by Eva Dolan
Mrs Darby wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist.
‘All we’re asking is that you think about this for us,’ Zigic said. ‘If there’s anything you can tell us about Walton, anything you didn’t mention to the original investigation, it could make all the difference.’
He held out a card to her but she just stared at it.
‘Neal Cooper murdered Tessa,’ she said firmly. ‘He confessed and I believe him. You weren’t there. You don’t know what kind of boy he was.’ She glared at Adams. ‘I don’t even know who you are. If you come near me again, I’ll be making a formal complaint of harassment against you.’
Wendy Darby stooped to pick up her broom and walked away from them.
Zigic watched her go, seeing a woman moving at speed because she didn’t know how long she had before she was going to break down completely. And he thought of how quickly they had upended her life, shredded whatever tenuous acceptance she’d come to, ripping the old wounds open again.
He trudged back to his car, relieved that Adams had finally worked out how to keep his mouth shut for a couple of minutes. Zigic wanted to blame him for what had happened but they’d both done it, decided, without openly discussing it, that the ends justified the means.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The satnav directed Ferreira through central Cambridge and down a series of residential streets until she entered a 1970s housing estate of neat detached properties, all two windows wide and standing a car’s depth back from the path. Their driveways were mostly empty at this time of the afternoon, but somebody was home at the last known address they had for Nadia Afua Baidoo.
A fifty-something woman with a lot of grey-threaded black hair piled on top of her head answered the door. She wore an oversized T-shirt with a sequinned French slogan and shorts she’d cut down from a pair of jeans.
She eyed them suspiciously and didn’t relax at the sight of their warrant cards as Ferreira made the introductions. She seemed reluctant to even give her name.
‘We’re looking for Nadia Baidoo,’ Ferreira said. ‘Does she live here?’
‘I should think you people have a better idea than me where she is.’
‘Please, Mrs Loewe, Nadia isn’t in any trouble. We just need to speak to her.’
‘About a crime?’
‘She isn’t a suspect,’ Ferreira reassured her. ‘Just a potential witness. She was released from an immigration removal centre a few weeks ago and nobody seems to know where she is now. As you can imagine, she’s in a vulnerable position and we’d like to be sure that she’s okay.’
Deborah Loewe put a shrewd eye on her. ‘Well, which is it? You want to question her or you’re concerned about her safety?’
‘The two things are linked,’ Ferreira said, seeing that the white lie had pricked Loewe. ‘It’s in relation to a murder investigation. Do you think we could come in, please?’
The woman directed Ferreira and Murray through the house to a boiling-hot kitchen overlooking a back garden strung with three lines of washing, sheets limp where they hung. The sliding doors were open but the breeze was so light it barely stirred the paperwork scattered across the small glass table – a series of sketches which looked like logo designs. There was a strong smell of weed but Loewe made no attempt to hide the ashtray it was coming from or the grinder that had prepared it.
They sat down at the table.
‘When did you last see Nadia?’ Ferreira asked.
‘I haven’t seen her since last summer,’ she said. ‘June time. She went out to work as usual in the morning, but she didn’t come back. I started to get worried and called the restaurant. They were very cagey about it, insisted they couldn’t tell me anything because I wasn’t Nadia’s family. So I went down there and made a bit of fuss.’ She smiled at the memory of it, reaching for a pack of cigarettes. ‘Finally, the manager admitted that they’d had an immigration raid and Nadia had been taken away.’ She unpeeled the wrapper. ‘But she’s been released, obviously. Which rather begs the question of why she was taken in in the first place.’
There was an accusatory note in her voice and Ferreira felt the sting of it, hating that it was being directed at her rather than the people responsible.
‘Nadia was given leave to remain in the country,’ she explained. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say any more than that. She was released to a hostel in Peterborough but she only stayed a few days before telling them she was coming back to Cambridge. We were hoping she might have come here. Does she have any family she might have gone to?’
