Tell No Tales (10 page)

They spoke to the people Manouf worked with, the other men who lived in the shared house on Taverners Road where he was dossing, waiting for an answer from Immigration about whether he would be deported. They were hoping for an argument, something easy to explain his death and allow them to break the potential link between him and Didi. But Ali Manouf was too placid for that, an educated man who had realised his new situation was best handled with politeness and self-containment.

Then the CCTV footage emerged and there was no more pretending this was an isolated incident.

Didi’s murder inquiry was different. A mess of theories and conjecture complicated by the quarter-ounce of marijuana they found tucked away in his orange puffa jacket. If he was dealing around New England there was the turf element to consider, and they pulled in a dozen local dealers who claimed to know nothing about him, assumed the men were lying but couldn’t prove it. Then the post-mortem revealed high levels of THC in his blood and hair, pointing to sustained use, a habit verified by his friends and funded, one of them finally admitted, by shoplifting.

The friends were coming into the frame when footage of the murder arrived.

He remembered Ferreira returning to the office with it, her tan skin paled by what she had just seen, a haunted look in her near-black eyes. And she left the room while Wahlia and he watched it, said she couldn’t face it again, and he was surprised by her uncharacteristic squeamishness until Didi hit the pavement and the first boot strike crunched into his temple.

They were braced for it when similar footage emerged of Ali Manouf’s murder and that experience at least yielded a lead. As the man stood over Manouf’s body he lifted his balaclava, just a couple of inches, enough to free his mouth, and spat on him.

Forensics ran the DNA through the system, returned a blank. Ruling out most of the local neo-Nazis who would have headed their suspects list. The main players all had form of some sort and Zigic doubted anyone would be stupid enough to spit on a dead man if they were already to known to the police. That fact sprang up like a brick wall between them and the killer.

If he was part of a group, he was traceable. It would take persistence and ingenuity but they could get him. As a loner, he was far more dangerous.

Ferreira spent two days solid stalking the right-wing forums with a dedication bordering on obsession. She seemed disappointed by how little reaction the murders had provoked, commented that they were getting more careful what they discussed, that the language was changing, the moderators stepping in more often.

They were aiming for respectability, she said.

Zigic thought of the quote from Richard Shotton in today’s
Independent,
a carefully weighted statement, no overt racism but it was there between the lines, couched in politicised terms which would appeal to the kind of disaffected, white working-class voters his English Patriot Party had convinced to turn out in great enough numbers to secure him a by-election win last November.

Zigic wondered how his well-oiled propaganda machine would cope when this case finally broke. The jackbooted origins of his party, which he was working so carefully to hide, marching back into the limelight.

A fist rapped on his door and Ferreira came in without waiting for a reply.

‘You want a coffee?’

He lifted his mug. It was cold now. ‘Actually, yeah. This is rank.’

Wahlia arrived a couple of minutes later, wearing the same black jeans and plaid shirt he’d left the office in last night, his usually immaculately styled hair fluffed up on one side and flat on the other, new blond highlights greasy-looking.

‘Didn’t this one own a hairbrush?’ Ferreira asked. ‘Or is that deliberate?’

‘I’m working a new look.’

‘You’ll just do whatever
GQ
says, won’t you?’

He slumped in his chair. ‘I hate it when you’re perky in the morning.’

They bickered on as Ferreira rolled a cigarette and Zigic did the decent thing, poured Wahlia the biggest mug of coffee he could find and put it in his hand, offered him the stash of Pro Plus he kept in his desk for emergencies. Wahlia waved it off, insisted he’d be fine as he booted up his computer.

‘Have you seen this?’ Ferreira was brandishing the newspaper Gilraye had left behind on her desk. ‘Richard Shotton. They’re going to Nick Griffin’s prettier little sister for quotes now.’

She slapped the paper down and stomped over to the open window, lit her cigarette and took a furious drag which hollowed her cheeks.

‘I would love this to be one of his people,’ she said.

‘I think Shotton’s a little bit more careful than that,’ Zigic pointed out.

‘He’s a piece of shit.’

