Long Way Home (11 page)

She did.

‘There’s nothing going on, you know.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Me and Bobby.’

‘I never thought there was. But if there ever is –’

‘I’m not his type,’ she said, her eyebrow flicking up.

Zigic smiled, ‘Come on, Bobby’s not gay.’

‘No, he’s not. But he only likes white girls.’

Her words hung in the air for a few seconds and Zigic tried to decide if it was regret in her voice or a more general disapproval of Wahlia’s sexual prejudices. To be so close to someone and find out your skin colour was unattractive to them; he was surprised they were still friends, especially with Ferreira’s hair trigger for racial slights.

‘I thought they’d be more helpful around here,’ he said, as she nosed out into the pre-rush-hour traffic on Lincoln Road. ‘He’s one of them. They should want to help.’

‘He isn’t one of them though, is he?’ Ferreira braked sharply as the car in front stopped to let a rangy black woman cross. She moved slowly, weighed down with shopping bags, a girl of three or four hanging onto the hem of her coat. ‘Blokes like Stepulov are an embarrassment. They all go to work, pay their taxes, knuckle down. And he’s out there on the rob, begging. As far as they’re concerned he’s giving them all a bad name.’

Ferreira headed north on Lincoln Road, the traffic at a slow, shunting pace now as buses pulled in and out of the stops and agency vans parked up wherever to make their collections. They passed a Polish grocer’s with a few men sitting outside at the tables, beers in front of them, winding down off shift. The door was thrown open but one roller shutter was still locked in place, a red ENL tag, two foot wide, filling it.

Was that another new one? Or had he just missed it before?

They’d marched through Peterborough in January, three hundred of them with banners and placards, hollering the length of London Road, chanting and singing, just a lot of angry noise which didn’t even faze the police horses. Then they reached the embankment and ran into the counter-demonstration, a loose conglomeration of anti-fascists, local Muslims and a few shoppers who’d wandered over from the city centre to see what would happen.

Fifty arrests, a few small fines and some community service, followed by a six-figure bill which the council could ill afford. The press reported ‘clashes’, the police that ‘no significant incidents occurred’ and the ENL boards were aflutter for weeks about the great victory they had scored.

Ferreira punched the horn as a motorbike shot across the street in front of her.

‘Ruining my fucking paint job because he’s suicidal.’

She went over the lights on amber and passed her parents’ pub, a big white stucco building with a throng of smokers near the door and an ‘All Day Breakfast’ sign screwed to the front wall. Maybe she was going to double back.

Her mother cooked an amazing ham and red-pepper frittata, spiced with smoked paprika, and they had the best coffee Zigic had tasted. He’d begged her for the method but even after she told him he couldn’t replicate the effect. He suspected she’d lied just to shut him up.

Ferreira pulled onto the kerb without indicating, stopping outside a Polish greasy spoon with one of its front windows boarded over.

‘What’s this?’ Zigic asked, but she was already gone.

An electric bell chimed as they went in and the sound barely registered above the babble of voices and the radio playing Lite FM at a deafening pitch. The tables near the broken window were cordoned off, plastic chairs stacked on top of them, and there was hardly a free seat anywhere. A piece of broken glass crunched to powder under his heel as he followed Ferreira to the long silver counter at the back of the cafe.

She ordered a bacon butty and a coffee and Zigic eyed the full English for a moment before choosing the same.

‘Ooh, table.’ Ferreira darted off as a couple of men in GPO uniforms left and Zigic paid the woman behind the counter.

‘What happened to your window?’

‘It was smashed last night.’ She handed over his change. ‘Some drunk.’

‘Did you see them?’

‘We see nothing, only hear glass.’

‘Have you reported it?’

The woman smiled. ‘We have number for insurance. What else is there to do now but clean up mess?’

She loaded their order onto a tray and Zigic carried it over to the spot in the window Ferreira had snagged.

‘I thought we were going to your place,’ he said. ‘I could have killed for one of your mum’s frittatas this morning.’

‘And I’d have been expected to go in the kitchen and cook it for you.’

He smiled.

‘It isn’t funny. They roped me in to doing a shift last night.’

