Long Way Home (33 page)

‘But you kept in touch?’

‘Case you forgot, I’ve been away.’

‘And you’ll be going back soon,’ Ferreira said. ‘You must really have missed it. Out a couple of months and you set another fire. You having trouble adjusting, that it?’

Renfrew’s mouth twisted into a smile but the look in his eyes suggested she’d hit a raw nerve. He scratched his tattooed neck, reddening the skin around his prison-issue Britannia.

‘You celled with Lee Poulter, didn’t you?’ Ferreira said. ‘Must have made you pretty important inside, being so tight with an ENL big dick.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Depends,’ she said. ‘You’ve got fuck-all going for you out here, no job, no money, living with your brother and his family. Tough to go straight under those circumstances. But I imagine they’ll welcome you with open arms when you get back to Littlehey. All your little fascist buddies.’

Renfrew turned his attention to Zigic. ‘Usually the woman’s the good cop. It works better that way because no matter how loud they fucking squawk they can’t sell the bad-cop routine. Don’t have the balls for it.’

‘We thought you’d respond better to a sympathetic man,’ Ferreira said. ‘Given your . . . let’s say, history.’

Renfrew laughed at her. ‘Must try harder. Put that on her next performance report, Inspector.’

‘You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of this situation,’ Zigic said.

‘I understand better than you do.’

‘Explain it to us then.’

He hunched forward in his seat, elbows on the table. The strip light, directly overhead, washed across his worn and stubbled face, hollowing out his cheeks and making shadows pool under his eyes.

‘You’ve caught me coming out your prime suspect’s house, so now you want to know if he paid me to set fire to his shed or if I just told him the best way to do it.’

‘No,’ Zigic said. ‘We already know he paid you to do it. We’re just wondering if you’ve got the common sense to admit it and take the goodwill we can give you.’

‘That’s what he usually does,’ Ferreira said. ‘You cut a good deal when you murdered that guy in the takeaway place.’

Renfrew stiffened. ‘I didn’t know he was in there. I said it a thousand times, I didn’t fucking know.’

‘Do you think the owner did?’ she asked. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Neves,’ Renfrew said, spitting it out.

‘Do you think Mr Neves knew?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think it’s likely he did,’ Ferreira said. ‘He let you go in there and fire that place knowing some poor kid was inside – because he was pretty much a kid.’

Renfrew couldn’t look at her.

‘He let you burn that place down and he didn’t give a shit who was inside or what happened to you when it all came out.’ She threw her hand up, muttered something in Portuguese that sounded like a curse. ‘What’s it matter to him? He gets on the first plane back to São Paolo and leaves you to take the fall.’

Renfrew stared into his tea.

‘By rights he should have done ten years for that. Instead his daughter comes over and sells the property for a quarter of a mil and he’s living it up back home in the sun.’ She slapped the table. ‘What did he pay you again?’

Renfrew stood sharply, kicked his chair away. ‘You seem to know the rest of the fucking story.’

He paced into the corner of the room, his back turned to them, tight bunched muscles straining his khaki T-shirt.

Zigic touched Ferreira’s arm, let her know that was enough. They’d found Renfrew’s button, no need to pound it to destruction.

‘Did you know Stepulov was in there?’

‘I didn’t set fire to that shed.’

‘Then why did Phil need to pay you off?’ Ferreira asked.

Renfrew cocked his head, smiled slightly. ‘What?’

‘This morning, Clinton, in town, I saw you go into that jeweller’s.’ She brought out the evidence bag with Barlow’s rings inside, placed it on the table. ‘You cashed in some of Phil’s bling.’

Renfrew dropped back into his chair and hung his head, but the smile was still there, broader and more genuine than before, and when he looked up at them finally he was laughing to himself.

‘That’s it? That’s what you’ve fucking got?’

‘It’s pretty damning,’ Ferreira said.

‘Do me a favour. You think I’d take a pile of his shitey jewellery for payment? I’m a professional. I take cash.’

‘So why did you have his rings?’

‘He gave them me.’

‘Very generous of him,’ Zigic said. ‘Especially since one of them was an anniversary gift he swore he’d never take off.’

Renfrew shrugged.

‘Why did he give you them?’ Zigic asked again.

