Tell No Tales (11 page)

‘
You
will?’ Sofia snatched the hot-water bottle. There were tears in her eyes and when she spoke he could see how hard she was fighting to maintain her composure. ‘It is not your business to do this. You do not know this woman.’

‘Your mother. Jelena’s mother. She isn’t just some woman.’

‘Your mother is . . . domestic goddess, yes? Cook and clean and make beautiful home for her family?’

Zigic couldn’t deny it.

‘That woman . . .’ Sofia glared at the phone. ‘That woman you tell me is mother tried to sell Jelena for five hundred US dollars to soldiers in Belgrade. Jelena was eleven.’

Her words hung in the air for a few minutes while Zigic tried to think of a suitable reply, knowing there wasn’t one.

Outside the skip slammed against the road and one of the men shouted to the driver. There was barracking and laughter, the sound of the cab door slamming. It was all so simple and banal and did nothing to block out the image in Zigic’s mind of his own sister at eleven, still a child despite her long limbs and her clever mouth, being bartered over by men with blood on their hands.

‘Jelena’s papers say she was born in Ljubljana.’

‘They are very good papers.’

‘And what about you?’

‘My papers are also very good.’

Sofia uncapped the bottle to take another long drink and he stopped himself commenting. Wouldn’t he be doing the same thing in her position?

‘If you’re not going to go back to hospital you should have someone here with you. What about your boyfriend?’

‘Tomas is in Poznań,’ she said.

‘There’s nobody else?’

She looked at him and he felt immediately it had been a stupid thing to say.

‘I am not so pathetic. My boss, she bring food later, check I am still alive.’ She frowned at what she’d said, maybe realising afresh how close she’d come to death, and the fight bled out of her in front of his eyes, leaving her a small, hunched figure. ‘Have you found the man who hit us?’

‘You told us it was Anthony Gilbert. Jelena’s ex.’

Sofia’s frown deepened and for a moment she struggled to focus on him, blinked as if trying to clear her vision. ‘Why would I say that?’

‘You were very certain, Sofia. You said he was stalking Jelena.’ Zigic watched her carefully for some small sign of recognition. ‘We came to talk to you. Don’t you remember?’

‘No.’ Her voice was little more than a whisper and she dropped her eyes to her bandaged wrist. ‘It could not be Anthony. He loves Jelena.’

‘That isn’t what you said before.’

‘Then I did not know what I was saying.’ She gestured vaguely with her good hand. ‘The medication . . .’

He thought of her straining in her hospital bed to make herself understood and even in the dimly lit room he had seen the effort it cost her, the words coming through gritted teeth, a film of sweat on her forehead.

They must have been the first words she spoke when she came round, telling a nurse to call them.

‘We went to Anthony’s house yesterday after I spoke to you and when we arrived we found him unconscious. He’d taken a massive overdose of painkillers.’

Her hand closed around the neck of the vodka bottle, twisting nervously.

‘Is he dead?’

‘He’s in hospital. They have him in a medically induced coma right now, they’re waiting to see how much damage the pills have done.’

She dropped her chin, but he still saw the relief on her face and the hint of pleasure the news had provoked.

‘Why did you claim he was stalking Jelena?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t remember.’

‘So they were still together?’

She didn’t answer, only tightened her grip on the bottle.

‘This is very important, Sofia,’ he said, trying and failing to catch her eye. ‘Anthony attempted to kill himself and we need to know why he did that. If it’s guilt-induced or if he was simply grieving over Jelena’s death.’

Still no answer and and Zigic began to wonder how much she really knew about Jelena and Gilbert’s relationship. Living in the same house, working together too, it would have been difficult for Jelena to speak privately to him on the phone – was that why they were using Facebook? Maintaining a dialogue Sofia couldn’t eavesdrop on?

Maybe she genuinely believed Gilbert was stalking her sister. Wouldn’t it have looked like that to her? All of those snatched, three-second phone calls, just long enough to say ‘I love you’?

Then he thought of all the messages between them which mentioned her, painting Sofia like some overbearing mother who had to be appeased, slowly and patiently won round.

