Between Two Evils

by Eva Dolan

  ‘It’s far too early to speculate,’ he said, as he brought out his phone and opened the photograph of the black-and-white flier Josh Ainsworth had been sent. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  Ruth peered at the screen and then sat back in her chair. ‘Not that one exactly but I’ve been sent similar ones. I didn’t know Josh was getting them too.’

  ‘He never mentioned it?’ She shook her head. ‘We found a large collection. It seems like he was saving them for some reason. Did he ever complain about being bothered by the protestors?’

  ‘No. We all try not to interact with them, to be honest with you. It’s not worth the hassle, is it?’ Ruth thrust out her bottom lip for a second. ‘They can be quite verbal when you’re coming and going though. I’d be happier if they were moved on but they have the right to be there, I suppose. Not much we can do about it.’

  Zigic found the Paggetts’ latest mugshots and showed them to Ruth Garner. ‘These two? Are they verbal?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you who’s doing the shouting,’ she said, still looking at the images. ‘I keep my head down and get past them as quick as I can.’

  ‘Have these two ever approached you beyond work?’

  ‘They’ve never come up to me, but I’ve seen them in the village pub a few times.’ She pushed his phone back across the table. ‘I was a bit nervous when I saw them, in case they started having a go at me while I was with my family. But they were no trouble to be fair to them, they just sat there and ate their dinner.’ She tapped the table. ‘Actually, now that you mention it, I did see them near my house awhile ago too. There’s a public footpath at the end of my garden – it’s a lovely walk, I see quite a lot of hikers and walking groups going by at the weekends – but it was a bit of a shock seeing them there.’ Ruth frowned. ‘Should I be worried about them?’

  ‘You should be vigilant, Ms Garner, but I don’t think you need to be particularly concerned about them.’ Zigic slipped his phone away again, thinking of the Paggetts hanging around outside Josh Ainsworth’s house, walking along the back of Ruth Garner’s place. Tried to think of an innocent explanation but couldn’t come up with one he even half believed.

  ‘How did Josh get along with the other members of staff?’ Ferreira asked.

  ‘Fine.’ Ruth Garner shrugged, a little too casually. ‘We don’t have a huge amount of contact with the other staff in the medical bay. Just the guards when they bring someone in for treatment. We’re quite self-contained.’

  ‘But Josh knew enough about the wider staff to know when they were abusing inmates,’ Ferreira reminded her. ‘Did you know what was happening, Ruth?’

  Ruth let out a murmur pitched somewhere between confusion and discomfort. A trapped animal sound.

  ‘You were working here then,’ Ferreira said. ‘You must have known.’

  Zigic could see the thoughts passing behind Ruth’s eyes. Was she remembering events she didn’t want to discuss or trying to decide if they were important enough to defy her apparently iron-clad NDA?

  ‘Dr Sutherland told us things got very nasty,’ Ferreira said, dropping her voice, so Ruth would understand that she knew the risks of speaking openly, too.

  ‘It was a long time ago.’ Ruth toyed nervously with her ID badge. ‘Mr Hammond took a zero tolerance approach when he arrived. He sacked most of the guards, brought in more women to do the job. This isn’t the same place it was back then. The women are safe now.’

  Ferreira straightened in the chair next to him. ‘Hammond sacked these guards based on your testimony?’

  ‘My testimony, yes,’ she said slowly. ‘And Josh’s and Patrick’s, we’d all seen things happening we knew were wrong. We had to speak out.’

  ‘And now Josh is dead,’ Ferreira said and let the weight of the words hang for a few seconds. ‘If Josh’s death has anything to do with those reports, then you could be in danger as well. You need to tell us who the guards were.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, her voice cracking.

  Ferreira leaned across the table. ‘Josh was your friend,’ she said fiercely. ‘You owe it to him to help us.’

  Under the table Zigic nudged her leg, signalling for her to rein it in.

  ‘He died a horrible death.’

  Again he nudged her but all she did was shift away from him slightly in her chair.

