Long Way Home (6 page)

The promoter’s men said they were taking him to hospital. Instead they put him on a northbound train, wanting the problem as far away from them as possible, and an hour after that a guard threw him off at Peterborough station. He had fifty pounds in his pocket, severe concussion and a detached retina.

‘Sergeant Ferreira.’ Helen Adu touched her elbow. ‘
Tudo bem?
’

‘Fine, thanks.
E voce?
’

‘It’s the usual controlled chaos,’ she said, forced brightness in her voice.

She looked tired out though, her pale skin desiccated and the wrinkles around her eyes deeper than usual. She fingered the chunky necklace she wore over a shapeless tunic and cast a worried glance towards the young Polish woman.

‘She isn’t your usual clientele,’ Ferreira said.

‘No. It’s very sad. Her husband died a few days ago.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘He had an accident at work. It’s horrific really, absolutely horrific.’ Helen Adu lowered her voice. ‘His arm was crushed by some machinery and he died of shock right there on the factory floor. He was only twenty-five.’

‘What’s going to happen to her now?’ Ferreira asked.

Helen Adu checked her watch. ‘She’s taking his body back to Poland for the funeral. I don’t think she’ll want to come back to England after that. I’m driving her to the airport. We need to leave in a few minutes actually.’

‘I thought you sent people home by bus.’

‘I’ve managed to persuade the company to pay for the airfares,’ Helen Adu said.

‘Did you put a gun to their heads?’

‘A metaphorical one,’ she said with a grim smile. ‘If there’s one thing sure to bring out the benevolence in a capitalist it’s the prospect of bad press. I thought the bastard was going to have a stroke when I told him how much it was going to cost to ship the body back but he found a few more drops of humanity. It was very reassuring.’

The telephone started ringing again in the office.

Helen Adu glanced towards the door but didn’t move to answer it.

‘Anyway, what can we do for you, Sergeant?’

‘Jaan Stepulov.’

‘Is he in trouble again?’

‘I’m afraid it’s a bit more serious this time. He’s dead.’

Helen Adu pressed her hands to her chest. ‘Oh my Lord, no? How?’

‘There was a fire,’ Ferreira said. ‘He was dossing in a shed in someone’s back garden.’

‘Had he been drinking?’

‘We’re not sure yet. The post-mortem isn’t scheduled until tomorrow morning. It looks like murder though.’

Helen Adu twisted her fingers into her necklace. ‘I can’t believe it. Why? He was such a lovely man.’

‘The people whose house it was don’t seem to think so.’

Helen Adu’s watch beeped and she switched the alarm off quickly. ‘I hate to be rude but I really do have to go, Sergeant, the traffic on the M11 is horrendous. Joseph knew Jaan quite well though, he can probably be of more use to you than I would.’

She gathered the woman and her children, picking up the smaller boy and holding him on her hip. The woman moved slowly, eyes down, like she didn’t trust the ground under her feet any more, and when she stumbled Helen Adu caught her under the arm.

She mouthed a goodbye to her husband and nodded to Ferreira as they left.

The room felt airless, every breath sucked out of it by the woman’s grief and overheated from the electric fire glowing in the corner. The television was still playing, bright cartoon animals and crunchy music absurd in that atmosphere.

‘Sergeant Ferreira.’ Joseph Adu shook her hand; the careful grip of a man well aware of his own strength. ‘Are you looking for somebody?’

‘No, I need to talk to you about Jaan Stepulov.’

‘We have not seen him for several weeks now.’

‘Did you ask him to leave?’

‘No. Jaan was no trouble.’ Joseph Adu spread his big hands wide. ‘Of course he has some problems but I believe he is a decent man. It is easy to be perfect when you have everything, don’t you agree, Sergeant?’

She did but it wasn’t the time to get into that sort of discussion.

‘Has he been arrested?’

‘No, Mr Adu. Jaan was squatting in a shed over on Highbury Street,’ Ferreira said. ‘There was a fire there this morning –’

‘Is he in hospital?’

‘No. Sorry, but he’s died.’

‘Oh my Lord. So much death.’ Joseph Adu sank into one of the armchairs, elbows on his knees and his eyes downcast. ‘Are you sure it is Jaan?’