‘With a seat in Parliament.’

Parr trudged in with his tie askew and a spot of baby sick on his lapel, damped and scrubbed at but still there, flecked with white from the towel he’d tried to clean it with. He grunted a good morning and went to the desk he’d claimed near the window.

Grieves arrived ten minutes later, the last one in but she looked more alert than the rest of them put together, bright-eyed and smiling, ready for business in a navy-blue skirt suit. Zigic had told both of them civvies was fine but they were still operating under Riggott’s rules and would take more deprogramming before they adjusted.

‘Alright. So you’ll have heard what happened at the press conference yesterday.’

Nods all round.

Zigic moved to stand in front of the whiteboards covering Ali Manouf’s and Didi’s murders, felt their dead eyes staring at the back of his head.

‘And for the benefit of our recent arrivals there is, at present, nothing to suggest that the hit-and-run is connected to these men’s deaths,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t just bluster for the hacks, that’s the truth. There is almost certainly a link between the murders though and we’re working on the assumption that the same man is responsible.’

Grieves put her hand up.

‘You don’t have to do that, Deb. Go on.’

‘Why do we think the same man’s responsible?’

‘CCTV footage. We can’t see his face but the build’s the same and his . . . actions after the crime are identical.’

‘What actions?’

‘He gives a Nazi salute,’ Ferreira said.

She was watching Grieves closely when she spoke and Zigic wondered what she was looking for – shock, disgust, approval? Ferreira seemed to believe most English people were prejudiced, a result of her upbringing he supposed, the racial abuse she’d suffered. He knew she’d had a tough time in uniform, where the prevailing attitude was white guys versus the world and a Lisbon-born graduate with a short fuse would have a target on her back.

Was there some lingering enmity between the two women? He was going to have to deal with that before it became a problem.

‘Were the victims chosen at random then?’ Grieves asked, turning subtly away from Ferreira. ‘Wrong place, wrong time?’

‘It appears that way,’ Zigic said. ‘They didn’t know each other. We haven’t been able to establish any links between them. So, yes, right now we’re assuming they were attacked purely because of their ethnicity.’

‘Were they asylum seekers?’ Parr asked.

‘Manouf was, Didi wasn’t.’

Ferreira flicked her cigarette out of the window. ‘You think it would have made a difference if they were?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘They were attacked because they were alone at the time and they were vulnerable,’ she said, her voice taking on a strident edge. ‘These men have no family over here, no close friends and no support network. You look at them.’ She gestured at the board. ‘They’re both short, thin, not the kind of blokes who can put up much of a fight. Our killer is looking for easy targets.’

Parr straightened in his chair. ‘Because he’s weak?’

‘Because he’s a pathetic coward and a bully who wants to inflict maximum damage with minimum risk to his person.’

‘He is a highly dangerous individual,’ Zigic said, tapping the whiteboard with his knuckles. There was a still from CCTV tacked up in the suspects column, worse than useless for ID purposes but it gave them something to focus on. ‘There’s footage of the murders if you need to be convinced but they don’t make for pleasant viewing.’

Grieves and Parr looked at one another, just a quick glance.

‘Our focus for today remains on the hit-and-run but I want to start a full review of the files on Didi’s and Manouf’s murders,’ Zigic said, trying to inject some enthusiasm into his voice as he put his attention on Grieves and Parr. ‘You two need to get up to speed this morning, don’t do anything else, just absorb those case files. We’re going to take the whole thing apart, right from the beginning. Somebody knows who this bastard is.’

14

THEY WERE CLEARING
breakfast away on Ward 6 when Zigic went in and he noticed how many of the plates were being loaded back onto the trolley untouched, the plastic covers condensated and the cutlery still wrapped.

In a bay further along somebody was calling for a bedpan in an urgent tone. A nurse told them to go in the bed, they’d clean it up later.

Zigic knocked on the door to Sofia Krasic’s room.

There was no reply.

He went in and found the bed empty. The blue waffle sheet was on the floor and the backless gown with it. He picked them up and put them on the chair.

An auxiliary nurse stuck her head round the door. ‘She’s gone, love.’