  ‘I can’t give you the names,’ Ruth said, virtually mouthing the words. ‘Please, I can’t afford to lose this job.’

  ‘What can you give us?’ Ferreira asked, desperation edging into her voice. ‘We need to speak to these people.’

  The door opened and Field came in. A palpable relief washed over Ruth Garner, her face lifting immediately, her shoulders easing down from around her ears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, with a regretful little shrug and a show of her upturned palms. ‘I didn’t see Josh outside of work. He has a brother, maybe he could tell you more about his social life.’

  Ferreira snapped her notebook closed and Zigic stood up.

  ‘Well, thank you anyway,’ he said tersely. ‘We appreciate your taking time out to talk to us.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A security guard escorted them out to their car and Zigic half listened as Ferreira tried to engage him in conversation, getting nowhere. The man had a dull, dead-eyed look, and a neck as thick as Zigic’s thigh. Seemed the type who would take his orders without deviation.

  ‘Well, it’s immaterial now, isn’t it?’ Ferreira said, with grim satisfaction, when they were back in their car.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Whether Josh Ainsworth was the anonymous whistle-blower from the film or not. We know he was informing the governor about his colleagues’ behaviour, and my guess is they knew he was the one doing the informing that got them sacked.’

  ‘Sutherland and Ruth Garner were equally responsible,’ Zigic reminded her.

  ‘Ainsworth cost people their jobs,’ she said, animated now, hands turning in the air. ‘He probably cost them their relationships too because how do you explain that to your other half?’ She pointed at him. ‘That is a very good motive for murder.’

  ‘But we don’t have any suspects,’ he said, still half hoping this line of enquiry would fizzle out. He’d driven in through the gate, praying they would leave with nothing, desperate not to have a political hot potato in his hands.

  Now it was becoming increasingly likely that Joshua Ainsworth’s murder had something to do with his job and the regime change at Long Fleet. Whether the blame lay with the protestors harassing him or one of these former colleagues who’d be lining up to pay him back for telling the truth about them, he didn’t know.

  There were still other possibilities, he reassured himself.

  Like the woman who’d been at Josh Ainsworth’s house the night he died. She hadn’t come forward as a witness or to rule herself out of enquiries, as he’d requested during yesterday’s public appeal.

  Or the ex-girlfriend his brother mentioned.

  Or maybe it wasn’t this job that had brought a killer to his door, maybe something had happened at the private hospital where he did his GP shifts. A symptom wrongly interpreted, a misdiagnosis, an avoidable death …

  There were plenty of less politically sensitive possibilities.

  ‘You think if we approach Sutherland and Garner off-site we’ll get any further?’ Ferreira asked, dragging his thoughts back through Long Fleet’s gates.

  ‘You saw how scared they are,’ Zigic said. ‘Ruth Garner was downright terrified.’

  Ferreira swore. ‘Two more minutes and we’d have got a name out of her.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t going to do that,’ Zigic said, remembering the relief on Garner’s face when the door opened and saved her from herself. ‘She said more than she meant to. But it’s a start.’

  ‘So we’re going to pursue this?’ Ferreira said.

  ‘Do you actually need me to say it?’ She nodded. ‘Yes, we’re going to pursue this. But you need to accept that it’
s going to be a slog because Hammond won’t make this easy for us.’

  Ferreira waved the warning away. ‘We don’t need him.’

  Zigic slowed as he passed through a village. The one Ferreira had grown up in. She scrunched down in her seat and he decided to look for a different route into Long Fleet next time.

  Did she know she was doing it? he wondered. He knew she’d had a tough time of it growing up, but he’d never really thought about how visceral the memories still were for her. Never considered the possibility that she hadn’t fully dealt with the emotional fallout. He’d always assumed her anger was a coping mechanism. Didn’t regard it as healthy, but thought it must be working or why would she hold on to it so closely?

  ‘Are you scared?’ she asked.

  ‘What of?’

  ‘What’s going to happen now?’ she said. ‘To your family. If we hard Brexit. If they might get deported.’

