Between Two Evils

by Eva Dolan

  ‘Nobody enjoys it and it never gets any easier.’

  They could have sent someone else to inform Joshua Ainsworth’s parents of his death, but Zigic thought it was important for a senior officer to speak to them, so they would know it was being taken seriously and that everything that could be done for him would be done. He remembered being sent out as a young DC to make the dreaded death knock and how completely unprepared he’d been for it, too inexperienced to provide the requisite level of comfort and reassurance, too raw to protect himself from the force of their grief. It wasn’t fair on anyone involved, sending a constable to do an inspector’s job.

  The Ainsworth house sat at the centre of the development, one of around two dozen houses sited facing the modest lake. It was a three-storey clapperboard place painted in a Scandinavian shade of dirty blue, with a neat little pathway running up the centre of a manicured lawn, still lush despite the heat.

  For a moment after he switched off the engine, they both sat, gathering whatever inner resources they had.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, finally, getting out of the car.

  He led the way, knocking on the brilliant white front door, feeling Ferreira behind him, reluctance radiating off her.

  The door was opened by a petite, deeply tanned woman in a pair of shorts and a man’s shirt, one hand still in a floral gardening glove, clutching its twin. She wore a polite smile, tinged with mistrust. They wouldn’t get cold callers here, Zigic imagined. Not with the security on the gate.

  ‘Yes, can I help you?’ she enquired.

  A beat later she noticed his ID and the smile froze on her face.

  ‘Mrs Ainsworth?’ She nodded too heavily, and he could see that she was already fearing the worst, was playing the scenarios through in her head as he introduced Ferreira and himself. ‘Do you think we could come in, please?’

  She led them silently through the house, her gait uncertain, her neck stiff, to a large room at the back, where a wide set of doors stood open on a balcony overlooking the garden. There were a few pots out there, in the process of being planted with jewel-coloured flowers from plastic trays.

  She went out and dropped her gloves near the pots, came back with her fingers knitted together in front of her.

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say this was about?’ she asked. ‘There hasn’t been another break-in, has there?’

  ‘I think you should sit down, Mrs Ainsworth,’ Zigic said, gently ushering her towards a long, low sofa scattered with cushions. ‘Is your husband at home?’

  ‘He’s in his office.’ She gestured vaguely and Ferreira followed her hand towards the doorway, going to find Joshua Ainsworth’s father.

  Mrs Ainsworth sat with her ankles crossed and her hands in her lap, head turned towards the view, tears already welling in her eyes.

  People always knew. Long before you told them, they knew what had happened. From your mere presence in their homes, your discomfort and deference, the weight you carried visibly around on your shoulders, a burden they knew they would soon take from you. They would take most of it, but the part that was left couldn’t be passed on to anyone else. That you kept forever.

  Ferreira returned with Mr Ainsworth and Zigic could see that he knew already as well. That his reaction was going to be different to his wife’s. Where she had retreated instantly to numbness, he was unbearably raw.

  ‘It’s Greg, isn’t it?’ he demanded. ‘Something’s happened to Greg and the boys?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Zigic said. ‘We’re here about Josh.’

  Was he imagining it, or was that a very slight flicker of relief he saw pass over Mr Ainsworth’s face as he crossed the room and sat down next to his wife, taking her hand in his own big paw.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Mr Ainsworth asked, glaring at Zigic as if daring him to actually say it. ‘Has Josh had an accident?’

  ‘I’m very sorry to tell you that Josh was found dead in his home this morning.’

  Mrs Ainsworth sobbed into her hand, looking at her husband who wasn’t looking back at her, but instead had fixed his attention on the floor between his feet, his face reddened with the effort of keeping in whatever reaction was rising up through him. A muffled cry broke out of him and his wife drew her arms around his shoulders, burying her face in the back of his neck.

  Zigic glanced at Ferreira and saw that she had turned away to retrieve a box of tissues from a nearby table. She placed it carefully on the arm of the sofa, as the Ainsworths talked to one another in choked undertones, saying Josh’s name, cursing whatever twist of fate had brought them to this. In the background through the open doors, the sound of a summer day continued, as if this tragedy wasn’t occurring; birdsong and laughter, the thwack and splash of somebody hitting golf balls into the water.

