Tell No Tales (34 page)

The hulk of an ancient tractor was parked a few yards from the side of the house, its fabric roof shredded and flapping in the breeze, its body more rust than not, just a strip of flaking yellow paint here and there which had survived the elements.

He stopped the car and they got out.

The air was heavy with pollen, but there was rain on the way, blowing in from the North Sea, ozone-tinged.

‘How did Gilbert know about this place?’ Zigic asked.

‘He said he came here when he was a kid, there’s a trail through the woods. Him and his mates used to bike over from the village and get stoned in there.’

Which explained the green plastic cider bottles nestling in the grass, he thought. If Gilbert and his friends came here years ago then other kids would have found it too, more recently, and done the same thing. There wasn’t much else to occupy them in a place like this.

Nobody had been here for a while though. Or if they had they’d been scared off.

Moore and Hale climbed out of the patrol car, ready for action, hitching their belts and checking their radios. Ferreira shouted at them to get a torch.

Zigic picked his way through the tangled undergrowth in front of the house, seeing the remains of a garden in the chaos, a stone bird bath off its plinth, the brick outlines of what had once been flower beds. Behind him Ferreira swore as she stumbled and kicked out at a bottle, sending it flying into the track.

‘You’d better hope that isn’t evidence.’

He peered in through the doorway, not getting too close, aware of the wicked barbs on the rose bush. The cottage’s interior was dark, very little of the afternoon sunshine penetrating the small windows, and all he could see was a patch of earth floor.

‘There’s another way in, sir,’ Moore said.

It was at the side of the cottage and as he approached he saw that the grass was flattened in a wide path from the road, no sign of tyre tracks or clear footprints but that wasn’t what they were there for. The door was closed but not locked and it opened with a quick shove, cool, stale-smelling air rushing out in a cloud.

Zigic stepped over the threshold, the ground level falling away six inches in one step, told Ferreira to watch herself as she followed. A torch beam came with her, sweeping the interior, catching on broken bottles and discarded needles and the quick yellow flash of a rat’s eyes before it darted across the room and disappeared through a hole in the wall.

He could hear more of them though, scratching away in the shadows.

A feather brushed against his eyelashes and he wafted it away. There were too many of them, too white, to be from an odd stray bird which had flown in through one of the broken windows.

Then he saw it. In the furthest corner of the room, partially hidden by an old pine table turned on its side like a barricade, a scrap of floral fabric and a puff of white down from the duvet inside. A grubby trainer lay nearby, no foot in it. No sign of the foot which had been inside it either.

‘Give me the torch.’

Ferreira handed it over, followed him towards the table.

The body, or what remained of it, lay on its back. The duvet it had been wrapped in was shredded and pulled about by rats and foxes and feral cats, alerted by the scent of decay which would have wafted out of the broken windows and across the fields. Zigic knew they went for the softest tissue first, the eyes, the mouth, the sludge of liquefying innards, they nibbled on the extremities until the small, intricate bones of the hands and feet came apart, and those pieces would be spirited away to nests and coverts for the young.

All of that within the first couple of days.

Tomas Kaminski had been lying here for four weeks, kept cool by the earth floor, protected from the worst of the elements, but that hadn’t saved his body from being picked near clean.

His hair remained, straw-coloured under the torch beam, and stained with dried blood, but his face was just a skull, missing its jawbone and sitting at ninety degrees from its proper position.

Through his ripped T-shirt Zigic could see ribs, but not all of them, scraps of flesh and clods of meat which the rats were still coming back to. The same with his jeans, which had proved a tougher proposition, not so badly destroyed but the limbs inside them were insubstantial now, misshapen, and he tried not to think of how the rats would have slunk up the hems, burrowed in and fed.

Ferreira was staring, wide-eyed at the body, her balled fist pressed to her mouth, as if to block out a rank odour. The body was past that stage though.

‘Let’s see Sofia deny this,’ she said.

‘We’ve only got Gilbert’s word how it happened.’

‘He’s out of the frame anyway. Whoever was with Lukas when he murdered Asif Khalid, it sure as hell wasn’t Tomas.’

