Tell No Tales (35 page)

‘Miss Krasic is in a very delicate state, Inspector,’ he said, wiping his moustache dry between his thumb and fingertips. ‘I’d appreciate you bearing that in mind.’

‘This shouldn’t take too long,’ Zigic said, not breaking eye contact with her. ‘Not if Sofia cooperates.’

‘I have told you everything I know.’ Her accent was more pronounced, her voice softer. ‘I do not know where Tomas is.’

‘We’re not looking for Tomas any more,’ Zigic said, and a little of the tension dropped from her face. ‘We found him a couple of hours ago.’

Sofia gasped, her hand going to her side a moment later. ‘Where is he?’

‘Where you left him. In that derelict cottage near Maxey.’

Her head dropped. ‘Anthony told you?’

‘It doesn’t matter to him any more,’ Zigic said. ‘Jelena’s gone, there’s nobody left to protect.’

Except himself and Sofia, and Gilbert didn’t care about either of their fates now. It was the one moment of emotion in his account, the last thing he said – ‘I’ve got nothing left to live for.’

‘He told you I am innocent?’ she asked.

‘You’re not innocent, Sofia. Not by a long way.’

‘But you know I did not kill Tomas?’

‘You covered up his death.’

‘It was an accident. He fell and hit his head, there was nothing any of us could do to stop it. He was drunk.’

‘Gilbert has admitted pushing him,’ Zigic said. ‘Tomas was getting aggressive with Jelena. He’d been acting out of line with her for months, hadn’t he?’

Sofia nodded. ‘He was not the man I thought he was. I told him not to touch her but he would not listen to me. He said he was being friendly.’

‘And you let that go on for months?’ Zigic asked. ‘You hated her going out with Gilbert but you put up with Tomas harassing her?’

Sofia looked away from him, her cheeks burning. ‘He was only like that when he was drunk.’

Zigic watched her posture close up, the shame she felt growing in her chest, deepening the spots of colour on her face.

‘Why didn’t you call an ambulance?’

‘Jelena wanted to,’ she said. ‘But we explained to her that it was not a good idea. Nobody would believe it was an accident. We had been shouting, the neighbours, they would tell you this. Anthony said we would all go to prison.’

‘The doctors might have saved him.’

‘No. He was dead.’ Her voice was firm but Zigic wasn’t sure she meant the words. A single blow to the back of the head, a man with Tomas’s build, there was a good chance he hadn’t died straight away. Might even have still been alive when they left him in that tumbledown old cottage. ‘Anthony said he knew a place we could take the body.’

It was the same story Gilbert had told, going into the kitchen to find Tomas pinning Jelena to the counter, his hand inside her jumper while she tried to wriggle out of his grip, not the first time he’d made a grab for her and they were past the point of pretending it was a joke. Tomas laughed though and backed away with his hands up, unconcerned by Gilbert’s shouting, which brought Sofia into the kitchen and divided his attention long enough for Gilbert to shove him, throwing both hands at his chest. He was much the smaller man but Tomas was drunk and off balance and the next thing they knew he was slumped on the floor in a pool of blood, his skull fractured as he hit the sharp edge of the worktop.

They waited until dark and carried Tomas’s body out to his car, wrapped in the duvet from the bed he shared with Sofia, no thought for the DNA on it, how easily they would be traced if he was ever found.

‘Is this why you attacked Gilbert in hospital?’ Zigic asked. ‘You wanted to stop him leading us to Tomas and what you’d done?’

‘I did not attack him,’ Sofia said wearily, clinging to her innocence. ‘How many times must I say this? I only went to talk to him.’

‘To make sure he wouldn’t tell us about Tomas?’

‘To ask him if he killed Jelena.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

Her palm slapped the table. ‘Why would he tell you? He killed Tomas, not me. He should have said nothing.’

‘But he did. Because he wants us to catch whoever killed Jelena,’ Zigic said, matching her angry tone. ‘You let us waste our time pursuing Tomas when you knew he couldn’t have been responsible, all to save your skin. The man who did this might be out of the country now because you were too selfish and scared to tell the truth.’

Sofia bit her lip, tears forming.