Loewe shook her head. ‘It was just Nadia and her mother. But her mum died a couple of years ago. The rest of Nadia’s family are back in Ghana.’
They knew she hadn’t gone back there, no activity on her passport.
‘Does she have any family over here?’ Murray asked.
‘From what I know of Nadia’s family situation, I doubt very much that she’d make contact with any of them.’ Loewe finally lit her cigarette. ‘You do know why Nadia and her mum came to England?’
Ferreira shook her head.
‘Nadia’s mum – Lola – was gay. Which is not a good thing to be in Ghana. Especially when you’re married to an abusive piece of shit.’
‘She was given asylum because he was violent?’
‘Violent hardly covers it,’ Loewe said bitterly. ‘One day he came home from work early and found Lola with her girlfriend. Not in bed, not really doing anything. They were just together in her kitchen and he put two and two together and dragged Lola out into the street and beat her into a coma.’
Ferreira swore. Murray shook her head angrily.
‘As soon as she’d recovered well enough to walk, Lola grabbed Nadia and got on a plane. Luckily she’d been tucking some money away or she’d have been stuck there with him, and God alone knows what would have happened then.’ She took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘Lola was given asylum on the grounds that her life would be in jeopardy if she returned. Nadia was here as a dependant.’
‘But then she turned eighteen,’ Ferreira said, seeing it all click together. ‘And she wasn’t a dependant any more so they were going to send her back.’
‘That’s what I presumed. Nadia wasn’t facing the same danger as Lola was so there was no reason to let her stay here.’ Loewe’s mouth twisted in disgust. ‘Except for the fact that she’d spent most of her life here and she was a good student and a hard worker. And that she’d been recently bereaved. None of that counted for anything.’
‘Maybe that’s why they let her stay,’ Murray suggested, more to Ferreira than to Loewe.
‘What happened to Lola?’ Ferreira asked.
‘Cancer,’ she spat. ‘She was dead within six weeks of them finding it.’
‘That must have been hard on Nadia,’ Murray said sympathetically.
Loewe sighed heavily. ‘It pretty much obliterated her. Coming out of nowhere like that and then progressing so fast. She didn’t have any time to adjust and she was trying so hard to stay strong and upbeat for Lola that when … the end came, it was like there was nothing left of Nadia.’
‘They were close then?’
‘They were everything to each other,’ Loewe said sadly. ‘Nadia kept it together long enough to get through the funeral and then she collapsed. We got home and she crawled into bed and she didn’t get up for months. Barely ate, I had to beg her to drink so she wouldn’t dehydrate. She didn’t speak, didn’t bathe. I honestly thought she was willing herself to die.’
‘Did you take her to see someone about it?’ Ferreira asked. ‘It sounds like she was dangerously depressed.’
‘It wasn’t depression, it was grief,’ Loewe said fiercely. ‘You can’t medicate grief, you can’t pray it away. You either survive it or you don’t.’
‘So you didn’t get her any help?’ Murray asked, doing nothing to hide her disapproval.
‘Of course I got her help,’ Loewe snapped. ‘I had the doctor in to her, I even called her bloody priest, fat lot of good he
did. She wouldn’t speak to either of them. Just rolled over towards the wall and ignored them.’
‘How long did this go on for?’
‘Three months or so,’ Loewe said. ‘One morning I got up and found her in here eating a bowl of cereal. She wasn’t right, though. Or better. Not really. She was just up and moving about and she could answer a question with a word or two.’ Loewe scrubbed out her cigarette and reached for a half-smoked joint in the ashtray before she thought better of it. ‘She’d got up because she had exams coming and she thought that if she missed them, she’d be wasting all the effort Lola put into her education. She’d missed so much school that when she got her results they were a lot weaker than she was expecting. That set her back a bit. But she found a job and she was going to retake her A-levels the next year.’ Loewe smiled absently. ‘I was so proud of how she started pulling it together again.’
‘But then she was arrested?’ Ferreira asked.