  He glanced over at her. Saw how tightly she held herself.

  ‘You’re really worried about getting sent back to Portugal?’

  ‘Of course I am.’ She turned away, stared out of the window. ‘You go to a place like Long Fleet, you have to see how insecure we are here. None of those women expected to end up there. Half of them probably believed they were here legally, then suddenly their paperwork isn’t quite right or they get a speeding fine, and there’s a knock on the door and bang, they’re locked up, looking at getting deported over nothing.’

  ‘I really don’t think it’s going to come to that.’

  She made a derisive sound. ‘Have you been reading the news at all?’

  Zigic didn’t answer, kept his eyes on the road, accelerated to overtake a slow-moving lorry. He didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to even think about it. He wasn’t reading the news. Wasn’t watching it either. Tuned out every conversation about Brexit he heard for the sake of his stress level and his sanity.

  ‘Your grandparents were asylum seekers, right?’ she asked. ‘What’s going to happen to your grandmother if things go bad?’

  ‘She’s technically stateless,’ he told her. ‘I don’t think she can be deported. There’s no country there to send her back to any more.’

  Ferreira remained tactfully silent, but he could guess what she was thinking because he’d thought it himself already. That that might not matter, if the mood of the country kept shifting, if the government decided to play hardball. His ninety-year-old grandmother being thrown out of the country she’d called home for seven decades, returned to wherever was closest to the place her bombed-out-of-existence village once stood.

  ‘You won’t get deported, Mel,’ he said finally.

  ‘Yeah? They’re deporting doctors and scientists. So I really doubt that being a copper is going to be much help.’ She sighed. ‘Did you ever think you’d have to consider shit like this?’

  He didn’t answer because it was a question that didn’t seem to need a reply, but the longer they drove on in silence, the more difficult it became not to speak.

  ‘Anna wants to change the boys’ names,’ he said.

  Ferreira twisted fast in her seat. ‘What? Why the hell would she want that?’

  ‘In fairness it was Milan who suggested it,’ he said, feeling immediately guilty for putting Anna in a bad light. ‘Are you seriously going to tell me you didn’t wish you had an English name when you were at school?’ he asked. ‘Because I sure as hell thought about it. You wouldn’t believe how difficult Dushan is to pronounce. Apparently.’

  ‘Did something happen?’ she asked. ‘With your kids?’

  ‘The last week of term, this girl and her little gang … attacked Milan. They gave it all the usual shit about him being a dirty Pole because they’re ten and they think all Europeans are Poles. They pulled a handful of his hair out.’

  ‘Fucking bitches,’ she spat. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What could we do?’ he asked, feeling the hopelessness afresh. ‘They’re kids.’

  ‘Batter their parents? That’s where they got it from.’

  ‘The main girl’s parents were totally mortified,’ he said, remembering their expressions of nauseated shock. ‘They blamed the grandparents, they’d been babysitting a lot lately and they were coming out with shit like that all the time.’

  ‘Probably don’t leave the kid with them then,’ she muttered.

  ‘So Milan thinks if he has an English name, it won’t happen again.’

  Ferreira shook her head. ‘Shit, Ziggy. You can’t let him do that. If he changes his name those bastards win. It’ll be like erasing his whole history.’

  ‘I know,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Anna must get that.’

  ‘She’s scared for them. Milan goes up to secondary school in September and she’s convinced it’ll be even worse there.’

  ‘She’s probably right,’ Ferreira admitted. ‘The reported incidents in schools have gone through the roof the last few months.’ She winced. ‘But their names. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You could kill the girls who attacked him?’

  Zigic laughed. ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘It was always my plan B at school,’ she said, and he wasn’t entirely sure it was a joke.

  Was this what he was condemning his children to? A lifetime of scars, deep and wide and never fully healing, of constant self-defence in the face of offhand comments and dirty looks.

  Did he want his kids to end up carrying the burden of rage Mel couldn’t rid herself of?