‘Anthony loved her enough to come clean,’ Zigic said, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken, letting her think the implications through. This man who she hated, who she’d pushed away from her sister and, in all likelihood, planned to murder, loved Jelena more than she did.

She wept for a minute, wiping the tears away with the cuff of her sweatshirt before they could reach her jaw.

‘You’re lucky Anthony’s taken responsibility,’ Zigic said. ‘He could have put this on you if he wanted to. But you’re not in the clear. You’ll be charged as an accessory and for preventing the legal burial of Tomas’s body. You’ve also perverted the course of justice. These are serious charges. I think you know that.’

‘I was scared.’

‘I’ve no doubt you were, but that isn’t a defence.’ Zigic knitted his fingers together. ‘You need our help and we need yours. Now, the night before Tomas died a man was murdered a few streets away from your house. We discussed this earlier.’

She nodded hesitantly.

‘You told us you didn’t remember Tomas coming home that night. And you claimed you couldn’t remember where you and Jelena were.’ He paused, checking that she was following him. ‘But I think you were lying because you didn’t want us to pursue the matter.’

Ferreira’s mobile bleated into the silence and Sofia watched her stand and excuse herself from the interview room, the sound of her voice blocked off by the door closing.

‘Where were you that night?’ Zigic asked.

Sofia took a deep breath and winced at the pain it sent through her chest. ‘We were at home.’

‘What about Tomas?’

‘He said he was at work but he wasn’t I think. He had blood on his clothes when he came home. He said there was a fight at the club. Two men . . . it was not strange. It happened many times before.’ She frowned. ‘People are not happy until they have hurt someone.’

‘I thought Tomas worked at Boxwood.’

‘He was a doorman also. Only some nights. Fridays and Saturdays, when it is busy.’

‘But this was a Sunday.’

‘Yes. He did not work on Sundays. Never. That is why I think he was lying.’

‘What did he do with the clothes?’

‘He threw them away.’

‘The ones we found at the house?’

She shook her head. ‘I told you, there was an accident at the farm. These were other clothes. He put them in the rubbish bin. It was collected the next morning.’

They were long gone then. Into landfill or the incinerator, any useful traces beyond their reach.

‘How did he seem to you?’ Zigic asked. ‘Was he acting strangely?’

She considered it for a moment, lips pursed, eyes fixed on the table. ‘When he comes home from work he is tired. Angry. He does not like the job but the pay is very good. He was not like that that night.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Big,’ she said, drawing herself up in the seat, perhaps subconsciously mimicking him. ‘I do not know how to say it. Like he had won something.’

The interview-room door opened and Ferreira gestured for him to join her in the corridor, her expression halfway between shock and triumph.

‘Two twenty-six. Inspector Zigic leaving the interview room.’

He closed the door behind him.

‘We’ve got a match for the DNA on Ali Manouf’s body,’ she said. ‘It was Pyotr Dymek. I’d asked Jenkins to run him through the system before we’d ID’d him and it’s just come back. Dymek killed Manouf.’

Zigic sat down on the radiator, the metal cold, the ridges sharp, thinking of Dymek at the bus stop talking to Sofia, pushing her out of the way as the car came towards them. Saving her because he knew her? Dymek heading home to Łódź, his rucksack stuffed with cash. Running away from something? From the crime he’d committed and the DNA he’d left behind?

‘So, Tomas murders Didi? And Dymek murders Manouf –’

‘And our mute Lukas kills Asif Khalid,’ Ferreira said. ‘But we’re still a man short, aren’t we?’

The pieces were fitting together. This was a gang thing, a racial thing – not exactly how they’d expected it to turn out but the motivation was the same. Three perpetrators dead, a hit-and-run, a maybe-accident and a suicide. The universe meted out its own punishment sometimes, Zigic thought.

He stood up, the threads of this case within his grasp finally.

‘OK, these men are a unit, right? A cell. So we have to assume they got together somehow.’

‘They’re all Polish,’ Ferreira said. ‘It might have happened back home.’

‘I’ll deal with that side of things when I’m done with Sofia. You and Bobby gather everything we’ve got on Tomas and Dymek.’ He stopped with his hand on the door. ‘And call Parr and tell him we need a thorough search of the house now. If Tomas came home covered in blood he must have washed up afterwards. And we need his phone.’

‘On it.’

