by Eva Dolan
Ruth still look wary.
‘Do you remember a former inmate called Nadia Baidoo?’ Ferreira went on. ‘She was released about seven weeks ago.’
‘I was on sabbatical seven weeks ago, I already told you that.’
‘Nadia was brought to Long Fleet June last year,’ Ferreira said, bringing out a photograph of the young woman. ‘Did you have any contact with her between that time and your sabbatical?’
Reluctantly Ruth came over to the table, picked the photograph up and gave it a quick glance before putting it down again and returning to her post against the sink.
‘I remember Nadia, yes,’ she said. ‘Nice girl, very quiet, very patient. I remember being surprised that she was in there because I thought she was English when I first met her. But then I found out she’d been over here since was she small so she is English really, in any way that matters.’ She shook her head. ‘Not the way that matters at Long Fleet, obviously.’
‘Did she have medical problems?’ Ferreira asked.
‘I can’t discuss that with you, sorry.’
‘She was coming into the medical bay, though?’
Ruth nodded.
‘Who treated her?’
‘All of us at various times.’
‘But who predominantly?’
‘Well, Patrick and Joshua, of course,’ Ruth said with a shrug. ‘Look, I’m sorry but why are you asking about Nadia?’
‘Did Nadia ever mention a boyfriend to you?’ Ferreira said, ignoring the question.
Ruth was silent for a moment, as if weighing the possibility of insisting on getting her own answer first.
‘No, she didn’t.’
‘What about family?’
‘We didn’t really have those kinds of conversations,’ Ruth said. ‘But I know her mother was the only family she had in England and she’d passed away. The rest of her family were in Ghana, but I got the impression she wasn’t very close to them.’
‘Who was Nadia close to at Long Fleet?’ she asked.
‘I couldn’t tell you that, sorry.’
‘Because of your contract?’
‘No, because I don’t know,’ Ruth said, getting testy now.
They were drawing closer, Zigic thought. He saw the shift in her body language, how she hunched her shoulders and spread her weight between her feet as if she was steeling herself for where she assumed the conversation was heading.
‘We really don’t see very much of any given client,’ Ruth explained. ‘They come in with a problem and we treat them and send them off again. We’re not therapists, we don’t discuss their personal lives.’
‘But you discussed some deeply personal things with the women whose complaints you reported,’ Ferreira said, opening her hands up. ‘You clearly have a very good idea of what goes on in the rest of the building.’
Ruth brushed away some hair that wasn’t really there.
‘I feel like there’s something you want to ask me,’ she said. ‘So why don’t you just say it?’
‘Did you know Nadia accused Joshua of attacking her?’
‘No.’
But she wasn’t shocked, Zigic saw. So either she was lying or there had been gossip about it, which had reached her ears and which she’d decided not to tell them before.
‘There must have been talk about it?’
‘Not that I heard.’
‘Nadia accused Joshua of attacking her and then he was told to resign,’ Ferreira said, trying and failing to catch Ruth’s eye. ‘Do you seriously expect us to believe something like that never got talked about?’
‘All I heard was that Josh left with stress,’ Ruth said carefully. ‘I was away and when I came back he was gone and I was told he resigned.’
‘Dr Sutherland was there when it happened,’ Ferreira said. ‘There are guards who were there. None of these people talked about it? At all?’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe they didn’t know either. Maybe Hammond wanted to keep it all quiet and he made sure nobody outside of admin found out about it.’
She believed the accusation, Zigic saw.
‘I still don’t understand why we’re talking about Nadia,’ Ruth said, picking up a damp cloth from the draining board and laying it over the tap.
Ferreira waited until she was facing them again before she replied.
‘Because Nadia has disappeared,’ she said. ‘She was released from Long Fleet seven weeks ago and she disappeared a few days later.’
Ruth straightened sharply, her hand going to her throat.
‘You think she murdered Josh?’
Another flicker of annoyance crossed Ferreira’s face because it was the obvious and logical assumption and not the one she wanted to be true.
‘Why would Nadia murder Josh?’ she asked.
Ruth’s hands made incoherent gestures in the air in front of her chest. ‘I don’t know. Revenge maybe.’
‘Revenge for attacking her?’ Ferreira suggested and got a small, doubtful nod in return. ‘Ruth, given that you’ve obviously reconsidered your opinion of Josh, is there anything further you’d like to tell us?’
‘I haven’t reconsidered,’ she said sadly. ‘I don’t know what to think any more.’
A shutter came down in front of her face but Ferreira pressed on regardless, hoping there was some way of reaching through it. She tried to impress upon her how much danger the young woman could be in and how important it was they talked to her. Ruth was looking at her the whole time but Zigic wasn’t sure she saw Ferreira any more, and though she murmured and nodded here and there, she didn’t really speak again.
Zigic left his card and asked her to call them if she thought of anything, walked out of the house dogged by frustration.
His phone rang as he got in the car.
‘Is this Detective Inspector Zigic?’ a man with a broad fen accent asked.
‘It is.’
‘You said I were to ring you if there were owt else I could tell you about young Josh,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve got summat here I reckon you’ll want’a see.’
‘What is it, Mr Edwards?’
But he’d hung up.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
‘Let’s just open it,’ Ferreira said excitedly, holding the letter Josh Ainsworth’s neighbour, Mr Edwards, had signed for on her lap. Ainsworth’s name printed on the front of it, nothing else to give away the contents.
‘We need to preserve any evidence on it,’ Zigic told her, again. ‘I know you know this, Mel.’