‘We won’t be certain until the DNA results are back. But it looks very likely.’

Ferreira took the chair next to him, the fusty smell of stale cigarettes rising from the draylon.

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘We have not seen him for almost three weeks.’

‘Something must have made him leave.’

Joseph Adu rubbed his hands together slowly. ‘A young man came here. He wanted to speak to Jaan.’

‘Do you know what it was about?’

‘No. I asked him to wait here while I fetched Jaan from the dining room and when he saw the man he ran out through the kitchen.’

‘Did the man go after him?’

‘He tried to.’

‘But you stopped him?’

He nodded. ‘I told him to leave.’

‘And Jaan never came back?’

‘No. We have been expecting him to return, but no.’

Ferreira thought of the argument Gemma Barlow claimed to have witnessed in her back garden. If it was the same man he could have tracked down Jaan Stepulov somehow. Three weeks between the two events, then the fire.

She felt a stab of annoyance, knowing that she was going to have to return to the station and admit the possibility that the Barlow woman was right.

‘All of Jaan’s things are still here,’ Joseph Adu said.

‘I need to see them.’

‘Of course.’

Ferreira followed him up to the first floor, a thick, heavily patterned carpet swallowing their footfalls. Doors stood open on either side of the corridor, showing rooms like prison cells, bunk beds on the left, lockers on the right. Pictures had been hung on the magnolia walls and there were blankets on the beds but the place felt transient and institutional, nothing genuinely personal anywhere.

They passed a bathroom where an elderly Ukrainian man, one of the hostel’s long-termers, was scrubbing the toilet on his knees, singing under his breath.

Jaan Stepulov had bunked in the last room on the left. It had a narrow window overlooking Lime Tree Avenue, the fire escape of the B&B opposite all that constituted a view. The window was open a few inches and a stiff breeze blew through but it did little to shift the smell of contained bodies and dirty hair.

‘Who’s in here now?’ Ferreira asked.

‘This room is empty.’

Joseph Adu opened one of the lockers with a key from the bunch on his belt and stepped aside to let her examine Stepulov’s possessions.

There wasn’t much. An empty rucksack and a few items of clothing which were probably third-hand when Stepulov got them, a pair of jeans and some combats, a couple of wash-faded sweatshirts from Gap.

‘The man who came looking for Jaan, can you describe him?’

‘He was slim, the same height as me. Clean-shaven. I think he had blond hair but it was shaved very close. He had pale eyebrows I remember.’

‘Was he Estonian too?’

‘I could not say. He was wearing an Orthodox cross so I think he must be from Eastern Europe. He had a tattoo here,’ Joseph Adu said, pointing to his own neck. ‘Of a bird, I think.’

Ferreira turned Stepulov’s washbag out onto the bottom bunk. The usual stuff inside it. She gathered it up again.

When you lived how Stepulov did, you kept the important things on your person. Lockers got broken into, banks weren’t to be trusted and you never knew when you’d have to make a quick exit. Anything they might have found useful would have been burned up inside his sleeping bag.

The buzzer at the front door sounded and Joseph excused himself to answer it.

Ferreira sat on the bunk and looked at the pathetic remains of Jaan Stepulov’s existence stowed away in the locker. She wondered what he was expecting when he climbed onto the bus in Tallinn, leaving everything he knew behind him. Not this, surely. It was warm and dry but that was all you could say for the place, and as sympathetic as the Adus were it couldn’t have been much consolation through the long, lonely nights and the days he would have spent wandering around Peterborough, trying to beg a few quid off strangers or find something worth stealing.

She closed the door behind her and went back downstairs.

Joseph Adu was in the office, signing for a parcel and she waited until the delivery man left before she asked why Stepulov wasn’t working.

‘His English was very rudimentary.’

‘A lot of people get by without.’

‘Jaan was not a worker by nature. We found him a job at the Gillette factory, packing the razor blades, but it did not last very long.’

‘So what was he doing all day?’

‘I think he was drinking,’ Joseph Adu said, lowering his voice as if it were a damning admission. ‘He was drunk most evenings when he came home. I saw him several times in Maloney’s when I was taking people to the bus.’

‘How do you think he was affording that?’

