Tell No Tales (30 page)

‘So maybe it’s clean because they were going up there to stow their savings.’

Ferreira shrugged. ‘Maybe. It’s not a great place to lie low, is it?’

‘Didn’t take you long to find it.’

‘He’ll be well away by now,’ she said. ‘If he was with Lukas when he murdered Khalid he’ll know they’re caught. You wouldn’t hang around and chance him giving you up.’

‘It depends whether they agreed not to talk if they got caught. Tomas might know Lukas has no intention of telling us anything.’

‘He can’t know it for sure. Let’s say they made a pact, spat on their hands, did the blood-brother thing, whatever. Would you trust the strength of that promise if you were Tomas?’

‘I’d clear out,’ Zigic said.

In the office Grieves and Parr were standing in front of Asif Khalid’s board while she brought him up to speed on the recent developments. He nodded, mumbled, but didn’t look as if he was paying much attention. When she led him back to her computer he stifled a yawn.

Wahlia was hunched over his desk, eyes fixed on the screen, columns of print reflecting off his glasses.

‘OK, what’ve we got on Tomas Kaminski?’ Zigic asked.

Grieves piped up first. ‘I’ve found three more instances of him and our unidentified man –’

‘His name’s Lukas,’ Zigic said, dropping into a seat at one of the unmanned desks. ‘No surname and it’s not for definite, but we can stick with it until we know better. Go on.’

‘Tomas and Lukas were regulars at that cafe so I thought perhaps one of the staff might know something about them.’

‘Did you send someone round there?’

She hesitated. ‘No, sir. Not yet.’

Zigic turned to Wahlia. ‘Bobby, anything from customs?’

‘Still waiting,’ he said. ‘It’s Sunday, you know the deal. I said it’s a priority but every appeal they get is. Best guess, we won’t hear back until tomorrow morning.’

‘Unfortunately we don’t have the luxury of waiting,’ Zigic said. He rose from the chair again and went over to Asif Khalid’s board. There was a photograph of Tomas Kaminski tacked up there, lifted from Facebook judging by the beer in his hand and the idiotic grin. ‘Tomas is our only viable suspect right now and given the evidence from the CCTV on the night of Didi’s murder he’s looking solid, so we need to concentrate on tracking his movements.’

‘Does Sofia know where he is?’ Wahlia asked.

‘If she does she isn’t saying, but we’ll try and put some pressure on her tomorrow. Right now I want a thorough canvassing of the hotels and dosshouses around the city, concentrating on New England first. And this cafe they were using. Parr, that’s you.’

He didn’t look too happy with the job.

‘I know it’s Sunday and I know you’d rather be at home. So would the rest of us.’ Parr shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘The sooner you get started the sooner it’s done. Take what you need, grab some uniforms and get cracking.’

Parr drew himself up slowly and trudged out of the office.

‘Bobby, check back through Jelena and Gilbert’s Facebook messages and see if you can pin down when exactly Tomas is supposed to have left Sofia. Also, look for anything that suggests why it happened and how Sofia reacted.’ Wahlia nodded. ‘The line I got from Gilbert is that there was a fight but I think he’s hiding something. We need to know if Sofia is genuinely pissed off with Tomas or if she’s covering for him. Find me something to get her talking please.’

‘On it.’

‘Deb –’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Bank records, employment details, all the basic stuff on Kaminski,’ Zigic said. ‘He was working through Pickman Nye but you’ll have to leave that for the morning. And track down his phone logs – Bobby can give you the number.’

He turned to Ferreira, saw her playing with her mobile, feet up on the bottom drawer of her desk.

‘Mel.’

‘Yeah?’ The phone on her desk started ringing. ‘Hold on.’

She answered it and immediately stood, listened for a few seconds, then swore towards the ceiling and slammed the receiver down again.

‘Lukas,’ she said, starting for the door.

Rita, the custody sergeant was waiting for them, red-faced in front of the main desk, one hand at her throat, clutching the gold crucifix which was usually tucked safely away inside her uniform shirt.

‘I don’t know how this happened.’

‘Wasn’t someone watching him?’ Zigic asked, already heading for the cells.

She fell in step behind him. ‘Lee collected his lunch half an hour ago and he was fine.’

