Tell No Tales (4 page)

The smile froze for a split second then evaporated. He nodded. ‘I run a respectable business, officer. All very clean.’

‘I’m sure you do, sir. We’re here about a car you bought a couple of weeks ago. A white Volvo, registration . . .’

Ferreira rattled it off.

‘You bought it through eBay.’

‘All legal, yes,’ Hossa said. ‘The man ask for cash. I pay cash. Is his lookout to be clean with taxman.’

‘Have you sold the car yet?’

Hossa nodded slowly. ‘There is problem?’

‘We need to know who you sold it to.’

‘I want no trouble,’ Hossa said.

‘We just need to know who bought the car,’ Zigic said. ‘You keep records I presume.’

‘I will find for you.’

They followed him into the Portakabin, where two desks sat at right angles, one under a mess of paperwork and car magazines, the other, which Hossa went to, clear except for a laptop which probably cost more than any of the vehicles out on the lot. Music was coming out of it, all bass and badass posturing, and Hossa switched it off before he sat down.

‘Who else works here?’ Ferreira asked, perching on the desk.

‘Ivan. My cousin.’

‘And where’s he?’

‘He go buy breakfast. Van near Wickes – he has girl there.’

Hossa started tapping away at his laptop and Zigic saw Ferreira sifting through the paperwork on the other desk. Hossa was watching her out of the corner of his eye but he said nothing.

‘Where are you from, Mr Hossa? Originally.’

‘Slovakia.’ He frowned. ‘I make business there when I am young. Sell cars. Do well. Then men come, say, “Nice business, Bogdan, we will take this.” And they take. Then I come to England. This does not happen in England.’

Not very often, anyway, Zigic thought. And not a business like this.

‘I sell this car on Tuesday.’ Hossa leaned back in his chair and knitted his fingers across his chest. ‘To John Smith.’

‘What’s the address?’ Ferreira asked.

‘No address.’

‘But you took a copy of his driver’s licence?’

Hossa’s face darkened. ‘Ivan sells this car. He is not careful.’

‘He got the money at least?’ Ferreira asked, an edge coming into her voice.

‘This he is careful with.’

‘Then we need to speak to Ivan,’ Zigic said.

Hossa glanced at his watch, a gaudy rose gold thing with a huge bezel studded with diamonds. ‘He will be back. You wait, yes?’

‘Yes, Mr Hossa, we wait.’

They settled into silence, Hossa staring pensively at his shoes, emitting an occasional soft snort. Ferreira started to roll a cigarette and asked Hossa if he minded before she lit up.

‘Please, no.’ He gestured at his chest. ‘Asthma.’

She went outside and Zigic saw her wandering around the cars as she smoked, checking tax discs and the numbers etched on the windows, looking for something they could use for leverage against Hossa and his cousin if they decided not to cooperate suddenly. Zigic doubted it would come to that. If what Hossa said was true he wouldn’t risk losing another hard-built business by antagonising them.

He thought of the name the buyer had given – John Smith.

It could be real but his gut instinct said it wasn’t. He was sure that only an English person would use it as an alias though. It was too culturally specific.

Outside, a burgundy 4x4 with blacked-out windows pulled onto the lot, stopping with its bumper a few feet away from the Portakabin and the man who got out made Bogdan Hossa look svelte. Three hundred pounds of soft fat in grey joggers and a brown suede jacket. He carried a striped plastic takeaway bag in one hand and a tray of hot drinks in the other, banged the car door shut with his backside.

Hossa stood up as he came in, said something to him in Slovakian, his tone sharp.

Ivan looked at Zigic. ‘White Volvo, yes?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I sell this car.’

Hossa let off another volley of machine-gun Slovakian at him and it looked like the words hit hard.

Ivan skulked around behind his own desk and put his breakfast down.

‘You did not ask this man address,’ Hossa said.

‘He says he has no house.’

‘Was he English?’ Zigic asked.

Ivan shrugged, bored-looking.

‘It is very important that we find this man.’

‘English maybe, yes.’

‘You must have spoken to him. Did he have an English accent?’

Ivan lifted a white styrofoam carton out of the bag, opened it to reveal a fat burger and chips.

‘He is slow,’ Hossa whispered.