‘You know why.’

‘I want to hear you say it. For the tape, Mr Renfrew.’

He shook his head like he couldn’t quite believe what he was going to do.

‘I told him you’d come to see me at the garage and he started bricking it. He begged me not to let on we knew each other.’ Renfrew smiled slightly. ‘I said it’d cost him.’

‘You’re blackmailing him.’

‘I wouldn’t call it that.’

‘I would,’ Zigic said. ‘And so will the CPS.’

Ten minutes later, back in the office with the sound of a vacuum cleaner droning in the corridor outside, Zigic amended Jaan Stepulov’s board, thinking of how contained his murder had looked, right from the off. Phil and Gemma Barlow’s photographs stared out at him, both of them wide-eyed in front of the camera, stunned by finding themselves in a situation they wouldn’t have believed possible a month earlier.

‘Renfrew knows what he’s doing,’ Ferreira said. ‘He’s copping to blackmail so we don’t pursue him for the fire.’

‘It’s possible.’

‘It’s highly probable,’ she said.

‘He’s got an alibi.’

‘Family alibis shouldn’t count.’

‘The sister-in-law hates him.’

‘But she’ll do whatever her husband tells her.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Zigic said. He rubbed his face, felt stubble against his palms; he’d been here far too long already. ‘Just because you hate him it doesn’t mean he’s guilty.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’ She opened her desk drawer, dug out a tube of lip balm and sniffed it before she ran it over her mouth. ‘I’ll send a car out for Gemma. We can start on Phil straight away then.’

Zigic glanced at his watch; almost nine o’clock and they had to be back in at four to prepare for the raid at Knarrs End Drove. Neither of the Barlows would talk without a solicitor and that could take hours yet. By the time they were done it would be too late to go home.

‘Let’s leave them for tonight.’

Ferreira slammed her drawer shut. ‘We should hit Phil while he’s unbalanced.’

‘You think a night in the cells is going to settle him down?’ Zigic asked, already pulling on his coat. ‘The longer he sits there, the more likely we are to get a confession.’

AT 5.30 A.M.
the featureless dawn landscape of the fens was resolving under a grey sky heavy with coming rain, dark smudges in the distance marking small wooded areas, farmyards dominated by hulking tractor sheds and Nissen huts rotting and crumbling. A phalanx of vehicles rumbled along the Wisbech Road, passing transporter vans filled with workers and delivery lorries from the processing plants at Spalding heading into Peterborough.

Zigic shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the unfamiliar hard bulk of a handgun digging into his ribs. He’d taken firearms training years ago and never expected to use it. This was the first time he’d worn a gun on duty and he hated the way the steel felt, first ice cold through his shirt now warmed to body temperature as if it was a part of him.

Next to him Ferreira was tapping her feet against the floor, taking furious drags on her third cigarette, and the interior of Adams’s car was close with the smoke. Adams had gone through a couple himself, complaining to Ferreira about how rough they were, but he was out and said right then he’d take his nicotine however it came.

In the passenger seat DC Carr was nervously rubbing his hands against the thighs of his jeans and every few minutes he tugged at the neck of his bulletproof vest.

It had been a while since Zigic wore one of those too and he wondered how the uniforms who put them on every day coped with them. Not the discomfort. That was nothing. But the knowledge that at any moment you might need it.

‘These things are stupid,’ Carr said. ‘What if I get shot in the head?’

‘It’ll be over quickly and you’ll get a hero’s funeral,’ Adams told him. ‘Now shut up.’

Ferreira opened her window and pitched out the spent butt, immediately started to roll another cigarette, spilling strands of tobacco as they hit a pothole.

‘For Christ’s sake.’

‘I didn’t build the fucking road, Mel,’ Adams said.

When she lit up he reached into the back of the car and she handed the cigarette over. He took a couple of drags and returned it a third smoked.

Zigic pressed his knuckles to his mouth and watched the fields whipping by, thinking of the boys, still sleeping soundly in their beds. He’d stood at the bedroom door watching them for a few minutes before he left the house, hadn’t wanted to go in and risk waking them. Now he regretted the decision. Anna got up at three to make him breakfast he told her he didn’t want and started to cry in the kitchen as she scraped the scrambled eggs into the bin.

