Tell No Tales (24 page)

It was good to hear her say it, because sometimes he wasn’t sure if she realised that.

A degree of friction was necessary during any investigation, questions needed to be asked, certainties challenged, and more often than not Ferreira was the one who did it, but as much as he valued her judgement she was prone to pursuing avenues of inquiry which had nothing more to recommend them than personal annoyance.

She’d probably call it instinct but Zigic had seen too many investigations derailed by an officer’s unshakeable belief in their gut to trust anything so nebulous.

Midland Road was a short drive from the station. A row of Victorian houses built in the shadow of the derelict hospital, opposite the abandoned and decaying hulk of the old Dairycrest lot and a run of corroded, corrugated-steel sheds which had once been a bakery. Sunlight glinted on the broken windows and the metal security fencing that had been erected to keep out vandals and the graffiti artists who had scrambled up to tag the most challenging spots. Beyond that was the wasteland around the railway, weed-strewn sidings and maintenance yards, and as they climbed out of the car a train barrelled through, its warning sounding.

‘This one,’ Ferreira said, pointing at a narrow terraced house with bleached net curtains up at the windows and a glossy red front door. ‘It’s a fast commute for her anyway.’

The parking area where Heather Crane had taken Ken Poulter was a couple of minutes’ walk away over the bridge, but it felt distant just then, with the birds singing and an unseasonal ice-cream van parked a few houses up filling the air with jangling music.

Zigic knocked on the front door, hearing a vacuum cleaner running inside. Waited a minute and knocked again, harder.

The vacuum cut dead and moments later Heather Crane opened up, just as far as the security chain would allow, a wedge of scrubbed face and scraped-back hair showing in the gap.

‘What do you want?’

Zigic held up his ID. ‘Could we have a word, Ms Crane?’

‘What’s this about?’

‘There was a murder last night. We need to ask you a few questions.’

She closed the door sharply and for moment there was no sound from her side, as she weighed up her options. Zigic imagined she knew better than to think this would just go away, and sure enough a few seconds later the chain slid off and she opened the door.

‘You’d better come in then.’

The vacuum cleaner sat in the centre of the small, square living room, the noxious aroma of lemon polish thick in the air and a feather duster propped against the foot of the stairs.

Her kids were playing in the back garden, laughing as they jumped up and down on a trampoline, and Heather Crane went to the window to keep a watchful eye on them, clearly not wanting them to rush in and hear what was going to be said.

She was older than he expected, approaching forty, plain and rounded in her grey tracksuit, bare feet gnarled from too many hours walking the streets in cheap, high shoes. It would be a challenge to make a living, he guessed. What with the ever-increasing, ever-renewed pool of foreign girls brought into the city to satisfy the wants of men who wouldn’t care how unwilling or mistreated they were.

The ages went down, the prices went down, and women like Heather Crane were pushed to the edge of the market by more exotic alternatives. Even the Eastern Europeans were falling out of favour, replaced by women trafficked over from China and Malaysia. It was a trade which thrived on novelty.

Ken Poulter’s politics obviously dictated his sexual preferences though.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ she said, her voice wavering already.

‘But you were in the car park when the murder happened,’ Zigic said, keeping his tone neutral, wanting her to know she wouldn’t be judged. ‘Your client told us that much.’

She smiled grimly. ‘I had my head down, didn’t I?’

Zigic moved closer to the window, wanting to see her face. ‘Just take us through what happened please.’

She folded her arms and looked away from him, into the garden where her kids had got bored with the trampoline and started playing with a pair of water pistols, screaming as they chased each other, two little girls in matching dungarees.

‘Ken rang me and said he was down Westgate, he wanted some . . . attention. He won’t let me in his cab so we went to the car park as usual.’

‘Were there many people about?’ Zigic asked.

‘A few. The pub crowd. It was pretty quiet, though.’ She tucked her chin into her chest, clearly uncomfortable about having this conversation when her kids were just a pane of glass away. ‘We went right into the corner, far away from the road as you can get. I heard some shouting but it sounded like the usual shit, you know? And Ken always takes a fair bit of warming up so I was concentrating on him.’