Zigic massaged his temple with his fingertips, watching Ivan take a massive bite out of his burger, ketchup dripping onto the paperwork across his desk. He certainly looked slow, but his English seemed fairly good. If his build wasn’t completely wrong Zigic would have suspected he was driving the Volvo that morning.

‘What did the man look like, Ivan?’

‘Normal man. He wear hat.’ Another big bite of the burger and when he spoke again it was around a mouthful of meat and soggy bap. ‘Red hat.’

The door of the Portakabin banged opened and Ferreira nodded for him to join her.

Outside a fine rain had begun to fall, the wind rising. She brushed her hair away from her face and it whipped straight back.

‘The hospital just called,’ she said. ‘Sofia Krasic has come round. She wants to talk to someone.’

‘Is she coherent?’

‘She said she knows who was driving the car.’

6

THERE WAS A
figure standing at the foot of the bed when Sofia opened her eyes, a small, dark man in a white coat stabbing his mobile phone, his tie bright red like a knife wound. She thought of a man she had seen lying dead in the street, his chest cut open, a wiry ginger dog lifting its muzzle from the wound, fur stained with blood and flecks of black gore.

That was not now. She had been almost the same size as the dog then.

This was a hospital bed. She could smell disinfectant, vomit. There was no noise though. She was in a private room. This was strange. The private room and the man who must be a doctor watching over her.

A foggy feeling came down over her and she drifted for a while, aware of a woman’s voice at a distance, a man’s answering, low and rumbling. Hands moved quickly across her body and she wanted to protest but she was too weak.

The pain was no more than a smudge at the edge of her consciousness, an unpleasant grey, like a looming storm cloud. Sofia ignored it, listened to the rhythmic sound of the machinery.

The man was speaking again and through her lashes Sofia saw him, standing close to her bed, holding a clipboard, heard words coming out of her mouth but couldn’t control them. He smiled, patted her shoulder and at some point, without her noticing, he must have left because she was alone.

Gradually she became more aware of the pain gnawing at her, a dull ache in her legs and her arms, a sharper pain every time she inhaled.

She tried to remember when that had happened but the memory was jumbled and elusive. Jelena’s pale face, her bright blue eyes, a scream.

She gasped.

Jelena standing on the roof of the tractor shed, ten feet above the ground and the ladder gone. Their mother shouting and the wind rising, thunder or gunfire in the distance. She told Jelena to jump. She’d catch her. And Jelena did, without hesitation.

Sofia felt the tears running down her cheeks and was sure that she would choke on them, knowing that if she did it wouldn’t matter.

She saw Jelena turn away from the road, lower her gaze and frown. She saw the car aiming for her. She saw her own hand shoot out stupidly as Jelena flew into the air, screaming until her head hit the windscreen.

Sofia tried to roll over, away from the memory, but the pain in her ribs flared so sharply that she passed out again for a minute or an hour.

In her delirious state the same few seconds kept replaying, disjointed and unreal, the car sometimes a tank, sometimes a bullock, Jelena dressed in her confirmation dress and work boots, eleven years old and dead, twenty-four and alive.

She saw Tomas dressed in black, his gloved hands and his face covered. But she knew it was him in there. Hiding from her.

She didn’t want to see what happened next. Knew there was blood coming. Lots of blood.

She turned away from the memory, resurfaced in the room, starting at the sensation of someone gently patting her cheeks dry with a tissue, standing over her, blocking out the light from the car’s headlights.

No. That was not here or now.

This was not him.

Did she know this man from home? His flat, high cheekbones and hooded green eyes looked so familiar. When he spoke she didn’t know what she was hearing and what she was remembering, the words coming out disconnected from the movements of his lips.

She closed her eyes and when she opened them again he was sitting very close to her. She tried to focus but he was hazy around the edges.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Zigic. Dushan. Can you hear me, Sofia?’

It was like being underwater, everything muffled and blurred, and she tried to fight her way to the surface.

‘Please – Jelena?’

‘I’m very sorry, they did everything they could.’

She crashed back down, feeling a terrible pressure across her chest, the man’s face rushing away out of focus, heard him speak, just a low murmur, and then wailing which only a small part of her brain knew was coming from her own raw throat and bruised lungs.

She saw the blood on his hands.

He would not get away with it.

She said his name.