Loewe nodded.
Ferreira tried to imagine how it must have felt to Nadia, fighting slowly through her obliterating grief, working to do her mother’s memory proud, be the girl she’d raised. Only to find herself spirited away to Long Fleet. Locked up, the last strands of stability she’d been clinging to snatched away.
How had she survived? Had she turned in on herself again?
Or had the grief numbed her so comprehensively that even Long Fleet’s regime, its claustrophobia and threats, the assault by Joshua Ainsworth, couldn’t get through?
Murray took over, breaking the silence that had fallen between them.
‘How long had Nadia been living here?’
‘She and Lola moved in five years ago,’ Loewe said, her face clouding over. ‘They’d been shunted around from pillar to post before that. Private rentals here are astronomical and not many landlords will take housing benefit. I don’t usually, to be honest, but I liked Lola and I could see what a good mother she was.’ She smiled, as if at the memory of them. ‘Every child deserves a stable roof over their head and Lola worked hard to make sure she could provide that for Nadia. I tried to do right by Lola and look after Nadia when she passed.’ She blinked quickly. ‘I did my best.’
Another momentary silence and Ferreira could feel the pain radiating from the woman, something like shame too. She’d never mentioned visiting Nadia in Long Fleet or staying in contact with her, and Ferreira wondered if that guilt was biting now.
‘Are there any friends we could contact?’ Murray asked.
‘They disappeared pretty fast when Nadia took to her bed,’ Loewe said disapprovingly. ‘Lives to get on with, exams and uni and gap years, all that stuff.’
‘What about a boyfriend?’
‘Not that I knew of. But Nadia was very … demure, I suppose. She wouldn’t have brought anyone back here, I think. She wouldn’t have thought it was proper.’
‘What about her church?’ Murray asked, picking up on the hint Ferreira was about to pursue. ‘We’ll need their details in case Nadia reached out to someone there.’
Loewe gave them the address, the name of the priest who she’d called to the house for Nadia.
Murray noted down the details.
‘We’re discussing her like she’s dead,’ Loewe muttered, looking away from them into the back garden. ‘Do you really think she’s in danger?’
‘Anyone coming out of a facility is vulnerable,’ Ferreira said, thinking of the gangs who preyed on young adults spat out by the care system and women released from prison into halfway houses. ‘The fact is Nadia has been out for almost two months now and we have no idea where she is.’
‘Maybe she went back to Ghana?’
‘No, we have no record of her leaving the country.’
‘Have you let her room out?’ Murray asked.
Loewe nodded. ‘I would have held it for her if I could, but … it’s been a year and my bank isn’t quite as sentimental as I am.’
‘Did you keep any of her things?’
‘There wasn’t much,’ Loewe said. ‘I boxed everything up and put it in the garage. You’re welcome to have a look through it, if you think it’ll help.’
She took them outside, heaving up the cranky metal door, and pointed them to the two modest cardboard boxes with Nadia’s name written on them. On the shelves above and below were boxes from other former residents and Ferreira wondered why Loewe had kept them – if everyone had left under such unusual circumstances and if she was waiting for their returns too.
Murray started to go through the boxes as Ferreira stood with Loewe on the driveway. She asked about her other lodgers and how many she had in the house, finding that she let out two bedrooms and a bedsit in the converted loft and that none of her current tenants had been living here at the same time as Nadia.
‘Do you have contact details for anyone who was?’ Ferreira asked.
Loewe went to get her phone book, a slim item that seemed to belong to another century. But Ferreira was glad of it. Lately they’d started struggling with contact details, as people lost and changed their phones and didn’t always back up their information.
She took down the names and numbers and email addresses of the two people who had shared the house with Nadia, hoping that one of them might have got to know her better than Deborah Loewe, maybe even well enough to be her first port of call when she left the hostel.
Nadia hadn’t done that on a whim, she thought.
She had a solid destination in mind.
Murray came out of the garage.