  Eventually Mr Ainsworth wiped his eyes across his forearm and asked Zigic how Josh had died. ‘Not those bloody stairs? I told him that cottage was a death trap.’

  ‘No, Mr Ainsworth, I’m afraid Josh was murdered.’

  His mother gasped. ‘Why? Who would want to hurt Josh? He was always such a sweet boy. He was a doctor, for God’s sake.’

  ‘It’s too early in the investigation for us to speculate,’ Zigic said, perching on the edge of a denim blue armchair, feeling more comfortable now he could return to being a detective, and slightly ashamed of himself for noticing the change. ‘We know Josh spent the evening at home with a woman. Presumably his girlfriend. Would you be able to tell us about her?’

  ‘Josh didn’t have a girlfriend,’ his mother said, reaching for a tissue and blowing her nose.

  ‘He was too young to settle down,’ Mr Ainsworth said. ‘I was always telling him that. “You’re a good-looking lad, you want to play the field.”’ His voice broke. ‘“Plenty of time for all that marriage stuff.”’

  ‘Josh’s neighbour reported seeing the same woman visiting on a regular basis. He was under the impression this was Josh’s girlfriend. Did he ever mention her to you?’

  ‘No.’ Mrs Ainsworth tugged another tissue out of the box but just held it between her fingers, stretching it slowly, until it tore up the centre. ‘I assumed he was dating but he didn’t mention anyone special. Josh always kept that sort of thing to himself. I think he enjoyed the secrecy. He was like that when he was a little boy – hiding his toys away from his brother and playing with them on his own. Once Greg found them Josh wasn’t interested any more.’

  ‘Would he have discussed his relationships with his brother?’ Ferreira asked.

  ‘Maybe.’ Mrs Ainsworth straightened sharply, grabbed her husband’s arm. ‘We need to tell Greg about this.’ She looked at Zigic. ‘You haven’t contacted him yet, have you?’

  ‘No, Mrs Ainsworth.’

  ‘I think it’ll be easier coming from us,’ she said.

  Zigic nodded. ‘Do you have a recent photo of Josh, please?’

  ‘I’ll find one.’ Mrs Ainsworth got up, shaky on her feet, and went over to a set of shelves where the family photos were lined up. Ferreira followed her and they began to speak softly, Ferreira asking who was who and saying how handsome the Ainsworth boys were, how happy Greg’s children looked, very mischievous.

  Mr Ainsworth slumped back on the sofa, his face drawn, eyes heavy. He’d aged ten years in as many minutes, and Zigic knew that some of the effect was temporary, but the man seemed to be staring into a void with the full knowledge that he wouldn’t be able to ever completely pull back from it.

  ‘Was it to do with his job?’ he asked, barely moving his lips.

  ‘We’re not sure yet,’ Zigic told him, surprised at the assumption. ‘Did Josh feel unsafe there?’

  ‘He can’t have been safe, can he? Working in a prison. With that sort of people.’

  ‘It’s an immigration removal centre,’ Zigic said. ‘The women in there aren’t criminals in the usual sense, they’ve just violated their visas.’

  ‘And what about the people they associate with?’ Ainsworth asked, fixing a beady eye on Zigic.
‘You know as well as I do, lots of them are trafficked over here by real criminals. Now those people are dangerous. That’s what you want to be looking into. Someone getting at Josh to get to one of them.’

  ‘Had Josh been approached by anyone like that?’

  ‘Josh wouldn’t tell me if he was,’ Ainsworth said, his voice thick with a peculiar blend of anger and regret. ‘I never wanted him to go and work there. All that money for university, all those bloody textbooks at three hundred quid a pop, and for what? To work somewhere like that. He could have done anything, he was so bright. Naturally gifted, he never had to work at it. He could have done research or brain surgery or anything, but he wasn’t ambitious.’