‘What? Sofia, I can’t hear you.’ The man leaned closer. ‘Did you see who hit you?’

‘Anthony Gilbert.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Jelena’s boyfriend. Her ex. He did this.’

7

‘HE’S GOT FORM,’
Ferreira said, relaying the conversation she was having with Wahlia as Zigic drove, catching sight of the patrol car dispatched from Thorpe Wood Station a hundred yards back, shooting off the Serpentine Green roundabout, cutting up a Royal Mail van to gain a few more seconds, lights and siren blaring.

‘For murder?’ Zigic asked, hands tight on the wheel.

‘No, stalking. First offence back in 2004,’ Ferreira said. ‘An ex-girlfriend. He trashed her car, broke into her house – there was a dead cat. She got a restraining order and that was the end of it.’

‘They don’t usually stop so easily,’ Zigic said.

‘No. Sounds like he moved on to someone else though. ’06 he’s done for criminal damage, same thing, slashed the car tyres. Harassment, threatening behaviour. This one was a barmaid at his local, no prior intimacy.’

‘Did he back off?’

‘Eventually,’ Ferreira said. ‘Nothing for a couple of years then there’s an assault charge, brought and dropped. That was another ex . . . What, Bobby?’ She swore, listened and when Zigic glanced away from the road he saw her eyes widen. ‘He went for the boyfriend too, tried to run him over in his works car park. This is it. This is the fucker we want.’

Zigic accelerated past a line of vaguely Scandinavian-looking houses on Hampton Ridge, the estate proper sprawling away behind them, hundreds of acres of carefully planned closes dominated by heavily ornamented cod-Georgian town houses, screening the cheaper, densely built social housing, along with the methadone clinic and the drop-in centres and the halfway homes. Man-made lakes peeped out here and there, the water dull under the gloomy sky, patches of grassland left to give the impression of clean, countrified living on this reclaimed rubbish dump which was slowly but surely sinking into the sludge below.

He turned into the main entrance as Ferreira wrapped up the call.

‘Piece of shit,’ she said. ‘This road, right here. Then next left.’

‘We don’t know it’s him yet.’

‘Stalkers will go through anyone to get at their victim. You know that as well as I do. Most people, they want revenge or whatever, they wait until you’re on your own then they strike.’ Her hand knifed the air. ‘Stalkers are a whole different ball game. That obsession
has
to be satisfied no matter what.’

Zigic murmured agreement, counting down the house numbers. It was a pretty street, red brick and slate roofs, lead canopies over the doors, a lot of window boxes and topiary. Anthony Gilbert would look like a good catch initially and he obviously had no problem getting girlfriends, just behaving like a decent enough human being to keep them.

There was no car on his driveway and Zigic felt a cold twist in his gut at the possibility of a drawn-out manhunt.

Ferreira jumped out of the car before he’d fully stopped and charged up to the front door, banged hard with the side of her fist. Zigic sent the uniforms down the back, heard their boots crunching on the gravel as Ferreira knocked again.

The curtains in the living-room window were closed but there was a two-inch-wide gap between them and through it he saw a lamp burning on a side table, the glow from the television spilling across the floor. A tufted cream rug, the edge of the sofa.

‘The key’s still in the door,’ Ferreira said. ‘He’s there.’

PC Blake came back onto the driveway at a jog.

‘He’s in the kitchen, sir. Looks like he’s had an accident.’

Zigic followed him along the narrow path between the houses. Next door, children were playing in the garden, screaming and laughing, the sound of a ball hitting brickwork over and again and then a wobbly thud as it struck a window and their mother yelled at them.

‘There,’ Blake said.

Through the panel in the back door Zigic saw Anthony Gilbert curled up on the kitchen’s white-tiled floor, still in his pyjamas, a pool of vomit near his face.

‘Call an ambulance right now.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And get the ram.’

‘Sir.’

A minute later Blake returned and Zigic stood back to let him work. Blake set his body and took aim, measured once, twice, and threw the ram at the wooden door frame just above the lock. It flew open, banging against the internal wall so hard that the glass panel shattered.

Zigic went in, broken glass crunching under foot, and squatted down next to Gilbert. He pressed his fingers into the man’s neck. His skin was cold but there was a pulse, weak and erratic. He moved him into the recovery position and told Blake to go and look for something to cover him up with.