‘Nothing obvious, but maybe we should take it with us.’ Loewe looked momentarily uncomfortable. ‘We’ll give you a receipt for it, ma’am. And if Nadia returns in the meantime, you can tell her we have her things.’
She nodded her reluctant agreement and Ferreira left Murray to deal with the paperwork while she checked her messages. Bloom reporting another potential suspect struck off the list – his alibi concrete. Nothing new from Weller or Parr yet and she hoped that meant they were both pursuing more promising leads.
Now that she knew more about Nadia Baidoo, she didn’t want to see the young woman as a suspect, was praying a more likely one would emerge from the list of Long Fleet’s sacked security guards.
She looked back at the house, wondering why Nadia had said she was coming back here when she had no intention of doing so.
Adil Daya had given her money for a bus to Cambridge but he didn’t watch her get on it. She could have gone anywhere, Ferreira realised with a sinking feeling.
She dialled the number he’d given them for Nadia, held her breath until the tone sounded and an automated voice apologised, but the caller could not be reached.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
There was no sign of Ferreira when Zigic got back into the station. Murray gone too, along with the rest of the team, and he felt a moment of dislocation, checked his watch to be sure that the shift hadn’t ended. Twenty past two and the only reason he could see for the empty desks was a list of names freshly printed on Joshua Ainsworth’s board.
Sure enough he found the same list in his emails. The staff members fired from Long Fleet after the purge. A few were crossed out already and he assumed Ferreira had divvied them up and sent the others out to question them.
Maybe she was doing the same but he suspected it was the other name that was absorbing her attention.
Nadia Afua Baidoo – the woman Joshua Ainsworth had been accused of assaulting. Her photo was up on the board and sure enough when he checked Ferreira’s computer, he found the message from James Hammond open on her screen. The details were thin but obviously enough to propel Ferreira into action and out of the station for a few hours.
She hadn’t called to keep him updated but given how he’d spent the better part of his day, he wasn’t surprised. She knew something was going on, would have noticed Adams’s absence and realised they were together.
DC Keri Bloom came in as he returned to the board. ‘I thought the others would be back by now,’ she said.
‘Nope, you’re the first,’ he said. ‘Anything to report?’
‘All of mine look fairly soundly alibi’d, sir.’ She picked up the marker pen and struck through two more names, a man and woman. ‘But everyone I spoke to told me the same thing.’
‘That they were totally innocent?’
She pulled a face. ‘They did say that, yes. But also that Jack Saunders took his dismissal very badly.’
Zigic remembered how ex-PC Saunders had acted when they spoke to him at the DIY store, the barely contained fury, the fierce insistence of innocence even as he openly admitted to multiple abuses.
‘Apparently Saunders confronted Josh Ainsworth over the accusations,’ Bloom said. ‘Three of the people I spoke to live in Long Fleet and evidently they all use the local pub quite regularly – Ainsworth included. Saunders went there a few days after he was sacked and attacked Ainsworth. He didn’t say anything, just went up to Ainsworth and punched him in the face.’
‘He didn’t mention that when we talked to him,’ Zigic said.
‘Maybe we should wait to have it corroborated by the others but I think it’s true. They all took too much pleasure in telling me about it for it to be a lie. I got the feeling they saw it as just punishment for Ainsworth.’
Did it feel that way to Saunders though? he wondered. Or was it an unsatisfying revenge? The kind that only sharpened his focus and made him realise he would need to go further.
‘Has anyone checked out Saunders’s alibi yet?’ Zigic asked.
‘No, sir. Would you like me to make a start on it now?’
‘If you would, Keri.’
‘Of course.’ She went to her desk, carefully positioned her linen jacket over the back of her seat and sat down to begin.
He heard Ferreira and Murray before he saw them, their raised voices coming up the stairwell, speaking over one another; Murray slower but persistent, Ferreira exasperated and angry. Their conversation came to an abrupt halt when they entered the office.