‘Men shouting?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What were they shouting about?’

‘I don’t know. Ken was talking to me, there was music from the pub. You just tune all that stuff out. You have to.’ She bit her lip. ‘I was kind of aware of it. I heard it stop. I think I heard some banging. Like a door maybe.’

‘A car door?’

‘No, a house door.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Like a minute later Ken finished and we started walking back over the car park. Then there was a load more shouting, doors going, and I wanted to get out of there sharpish.’

‘Why?’

‘They don’t like girls working on their streets,’ she said. ‘I know a couple who’ve been beat up the last few months, told if they go back it’ll be worse.’

‘But you keep working there?’ Ferreira said.

‘I’m careful,’ she said. ‘The others look like whores.’

Zigic glanced at Ferreira, got the merest shrug from her and wondered if she was thinking what he was now. Whether Heather’s experience was colouring her recollection, deliberately or otherwise. If what she said was true she might be sympathetic to Poulter’s way of thinking.

‘What did you see?’ Zigic asked.

She didn’t answer.

‘We’ve spoken to Ken, we know he saw the body. Were you still with him?’

‘He wanted to take a picture of it.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Sick bastard – can you believe it? He made me stand there while he did it.’

‘Why did he make you stay?’ Ferreira asked.

‘There were men on the street, I guess Ken thought they’d notice him if I walked off.’

‘How long did you stay there?’

She frowned. ‘It can’t have been more than a couple of minutes. A load more Asian blokes came out of their houses and Ken started getting twitchy. He said we should clear out before they got aggro.’

Zigic took out their mute suspect’s mugshot.

‘Do you recognise this man?’

‘Who is he?’

‘He killed the young lad whose body you saw. Asif Khalid. He was twenty years old, just walking home from a bar, minding his own business.’

‘It said on the news you arrested someone.’

‘This man, yes. But we have reason to believe he wasn’t acting alone. There was a second man involved but he ran off. You and Ken were the closest people to the scene when that happened, so it’s very important that you think now, did you hear or see anything, anything at all, which might help us identify him?’

‘No.’

Just like that. Snapped out, no thought given to it at all.

‘You said you heard shouting. Maybe a name . . .’

‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

‘What about earlier in the evening?’ Zigic asked, taking the photograph as she shoved it back at him. ‘You work around there, did you see anyone acting strangely?’

She laughed. ‘In Peterborough? On a Friday night? Are you joking?’

‘Do I look like I’m joking?’ Zigic said, dropping the neutral tone.

‘Maybe Ms Crane would be able to concentrate better at the station,’ Ferreira said, taking out her mobile. ‘I’ll call social services and have them send someone over for your kids.’

Heather turned on her, face wild. ‘Don’t you dare threaten my kids.’

Ferreira held her phone up. ‘Tell us what you know and we’ll leave you to the rest of your weekend.’

There was a moment of charged silence as they stared each other down. Zigic didn’t like operating this way, was sure that reasoning with people yielded better results than bullying them, but sometimes it was the only option.

‘Look, I didn’t see anything. All I know is I heard a couple of blokes shouting. I thought it was a robbery or something.’

‘What made you think it was a robbery?’ Zigic asked.

‘One guy was saying “no” over and over. Then there was some scuffling.’

‘What about the other guy?’

‘I couldn’t understand him. He wasn’t speaking English, but he was doing most of the shouting.’ She looked at Ferreira. ‘Satisfied now?’

‘Where were you when you heard this?’

‘It wasn’t long after we got there. I was too far away to make out what was going on properly,’ Heather said. ‘All I know for sure is that he wasn’t English.’

‘What did he sound like then?’

She shrugged. ‘Foreign. I don’t know.’

The back door opened and her kids ran in through the kitchen, into the living room, both drenched, the older girl still squirting her sister with the water pistol. Heather shouted at them not to mess the house up and they shrank back, stood in the doorway looking at Zigic and Ferreira, water dripping off them into the spotless cream carpet.

‘That’s all I can tell you.’

