill in it, told him not to exert himself as she left the room.

‘I see you met Stefan.’

Ferreira set the dinosaur down on the arm of the chair.

‘He’s a lovely kid.’

Zigic straightened carefully on the sofa, rearranging the pillows propped at his back.

‘What’s happening with Adams?’

‘There’s going to be an investigation,’ Ferreira said. ‘He seems to think it’s just a formality.’

Zigic winced. ‘It was my fault. He had no option but to shoot Kelvin. I don’t even know how he managed to get my gun.’

‘You shouldn’t have gone in there on your own.’

‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘He’s no great loss to the world,’ Ferreira said, seeing it again, Kelvin Gavin face down on the barn floor in a pool of blood, Zigic a few feet away, trying to get up while Adams was unfastening his bulletproof vest, asking him where he’d been hit.

‘I was stupid.’

‘It could have happened to any of us,’ Ferreira said. ‘You just ran faster.’

Zigic pulled the remote control out from between the sofa cushions and turned the sound up loud enough to drown their conversation, a man’s monotone voice droning over the action as a bunch of riders whipped through a flat landscape almost identical to the one she’d just come from. Ferreira looked at the fields and the farms and wondered what secrets were hidden a few yards from the bright blur of the race.

‘Have you questioned the Barlows?’

‘You told me to wait.’

He raised one thick, black eyebrow. ‘I didn’t expect you to take any notice. Especially since this.’

‘I haven’t had time anyway.’

The amusement went out of his face.

‘What’s happening, Mel?’

‘There’s been a development.’ She placed the wooden dinosaur on the table, noticed his mobile hidden under the open book. ‘Look, I can handle this, you don’t have to come back in if you’re not ready.’

‘What’s happened?’

She heard Anna bustling around in the kitchen, cups clinking, the fridge door opening and closing with a slam which sent the bottles inside rattling.

‘The DNA results are back,’ she said. ‘It’s not Stepulov in the shed.’

‘
OUR DECEASED IS
Andy Hudson,’ Zigic said, tapping his knuckles against the whiteboard, where the man’s mugshot was now under the word ‘victim’. Jaan Stepulov had been shifted ten inches to the bottom of the suspects column. It was getting cluttered there, Clinton Renfrew above him, Phil and Gemma Barlow at the top.

‘Mr Hudson is well known to us.’

Six sets of eyes watched him, waiting for more. Ferreira and Wahlia at their desks, his extra troops, newly recalled, scattered about, cluttering the usually empty office. At the back of the room the press officer was tapping away on her BlackBerry, preparing a statement which he hoped wouldn’t make them sound inept.

‘Aggravated assault, intimidation, manslaughter – there’s a high probability that he was asking for this but it doesn’t alter the fact that he was brutally murdered and it’s our job to find the culprit.’

He took half a step back and pointed to Jaan Stepulov’s photograph.

‘For those of you just joining us, Jaan Stepulov was originally believed to be our corpse . . .’ He tailed off, looking at the crime-scene photos of the burnt-out shed, the charred body snagged in the twisted metal wreckage of a sunlounger. The smell came back to him, so strong and bitter he could taste it. Or was it just failure?

They’d made an assumption –
he’d
made an assumption – and it was wrong and now here they were a week later, starting from scratch, and Jaan Stepulov could be anywhere in the world.

‘As of now our primary objective is to locate Stepulov and bring him in.’

He spread his hands wide, like it was simple, but he could see nobody was buying that. The new faces showed no enthusiasm, none of the usual energy which fired up the start of a case, and even Wahlia sat slumped in his chair, knees wide, cracking a pen lid between his teeth.

A hand went up, a black-haired DC in a pinstripe suit.

‘Carr, yes?’

‘What about the brother? Are we considering the murders linked?’

Zigic gestured at Ferreira. She put down her half-rolled cigarette, scattering strands of tobacco across the desk, and came over to the board with another photograph.

‘This is what we’ve got from the CCTV at Holme Fen crossing.’ She stuck it up. The man’s broad back, his uncovered head where he’d lost his beanie and the dark comma of a ponytail at the nape of his neck.

Next to it the side profile from Andy Hudson’s mugshots showed a similar configuration.

‘It’s not concrete,’ she said. ‘But there’s a strong resemblance.’

‘Our prime suspects are the householders, Phil and Gemma Barlow, but until we know for sure, it remains a solid maybe,’ Zigic said. ‘Hudson kills and dumps Viktor Stepulov and three months later he’s murdered by Jaan . . . we can’t ignore this line, but right now Jaan is a valuable witness and we need to bring him in.

‘I want you – Carr – to get hold of CCTV from the train station, the bus terminal and the coach park on Bright Street.’

The DC’s jaw tightened and he nodded.

‘Greaves.’ He pointed at a young woman with a severe blonde bob and the action sent a spike through his chest. ‘Airports.’

She nodded.

‘West and Parr, get me everything you can on Hudson. Tax records, bank accounts, known associates. We need to know what his link to Jaan Stepulov was.’ He shoved his hands down into his pockets. ‘DC Wahlia is coordinating, everything goes through him, right?’

