Tell No Tales (8 page)

‘I need to see the corpse,’ Ferreira said.

He pushed away from his desk and she followed him across the white-tiled floor to the bank of stainless-steel refrigerators droning lazily into the hush, noticing a moth hole on the back of his chunky cream cardigan.

The drawer stuck as he tried to open it and he smiled.

‘This one’s tricky.’

He hauled on it two-handed and there was a sound like shearing metal then a bump and it slid out the rest of the way.

The right side of the dead man’s face was badly grazed, spots of grit from the pavement embedded in his pale, pockmarked skin, and dried blood at the corner of his mouth which nobody had thought to clean away. Her eyes strayed to his chest, a thatch of thick black hair fanned out across his shoulders and his narrow ribcage, which had been cracked for the surgery that failed to save his life and pushed back together once the surgeons finally stepped away. It was difficult to tell now what was injury and what was intervention but looking at the churned mess above his heart Ferreira was surprised he lived long enough for the ambulance to arrive.

She took a couple of photographs of his face with her mobile phone and thanked the man as she left, hearing the terrible shearing sound once again as he fought the drawer home.

11

ZIGIC STOOD AT
the office window, looking down at the car park while he waited for a fresh pot of coffee to brew. Three floors below he saw a maintenance man sweeping the ugly brown steps outside the main doors, dispatched by the press officer to make sure everything looked good for the cameras which would be arriving within the next hour.

The coffee machine spluttered out the last few drops and he poured himself a cup, trying not to think about how many he’d had already today, enough to give him mild palpitations, but there was nothing else to do now but wait and hope that Anthony Gilbert woke up soon in a confessional state of mind.

Hate Crimes was enveloped in the usual mid-afternoon lull which, on casual inspection, could pass for an industrious hush. Grieves was going through Anthony Gilbert’s bank records, trying to track down cash withdrawals to tally with the four hundred pounds he’d paid Hossa Motors for the Volvo. Nothing so far but it was such a small amount of money that with careful planning he might have scraped it together with odd tenners and twenties, covering his tracks in that regard just as assiduously as he had elsewhere.

Parr was scanning the information line messages sent through from control, a mix of badly directed sympathy, armchair hypotheses and racist glee. He looked shattered, slumped in his seat, eyes drifting, but Zigic guessed some of that was due to the new baby at home.

He didn’t know if he could face that again. Sleep broken every two hours for feeds, regardless of which of them actually got out of bed to do it, being woken by crying in between, or, even worse, the sudden awareness that there was no crying then the clutching panic that something must be wrong.

Anna had made her decision though. Later this year when Stefan started school. That would be the best time to get pregnant.

Across the office Wahlia blew out a fast hard breath and rocked back in his chair. Anthony Gilbert’s laptop was open on his desk, delivered fully cracked by a techie about twenty minutes ago.

‘Think we got a problem here.’

‘What’ve you found?’ Zigic asked, feeling an unpleasant pricking sensation.

Wahlia stood up to let him get a better look at Gilbert’s Facebook page. He was in the private message section, the sidebar clouded out, the inbox on the other side showing a selection of faces, a conversation with Jelena open, dated two days ago, and it didn’t read like a stalker and his victim.

Jelena signed off her last one with two kisses and an ‘I love you’.

‘Are we sure this is definitely her account?’

Wahlia reached for a packet of gum. ‘The messages go back for about six months. I’ve checked out her page and that was registered in ’09, she didn’t use it much but it looks legit. Lot of photos of her and Sofia. There’s a bloke who might be Sofia’s boyfriend, Tomas.’

‘Blond guy? Kind of Hitler Youth looking?’

‘That’s the one.’ Wahlia folded a stick of gum into his mouth, pointed at the screen. ‘Gilbert was sending her links to hotels, picking out clothes for her.’

‘Typical control freak.’

‘Suppose some women think that’s gentlemanly,’ Wahlia said. ‘She seemed flattered by it.’

Zigic scrolled back up through the messages, seeing discussions about recent dates, Jelena gushing, saying what a great time she’d had, how lucky she was to go to such nice places. Gilbert’s dialogue was all about her, seemed disconnected from what she was saying.