‘Where? They can’t have discharged her yet.’

The woman shrugged. ‘Reckon she just left.

How had she walked out unchallenged? A bruised and battered woman with broken ribs and head trauma, the lone survivor of an incident even the overstretched doctors must have realised was suspicious.

Zigic went out through the double doors, along the dark corridors with their posters for cancer and tropical diseases, intermittent bursts of colour from the corporate artwork, prints of kittens and blown-up flowers which were somehow more depressing than the thought of rotting alive.

He swore at himself as he started the car, thinking he should have posted a guard outside her room. He pulled off the kerb and back into the traffic, the tail end of the morning rush hour clogging up the area around Bretton Centre, and with the roadworks on the parkway unmanned but seemingly permanent now, it took him fifteen minutes to get to Sofia’s house. There were a couple of builders smoking outside the place opposite, watching a badly corroded skip being unloaded from its flatbed, and they eyed him as he got out of the car.

He knocked on the front door.

There was music playing inside and through the frosted-glass panel he saw the hall light burning, then a blurred figure coming towards the door.

Sofia Krasic looked smaller and more broken in her pyjamas than she had in the controlled surroundings of City Hospital, more like Jelena than he had noticed before. Their faces were almost identical, only the colouring different.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded, ushering her back into the house. ‘How did you even get here?’

Sofia gestured vaguely towards the door. ‘Work. I call. My boss, she come, bring clothes, take me home.’

‘You need to be in hospital,’ he said. ‘You can’t just leave. They need to take care of you.’

‘I do not need care.’

She walked away from him, into the living room at the front of the house. On another day the room might have looked inviting, with the sheepskin rug in front of the electric fire and low cream armchairs stuffed with cushions, but the grief was heavy in the room, greying and dulling everything.

Sofia went back to the place on the sofa where she had set up a bank of pillows to keep her ribs at the most comfortable angle. There was a bottle of vodka between the cushions and Zigic got to the pills on the coffee table before Sofia could stop him.

‘Co-codamol? You can’t take these with alcohol.’

‘Is safe. I take before.’

Zigic opened the packet, found six pills missing. A brief image of Anthony Gilbert unconscious on his kitchen floor flashed in front of his eyes.

‘Have you taken all of these?’

Sofia gave him a smile, sad and a little crooked. ‘You think I try to kill myself?’

‘How many of them have you taken?’

‘Only one. They are strong pills.’

‘You’re still going to have to go back to the hospital.’

‘I have to do nothing,’ Sofia snapped. ‘That place . . . they leave the old to die in their own filth. They would not let a dog be like that. The English, they are crazy, care more for animals than people.’

Zigic sat down in the armchair, elbows on his knees. ‘Look, Sofia, your ribs are broken –’

‘Only bruised,’ she said, dragging a hot-water bottle out from underneath her and placing it on the left side of her torso. ‘I have bruised before. Two, three days, I rest.’

‘You might have internal bleeding.’

‘You are doctor? No, you are not. You are police so do not tell me what I need.’

The phone in the hallway began to ring and Sofia stirred to answer it.

‘Stay there, I’ll get it.’

Zigic picked up the phone and a woman started speaking instantly, her accent too thick for him to penetrate. He went back to the living room and gave Sofia the handset.

She listened for a couple of seconds, her face darkening, then she pressed the phone to her shoulder and held the hot-water bottle out to Zigic.

‘Would you fill please? From kettle. It must boil. Thank you.’

It was still hot but he took the cue and left the living room, went as far as the bottom of the stairs and listened to Sofia calling the woman Mama, faking brightness into her voice from somewhere.

She was speaking quickly, too quickly for Zigic to follow her perfectly, but he heard her say Jelena was well, she was working, yes, she was at the farm also now, Sofia’s voice beginning to thicken until she had to clear her throat, excusing it as a cold, nothing important. Her tone changed abruptly then and she said she would send no money. No more. The conversation was over ten seconds later.

‘You hear this?’ Sofia asked.

Zigic returned to the living room. ‘If you don’t tell her we will.’