‘Had he eaten it?’ Ferreira asked.

‘No, but we didn’t think anything of it. He hasn’t eaten anything for a couple of days. We thought it was just the food. I asked if he was vegetarian or something but he didn’t answer so we kept giving him the usual. What else was I supposed to do?’

The corridor was long and brightly lit, despite its basement location, cell doors standing closed on the left, the names of their occupants on whiteboards. They were kicking up a racket now, alerted by the alarm which had been sounded too late, shouting and banging. There was a smell in the air, stale bodies and dirty hair and the tang of alcohol sweated out overnight into the confined spaces, then urine, as they approached the final cell, where Dr Hopkins was standing with one gloved hand on his balding head, looking in through the open door.

Hopkins moved aside as they approached, letting them see Lukas’s naked body, lying flat on the floor, arms outstretched, head still tilted back from the failed attempt at resuscitation. His lips were blue, drawn back from his teeth, eyes closed. The ligature, formed from the ripped and knotted fabric of his shirt, had been cut away and thrown aside, the other end of it still tied off around one of the metal brackets which supported the bunk. The rest of his clothes were neatly folded and piled up on the thin pillow.

‘What happened?’ Zigic said. ‘Exactly.’

‘I tried to revive him,’ Rita said, getting her defence in quickly.

‘Before or after you called Dr Hopkins?’

‘I was attending to another guest,’ he said. ‘Your man was dead by the time I got here. I performed CPR but there was very little point. Choking takes a high degree of willpower. It isn’t like hanging, you can stop at any point, but he didn’t. It would have been drawn out and very painful. He was clearly determined to end it.’

Zigic looked at the scrap of striped fabric secured around the metal bracket, no more than two foot above the floor. Lukas must have knelt down and leaned forward until the makeshift noose began to bite, felt his lungs burn and scream, heard the blood rushing in his head as his vision shimmered and broke apart. Maybe he pulled back once or twice, a change of mind, a surge of self-preservation, but he kept going, pushed through the fear and the pain until he passed out, then his bodyweight would have done the rest, holding him in that position until he finally died.

Zigic turned on Rita, trying to make herself as small as possible in the corner of the corridor. ‘Who cut him down?’

‘Lee. He found him on routine inspection.’ She wouldn’t look at Lukas’s body, kept her eyes fixed firmly on Zigic. ‘We did a full assessment, he didn’t present any of the characteristics for a suicide risk.’

‘And yet there he is,’ Zigic said.

‘There was no way to predict he’d kill himself.’

Zigic thought of his behaviour during the interviews, that absolute refusal to interact, the upright and defiant stoicism. He’d interpreted it as strength but now he wondered if he’d been wrong. Was the man scared? Did he sit in this cell imagining what the next thirty years of his life would be like, locked up in a prison with men as tough as him, ones who would be queuing up to stick a knife in the ribs of a racist serial murderer? Motivated by their own ideas of vengeance or the desire for the kind of kudos which came with killing a high-profile hard man.

Ferreira was laying into Rita, asking her precisely when the previous inspection had been made, questioning the length of the interval against the time it would have taken for Lukas to choke himself to death. The woman struggled to give her a satisfactory answer, first mumbling then becoming increasingly hostile.

Sunday afternoon was a soft shift in the custody suite; they used it like paid downtime and he wouldn’t be surprised if the usual protocols had slackened for a few hours.

‘What do you care?’ Rita snapped defensively. ‘Everyone knows you couldn’t get him to talk.’

Zigic turned from the cell. ‘We care because the men he murdered, and their families, have a right to see him punished. And thanks to your negligence they will never get that.’

‘We did everything we had to.’

‘You better hope the IPCC agrees with that assessment.’

37

IT WAS GONE
seven by the time Zigic got home, the sun dipping low, throwing long shadows across the front garden, where Anna was fiddling with the honeysuckle around the door, tucking the slim, whipping strands back into the wire supports so it wouldn’t attack them every time they went in or out. She’d been out there a while, he noticed, gathered a binful of weeds stripped from the flower beds under the windows, leaving the earth bare between the evergreens.

‘You look shattered,’ she said.

He bent to kiss her, smelling the sap on her skin.

‘It’s not been a good day.’

