Long Way Home (7 page)

He was right. All they had against Stepulov were the Barlows’ statements and they were hardly unbiased.

‘I’ll tell you something about Stepi now. Round Christmas he was in here playing cards –’

‘Was he any good?’

‘I wouldn’t have bet my bollock hair to bullion if I had quad kings against him.’

‘So he cheated?’

‘How he won is neither here nor there.’ Maloney put his hand up. ‘But there was a fella in here waiting for the coach back to Krakow. Real loudmouth piece of work he was, flashing his money around. Now he got into a game with Stepi and Stepi cleaned him out right down to his mobile phone – piece of shite that was too.’

Ferreira sipped her rum, waited for him to continue. Maloney liked to string things out when he had an audience for it.

‘Your man had tears in his eyes, complaining how his ma was going to be so disappointed when he never came home for the holidays and his sister wouldn’t be able to go back to university next year if he didn’t give her the money.’

‘Did he pay up?’

‘Course he paid up. You lose your money, you pay your debts,’ Maloney said. ‘But Stepi was a proper gentleman about it, gave him his fare back and a few quid spending money. Even made sure he got on the coach safe and sound. He’d had a few, you know, man like that in that kind of mood, well, he was as likely to throw himself in the river as anything else.’

A shout went up from the corner of the pub.

‘
Łód
ź
autobus – dziesiec minut
.’

A few people stirred from the tables, gathering bags and draining their drinks. The driver ambled out again, none too steady-looking.

‘That was the kind of man Stepi was. Salt of the earth.’ Maloney topped his whiskey up from the bottle under the counter. ‘Would I freshen yours, Sergeant?’

‘I’m on duty.’ She slid her glass away from his hand. ‘Has anyone been in looking for Stepulov?’

Maloney smiled. ‘You’re a sharp one – already got a suspect in your sights.’

‘Look, Maloney, I love an Irish accent as much as the next girl but get to the fucking point, hey?’

‘Young fella came in here a couple of days back wanting Stepi. Said he was his son-in-law – gave me a load of old bollocks about his daughter being pregnant and nobody knew how to get in touch with him. Man wasn’t even Estonian if you ask me.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Long, tall streak of piss with a bird tattooed on his neck.’ Maloney fingered the collar of his blue check shirt. ‘Stepi wasn’t in yet but the fella didn’t want to wait around for him.’

‘Has he been back since?’

‘I’ve not seen him if he has,’ Maloney said. ‘I’ll tell you something, he looked a nasty piece of work. I wouldn’t proclaim to be an educated man but I know a thug when I see one.’

Ferreira drained her drink.

‘If he comes in again I want you to call me right away.’ She pushed her card across the bar. ‘And if you hear anything.
Anything . . .
’

Maloney slipped her card into his breast pocket. ‘You can rely on me, Sergeant.’

OLGA AND SOFIA
were talking about the fire as they stacked the glass washer. It was all anyone had spoken of all morning, and Emilia tried not to listen, didn’t want to think about what it must have been like inside that rickety little shed as the fire took hold.

It was easier not to think about it. Put it in a box and pretend it never happened.

There were many boxes in her head, all tightly locked and shoved away in the dark. Over time some of them fused and she was spared the memories she didn’t want to face, but others corroded and leaked, snatches of conversations and strange faces swimming up unexpectedly, provoked by the smell of a certain tobacco or a snatch of music on the radio. Others snapped open without warning and slapped her between the eyes.

This box didn’t want to be closed.

She pressed her lips together tightly and willed the images away.

The pub was busy now and that helped. She concentrated on taking orders into the kitchen, picking up plates of steak and pasta, the crockery burning the skin on her forearms through her thin white blouse.

The pain helped. She focused on that for a while.

But soon it became bundled up with other sensations and she couldn’t escape the images which were so strong she felt she was there, feeling the heat on her own skin, breathing the thick, black smoke.

Maloney was at his regular table, laughing like a madman, wiping tears from his eyes.

She was sure he knew something.