‘
I love walking into places with you
,’ Zigic read. ‘What does that mean?’

‘That he gets off on other guys being jealous? She was totally out of his league, wasn’t she?’

‘She was a few years younger.’

Wahlia pulled another chair over. ‘She’s like an eight – if you’re going to be a wanker about women – and he’s, shit, a five on his best day. A two if you factor in his personality.’

‘Jelena was poor though. He probably looked like an escape route.’

Wahlia nodded, took off his heavy-framed black glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt. Said, ‘Maybe that’s why Sofia didn’t like him. He was taking her little sister away.’

Zigic went further back into the messages, past long strings of elaborate, late-night sex talk which made him blush, not the content so much as the knowledge that neither of them ever meant for it to be seen. Murders exposed every hidden corner of people’s lives though, and as he kept going he became more convinced that this relationship was not what Sofia had led them to believe.

Her name cropped up occasionally, always as an excuse to break a date, and at the beginning Gilbert tried to encourage Jelena to ignore her sister’s opinion of him.

When he returned to the most recent messages he saw how little progress Gilbert had made; all of that wheedling, the chipping away at Jelena’s resolve, but still Sofia had to be assuaged.

Sofia would not like this. It is best Sofia does not know. She will calm down. Be patient, darling. I will explain to her.

‘How does this line up against what we’ve got from her mobile?’ Zigic asked.

‘Still waiting on it.’

‘Call them and tell them to drop whatever else they’re doing,’ Zigic said. ‘Christ, how hard can it be to shove the SIM card into a new phone?’

‘I’ll chase them up.’

Zigic thought of Sofia Krasic at the hospital this morning, demanding to speak to a policeman through the fog of pain and medication. Every word she had uttered looked like a torture but she had been determined to tell him Anthony Gilbert was responsible.

How certain could she be though?

So far they had nothing concrete to tie him to the vehicle only a match to his blood type, one too common to mean much. His neighbours hadn’t noticed him leave the house or return, and it was a small close, the houses built tight together, the kind of place where you got to know the familiar rumble of a specific engine or the way the people opposite’s door rattled.

All they had to go on was Sofia’s word and Gilbert’s overdose and very soon Zigic was going to stand in front of the assembled press and declare the case as good as solved, based on those things alone.

Ferreira came into the office carrying a white plastic sack, dumped it on her desk and shrugged out of her jacket.

‘You two look serious.’

‘Sofia Krasic was spinning us a line about Gilbert,’ Wahlia said. ‘Jelena was still seeing him.’

‘Why would she lie about it?’ Ferreira asked, taking a sleek, silver laptop out of her bag. ‘Hossa Motors CCTV footage.’

She called Grieves over and told her to take it up to the technical department and get them to run a copy off onto a hard disk straight away.

‘Tell them they do not want me up there.’

Grieves hurried out, clutching the laptop to her chest.

Ferreira sat down, gave them both an expectant look.

‘So, what do we think?’

‘That Sofia’s going to have some explaining to do,’ Zigic said.

‘He tried to kill himself. He’s guilty.’ Ferreira took a small tin out of her handbag and started to shred tobacco into a liquorice paper. ‘Course, the television was on when we got there, he might have seen the footage on the news and been overwhelmed with grief.’

‘That still doesn’t explain why she’d lie about him stalking Jelena.’

‘How would she know he’s got form?’ Wahlia asked.

‘She couldn’t have known that,’ Zigic said. ‘Unless he was stupid enough to mention it. Which is unlikely.’

Ferreira stuck her unlit cigarette in her mouth and went over to the murder board, picked up a black marker pen from the shelf underneath.

‘While we’re sharing shitty news.’ She rubbed out ‘unknown one’ which was written in red and added it to the deceased list. ‘He didn’t have any ID on him. I’ve got his stuff but it looks like someone pinched his wallet from the scene or he forgot it when he left the house.’

‘Did you get a photo?’ Zigic asked, going round to her side of the desk.

‘On my phone.’

‘Sofia might know who he is.’

