Tell No Tales (5 page)

On the black granite counter a tumbler sat next to a half-empty bottle of vodka and four spent blister packs of ibuprofen. Forty-eight pills gone. More than a gesture.

‘Guilt-induced overdose?’ Ferreira asked, coming up behind him.

‘Maybe.’ Zigic picked up Gilbert’s mobile from the floor. ‘He’s in his pyjamas though. Why would he get changed to kill himself?’

‘I’d want to be comfortable, wouldn’t you?’ She stood over him, her toe a couple of inches away from his head. ‘Do you think he can hear us?’

‘Probably.’ Zigic swiped his thumb across the phone’s screen and it lit up, showing a photograph of Anthony Gilbert and a young blonde woman with heavily made-up eyes, their cheeks pressed close together, both smiling, faces shining drunkenly.

‘That’s Jelena Krasic,’ Ferreira said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. She was still at the scene when I got there. They were just moving her body.’ Ferreira’s eyes drifted down to Anthony Gilbert’s prone form; she drew her foot back as if considering kicking him, but then wandered away to a noticeboard hung over the breakfast bar. ‘Be handy if he left us a signed confession.’

‘Go and have a poke about, Mel.’

Zigic scrolled through Gilbert’s call logs, saw he’d rung Jelena Krasic several times before six o’clock that morning, knowing she would be up already, getting dressed for work. He’d called the previous evening too, almost hourly, short calls which she evidently hadn’t answered. Zigic went back further, saw the pattern repeated day after day, upwards of twenty phone calls, most of them ignored, but Jelena answered occasionally and those conversations lasted no more than a few minutes. Zigic imagined Gilbert wheedling and begging, promising her it would be different this time, that whatever he’d done to scare her away would never happen again.

Or he was threatening her. That was more in keeping with what they knew of his character.

The call logs showed Jelena had phoned him just after five this morning, spoke to him for twenty-five seconds before she rang off.

Was that it? Zigic wondered. A final, unequivocal no which provoked him to act?

The car had been bought two days ago though. This was premeditated murder and Gilbert wouldn’t be able to blame it on a moment of madness.

Blake came back into the kitchen as Ferreira left, a fake-fur throw bundled against his chest. He laid it over Anthony Gilbert, folded it back from his face, which was drained of all colour, his lips very pale, beginning to take on a bluish hue.

A siren was wailing at distance and within a couple of minutes the ambulance pulled up outside the house, drawing a few neighbours out onto their doorsteps. Zigic sent Blake and Jones to speak to them as the paramedics attended to Gilbert, working quickly and precisely, speaking in two voices, bright and optimistic to Gilbert, serious undertones to each other.

Zigic got out of their way. He went into the living room and found the BBC News Channel playing on the flat-screen television mounted above the fireplace. He looked over the bookshelves – a few dozen paperbacks and stacks of men’s magazines, DVD box sets arranged alphabetically, the usual stuff.

There were framed photographs of Gilbert with Jelena and Sofia Krasic, a blond man in a couple of them, his arm around Sofia, but mostly it was Jelena and Gilbert, photos taken in a procession of bars and restaurants, in this living room, Jelena curled up on the leather sofa with a glass of wine in her hand, sitting on the rug in front of the fire, dressed in nothing but a man’s shirt too large for her frame. It had the look of a shrine.

One of the paramedics went out and returned with a stretcher.

Maybe Gilbert didn’t expect it to go this far and only realised what he’d done when the adrenalin wore off. Or maybe Jelena was different to the others, so special that he believed he couldn’t live without her and this was always going to be a murder–suicide.

‘No sign of a note,’ Ferreira said, coming up behind him. ‘Let’s hope the bastard pulls through, hey.’

8

DCS RIGGOTT WAS
in Hate Crimes when they got back, standing in front of the board where the hit-and-run was plotted out, immaculately dressed as usual in a black wool suit and crisp white shirt. Zigic always felt dishevelled next to the man, but Riggott wasn’t a copper really, never ventured into the field these days. Although he had a formidable reputation among the older officers, who could remember him kicking in doors and bashing heads, the ones who shared his vicious temperament but not the politicking skills which ensured he rose through the ranks while they hit their pensions exactly where they started out.