When the policewoman left he came over and asked her to get him a sandwich, studied her carefully when she took it to his table and set it down in front of him. He never asked her to do things, always Olga. She was his favourite, the one he liked to serve him.

He would protect Olga from the police, but Emilia was sure she couldn’t count on the same treatment.

When he asked if she was feeling alright she told him she was fine. Just a slight headache. She would take a pill in a moment.

He knew.

She could see it in his eyes. He was like a wolf, always prowling, always watching, and even when he smiled his eyes were dead.

‘Serve this gentleman,’ Olga said.

Emilia went to the end of the bar and opened a bottle of Beck’s, took the man’s money and gave him his change. Olga was watching her too, standing with her arms folded three feet away, a smirk on her red-painted lips.

Was she acting differently?

‘I must go to toilet,’ she said, and slipped past Olga, out from behind the bar, and she forced herself to walk naturally across the patterned blue carpet which made her eyes ache, not bolt through the door marked Staff Only.

Upstairs she locked herself in the bathroom. The sink was full of water, soap scum floating on the top and a damp flannel on the floor underneath it. The hamper was overflowing with dirty washing, the smell of it overpowered by recently sprayed deodorant, pink and sickly. A pair of seamed black stockings were drying on the towel rail and the sight of them made her stomach flip.

She rushed to the toilet and threw up, nothing in her but bile and it burned, making her eyes water.

She wouldn’t cry. She couldn’t go downstairs with puffy eyes. Couldn’t afford the curiosity they would arouse and the questions she didn’t trust herself to answer.

Emilia flushed the toilet and put the seat down, sat for a few minutes with her head in her hands, staring at the black-and-white chequerboard floor.

She used to play chess, but that was a long time ago. Another life. One without stockings and whores’ baths, which existed only in one of those old, corroded boxes.

Now was not the time, she told herself.

She took out her mobile and dialled.

He answered immediately.

‘The police have been here,’ she said.

He swore. ‘Did they question you?’

‘No. She talked to Maloney.’

‘They know about you.’

‘They can’t.’

‘Why else would they come there? Think about it.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘They’d have arrested you if they had a witness.’ His voice was smooth and consoling, the way it was when they were together, lying close in the darkness. ‘But we need to work out what we’re going to do.’

She nodded, as if he was there with her.

‘Tonight, when you finish up, I’ll come get you.’

‘No.’ The panic gripped her. ‘Don’t come here.’

‘OK, your place then.’ She heard him pacing around, then glass touching glass, liquid running. ‘And don’t call me again, Emilia. It’s not safe.’

He rang off and she stared at the phone’s black screen for a second. He was right, she had been stupid to call him. If the police came back for her this afternoon they would take her phone and crack its secrets.

There would be no lie good enough to get her out of trouble then.

She flicked through the photos she had taken; there weren’t many. Almost nothing in her life was good enough to want to remember. A pair of shoes she wanted but couldn’t afford, spiked gold leather things with straps around the ankle, a sunset which didn’t look as beautiful as she remembered and a small white dog one of the regulars had brought into the pub, trying to find it a new owner. They were pathetic remnants of a life she felt coming to a close but they were not the ones she was worried about now.

Jaan, lying in bed with his hand under his head, smiling that hungry smile at her. Jaan showing off his muscles, posing like a star athlete. She kept deleting them, more photos of him than she remembered taking, and as they disappeared she wondered why she had bothered. He wanted her to take them, that was why. Was determined to have her prove how important he was to her.

She hesitated over the last one, their two faces pressed cheek to cheek, taken at arm’s length, both smiling, but she saw her smile was not as deep as his and he looked a little drunk around the eyes.

She hit delete and it was like he never existed.

THE REPORT FROM
forensics came through at three and Zigic took it into his office. Even with the lights on the room was small and dreary and nothing he’d done since he moved in made it any more comfortable. He’d bought a fancy leather chair with a lot of levers, put photographs of Anna and the boys on his desk, but it was still a windowless box with broom-cupboard dimensions and an acoustic tile ceiling splashed with old stains that looked like dried blood.