They returned to the car, the sound of an alarm going off a couple of streets away cutting through the air, off-key but insistent. Zigic pulled away from the kerb, turning around what Heather Crane had said, trying to find something more hidden between the lines.

‘Did you buy that?’ Ferreira asked. ‘She’s basically alibied Poulter.’

‘Why would she lie for a client?’

‘It’s a saturated market, she needs to keep the regulars she’s got. And let’s face it, she’s biased. All that about “them” not wanting working girls on their streets. She’s got her own axe to grind.’

‘Poulter does have alibis for the other murders,’ Zigic said. ‘And they’re pretty solid ones at that. Maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘It doesn’t feel right.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’ He slowed as he hit a line of traffic on the railway bridge, shunting out of the city centre. ‘It feels like too much of coincidence, but think about it for a minute, do you really believe Poulter would set up a prostitute for an alibi? If it was him and he was planning to murder a third man in a matter of four weeks, with an accomplice, would he really use her to cover for him?’

‘Depends how well they know each other.’

‘No, Mel. It doesn’t stand up. Especially when you factor in him posting that photograph on Facebook. Nobody is that stupid. Not even Poulter.’

She blew out a sharp sigh and he felt the same frustration. Right from the very beginning, within hours of Didi’s murder, they started hitting dead ends. Inevitably it happened in every case, because no matter how many enemies a person had they couldn’t all be guilty, but this case was different. No matter how diligent they were, no matter how determined, the shutters kept coming down around them. They get CCTV of the culprit. He’s wearing a balaclava. They get DNA. There’s no match on the system. They arrest the murderer, finally, literally red-handed. It turns out he isn’t working alone.

One step forward. Two steps back.

‘He must know more than he’s admitting though,’ Zigic said. ‘If she heard shouting, he heard it too.’

‘Foreign shouting,’ Ferreira said, like she didn’t believe that either.

‘It could have been Khalid.’

‘Or she was lying, trying to lead us away from Poulter’s boys.’

31

IT WAS THE
wrong weather for a vigil, Zigic thought, as they entered the cathedral precincts through the western gateway. The wrong time of day. Four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon with the spring sun shining down on the green, promising regeneration and growth, almost taunting the gathered crowd with its permanence in the face of their loss, rendering the candles they held invisible.

It was the wrong location too. They were all here to pay their respects to the victims of the hit-and-run, and by rights they should be standing on the spot where it happened, but that would have meant closing down Lincoln Road for the second time in four days and the council had evidently decided that was too disruptive.

Tough to make space for all the dignitaries on that stretch of pavement as well.

They’d come out in force, the mayor in full regalia and a few members of the city council, Chief Constable Weir and a trio of priests Zigic recognised from St Mary’s Church; they held services in several different languages now and they’d obviously decided to make sure everyone was catered for. Despite the fact that Jelena and Sofia Krasic didn’t seem particularly religious and who knew what Pyotr Dymek believed in.

The crowd was fifty or sixty strong, more women than men, mostly young, around the same age as the Krasic sisters. Co-workers perhaps or aquaintances from the neighbourhood. They stood in silence as Father Piec addressed them, his words prompting occasional group responses and flurries of sombre crossing.

Zigic noticed Ferreira’s hand twitch but she managed to keep it by her side, fighting the old Catholic impulses she’d deny having.

Beyond the core group a steady stream of shoppers made their way through the precincts and into the courtyard, a few slowed to see what had the local press so interested but most kept walking.

The TV crews maintained a respectful distance, placed to capture both the small raised platform outside the cathedral’s main doors and the faces of the men and women waiting to take their turn on it.

Under other circumstances there would be police cameras here too, more discreet and roving, capturing every person in the crowd for later analysis, just in case the man responsible for the hit-and-run had come to feed off the misery he’d caused, but it wasn’t that kind of crime.

A young man came over and offered them candles from a tray, looked disappointed when they both declined, then moved on to an elderly couple weighed down with shopping bags, who had stopped on their way back to the car park nearby. They took the candles and shared an uncomfortable moment as the young man lit them, then stood awkwardly watching, as if they felt they’d been pulled into something which was none of their business.