Was that why she accused him? Just hatred, deeply buried, burning through the pain. The medication jumbling her thoughts and loosening her tongue, releasing a subconscious fear she’d been harbouring for months, that Gilbert would hurt Jelena eventually, mixing that up with what had happened.

‘Why don’t you like Anthony?’

She shot him an angry look which pinched the skin around her dark green eyes. ‘I know men like him. Big car, big mouth. I tell Jelena, you want some man to buy you? Use you until he is bored and throw you into the gutter?’

‘But you just said he loved her.’

Sofia snorted. ‘He loves to have a pretty young girl who does not see what he is.’

‘And what is he?’

‘He was not good enough for her,’ Sofia said, with a certainty more maternal than sisterly, born of hard experience and edged with desperation. ‘Look what he has done.’

‘We don’t know who was driving the car yet,’ Zigic reminded her.

‘He has killed himself, of course it was him. Why else would he do that?’

‘He’s still alive, Sofia.’

‘No. He will die. He is a weak man.’ Almost chanting it, like she could stop his heart with the sheer scale of her grief. ‘He will not survive. He does not deserve to live.’

She got up and walked across the room, over to the mantelpiece with its half-burnt candles and gilded ikons.

‘Did you know they were still in contact?’

‘She told me they were not.’ Sofia ran her fingertips across a hinged triptych. ‘She was secretive. Always she hides things from me.’

‘Did she know how much you hated him?’

‘I only wanted what was best for her.’

She was replying but not actually answering his questions and he could see her swaying slightly, steadying herself against the mantelpiece, lost in her own thoughts.

‘So you encouraged Jelena to break up with him?’

‘She would have been happier without him,’ Sofia said. ‘I knew that. She should have trusted me.’

Zigic went to where she stood, the flat eyes of half a dozen Orthodox saints looking on impassively. ‘She didn’t break things off with him. They were in love, Sofia. Whether you approved or not. Anthony had absolutely no reason to do this.’

‘And you have never hurt someone you love?’ she asked, fingers jumping suddenly, knocking over the triptych, the sound echoing the remembered slap in Zigic’s head, the sting on his cheek, pink eyes and jasmine perfume and a string of words he’d wanted to take back before he’d finished saying them. ‘The people we love are the ones who hurt us most.’

Again he explained it, patiently, slowly, telling her about the conversations between them, the plans they were making for the future, right up until the night before Jelena died. No signs of friction, no motive.

‘I understand why you accused him.’ Zigic righted the fallen ikon. ‘You were confused. You were angry. But it is
highly
unlikely that he’s responsible for this.’

‘You do not know what kind of man he is,’ Sofia said.

He did. Better than her. He wasn’t about to reveal Gilbert’s long history of obsession and violence towards women though.

If Jelena had listened to Sofia and left him then it would be relevant. Gilbert’s crimes were provoked by rejection, the pricking of his overinflated ego which couldn’t accept that the women he wanted didn’t want him. When that happened he turned on them and anyone else he perceived to be standing in his way.

The reassurance Zigic was preparing died on his lips.

Sofia was standing in his way.

Jelena hadn’t dumped him but she was backing away, not seeing him as often, cooling things off to keep her sister happy. It was a softer kind of rejection but to someone like Gilbert it might be enough.

Was Sofia the real target?

Zigic tried to picture the scene, tried to dredge up the preliminary report forensics had sent over; where everyone was standing, the trajectory of the car as it cut across the traffic, speed building.

Early morning. Cold. People dressed in hooded tops and hats. Indistinguishable from one another. Jelena and Sofia who looked so alike . . .

He thought of Gilbert on the kitchen floor, the pills and vodka, too many for a gesture, the man wanted to end it and he’d almost succeeded. Ferreira had said it, half serious, maybe it was grief rather than guilt. He climbs out of the car, stunned by the airbag and the force of the impact, sees Sofia lying on the pavement, still alive.

Sees Jelena on the road, covered in blood, dead.