‘I thought you and Bobby went out last night.’

‘We did. This was when I got back.’ She opened up her butty and smothered the bacon in brown sauce. ‘I was stuck in that kitchen for two hours cleaning fucking plates.’

‘Tell them you’ve been at work all day and you’re knackered.’

‘You don’t understand. If I’m there I have to help out.’

‘So get your own place.’

‘I can’t afford it.’

Zigic sipped his coffee; it was somehow bitter and weak at the same time.

‘Mel, I know what you earn.’

She glanced away as men’s voices rose sharply at a nearby table. There were empty beer bottles in front of them, a couple of tumblers holding short measures of brandy. They had the local paper open to the jobs page.

‘I haven’t even paid off my student loans yet,’ she said. ‘And I owe Dad, like, God, eight grand or something. It’s probably more.’

He almost asked what she was wasting her money on, but then he remembered the shopping trip to New York before Christmas and the three weeks she spent in Cuba over the summer. Then there was the car, a Golf GTi loaded with extras, and the clothes she obviously didn’t scrimp on. He’d flicked through enough of Anna’s magazines to realise those little leather jackets and fat handbags didn’t come cheap. At work she was always the first one to go out for lunch, or get a pizza delivered if they were staying late, and unless the money was pressed on her she’d just pay for it herself.

It was a consequence of living at home, he guessed, that complete disregard for money. She would only learn the value of it when she started paying her own bills.

By the time he made sergeant he was married to Anna, saddled with a full complement of pension plans and life insurances to go with the mortgage on the two-bed stone cottage in Wansford she thought was so cute and such a bargain, exactly the kind of place where she might be able to get pregnant. A year after they moved in Milan was born and she decided the cottage wasn’t cute any more, it was draughty and damp and those stairs were so narrow somebody was going to fall and break their neck on them.

She had to wait for the next move though, and Zigic felt the full force of her annoyance on a daily basis until it came. It was the best motivation to get promoted he could have asked for.

‘There’s a bad vibe around this,’ Ferreira said.

‘We’re making progress.’

‘Say this tattooed guy is who we want –’ she sucked brown sauce off her thumb. ‘He could be long gone by now.’

‘Someone knows who he is.’

‘Well, they’re not saying.’

Zigic took a mouthful of his bacon butty. The meat was smoky and salty, cooked to a perfect crisp. He thought of Stepulov’s body in the shed and forced himself to swallow. He put the rest of the butty down on the plate and swilled his mouth with the bad coffee.

‘Maybe we should fit the Barlows up,’ Ferreira suggested with a mischievous grin.

‘So you think they’re innocent now?’

‘You let them go, who am I to argue?’ She pointed at his plate. ‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’

‘No, take it.’ He pushed it across the table. ‘I don’t think the Barlows did it. Logically, you look at that situation and they should be guilty as hell. But I just don’t think either of them are capable.’

Ferreira squeezed more sauce into the half-eaten butty. ‘You bought that about them preparing to demolish the shed?’

‘Phil told us the same thing when we interviewed him.’

‘They had plenty of time to work out their story.’ She took a bite and held her hand over her mouth when she spoke again. ‘And if they were really going to do that why didn’t he tell us when we interviewed him the first time?’

‘That’s partly why I think they’re innocent. It’s such a good excuse he should have shoved it at us right from the off. That’s what you do when you’re nervous and guilty, you get your best lie and run with it.’

‘It’s not much when you weigh it against the whole means, motive, opportunity thing,’ Ferreira said.

‘It’s immaterial. We haven’t got enough for the CPS unless one of them cracks and if they didn’t do it yesterday when they were under pressure they sure as hell won’t do it now.’

‘The post-mortem might throw up some leverage.’

‘Jenkins is pretty sure the fire was set through the window. Whoever did that wanted to make damn sure they didn’t leave any physical evidence behind.’

Ferreira wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and shoved her plate aside.

‘Tombak’s capable,’ she said. ‘Stepulov rocks up at the house looking for his brother . . . we’ve got to assume Tombak knows where he is, don’t we?’

‘It’s more likely they were arguing about that than a few quid for a broken kettle,’ Zigic said.