He opened the file onto a close-up shot of Jaan Stepulov’s scorched head and reminded himself it could be worse.

The crime scene photos were extensive but they told him nothing he didn’t know already. He shuffled them aside and picked out Kate Jenkins’s preliminary findings. The post-mortem was scheduled for eleven o’clock tomorrow morning and until then they wouldn’t know if the fire killed Stepulov or whether it was an attempt to eradicate evidence after the fact.

Tentatively Jenkins suggested the former was more likely.

Stepulov’s body was stretched out on one of the Barlows’ sunloungers and Jenkins had identified a high concentration of accelerant on his body and the concrete floor surrounding it – lighter fuel; she didn’t have a brand yet but she was doing follow-up tests on the samples.

It was more reliable than vodka, more portable than petrol, all you had to do was squirt it around and drop a match.

They had found a brick, surrounded by broken glass, on the floor inside the shed, which suggested someone broke the window before the rest of it was blown out by the fire.

Zigic pictured the lawn, scattered with blackened shards . . . Stepulov’s killer would have padlocked the shed door first, ensuring he couldn’t get out, then smashed a pane of glass and sprayed lighter fuel into the confined space. The shed was small enough that hitting Stepulov would have been easily done, and even if they missed where was he going to escape to?

A wave of sympathetic claustrophobia seized Zigic but he pushed it away.

Could he imagine the Barlows doing that?

It was a coward’s way to kill someone. Impersonal but with a high success rate. Phil Barlow might have been capable of walking outside at dawn with a can of lighter fuel, setting the fire then returning to his warm bed. He didn’t seem like the type but under duress you discovered new corners of your soul and they were usually darker and colder than you believed possible.

There were photographs of the padlock, a weighty brass Chubb, fire-stained but new-looking. Stepulov’s prints were the freshest, easy to identify, but there were others, smudged and older, which Jenkins was still working on. She had a thumbprint which might – she’d underlined that twice – might belong to Phil Barlow. A four-point match, not enough for the CPS but enough to raise some questions.

Like why wouldn’t Barlow have worn gloves?

The padlock was on his shed though, and Zigic imagined himself in that situation, going out into his garden and testing the heft of the thing, wanting to smash it off the door, furious that someone had closed him out of his own property.

He scanned the rest of Jenkins’s report. Empty bottles in the shed, a pair of heavily damaged work boots and the charred remains of a pickaxe handle. They’d found a handful of change in Stepulov’s pocket, nothing else.

Zigic stared at the photograph of Stepulov’s ruined head until it stopped being a person, wondering what he would have done in the Barlows’ position. Could he leave Anna and the boys at home every day, knowing there was a drunk, aggressive man less than thirty feet away from his back door?

He couldn’t and he knew he wouldn’t have to. A phone call would bring a patrol car and as many bodies as necessary to swiftly evict the man.

The same was true for the Barlows, even if they had dismissed the possibility. Maybe they were just the kind of people who had little faith in the police. Or maybe things had gone further than they were prepared to admit on record and they wanted a more definite solution to the problem.

Ferreira opened the office door as she knocked on it.

‘I thought you’d gone home.’

‘I was in the pub.’ She shoved both hands into the back pockets of her jeans. ‘Think we might have another suspect. Some guy spooked Stepulov out of Fern House – that’s what he was doing at the Barlows’ by the look of it, lying low.’

‘You get a name?’

She shook her head. ‘But he was in Maloney’s asking after him a couple of days ago as well. Might be nothing.’

They went back out into the main office. Wahlia was sitting with his feet up on the corner of the desk, phone cupped against his shoulder, hold music bleeding out of it. Zigic handed him the forensics report.

‘Get that on the board when you’re done.’

‘They find anything good?’ Ferreira asked.

He gave her a quick run-down.

‘So what’re you doing with the Barlows?’

‘I’ve kicked them loose, we’ve not got enough to charge them with.’

Ferreira made a face.

‘Is that alright with you?’

‘I guess they’re not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘Not like they’re going to leave the country, is it? All those foreigners they’d have to deal with.’