  Mr Ainsworth looked around his cavernous, double-height living room, the gargantuan sofa and armchairs, the twelve-seater dining table and the striking chandelier hanging over it, all crystal and chrome. He’d been an ambitious man, Zigic imagined. Worked hard, wanted the best for his son, couldn’t understand how intelligence wasn’t always allied to aspiration.

  ‘Did Josh mention the protest at Long Fleet to you?’ Zigic asked. ‘There’s an ongoing leaflet campaign in the village.’

  ‘I know about the protest, yes,’ Mr Ainsworth said. ‘We saw them sometimes when we went to visit Josh. Were they getting at him?’

  ‘We found some leaflets in his house, it looks like he was saving them for some reason.’

  Mr Ainsworth appeared perplexed. ‘Some people will protest anything, won’t they?’

  ‘Whoever is responsible was targeting Josh very directly.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘That he had blood on his hands.’

  Anger flared across Mr Ainsworth’s face. ‘That’s complete nonsense.’

  ‘We’re regarding it as part of a harassment campaign right now,’ Zigic said. ‘We don’t think it’s necessarily linked to his murder, but we need to keep in mind the possibility. Especially as it was obviously bothering him enough to keep the threatening material. Perhaps he mentioned pressing charges?’

  A brief shake of the head from Mr Ainsworth.

  ‘Had you seen much of Josh lately?’ Zigic asked. ‘We understand he’d been on holiday recently?’

  Another shake. ‘No, to be honest, this is the first I’m hearing of holiday time.’

  Across the room Mrs Ainsworth was slipping a photograph from a frame and handing it to Ferreira. She promised they would return it as soon as they could, thanking his mother, who stood staring at all the other images, reaching out to straighten a couple of them.

  ‘How did he die?’ Mr Ainsworth asked in an undertone.

  ‘It looked like there was a fight,’ Zigic said, reluctant to go into the painful details.

  ‘Josh never was a scrapper.’ He frowned regretfully, knocking his knuckles together. ‘I should have tried to toughen him up. I never thought he’d need it.’

  They left the couple with assurances that they would keep them updated, the offer of a family support officer declined. Zigic tried to impress the value of their presence, especially during the difficult process of identifying Josh’s body, but Mr Ainsworth waved it away and his wife didn’t object. Ferreira seemed uncomfortable with their stoicism too, offered to go along with them if they’d like, directing the suggestion more towards Mrs Ainsworth. Another polite refusal.

  In the car, pulling off the driveway, Ferreira said, ‘They don’t seem like they were very close.’

  ‘Did you tell your parents about every boyfriend you had?’ Zigic asked.

  ‘The important ones,’ she replied, but the vagueness of her tone made him doubt that.

  ‘Have they met Billy?’

  She turned away and stared out of the window. ‘I’m not sure he’s important yet.’

  But he clearly was, Zigic thought, which meant she had another reason for keeping him away from her family. Embarrassed about him or them, scared they wouldn’t get along and she’d find herself caught in the middle.

  He wondered if that was the case with Josh Ainsworth and his mystery woman. Whether there was something about her he feared his parents wouldn’t like.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By 2 p.m. the first round of information from the door to door enquiries in Long Fleet had come in. It was mostly retirees and stay-at-home parents in to speak to the officers and they had nothing to report. A few knew Ainsworth by sight, none called him a friend. No one had seen anyone suspicious hanging around the village over the weekend, just the usual walkers drawn by the nature reserve nearby. The other residents of the row of cottages on the green were all out at work, bar the neighbour Zigic had already spoken to, and all they could hope for was a phone call when they returned home this evening. Fourteen cottages tucked so close together, the odds were good, they thought.

  Ferreira had set DC Weller the task of going through recent crime reports in the village and the ones surrounding it, looking for anything that might suggest a pattern of returning offenders drawn to the frequently empty homes. There had been a spate of shed break-ins, a few thefts of vehicles, but nothing jumped out as a possibility. Ainsworth’s car was an eight-year-old Renault Clio with rust around the rims and a radio still boasting a cassette player, and his bike, which looked expensive, remained safe and sound in the small shed behind his kitchen.

  Despite the absence of his mobile phone and laptop, burglary didn’t look like a motive.