43

BACK AT THE
station Zigic went up to Riggott’s office, dreading the conversation they were going to have but there was no point delaying it. The case wouldn’t break in the next couple of hours and there was a press conference slated for five. Riggott would have sought him out anyway and Zigic preferred to do this away from the rest of the team.

He found Riggott standing at a whiteboard with an e-cigarette clamped between his teeth, scanning the jumble of information linked by straight lines which cut across each other. So many potential suspects that Zigic felt envious of the officer in charge, a new name, one he didn’t recognise. He’d heard they were bringing someone in to replace DI Hawkes, in remission now but with little prospect of ever being fit enough to return even if he wanted to.

The complexity of the case explained the lack of bodies in CID, only a handful of people at their desks, all in the kind of deep focus which practically hummed in the air with the sound of keyboards rattling and phones ringing on unmanned desks.

One murder and the whole of the department was mobilised. Meanwhile he had four officers to solve five murders. Six now.

‘What’s this one about?’ Zigic asked.

‘Drugs,’ Riggott said. ‘We’re having ourselves a right old turf war in Bretton.’

The whole department scrabbling to find who murdered a drug dealer. Zigic knew you weren’t supposed to judge the victim, should remain neutral, leave your morality at the front steps, but how was it right that this man warranted more effort than the victims staring out of the boards in Hate Crimes? Three men murdered for nothing but their skin colour, two people killed while they waited to be picked up for work, not so much as a littering fine between them.

And were the press breathing down DI Sawyer’s neck? Were they hell.

‘Hope you’ve got something good to tell me, Ziggy,’ Riggott said. ‘The ACC has been over to the mosque this morning, reassuring the community that we’re close to making another arrest.’

‘Do they know about the suicide yet?’

‘Official release is this afternoon.’ He started towards his office. ‘Where’re you lot on the second attacker?’

‘We were making progress.’

‘I don’t like “were”.’

‘Tomas Kaminski, he was friends with the man we arrested, had a history of violence against Muslims, links to a far-right group back in Poland.’

‘There’s that fecking past tense again.’ Riggott began hunting for a drink among the opened Sprite cans on his desk; couldn’t find a live one. ‘What’s the problem? Skipped off back to old country, has he?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘When?’

‘About four weeks ago. He could still be in the frame for the first murder but that would mean there’s more than two of them involved.’

‘Meaning you want to chuck Kaminski’s murder down here?’

‘No.’

Riggott’s eyebrows made a quick leap. ‘You reckon you know who did him then?’

‘I’m beginning to suspect his ex-girlfriend might be responsible. Although I’m not entirely sure why yet.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Sofia Krasic.’

‘Yon woman from the hit-and-run?’

‘Yes. We haven’t questioned her yet but we have strong reason to believe she was responsible. Some of the details are open to discussion but I think she might have information about the murders and I want to keep this in Hate Crimes so we can maintain close contact with her.’

‘Don’t want someone else blundering in, pissing off your witness?’

‘She’s a tough customer.’

‘You keep it then,’ Riggott said. ‘But if it’s her, get her charged. You need to start closing some of those cases, Ziggy. Press are turning.’

‘I don’t care what the press thinks.’

‘Course you don’t, but the ACC does and he’s holding our balls in his big sweaty palms, deciding whether to tickle them or crush them.’

‘If the custody suite ran like it’s supposed to the press would be covering Lukas’s bail hearing today. They’d have had their headlines. I can’t be held responsible for someone else’s screw-up.’ Zigic brought his voice back down. ‘We’re trying, believe me.’

Riggott showed him an understanding face, made a smoothing gesture with his hand. ‘What about the hit-and-run? Kate tells me the boyfriend’s off the hook.’

‘We’re nowhere,’ Zigic said, feeling himself slump in the chair, the weight of it all pressing him down. ‘Back to the beginning. We need an appeal for witnesses, anyone who saw the car in the days leading up to the attack.’

‘I’ll have a wee word to Nicola.’

Zigic rubbed his eyes. They felt swollen and gritty, particles of dust or pollen in there, grating every time he blinked. ‘It really looked like Gilbert.’

Riggott tucked his e-cigarette away in his shirt pocket. ‘Crack on with the Krasic girl, that’ll buy you some goodwill.’

