Between Two Evils

by Eva Dolan

  Billy had raised the option of her moving in with him while they were away, but it felt too soon.

  Their ‘relationship’ had been an on-and-off thing, way more off than on, for almost a decade. Never serious or exclusive, never more than a series of spur-of-the-moment encounters based entirely on physical attraction. She couldn’t deny the change that had occurred in the last eighteen months though, even if she wasn’t quite ready to discuss it properly with him or make that one big step he was pushing her towards.

  She shook the thought away, put a pot of espresso on the hob and ate a few handfuls of granola from the jar while she waited for the coffee to come bubbling up, remembering that last night in the bar on the beach. The pair of them drunkenly stringing along an ageing Dutch couple who they were sure wanted to swap partners for the night. Her pretending fascination at the husband’s stories of spearfishing and skydiving, distracted by his grey chest hair and very blue eyes, while Billy flattered and flirted with the wife in a voice too low for her to hear. Another few drinks and they might have talked themselves into it. They were an attractive couple and now that she thought about it, the husband wasn’t much older than Billy anyway, had a good, hard body and a filthy look.

  When the coffee was ready she took it into the living room, put on some music and opened her laptop, throwing back one shot while it booted up and pouring a second as she typed ‘Joshua Ainsworth’ into Google.

  It wasn’t a common name but she scrolled through a few people who weren’t her dead man: a professional photographer and a long-deceased soldier, people who blinked in and out of their own online presence.

  On Facebook she found an account Josh had started in his teens but not touched since he graduated from med school. It was tame stuff: lots of photographs of bikes and off-road rides, views from fell paths and moments where he stopped to capture the dappled sunshine hitting forest trails.

  She kept scrolling, until she got back to his first post, a shot of the vaulted metal ceiling of a train station, taken from an elevated walkway.

  ‘Okay, let’s do this.’

  The message of a man psyching himself up to suicide, she thought darkly. But the dates were right for it to be him heading off to university.

  His friend list was just under three hundred people and she wondered at how easy it was not to notice his lack of activity for the last fifteen years. If anyone had reached out to him when he fell silent.

  As she clicked onto the friend list, a moth settled at the centre of her screen, the backlight glowing through its delicately patterned wings. It had fallen dark outside without her noticing.

  She got up and went to close the windows, wondering what was keeping Billy so long at the station. In the bedroom she paused to grab her mobile, found a message two hours old, saying he was delayed but was on his way. She texted him as she tugged on the bedroom window, stopped without knowing why she was doing it and looked up.

  Across the street, half hidden in a recessed doorway, she saw a figure turned towards her. Couldn’t see his face but could feel him staring at her.

  As she stepped back, he stepped forward into the light spilling from a window above him.

  Lee Walton.

  For a second she couldn’t move. Part of her wanted to turn the light off and make herself invisible to him, but part thought she should go down there and challenge him. Her pulse was beating in her neck, eyes wide and unblinking, as she waited to see what he would do.

  What felt like an eternity passed and she was sure she could see the expression in his eyes, fierce and flat at the same time, that dead intensity she remembered from the interview room, the moment when she had been toe to toe with him and felt herself being flayed down to the bone.

  A car came around the corner, breaking her gaze, and she registered the shape and sheen of Billy’s Audi turning into the space under the building.

  Now Walton was moving away into the city centre, hands in pockets, taking his time. Heading for the isolated grey tunnel next to Barclays bank and whatever woman was unlucky enough to be walking home alone at half past nine on a quiet Tuesday night.

  She flicked the light switch with shaking fingers.

  Had Billy seen him?

  He must have. He drove right past him. Four or five metres away.

  And if he hadn’t and she told him about it, what was he going to do? Tear off after him and hand him a caution for loitering?

  She heard the front door slam home hard and knew that the questions were moot, that he’d seen Walton.

  The Billy she’d left at the station was not the one in front of her. His face was ashen under his tan, hair pulled about at strange angles, while a disconcerting wildness sent his eyes wandering around the flat. He threw his jacket down onto the sofa, the flutter of a newspaper underneath it.

  ‘You want a drink?’ he asked. ‘I need a drink.’

  She followed him into the kitchen, pulling down the blinds as he poured a hefty slug of rum into a glass and sank it.

  ‘Sadie Ryan,’ he said. ‘You remember her?’

  Ferreira nodded; the moon-faced, black-haired young woman Lee Walton had dragged off the path on Orton Mere and raped. Who Colleen Murray gently coaxed into bringing charges, only to see her refuse to cooperate mere days after making her official statement, scared off by a visit from Walton.

  ‘She took an overdose,’ he said.

  ‘Shit. Is she okay? What happened?’

  ‘Walton was back on his manor this morning. Someone saw him, sent her a photo. All kicks off on Facebook, people saying she was lying about being raped, that she must have been if he’s out.’ Tension wrinkled his forehead and he took another drink to try and wash it away. ‘Her mum got home from work tonight and found her passed out in her bed, fucking vodka and Tramadol cocktail. She called me from A & E.’ He rubbed his face, stared into nothing. ‘She’s going to pull through but her mum’s terrified she’ll try again and she won’t find her in time. And, you know, she’s going to, isn’t she?’