‘I can see that.’ She took hold of his shoulders and scrutinised his face. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I need a shower first.’

He went inside, threw his parka over the newel post and kicked his shoes off under the console table. As he trudged upstairs he regretted saying anything. He didn’t want to tell her about Lukas’s suicide. That was work and this was home and he knew that it was best for everyone’s sanity if the two things were kept separate.

Through the bedroom window he saw Milan and Stefan playing in the back garden, running around the chestnut tree with their lightsabres glowing in the shade from the sagging branches. Stefan’s was dragging along the ground through the grass as he shouted out commands. Milan’s heart wasn’t in it and Zigic wondered how much longer he would go on playing these games with his little brother, occupying a fantasy world which wasn’t as real for him as it was to Stefan.

He went into the en suite and turned on the shower, stripped off his work clothes and stepped into the cubicle. He closed his eyes and turned his face into the water, trying to think of nothing, wanting just a few minutes’ respite from the continuing cases and the looming prospect of an investigation into Lukas’s suicide. It wasn’t his fault but Lukas was his suspect and he knew he would be touched by the process, tainted by association even if he faced no official censure.

It was just another problem to add to all the others and he could have done without it.

He thought of Asif Khalid’s young widow, the grief she was going through, and hoped her friends and family were looking after her. How was she going to feel when she discovered that the man who’d murdered her husband had evaded justice by killing himself? If she was devout she might regard it as Allah’s will and be satisfied that Lukas’s greatest punishment had come to him early, but still, some part of her would have wanted to see him rot in jail, Zigic imagined.

There would be no respite from these thoughts tonight.

He switched off the water and dried himself, pulled on his oldest jeans and a jumper and went downstairs into the kitchen. There was chicken marinating in a bowl in the fridge, salad in another. He ate a couple of fat green olives stuffed with lemon zest, picked out some feta, then poured a glass of Żubrówka from the bottle in the freezer.

The Sunday papers were piled up on the kitchen table, read and refolded, the glossy sections on top. He sifted through them as he sipped his vodka, found a magazine with Richard Shotton’s tanned and serious face staring out from the front cover, the English Patriot Party’s red-and-white rosette pinned to the lapel of his cashmere overcoat.

Inside, the piece ran across six pages, light on political interrogation and so heavy on flattery that it might have been written by Shotton’s PR people, focused on his military career and his charity work. There was much mention of his wife of eighteen years, a corporate lawyer and art collector, Brazilian by birth and always impeccably turned out. The implication being that of course he couldn’t be a racist and he must have leadership potential or why else would this alpha female be with him?

Zigic closed the magazine in disgust then shoved it in the bin.

There would be more in the rest of the papers, editorials about the social implications and underlying causes of the ENL riot, skewed to suit the perspective of intended readers, and columns on the murders which would focus on the most gruesome aspects. Everyone interested now. It seemed impossible that a few days ago he was pushing Riggott for more press coverage, hoping to stir some reticent member of the public into coming forward with information.

When news of Lukas’s suicide was formally announced tomorrow it would only get worse, accusations of negligence and incompetence thrown into the mix, his name attached to it because who cared who the custody sergeant was? She hadn’t given a press conference. They didn’t know her.

He put a cast-iron pan on the heat, slammed it down harder than he meant to, and started to fry the chicken, the smell of tomato and oregano filling the kitchen as it sizzled.

Anna came in through the back door, pulling off her spotty gardening gloves.

‘I was just about to do that.’

He offered her the tongs. ‘Do you want to take over?’

‘No, you look like you’ve got it under control.’ She took his glass out of his hand and gave it back refilled. ‘How many more are you going to need before you can tell me what happened?’

‘There’s no point talking about it,’ he said, concentrating on turning the meat. ‘It’s getting frustrating, that’s all. We seem to be making progress then something swims up from nowhere and sets us right back where we started.’

‘Is this the hit-and-run?’

‘No, the other thing.’

‘But you charged the man responsible?’ she said. ‘It is him, isn’t it?’

Zigic took a long mouthful of vodka and looked down into the pale green liquid when he spoke, telling her about the second attacker and this afternoon’s suicide, how it complicated the matter and how much new pressure it would bring down on them.