Zigic went back up to Hate Crimes, his mind already moving ahead to the interview room, planning the best way to approach Sofia Krasic. She wouldn’t make it easy, he knew that much, but she was the only person who could shed any light on Tomas’s behaviour and the position she was in now he imagined even she would realise that full cooperation was the wisest course to take.

Wahlia had wheeled a fresh whiteboard over to the far side of the office and was marking it up. Tomas Kaminski’s photo was at the top, Sofia and Anthony Gilbert in the suspects column, the first photographs sent in from scenes of crime up there, more for focus than information. Interior and exterior shots, the remains of Tomas’s body.

A second team were at Sofia and Jelena’s house on Green Street, looking for evidence of the fight Gilbert had described, one which had painted the kitchen with blood. No matter how well Sofia cleaned up there would be traces still, waiting to have an ultraviolet light shone on them.

Parr was supervising, organising door-to-door. Not the best time of day to catch the neighbours at home but they could always hope, and at this point Zigic didn’t want any more mistakes being made. Everything that could be done would be done, no matter how pointless it seemed.

Grieves he’d sent to Boxwood Farm, told her to talk to the management, the line hands, anyone who was on the same shifts as Jelena and Sofia, look for quarrels, jealousy, threats uttered with enough power to suggest an eventual follow-up.

They should have done that days ago, not got wedded to the idea of Anthony Gilbert’s guilt, not been so willing to push the case aside for one he considered more pressing. Now he was divided between hoping Grieves found something which led to their driver and closed the case and hoping she found nothing so he wouldn’t be proved wrong.

He sat down at Ferreira’s desk, her computer screen showing the first page of results for the White Brethren search she’d run earlier in the afternoon, everything in Polish, and when he ran the first one through Google Translate it made little more sense.

He went back to the original version, found the language was straightforward enough for him to follow, a reportage piece from a newspaper based in Krakow, some fearless journalist interviewing a multiple murderer in the safety of a prison visiting room, making it sound like he’d stepped into the cage of a hungry lion. The piece was long on description, short on fact, and Zigic got the impression the journalist wasn’t entirely unbiased, detected a strain of admiration for this twenty-two-year-old thug who’d murdered four migrant workers in the city, all North African, hacking each of them to death with a machete before the police caught up with him.

Several of the other results covered the same crime, a dozen more were about a Polish death metal band who’d named their debut album
White Brethren
, coincidentally or out of solidarity, he wasn’t sure. The fascist group didn’t have their own site and that surprised him. The Internet seemed to be one of the few elements of progress the far right actively embraced.

‘Have we got anything on Tomas’s cause of death yet?’ Zigic asked.

Wahlia turned away from the board, tapped the back of his head with the marker pen. ‘Early thinking is blunt force trauma. Pretty major, stove his skull right in.’

‘Sofia’s a lot smaller than he was.’

‘Maybe she got him while he was sitting down.’

Zigic could imagine that, her coming at him from behind, while he wasn’t expecting it. A man his size, with his propensity for violence, you would have to hit him once, hard, not give him a chance to get up and retaliate.

Ferreira came into the office, handed him a folder.

‘Gilbert’s statement.’

It was short and matter-of-fact and Zigic read it through twice, setting the sequence of events in his mind, the parts played by Gilbert and Sofia not quite as he would have expected. Her behaviour over the last few days made sense now, but he wanted to hear it from her own lips, to test her version for the ring of truth.

44

SOFIA FIXED ZIGIC
with a hard, accusatory stare as he entered the interview room, didn’t shift her gaze as he took his seat and waited for Ferreira to perform the formalities.

She looked exhausted for all her rage, dark eyes heavy-lidded and bruised by sleeplessness. Sitting slumped with her arms wrapped around her body, taking shallow breaths through her mouth as if her ribs were troubling her.

Next to her the duty solicitor, Mr Kelley, sipped his tea, wetting his stiff grey moustache, which was a shade darker than the sparse, too long hair he wore swept straight back from his forehead. His expression was blank in a practised fashion, saying he’d seen everything, heard everything, a thousand times before, and nothing that happened in here would surprise him.