  Ferreira slipped her arms around him, held on to him, feeling his chest swell against hers with each breath he took. Deep ones, slow ones, trying to calm himself but failing. He buried his face in her neck and she stroked the back of his head, saying the usual words they brought out in these situations.

  It didn’t work with another copper though. He’d said them, too. Knew how hollow they were.

  ‘We’ve got to do something about him,’ he said, drawing back slightly from her, arms still locked around her waist.

  ‘We are doing something,’ Ferreira said firmly. ‘Bobby’s working on it.’

  ‘You didn’t see that girl,’ he groaned. ‘She’s looking at a fifty–fifty chance of brain damage. Her mum’s in fucking bits. Bobby going through the files isn’t anything like enough. Col was right, we can’t just wait around for him to do it again.’

  ‘What can we do?’ she asked. ‘Seriously? We don’t have a lot of options here.’

  He looked helpless. ‘Fucking something.’

  She said nothing because there was no answer now, just like there hadn’t been this morning in his office. She guided him into the living room and sat him down, moving his jacket and the newspaper underneath it.

  The front page held a splash on prisoner releases imminent in the city as a result of the compromised forensic results. She scanned it quickly: no mention of Walton, but plenty about the failings of the police to keep people safe, about the abuses of justice, innocent individuals sent down on corrupted evidence.

  ‘They don’t mention him,’ she said.

  ‘Page four,’ he said wearily.

  She turned to it, straight into a photograph of Walton looking like a model citizen with his girlfriend and son. An old photograph that didn’t show the marks on the girlfriend’s arms, which Ferreira had seen when she interviewed her or the shadow of trauma visible behind her son’s eyes.

  Miscarriage of justice, the headline said.

  ‘“I’m scared for my saf
ety,”’ Billy quoted, spitting out the words. ‘“The police have branded me a predator and even being exonerated by the courts won’t clean away that stain. There are scary people out there who aren’t above vigilante justice.”’

  Ferreira swore softly, feeling the anger rising in her chest.

  ‘Anything we do now, we’ll be accused of harassment,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  A humourless smile twisted his mouth. ‘Oh, I do know that. Because I called the boss from A & E and he told me in no uncertain terms that we’re to steer clear of Walton.’

  Ferreira dropped, stunned, onto the sofa next to him. ‘Why would he say that?’

  ‘There’s legal action in the offing.’ He shook his head, the disbelief written across his face. ‘Fucked-up system, yeah? Walton is suing for false imprisonment.’

  ‘But he won’t get anywhere.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  She stared at the photograph.

  ‘So, what does that mean for the investigation?’

  ‘Nothing, we have to keep going,’ he said, determination squaring his shoulders, even though she could hear the hesitancy in his voice. ‘We don’t need to talk to Walton to dig something up on him.’

  Instinctively she glanced away, towards the window, thanking the God she didn’t believe in that he hadn’t seen Walton on the street outside. The mood he was in he might have beaten him to death right there on the pavement. Or more likely, found himself laid out.

  One thing she knew for certain, she couldn’t tell him what she’d seen.

  DAY TWO

  WEDNESDAY AUGUST 8TH

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Zigic called the morning briefing for eight, evidently wanting to get a jump on the case. He didn’t look as perky today, Ferreira thought, looked like he’d hardly slept in fact. His hooded green eyes were deeply shadowed and drooping, his beard unkempt, cheeks slack above it. Maybe it was only the sweltering heat wilting him, but the careless way he’d dressed this morning and the distracted approach he took to the coffee machine, spilling half a scalding cup over his hand, suggested there was something bigger at work in his life.

  Or perhaps he was just as rattled by Walton’s release as Billy.

  She watched from her desk as the rest of the team arrived, checking her emails and rolling a cigarette she was already desperate to get lit. Parr was eating a two-bag breakfast he’d picked up from Greggs, today’s sunflower-yellow tie placed carefully over his right shoulder as he tucked into an eclair, his chin thrust forward as he took delicate bites to preserve the parts of his shirt the double-napkin arrangement didn’t cover. In the corner of the room the new kids, Keri Bloom and Rob Weller, were watching and quietly mocking him.

  They seemed ridiculously young to Ferreira, almost children. Maybe it was because they’d known each other so long, through school together, then training, then uniform and now, sharing a desk and the same stupid in-jokes they should have grown out of.

  She spun slowly in her chair to see what was going on with Adams and DS Colleen Murray, who had already been sequestered in his office when Ferreira arrived. He’d left her bed at first light, said he was going home to change, even though he kept clothes at her place. She suspected he’d gone back to the hospital to check on Sadie Ryan.

  She’d spent half the night awake, thinking about Walton and what he wanted: was it an attempt at intimidation or something more serious? There was no guarantee she’d see him out there, only luck that she did, and as the dark hours ticked by, she started to realise that whatever he was planning, it must go further than standing around in doorways.

  By the time she’d dozed and dithered and worried, she was ready to tell Billy about it. But she woke to find his side of the bed empty and now, seeing how agitated he was, pacing around his desk while he talked to Murray, she began to weigh up again the cost of telling him. What he could achieve against how much trouble he could get himself in.