‘A drunk will always find the money to feed the demon.’

There was more to it than that, Ferreira guessed. You didn’t go into a pub when you could drink cheaper out of an off-licence. Stepulov would have lifted what he wanted anyway, if it was just about getting alcohol inside him.

She thanked Joseph Adu for his help and assured him she would let them know if they could do anything else.

MALONEY’S WAS THE
last building standing on a patch of land opposite the city bus station. Four floors of gaudy Victoriana in exhaust-stained buff brick, with green tiles at street level and a sign declaring that they had Sky Sports.

Everything around it had been razed to the ground ready for the planned expansion of the Queensgate shopping centre across Westgate. They were going to build elevated glass walkways to link the new development to the old, put restaurants and clubs in there, a Debenhams which was supposed to draw the coach parties from far and wide, turn Queensgate into a destination.

The last time Ferreira went in there a quarter of the shops were shut down and she couldn’t imagine where the money was going to come from to keep the new ones afloat. The whole city reeked of poverty since the crash, fewer cars on the road, fewer people out in the clubs at night. Gap was gone, Topshop was gone. The only new businesses opening up in the centre were pound stores and hole-in-the-wall gold dealers. Old-school fences given a gloss of legitimacy with a smart website and some cheap advertising space on Hereward FM.

She parked outside Cash Converters.

On a hunch she went in, got the manager, a dumpy middle-aged woman with bottle-black hair and a mouth like a straight razor. Yes she had seen Stepulov in there, no not lately. Of course they were happy to cooperate with the police but would you please get the fuck out, you’re spooking our customers.

It was a logical process. Stepulov leaves the hostel on Lime Tree Avenue with empty pockets, robs something on his way through the city centre, cashes it in and two minutes later he’s walking into Maloney’s with his day’s drinking sorted.

No wonder he didn’t fancy twelve-hour packing shifts.

She went into Maloney’s. Tail end of the lunch hour and the place was heaving but she knew it would have been just as busy at 10 a.m. Maloney’s was always full. It was the first place you could get a drink off the train or out of the bus station, and the lot behind the pub was where coaches from all over Europe came to a final stop, ensuring a constant stream of euros. There were banners strung around the cavernous bar proclaiming ‘Welcome to Peterborough’ in eight different languages, flags lined up like a UN convention.

The landlord, Fintan Maloney, was holding court at a corner table and the three old Irish guys with him were probably the only people in there who hadn’t been born somewhere east of the Channel. At the next table a group of young men were playing cards, a pile of matchsticks already in the pot, but their focused expressions made it clear that all debts would be met later in cash.

Ferreira went to the end of bar and waited to be served.

There were four woman working behind it, struggling to keep up with the demanding voices. It was a drinkers’ pub and they didn’t appreciate slow service, especially when they’d sunk a few already.

Ferreira eyed the replay of last night’s Porto game on the big screen, saw Manchester City put a third goal in the net and turned away again. They weren’t the same since Mourinho left, but who could blame him? You followed the money, no matter where it took you.

‘Have you got the place surrounded, Sergeant Ferreira?’ Maloney laughed lightly, always the same joke, and eased his bulk through the hatch. ‘Haven’t seen your bossman for a good while.’

‘Guess you must be behaving yourself then.’

He winked at her and drained a dark rum off the optic.

‘You’ll be here about Stepulov,’ he said, a twinkle in his eye.

‘Bad news travels fast.’

‘Fast? The man’s been dead nigh on eight hours.’

‘And we haven’t released his name yet.’

‘Sure if you want confidentiality you need to start paying those civilian support officers.’ He poured himself a whiskey from a bottle of good stuff he kept under the counter.

Like a lot of what was on offer in there you had to know about it to get it. You wanted coke you went around to the service entrance and talked to the chef, you wanted a blow job you picked a waitress and asked her the price. False documents, blank credit cards, a gun with no history; it was all there if you knew which one of the customers to approach.

Maloney you went to for information and Ferreira knew several detectives had him on the pad, Zigic included, even though he behaved like a puritan.

‘So what can you tell me?’ she asked.

‘He was a fine young lad.’

‘Somebody didn’t think so.’

‘It wouldn’t be anyone knew him well told you otherwise.’