Nods all around. A charge was stirring through the room now and he felt it too, movement, finally, in the case.

‘Get to it then.’ He turned to Ferreira. ‘What’s happening with Barlow’s solicitor?’

‘On her way.’

‘Let’s see what the widow Hudson has to tell us then.’

Ferreira pulled on her duffel coat, grabbed her keys.

‘I’ll drive,’ Zigic said.

‘You sure you should?’

‘I’m not an invalid.’

There were roadworks on Bretton Parkway, one lane coned off where it bridged the River Nene through Ferry Meadows, but there were no workmen in sight, just a lot of annoyed motorists sitting tight on each other’s bumpers, crawling along at ten miles an hour.

Zigic indicated and turned down onto the Oundle Road, passing a pub with a few people sitting out in the beer garden, togged up in coats while their kids played on the swings, their screams breaking across the traffic. A young woman was pushing a double buggy along the pavement, rushing towards the bus stop where a couple of schoolboys in grey uniforms were climbing into the waiting double decker, bags slung low, trousers lower, showing off the logos across the top of their pants.

‘I still think the Barlows did it,’ Ferreira said.

‘You thought Renfrew did it last night.’

‘He’s too confident. I think he was telling the truth about blackmailing Phil. He saw his chance after we questioned him at the garage and he took it.’ She turned on the heater, set it to full blast in the footwell. ‘Phil did it. I don’t know whether Gemma knows that, but he did. Why else pay up?’

‘Blackmail doesn’t actually require a guilty party, Mel.’ Zigic slowed and flashed for a cyclist to come out of the Botolph Arms car park. ‘Just a scared one.’

He thought of Phil Barlow, a big man but soft, not tough enough to stand up to Jaan Stepulov and throw him out on the street. How would he cope with Clinton Renfrew in his face, threatening to take away everything he’d worked for? He wouldn’t dare call his bluff. Guilty or innocent, he’d pay up and hope that was the end of it.

Zigic cut across the Shrewsbury Avenue lights on amber, his chest twingeing as he turned the steering wheel, the pain so sudden that he almost ran into the back of a Royal Mail van stopped for no reason at the mouth of the business park to their left.

Ferreira’s hands shot out for the dashboard.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?’

The van turned down towards the sorting office and Zigic pulled off again. He slipped on his sunglasses and that helped, blocked out some of the glare from the afternoon sun cutting in low across the blocky units sitting squat ahead of him.

‘Do you think the Stepulovs know Jaan’s still alive?’

‘His daughter seemed properly distraught,’ Zigic said. ‘I don’t think she does.’

‘Do you want to send a couple of uniforms over to break the good news?’ Ferreira asked.

‘Best one of us does it.’

‘So, me then?’

‘You then.’

Hampton Vale sprawled towards the horizon as he came off the Serpentine Green roundabout, the shopping centre sitting on a plateau overlooking it, the only really solid piece of land there. The rest of it, where the houses and schools and health centres were built, was a rubbish dump ten years ago and rumour had it the place was sinking already.

Zigic drove through the first phase, red-brick cod-Georgian town houses with lead canopies and railings on the path, stone sills and busy facades. Quickly all the expensive ornamentation fell away and as they headed into the heart of the development things got brutal and utilitarian. Seventy per cent of the housing was council and the parts that weren’t were slowly being gated, the private residents locking themselves away from their neighbours, the ones the local authority had built a battered women’s refuge for and a drug rehabilitation centre, then a police station for when things got too serious to be handled by social workers.

‘Where am I going?’ Zigic asked. ‘All these closes look the same.’

Ferreira had her mobile out, a map on the screen.

‘Third left, then it spurs off right.’

He turned onto a short cul-de-sac of yellow-brick houses with white plastic windows and off-road parking, no fancy brickwork on the eaves here, just a lot of satellite dishes for decoration and the occasional flag in a window.

‘Number 8,’ Ferreira said.

There was a black people carrier in the driveway, its rear bumper overhanging the path when Zigic pulled up. Mid-afternoon and the neighbouring houses were all occupied, lights on, windows open, nobody working. Radio voices bled out into the close, arguing hotly, and the air smelled of frying food, but there was another odour coming up through the grass and the cracks in the tarmac, something black and rotten, a chemical base note.

Zigic rang the bell and started a dog yapping inside number 8. A woman shouted at it but the dog kept going, then it yelped and Tanya Hudson opened the door. She was petite and blonde, with a sharply pointed face that showed a lack of sleep and an excess of worry. She had form herself, a shoplifting career which dated back to her teens and a conviction for assault when she kicked a woman unconscious in a nightclub toilet for splashing water on her dress.

They must have made quite a couple, Zigic thought.

‘Mrs Hudson, I’m DI Zigic.’ He flashed his warrant card. ‘This is DS Ferreira. We need to talk to you about your husband.’

She folded her arms. ‘What’s he done now?’

‘Could we come in please?’

‘You got a warrant?’ she asked, but there was no force to the question, it was just a reflex, Zigic guessed, the kind you developed when you were married to a recidivist thug.

‘I’m afraid we’ve got bad news, Mrs Hudson.’

‘No. No, you’re not giving me that shit,’ she said, her voice dropping.