  They emerged from the office, Murray taking her seat at the desk opposite Ferreira’s, Adams staying at the back of the room, leaning against the wall with his arms folded and his face set hard, no more than an observer in Zigic’s case.

  When she and Zigic had moved back to CID, Ferreira was worried Adams would pull rank over Zigic just to wind him up, not considering how it might make her position between them uncomfortable. They’d had a fractious relationship before the establishment of the Hate Crimes unit separated them – like two troublesome schoolboys sent to opposite corners of the classroom by the teacher. But so far Adams was using his chief inspector powers lightly and Ferreira was quietly grateful for it. Would have hated having to pick sides.

  ‘Okay, everyone, let’s get started.’ Zigic was standing at the board, visibly pulled together now and ready to go. He tapped the photograph with his knuckle. ‘Joshua Ainsworth, thirty-four years old. Single, lived alone in Long Fleet. Doctor at the immigration removal centre in his village. Murdered sometime on Saturday evening after an altercation in his home. Today we’re going to fill in the blanks in this man’s life.’

  Quickly he précised the progress they’d made yesterday and outlined the new avenues of enquiry it had opened up – making sure everyone understood how important it was to pursue these lines while they were hot. He divvied up the day’s tasks, took the few questions that followed, got his nods and ‘yes, sir’s, then clapped his hands together.

  ‘Crack on then.’ He gestured at Ferreira. ‘Mel, let’s go.’

  Downstairs she lit up and dawdled the short distance to his car, taking deep draws because she couldn’t smoke once she was inside. Wahlia arrived as she was scrubbing out the butt, late and dropped off in a strange vehicle.

  ‘That’ll be the fiancée, then,’ she said, catching a flash of platinum hair and big sunglasses before the SUV pulled away.

  She got into the car and waited as Zigic shared a quick conversation, personal-looking rather than professional with Bobby, ending with a slap on the shoulder. Wahlia put a hand up to her before he went inside and she waved back, thinking how distant he felt to her now.

  That was what bugged her about Bloom and Weller, she realised uncomfortably. They were just like she and Bobby used to be. And she couldn’t pinpoint any one moment when they stopped being like that. Could blame it on the move from Hate Crimes, when they were no longer sharing a desk and shit-talking each other all day. Or on things getting serious between her and Adams, keeping her home in the evenings like an old married woman. But if she was honest with herself it started before that. Fewer nights out together, tickets for gigs bought and not used, jokes misfiring. She couldn’t even blame his new woman because their friendship had survived numerous partners in the past and there was no reason this one should be any different.

  Except that he was getting ready to marry her, Ferreira reminded herself.

  Maybe it was just a natural ending. It didn’t feel natural though.

  She dragged her attention back to the moment, seeing that they were almost at the village.

  In the distance Long Fleet Immigration Removal Centre sprawled squatly against the horizon. Sections were shielded by dense screen planting, which only drew more attention to the spread of the place, and let anyone driving by know that it was somewhere that should be hidden. As the road looped around she saw the red-brick and grey-clad buildings clustered at its centre, the site’s former incarnation as an RAF base clear from the utilitarian architecture. A few niceties had been added: brightly planted flower beds and a vegetable patch ostentatiously located within easy view of the road.

  The perimeter was cordoned off by dark green security fencing, solid up to three metres high and then more mesh, topped with spikes. The panels had been sprayed with the names of women, presumably inmates, and entreaties to free them underneath with the dates of their deaths sprayed in different-coloured paint.

  ‘I watched that documentary you sent over,’ Zigic said. ‘Didn’t make for a good night’s sleep.’

/>   She’d found it late yesterday evening, after Billy collapsed exhausted on the sofa and she found she couldn’t sleep. Restless and over-caffeinated she went back to her laptop and starting looking more thoroughly into Asylum Assist, searching for some clue left behind by Ruby Garrick or the Paggetts.

  The documentary was barely fifteen minutes long, more of a short film, shot inside Long Fleet with a hidden camera, with the images often juddery and erratic. It had been put together by Asylum Assist, voiced over by Ruby Garrick, and it struck Ferreira as odd that she hadn’t mentioned it during the interview.

  Whoever was wearing the camera had access everywhere, from the women’s small grey cells where there was scant trace of personal items or softening touches, to the kitchen where they worked, cooking for each other, and the facilities they cleaned for a pound a day. The hallways all looked the same, white walls and the ceilings too low and the lights blue-tinged, the doors not quite prison-like but unmistakably penal, especially when it came to who had control over them. The camera’s bearer had stood behind guards opening those doors onto women sleeping or dressing, who scrambled to cover themselves but never quickly enough. They had sat in the staff rec area and captured the dehumanising language they used about the women, the racist nicknames they gave them and the impressions they tossed between themselves to vicious laughter.

  The voice of the man wearing the camera had been obscured in the edit but it was definitely a man. He spoke infrequently, only when necessary, and Ferreira had wondered while she watched if that was because he had nothing left to say or if he wanted to minimise his chances of being identified when it went public.