He tried to laugh it off, told her how stupid she was being, it was perfectly safe, he’d be one of the last people to go in, and by the time he did the site would be secured. She asked if he’d have a gun and he lied, told her it wasn’t necessary.

It was only as he was leaving the village that he realised why she was so upset. Her whole childhood had been spent watching war zones on television, knowing her father was in the thick of the action, and every time an unnamed soldier died she would wonder if it was him.

A helicopter crossed the road above them, the deep thwump of its blades banging through Zigic’s head and then the car was slowing and he saw the vehicles ahead of them turning off onto a narrow drove, their headlights dimmed, a weighty black armoured van with a ram on the front of it, a tactical firearms unit behind it, then a van full of pumped-up uniforms.

‘Here we go then,’ Adams said under his breath, and swung down Knarrs End Drove.

The compound was two hundred yards away on the left, floodlit against the dim shapes of the surrounding countryside. It looked like any other travellers’ site, four tracks and vans parked here and there, and everything surrounded by a high mesh fence topped with razor wire which glimmered viciously under the intense white light. The only anomaly was the L of Portakabins arranged along the perimeter.

Reconnaissance photos taken the previous afternoon showed eleven of them, shoved tight together, hardly a body’s width between them, waste outlets running straight into a dyke, a mass of wiring strung haphazardly across the site to a pole on the verge which didn’t look up to the job. Even in the photographs they looked half derelict, felt roofs peeling, damp climbing the prefabricated walls.

The caravans, by contrast, were at the luxury end of the market, three long, wide blocks of white cladding with bay windows and wooden verandas; business was good when you weren’t paying wages.

Adams had tracked down the owners of the compound through a friend on the Lincolnshire force. The Gavin brothers leveraged the site off a local farmer in 1998, rolled onto it one bank holiday Monday and refused to leave. He tried to press criminal charges, got nowhere, tried civil, just the same. An ill-advised stab at clearing them out with a forklift truck put him on the wrong side of a compensation claim. Finally he agreed to sell them the land for market value, six grand an acre and they dropped their lawsuit as a gesture of goodwill.

Adams pulled up and they got out of the car.

Ahead of them dark figures emptied out of the vans and ran to take their positions as the driver of the armoured vehicle lined up to the compound’s entrance and gunned the engine. It tore through the main gates and then everyone was moving at once. The tactical unit flooded the compound, calling to each other above the rising chorus of barking dogs. They moved in brisk formation, ignoring the cabins, focused on the mobile homes at the south of the site.

A haggard blonde woman in pink silk pyjamas was standing screaming on her veranda. Marie Gavin – two years for assault, eighteen months suspended for fraud.

Her place was the largest on the site, frilly curtains at the windows and hanging baskets on the cladding, but Zigic was looking at the cabins now. Up close they were filthy, buckled things, unfit for human habitation, and for a second he thought they’d made a mistake. People couldn’t possibly be living in them. Then lights started coming on inside them, faces appearing behind the grilled windows and he noticed the padlocks fastened on the outside of the doors, just as Paolo had described.

A gunshot sounded above the chaos and a white pit bull dropped three feet away from one of the armed officers, twisted in the dirt and struggled to its feet again. As the man put a second bullet in it the rest of the pack emerged from the shadows between the cabins, scenting fresh blood. No barks now, just low growls as they advanced. Heads down, teeth bared.

Four more gunshots and the pack was neutralised.

A hefty man with thick black hair came out of another mobile home. Ken Gavin – eight years for aggravated burglary, six years for converting replica firearms.

‘This about the TV licence?’ he shouted.

‘On the ground.’

‘I paid it,’ he said. ‘On my mother’s eyes.’

‘Down on the ground. Now.’

Ken Gavin put his hands up but he was laughing. Kept laughing as he was surrounded and only stopped when a swift boot to the calf dropped him. Then he found some fight, lashing out with his elbows and feet as they tried to restrain him. One man drove a knee into his kidney and that stilled him long enough to get the cuffs on. Two uniforms dragged him across the ground towards the waiting van, dust blowing up from his heels.

‘One down,’ Adams said, standing with his hands on his hips, surveying the scene.