  Milan would take it worst, he knew. He took everything to heart, nurtured his pains in private, shielded them for days or weeks before he and Anna managed to coax them out into the open. Stefan – he was a fighter, but that was no comfort. Fighters were only tough until they met someone tougher. And what about Emily? Too young to know what was going on, although he was sure she was picking up on the frosty mood between her parents already, saw how watchful she had become, although her language skills were still all a babble.

  ‘There must be a better way to deal with it,’ Ferreira said.

  For a second he considered telling her Anna’s plan but stopped himself. Because what if Mel agreed with her? If the two most important women in his life both told him he was wrong, then what option would he have but to give in?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  They found Josh Ainsworth’s ex-girlfriend on the website of the private hospital in Peterborough where he did occasional weekend shifts. She was listed as a head and neck consultant, specialising in reconstruction surgeries after major trauma and disease. She was highly regarded, had published multiple papers and developed a new procedure for rebuilding damaged ears.

  ‘Portia Collingwood.’ Ferreira turned her phone towards Zigic as he unbuckled his seatbelt.

  It was a professional shot, showed a fine-boned, pale-skinned woman with auburn hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. She wore a pin-tucked blue shirt that looked vaguely puritan to Ferreira. She thought about how Josh’s brother had described her – ‘a wild woman’ – and wondered if that was true or just boy talk.

  ‘Is she what you were expecting?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Zigic said. ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘She doesn’t look like the Domino’s and quickie type to me.’

  ‘Come on, Mel. It’s her work photo. What do you look like on the station website?’

  ‘Like a kick-ass bitch, obviously.’

  He shook his head at her. ‘And yet look at you now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This,’ he gestured towards her blouse. ‘The corporate ice queen in a Scandi thriller get-up.’

  ‘I like nice clothes,’ she said sternly, but she knew what he meant and wondered how long he’d been thinking it without saying anything.

  She had changed her appearance since they’d moved into CID. The skinny jeans and baggy jumpers she’d worn in Hate Crimes felt wrong suddenly, her leather jackets and parkas somehow unprofe
ssional. They were still the right clothes for out on the street but in the office, surrounded by a much larger team who all plumped for suits, that was where she’d felt out of place.

  ‘You do look smart,’ Zigic said, in the tentative voice of someone immediately regretting an ill-conceived attempt at humour.

  ‘I’m more comfortable like this,’ she told him.

  ‘Yeah, you want to be comfortable at work.’ He looked down at his jeans and the white cotton shirt she guessed he’d picked because they were going into Long Fleet today and thought he should smarten up. ‘I should probably wear my suits more.’

  ‘You’ve made this conversation weird,’ Ferreira told him and got out of the car.

  The hospital sat in a slight hollow, surrounded by greenery, carefully tended flower beds and a broad arc of grass, and beyond it a dense stand of trees, which extended for acres into open countryside. It was at the edge of Peterborough but felt entirely removed from it, except for the faint hum of the traffic on Bretton parkway.

  As they walked in, entering a reception area that wouldn’t have looked amiss in a boutique hotel, with a main desk where the staff all wore smiles and relaxed airs, Ferreira thought how jarring the transition must have been for Ainsworth; Long Fleet during the week, this place on the weekends. Privilege to penitentiary from shift to shift. Wouldn’t it have been tempting to stay here?

  They waited behind people paying bills and making appointments and when they finally got to the front of the queue, the man behind the desk told them they would have to speak to someone in HR. He gave them directions and said he’d call ahead for them.

  Laura from HR met them, already showing signs of grief, her eyes puffy and her nose pink through her make-up.

  ‘Are you here about Josh?’ she asked and didn’t wait for a reply. ‘We’re all in shock. I’m sorry. You just don’t expect something like that to happen to someone you know.’

  They followed her into her office and sat down as she searched her desk for the box of tissues that had somehow ended up on the windowsill behind her, next to a line of succulents dusted in glitter and a framed photograph of her and a group of friends on what looked a pretty sedate hen party.