He clapped his hands together as they walked over.

‘Ziggy, a result already. I always said you were a sharp one.’

‘We haven’t made an arrest yet,’ Zigic said, shrugging off his parka. ‘But it looks promising.’

‘Your man tried topping himself, I hear.’

‘The paramedics think they got to him in time.’

‘Grand.’ Riggott nodded, eyes on Anthony Gilbert’s most recent mugshot, a lean, unremarkable face, brown hair and designer sideburns. ‘This sort of thing demands a trial. People want to see proper punishment meted out. We’re a biblical lot when it comes to multiple murder.’

‘We’re not there yet.’

‘He’ll confess. Sure, if he’s guilty enough to kill himself it won’t take much pressure to crack him, you mark my words.’

‘Do you want us to stay on this?’ Zigic asked. ‘It doesn’t look like a hate crime and we’ve got other cases.’

‘You want to be happy you’ve got a success story on your books.’ Riggott glanced towards the whiteboards lined up along the opposite wall, too much blank space on them for comfort and no immediate prospect of a breakthrough. ‘What’s the progress in that direction?’

‘We’re working on it.’

Riggott moved across to the boards.

Two murders three weeks apart, the victims both men of foreign origin. If they were women, or English, people would already be hinting darkly at a serial killer, but these were closing-time kickings dished out on rough side streets where violence was routine and those on the receiving end rarely reported it. Unglamorous and commonplace and so far they’d been able to keep the link between the crimes out of the public domain.

Each had warranted a single front-page splash, a clutch of mentions on the local news which petered out inside a week, replaced by more teatime-friendly horrors.

‘We need more coverage,’ Zigic said. ‘Someone saw something – you know what it’s like round there at night, the streets are heaving. We just need to get them to come forward.’

Riggott didn’t speak for a minute but studied the crime-scene photographs and forensic reports in silence, frowning at the short list of suspects and lines of inquiry which ended abruptly, shut down through lack of witnesses or unbreakable alibis.

‘You’ve got lucky with this hit-and-run,’ he said finally. ‘Show people a jealous ex-boyfriend and they don’t ask questions. But we’ve got the nationals poking around now and you do not want them catching on to these murders.’

‘Maybe it’d be good if they do,’ Zigic said. ‘A bit more attention might bring a witness out of the woodwork.’

‘It might so,’ Riggott conceded, stroking his jaw with his fingertips. ‘Or it might permanently fuck your career. You see what happened to the fella from Soham? Good copper, one of the best about, but the press had his balls off him. Once you invite them in you can’t control them.’

‘This isn’t that kind of case.’

‘No, it’s the racially motivated murder of two dead immigrants in a city with a burgeoning far-right movement and a shiteload of discontentment about services and housing and any other thing you care to mention.’ He stepped in closer, lowered his voice. ‘You know where the Chief Constable is today? Out at Milton golf club playing the big bollocks with a delegation from Tata.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Zigic asked.

‘You’re sharper than that. Tata are looking to take over the old Perkins plant on Eastern Industrial, right? Fifteen hundred manufacturing jobs guaranteed for both of our career spans. Now, how do you think the old bastard’s going to react if his new friends start asking him about crime in the city? If they raise concerns about the safety of their workforce?’

‘I’ve not come across a boss yet who cares about the safety of their workers.’

‘Leverage,’ Riggott said. ‘Raise concerns, drop the price. Catch yourself on, son.’

Zigic crossed his arms, seeing where this was going.

‘This department is a publicity stunt,’ Riggott said and put his hand up when Zigic began to argue. ‘No offence, you’re doing important work and you’re doing a fine job. But we both know the Hate Crimes caseload could be handled within CID. Now would not be a good time to go drawing attention to yourself.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning, a certain someone with shiny buttons on his epaulettes will be starting work on next year’s budget very soon and he won’t take kindly to you putting a spotlight on his city’s myriad, unsolvable social problems.’

Zigic turned away, looked at the photos of the dead men.

A Somali boy, seventeen or eighteen years old, they hadn’t been able to establish his age exactly. The friends he was sharing a flat with in Bretton knew him only as Didi, couldn’t tell them how long he’d been here, or how he’d got to England, couldn’t even tell them if he had any family they needed to break the bad news to. They provided a photo, Didi smiling behind a can of Coke, his eyes almost closed. When his body was found his head was completely ruined, kicked and stamped on so many times that every bone in his face was broken, and they only identified him from his medical records at the local health centre.