‘Maybe the agency knows where the brother moved on to. Perez said they did a couple of shifts at one of the big fruit farms out near Spalding.’

‘Did he say which one?’

‘No, but Pickman Nye run most of the labour over that way,’ Ferreira said. ‘You want another coffee?’

‘No, come on. The stuff in the office is better.’

In the car he began to think back through the previous year’s caseload. They had the lowest conviction rate in the station but it wasn’t for lack of suspects or evidence. When you were dealing with a transient population timing was everything; a witness not followed up quickly enough or a forensic report delayed and your window snapped shut. The person you wanted, whose guilt you could prove incontrovertibly, would be gone.

Twenty-four hours since Stepulov’s death . . . his killer could be anywhere on mainland Europe by now and they didn’t even have a name for Interpol.

PICKMAN NYE’S OFFICES
were located in a three-storey Georgian town house within sight of Peterborough Cathedral’s western front and if it wasn’t for the steady stream of foreign workers coming through the place it would have looked more like a chamber of law than an employment agency. Austere black gloss doors stood at the top of four weathered steps and the windows were tall and slim with shutters folded back inside. The name plate was small, brass, gave away nothing.

They were the largest agency in the county though, and Zigic supposed they didn’t need to advertise any more, not when they were running nine thousand workers on a margin of a pound an hour.

Fifteen years ago they were a two-man outfit operating out of a rancid office above a tanning salon down Cowgate. The street door was kicked in twice a week and more than one employee had found themselves in A&E when the money in the envelope didn’t match the work done in the fields. Back then they were PN Employment Solutions, supplying contract cleaners and farmhands at rates which dipped well below minimum wage once their ‘overheads’ had been taken into account.

A tax investigation and a tactical bankruptcy later they re-established themselves on Priestgate, moving one street over and a few rungs up the ladder. They expanded into medical personnel, added a lucrative fifty-thousand-pound-plus head-hunting service, and slowly the reputation for worker exploitation and casual brutality went away.

The gangmasters were now recruitment consultants, the business became discreet, the charity work ostentatious, Mr Pickman earned himself an MBE and retired to Malta. Mrs Nye took them into the cathedral precincts.

Zigic went up the concave stone steps and through the door which was standing open, into a tiled lobby and through a second, toughened-glass door, into the reception area like a doctor’s waiting room, uncomfortable chairs tightly packed, a table with old magazines and leaflets in different languages. There were half a dozen people waiting to be seen, mostly in a tolerant silence, but two of the men were talking across the narrow aisle, speaking Polish, discussing a friend’s cousin who was working as a prostitute from a bedsit in Woodston; her brother would kill her when he found out.

The receptionist – Euan – glanced up from his computer as Zigic approached the curved blond-wood counter. The woman at the other end kept working, her fingers flying across the keyboard, eyes on a sheet of paper filled with indecipherable handwriting.

‘Inspector Zigic, good morning.’ Euan flashed a bleached smile. ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

‘Is Mr Harrington available?’

‘I’m sure he is.’

Zigic followed Euan through another toughened-glass door into a second waiting room identical to the first, everything bland and functional, conveyor-belt abstracts on the cream walls, the carpet brown marl, stained here and there and with a defined pathway which they followed to Patrick Harrington’s office.

Euan knocked, poked his head around the door. ‘Detective Inspector Zigic for you.’

‘Well, let him in then.’

Harrington’s office was large and dark, despite the optic-white walls and the chrome lights hanging from the distant ceiling, decorated as if he wanted to be in a Docklands warehouse conversion rather than a nineteenth-century town house, with Eames chairs he probably couldn’t fit in and copper venetian blinds at the deep windows, which overlooked a brick wall where an extractor fan pumped out the salty, spicy smell of the takeaway noodle place behind the office.

‘Ignore the mess,’ Harrington said, hefting his bulk up to shake Zigic’s hand across the broad glass desk, cluttered with paperwork. ‘You’d think this’d all be on computer by now, wouldn’t you? What can I do for you?’

‘We need some information on a couple of your employees. Addresses, work records, everything you’ve got.’