‘Yeah, and she’ll probably lie about that too,’ Ferreira said. She went and opened one of the long bank of windows on the opposite side of the office, perched on the narrow sill and lit her cigarette. ‘Aren’t you supposed to have a suit on?’

Zigic shot her a mock-stern look and she grinned.

‘Black, do you think?’ he asked, emptying the property bag onto her desk. ‘Or charcoal grey? Since you’re our resident fashionista.’

‘Navy blue,’ she said. ‘It’s professional but it doesn’t look like you’re trying too hard. White shirt, black tie.’

He picked up the key. ‘Half Windsor knot?’

‘What else?’

Zigic dropped the key again. It wasn’t going to tell him anything. He thumbed the power button on the man’s mobile but the screen stayed black. Another job for the techies.

He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better shift.’

An Anglia News van was turning into the station car park as he pulled out. They were an hour early but they obviously expected a scramble and wanted to grab a prime spot. The press officer promised it would just be a brief statement but he knew already exactly how trapped he was going to feel, the lights in his eyes and the cameras on him, like some old-school interrogation technique they were no longer allowed to use.

Two people were dead. A brief statement wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the hacks.

He slipped off the dual carriageway and slowed sharply as he approached the edge of the village, catching up to the back of a horsebox which looked more secure than most armoured vans. It turned into the driveway of a sprawling 1970s mansion on Castor Heights, the kind of house which screamed slum landlord or drug dealer gone legit. Down the hill he passed rows of small stone cottages, cars parked out on the winding road as the last stragglers from the village primary’s after-school club bundled their kids home in a flutter of bags and coats and craft projects, which left the pavement scattered with glitter and pasta shapes.

A broad, blonde woman with twin girls waved at Zigic as he went by and he put his hand up, trying to remember her name. Anna had insisted they have the woman and husband over for dinner last year and the evening had been so excruciating that he had drunk too much wine and almost fallen asleep at the table, listening to the husband drone on about his work in the City, while the women talked over each other at double speed, discussing private schools they couldn’t afford, ski resorts they wouldn’t go to, and how difficult it was to find honest cleaners. Which they didn’t have. The one small comfort was that the man was too much of a narcissist to ask Zigic about his job.

He stopped at the village shop and bought an
Evening Telegraph
from the bundle just delivered by the till. The owner had her back to him, concentrating on filling the fridge, so he left the money on the counter and slipped out before she could cross-examine him.

The front page was taken up by a photograph of the scene, shot from such a distance that it was impossible to make out the details. The article was short on those too. Their deadline hit too early for them to use anything from the forthcoming press conference and all they had to go on was the statement released at lunchtime. It was neutral in tone and more tactful that he expected, no mention of a racial motive.

He reversed into the drive ready for a quick getaway and let himself into the kitchen through the back door. Milan was sitting at the long pine table bent over a colouring book, his pencils lined up neatly in front of him, bracketed by a rubber at one end and a sharpener at the other. He was concentrating on a picture of an oak tree, three different greens clutched in his right hand which he kept switching between as he did the leaves.

Zigic kissed the top of his head. ‘Let me look at your teeth.’

Milan turned his face up and bared them in a wide grin.

‘Was the dentist nice?’

‘She gave me a lolly.’

‘She didn’t give me a lolly when I went.’

Milan considered it for a moment. ‘Were you naughty?’

‘I hadn’t flossed,’ Zigic said, taking a bottle of water from the fridge. ‘Maybe that’s why.’

‘You can have mine.’ Milan slipped out of his chair. ‘I hid it so Stefan can’t find it.’

He ran out of the kitchen and Zigic followed, hearing the vacuum cleaner going upstairs in the boys’ room, the muffled thump of Stefan jumping up and down on his bed. Anna’s voice cut sharply across the drone and the jumping stopped, followed a few seconds later by the vacuum.

Zigic went into the master bedroom and looked at his suits hanging in clear plastic protectors, pushed away and forgotten at the far end of the wardrobe. They stuck to civilian clothes in Hate Crimes, a command decision he’d made early on, aware of the kind of people they would be dealing with and the negative connotations provoked by anything that smacked of uniformed authority. That was the official line anyway. The truth was he just hated wearing one.