  Zigic wouldn’t rule it out, but Ferreira doubted anyone would be killed over them.

  She added the information they had to the murder board, placing it up there more to rule out the possibility than as a spur to further action.

  At the top of the board, a copy of the photograph Josh’s mother had given them showed him beaming delightedly at something off camera. He had a quirkily attractive face, with heavy brown brows and small, clever eyes, a shadow of stubble across his cheeks only broken by the thick comma of a old scar at his jawline, a souvenir from his younger brother’s hot temper and a long-gone metal coffee table. His mother had smiled sadly as she told the story, but all Ferreira could think of was the table leg that had been used to kill him.

  ‘Maybe the killer took his phone and all that to make it look like a burglary,’ DC Parr suggested, standing watching her as she recapped her pen. Inexplicably he was still wearing his jacket, despite the heat in the office, but had weakened enough to loosen his bright orange tie slightly, allowing the sweat on his neck some extra space to gather. ‘Did they nick his wallet?’

  ‘Nope, it was still at the house.’ Ferreira took a mouthful of tepid coffee from the mug on her desk. ‘Did you get in touch with the pizza delivery place?’

  Parr nodded. ‘Driver would have been wearing gloves but he’s giving us prints for elimination on the box. Couple of other staff members coming in tomorrow as well.’

  ‘You get any pushback from them on it?’

  ‘No, they were happy to cooperate,’ he said. ‘I’m as surprised as you are.’

  She made a note of it but her eye kept drifting to the part of the board where she’d stuck up images of the leaflets that Joshua Ainsworth had hoarded in his bedroom office, feeling her gut inexorably drawing her back to them.

  The box file was on her desk now, the leaflets and fliers already dusted for fingerprints, and she wasn’t entirely surprised to find that while the more professional and considered leaflets had yielded prints, those angry black-and-white fliers showed only Ainsworth’s. Whoever produced them had been scrupulous when they handled them, wore gloves to keep their identity hidden. Meaning they were either in the system already or paranoid about protecting themselves from charges of harassment down the line.

  Jenkins had managed to lift DNA samples from two fliers, though, and Ferreira was praying it wasn’t just a matter of Ainsworth sneezing while holding them.

  She tucked in her earbuds and went back to the briefing she was compiling on Long Fleet Immigration Removal Centre. Zigic had suggested putting a package together so they could be confi
dent that the whole team was up to speed on what was happening there, giving them some background on the protest and the ongoing harassment campaign. She’d started with the basics, intending to keep things brief – Long Fleet Immigration Removal Centre opened in 2008 and held up to 300 women and children at any time, awaiting decisions on their asylum status or deportation. It employed 150 staff, had processed 35,000 cases to date – but quickly she realised more was needed than the Wikipedia version.

  It was a time-consuming job to undertake during the first, vital hours of a murder investigation and the fact that Zigic had insisted she do it now suggested he considered it a significant avenue of enquiry.

  They’d already checked out the women they’d spoken to outside Long Fleet’s gates and they all came back clean. No criminal activity in any of their histories, at least none that had escalated to the point of police involvement, but he’d scented something there and she agreed. The serious agitators, the dangerous kind, wouldn’t be hanging around the gates with placards, she suspected. They wouldn’t be satisfied with peaceful protest.

  She’d found the group behind the leaflet campaign quickly enough – Asylum Assist’s website was printed on the back pages of each sheet, their Twitter handles and the Facebook group they’d launched to try and disseminate their message of lobbying local politicians and press, anyone who might be able to raise the profile of the cause and that of the women inside Long Fleet.

  The website contained interviews with released women and testimonies from those still inside passed to their family members and friends or their legal representatives. All told tales of lives upended, of jobs and homes lost when they were taken in, of raids in the middle of the night. One woman had been arrested when she was a witness to a street robbery of a pensioner; she’d gone to help and the attending PC had reported her to immigration officers. Several had been caught as they went to A & E for emergency treatment, their overstayed visas ensuring that they were treated by Josh Ainsworth and the rest of the medical team in Long Fleet instead of their local NHS hospital.