He shoved through the door, harder than he meant to, sending it slamming into the wall with a bang which made Mr Kelley jump in his seat. Sofia didn’t react. A childhood spent in a war zone would do that to you, he imagined, cauterise your nerves.

‘Two twenty-nine. Inspector Zigic returning to the interview room.’

He sat down, on the edge of his seat, wanting to get this finished quickly. After weeks of stalling and dead ends they had movement and he knew from bitter experience that momentum had to be harnessed immediately and not let slip.

‘Alright, Sofia, I need you to tell me about Pyotr Dymek. He was a friend of Tomas’s, right?’

‘Yes, from work. Why does this matter? Pyotr is dead.’

‘He knew him from working at the clubs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who their boss was?’ Zigic asked. ‘Was it an agency?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what agency though.’ She shifted in her seat, perplexed by the sudden shift in questioning. ‘Pyotr is dead. The nurse told me this.’

‘How well did you know him?’

She shrugged. ‘He came to see Tomas sometimes when we are out. If we are in a bar maybe he would have a drink with us.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us you knew him sooner?’

‘We were not friends. Tomas knew him.’

‘What was he doing at the collection that morning, Sofia? We know he was heading back to Łódź, there was no reason for him to be there.’

She closed her eyes for a couple of seconds, chin dropping. ‘He was looking for Tomas. He said he needed to speak to him. It was very important. He did not understand why Tomas was not answering his phone.’

‘Where
is
Tomas’s phone?’

‘I threw it in one of the bins at work,’ she said.

Another piece of evidence lost.

Zigic pushed the annoyance away, drew her back to the point. ‘What was so urgent he needed to talk to Tomas about?’

‘I did not ask. I wanted him to go away and stop asking me questions. But he kept talking. “Has Tomas gone home? When did you see him last? Is he sick?” He was desperate. Scared, I think.’

‘What was he scared of?’

‘I do not know.’

‘What did you tell him about Tomas?’

‘That he was visiting his mother. Pyotr did not believe me. He wanted me to give him her phone number.’ Her chin rippled and she wrapped her arms around her body again. ‘And then it happened.’

The white Volvo accelerated up Lincoln Road and Jelena turned away from the headlights speeding towards her. She looked at Sofia as the car mounted the pavement and drove straight at her, tossing her up in the air like she was weightless, landing on its roof as Dymek shoved Sofia away to safety. It was the last, maybe the only, good thing he had done in his life.

45

SHOTTON LOOKED AT
the schedule in front of him on the table, eight appointments, twenty minutes each, names of the people he was meeting and a brief precis of their grievances. It was the usual stuff, bin collections and traffic-calming measures, planning issues and operations at City Hospital which hadn’t gone as they expected. The grinding day-to-day business of the constituency.

Most MPs didn’t bother with their surgeries; the ones in the safest seats would strike out to the provinces once a month or so and make a token appearance, all the while checking their Twitter accounts and sorting out dinner reservations for when they could escape back to London.

He didn’t have the luxury of disinterest.

Which meant turning up at school halls and community centres, like this one in Woodston, three or four times a month, reminding his constituents who he was and that he would be there for them no matter how petty or unworkable or downright insane their complaints were. All the glossy flyers and endorsements in the world couldn’t convert floating voters as effectively as simple face-to-face interactions and the good word of mouth which came from them.

He was dreading today’s though.

Talal Raziq, one of their city councillors, was due to sit in with him as usual, but he hadn’t arrived. An uncharacteristic laxity which could only be down to the riot on Friday night and the murder of the young man on Cromwell Road. It was Talal’s neighbourhood, likely he knew the young man’s family, and he’d clearly realised showing up here would damage his standing within the community.

Shotton couldn’t blame him. It was just good politics to publicly distance yourself from toxic friends. Privately was another matter.

He took his mobile out and tried Talal again.

No answer.

The office door opened and his next appointment came in, a plain, heavy woman with twin boys in a pushchair she struggled to negotiate in the room’s narrow dimensions. Shotton got up to help her, moving one of the plastic chairs aside.

‘We really should move to a more child-friendly location,’ he said, giving her a warm smile which she ducked her eyes from. ‘How old are these fine young gents then?’

‘They’ll be three next month. Oscar and Madox.’