The second man, Ali Manouf, was just as comprehensively beaten, another face caved in under heavy boots, injuries more extensive than Zigic had ever seen before, and he couldn’t imagine the kind of hatred which would drive someone to that.

It wasn’t just murder, it was obliteration.

Manouf they knew a little more about. An Iranian engineer who’d paid Spanish smugglers to get him into England and provide him with false papers. He’d handed over the money only to find himself dumped on the side of the A1 just north of Peterborough without the promised documents. Police manning a speed check on the road picked him up and turned him over to the Immigration and Borders Agency. His claim for asylum was being processed when he died. The official Zigic spoke to said they would likely have denied him leave to remain.

He had been staying at a halfway house off Lincoln Road, working on the black at a sweatshop nearby, sewing party dresses for a big high-street name, and his boss told them how grateful he’d been for the overtime when offered it. He’d left at 2 a.m. and walked home with the extra cash in his pocket, probably feeling like he’d had a better day than usual, until he’d run into the man who’d murdered him.

Both men were considered decent by the handful of people who knew them, quiet, polite, determined to keep their heads down and avoid trouble. Neither were fighters, which was probably why their killer targeted them.

Three weeks since Didi’s murder and four days since Manouf’s they were no closer to an arrest. Zigic went to the boards first thing every morning and looked at the dead men’s faces, keeping them clear in his mind so he wouldn’t forget what was at stake. But what dogged him was the belief that soon the blank whiteboard in the corner would be wheeled out, a third victim filling it, because someone who was capable of this level of violence wouldn’t stop until they were caught.

‘So you want me to hush this up?’ he asked.

Riggott put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m advising you to spend the next few days concentrating on building a strong case against Anthony Gilbert. Once he’s charged the pressure goes away, you follow?’

He knew Riggott was right but he resented having his actions dictated by the demands of the press and the machinations of the city council. Riggott hadn’t wandered up here of his own accord, this wasn’t friendly, off-the-cuff advice, it was an order couched in camaraderie.

‘Fine.’

‘Good man. Press conference at five,’ Riggott said, heading for the door. He stopped to click his fingers at Ferreira. ‘Mel, make sure he’s wearing a suit.’

She watched him leave, eyebrows drawn together in a scowl. ‘What, I’m the fucking wardrobe mistress now?’

Zigic dragged himself away from the boards and poured a coffee, finding the extra officers he’d been given had taken a toll on supplies. Someone had bought pastries though. Small victories, he thought, as he bit into an apricot Danish.

‘Have we got anything back from forensics yet?’

‘Blood on the airbag is a type match for Gilbert,’ Wahlia said. ‘Jenkins is still working up trajectories, shit like that, I didn’t understand half of what she said to be honest.’

‘We don’t need all that,’ Ferreira said, hunched over her desk rolling a cigarette. ‘We just need the bastard to wake up and talk.’

‘And if he denies it?’ Zigic asked.

Ferreira sealed her cigarette. ‘Then we ask harder.’

‘And what if he doesn’t wake up at all?’ Zigic said, dipping the end of his Danish into his coffee. ‘Then we’ve got nothing for the CPS. Go back over to Hossa Motors and see if you can get a positive ID from Ivan.’

Ferreira grabbed her jacket and left the office.

‘Have you got hold of his bank records yet, Bobby?’

‘Still waiting on them.’

‘What about the CCTV?’

Wahlia shook his head. ‘Bad news on that front. We’ve got nothing before the car appears on Lincoln Road just before the incident.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘Grieves is on it.’

Zigic went over to the woman’s desk and she quickly brushed away a few pastry flakes from her lunch. She’d been made up from uniform eighteen months ago and still didn’t seem entirely comfortable with her new rank, softly spoken and painfully timid when it came time to talk up; Zigic wondered how she’d survived as a PC. She was diligent though and had a good eye for detail, something her more bombastic colleagues didn’t share.

‘He was chased down Green Lane,’ Zigic said. ‘Is that right?’