15

EVERY TIME FERREIRA
went into the centre of Peterborough there seemed to be more empty shops and as she came out of the car park near the city marketplace, heading towards Midgate, she noticed another window opaque with whitewash and found she couldn’t remember what had been there.

The buildings were brutal grey monoliths, three and four storeys high, smoked-glass windows and crumbling concrete patched in lines which had never weathered back. She imagined you wouldn’t open a business there unless you were on limited capital, maybe not expecting to see out more than two years’ trading.

There were pop-up stores selling cheap clothes and pound shops all with the same plastic tat outside them, four different gold-cashing places which would have been based in council flats in Bretton a couple of years ago. Now they were respectable, or near enough, fences with business cards and backstreet accountants, legitimised by austerity.

She turned into the Wheelyard, a few morning drinkers sheltering under the budding cherry blossoms on the corner, then turned along a cobbled alleyway into the cathedral precincts, high stone walls rising above her, spackled with moss and noxious yellow lichen.

A loud woman with a Home Counties accent was leading a group of tourists across the cathedral green, men and women dressed in matching anoraks, almost indistinguishable from one another as they turned their faces up to the building’s busy facade, holding cameras or snapping away with their phones. A couple of stragglers detached themselves from the back of the herd and slipped into the small cafe next to Pickman Nye, tempted by the chalkboard out front advertising cream teas, two for a tenner.

They didn’t even glance at the dishevelled man standing nearby, clutching a handful of leaflets, holding one out hopefully to them. Ferreira took it from him as she walked passed, thanked him without looking at it, and only realised what it was as she climbed the short flight of stone steps to Pickman Nye’s front entrance.

The leaflet was printed on cheap paper, the word ‘missing’ across the top in English, replicated smaller in another six languages. Underneath it was a photograph of a grey-haired man with coarse skin and a broken nose, badly healed years ago. A name and a phone number at the bottom.

It was so easy to fall off the radar, she thought, as she folded the leaflet and tucked it into her back pocket.

The reception desk was unmanned when she went inside and she rang the bell on the raised counter, heard it echo in the room beyond. They’d redecorated since the last time she was there, laid new brown carpet and added a fresh coat of white paint to the walls, which only reinforced the chilliness of the old stone building. They’d found space for a few more chairs but only two of them were occupied, a man in a tracksuit sitting with his young son, who rustled a bag of sweets and kicked his feet for something to do.

Ferreira remembered that feeling. She was about the same age as the boy the first time she walked into Pickman Nye. Back then this highly respectable employment agency, with its council contracts, was still a grey-area gangmasters squeezed into three small offices above a tanning salon on Cowgate, supplying farmhands and factory workers at minimum wage, chiselling whatever they could off the top.

Her father dragged her there every day for a week. It was the middle of the summer holidays and the office was stifling, full of recent arrivals who’d been given the number back home and told there was all the work anyone could ask for waiting in Peterborough.

Her father was told the same thing but the job he’d been promised only lasted a month, ended abruptly by a fight with the Polish chargehand which had cost him two back teeth and a large chunk of pride. She heard her parents arguing about it at night. They left the caravan to do their shouting but they wouldn’t stray far with the kids ‘asleep’ inside, the four of them top and tail in two single beds. The money was running out and her mother’s wages weren’t enough to keep the roof over their heads and feed them too.

So every morning they took the bus from Spalding, eating into their dwindling reserves, and every morning the hatchet-faced bitch behind the desk said she had nothing for him. Her father was stubborn though, and he waited, made her wait too, watching other men come in and ask the same question only to get a different answer. The woman led them into another office and they came out smiling with directions to their new jobs.

It took Ferreira four days to figure out what was going on. She wandered off to look for the toilet and saw the woman take a carrier bag from one of the men, the hard edges of cigarette cartons showing through the plastic before she dropped them into a filing cabinet. When she explained to her father he ruffled her hair, told her she would be a spy when she grew up.

The next day he spent the last of their cash on one hundred Silk Cut and the woman miraculously found him a six-month contract at a pork processing plant.

She was a philanthropist now, Mrs Pickman, supporting local arts charities and buying incubators for the special care unit at City Hospital, trying to wash the filth off her money.