‘There might not be any forensic evidence.’ She turned it over in her hands, the evidence bag crinkling, as if something new might have appeared on the plain white envelope in the minute since she last did that. ‘We should open it.’
Zigic glanced away from the road and plucked it from her grasp, tucked it into the side pocket of the car door.
‘Anything that was sent to Ainsworth special delivery is too important to mess about with,’ he said. ‘Forensics are opening it.’
She huffed lightly, folded her arms. ‘You could stick your foot down, at least.’
He accelerated along the narrow fenland road, a group of cyclists up ahead all wearing the same Team Sky jerseys. He slowed as he approached them, staying well back but getting some disgusted looks from the riders at the rear all the same. When the road was clear he overtook.
‘What happened with Patrick Sutherland yesterday?’ he asked. ‘You never did tell me.’
‘Not much to tell,’ she said. ‘Sutherland’s so terrified of breaching his contract I’m not even sure you could torture anything helpful out of him. I mean, he bolted pretty much as soon as he realised why I’d got him in there.’
‘You didn’t get anything out of him, then?’
‘I got to see him without Long Fleet’s watchful eye on his back,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘That was useful.’
It didn’t sound very useful, but Ferreira’s approach was different to his own; more psychologically based, she’d
claim. More gut-driven, he’d say. If she was left to her own devices she’d bring suspects to the interview room over and over again, grind them down with the same questions and statements until they cracked. But that wasn’t how you built a case. It was how you got a confession.
Momentarily Neal Cooper popped into Zigic’s head and he pushed the image of the broken-down man aside. He was a problem for Monday morning.
‘I did find out one very interesting thing,’ she said. ‘Sutherland was behind the hidden camera footage.’
‘I still don’t think that’s as interesting as you do,’ he told her, his attention drawn away from the road to a field where a couple of metal detectorists were working their way up and down the dusty furrows. ‘Did he know about the accusation against Ainsworth?’
‘Yeah, I’m fairly sure he knew all about it,’ Ferreira said, reaching into her bag. ‘Somebody examined Nadia afterwards and he was the only other doctor available at that time. Stands to reason he knows exactly what happened.’
‘So he risks his job smuggling in a hidden camera, but he won’t tell you anything about what happened to Nadia?’ Zigic asked.
She swiped lip balm over her mouth. ‘That was what I told him. But no. Honestly, I got the impression he feels like he dodged a bullet with the initial whistle-blowing and now he’s going to toe the line at any cost, as long as he keeps his job.’
‘Some moral crusader he is.’
She let out a thoughtful murmur. ‘I think we need to stop considering it an “allegation of assault”, you know. Sutherland got all wound up when I suggested Hammond didn’t believe it. And if he did examine Nadia …’
‘He knows it definitely happened,’ Zigic said. ‘You think he might have something to do with the murder?’
‘What’s his motive?’ Ferreira asked.
He shrugged. ‘He’s putting his neck on the line reporting abuses at Long Fleet. Josh Ainsworth was doing the same. So Sutherland feels like the two of them are fighting the good fight.’
‘Then he finds out Ainsworth isn’t quite as upstanding as he thinks and kills him over it?’
‘It’s possible,’ Zigic insisted.
‘But unlikely.’
‘You had no problem with an ideologically driven motive for the Paggetts,’ he reminded her. ‘Now we know about the secret footage, we have to put Sutherland in the same bracket as them. Except he actually did something to back up his beliefs. If anything that makes the motive even more viable for him than it did for them.’
‘I got the feeling you never bought that as a motive for the Paggetts murdering Ainsworth though,’ she said.
‘I thought it was a stretch,’ he admitted. ‘If it wasn’t for them mouthing off about kidnapping someone, I wouldn’t have even considered it a possibility.’
He pulled off the parkway, heading for the entrance to Thorpe Road Station, quietly pleased that he’d distracted Ferreira from continuing the discussion he’d endured on the way to Long Fleet.
‘You want me to push Sutherland some more?’ she asked, as they got out of the car.
‘Check his alibi,’ Zigic said.
They headed up the steps and in through reception.
‘The problem I keep coming back to,’ Ferreira said, as she opened the stairwell door, ‘is we have a staff of – we don’t even know how many – at Long Fleet, right? And any one of them could have some personal grievance against Ainsworth, and as long as we can’t talk to them, we’ll never know about it.’
He’d been thinking the same thing. Right from the moment they first drove through Long Fleet’s gates. The nameless, faceless employees who were each and every one of them suspects until they could be reasonably disregarded.
‘Hammond is never going to allow us to question them all,’ he said, following her up the stairs.
‘Maybe we just need to find another way to identify them,’ Ferreira suggested. ‘We could use the sacked staff members we have to get some names.’
‘Or HMRC?’
Ferreira stopped at the top of the stairs, sheepish-looking. ‘Yeah, I already thought of that. I didn’t want to say anything because you seemed so spooked about getting in Riggott’s bad books.’
‘And?’
‘They’re employed centrally through Securitect,’ she said. ‘There’s no way to know who’s at Long Fleet and who’s just doing property maintenance on their care homes or whatever.’
‘It was a good idea but we might not need to worry about identifying them.’ He held up the plain white envelope in its clear bag. ‘Maybe the murderer’s in here.’
Ferreira rolled her eyes at his jokey optimism and shoved through the door into the lab.
There was only one person on today. Budget issues and holidays cutting them down to the wire. If something major happened, extra bodies would be pulled in from home but for now it was just Kate Jenkins’s right-hand man, Elliot, sitting in her office, reading a fat science fiction book with a heavily cracked spine.
‘Finally, something interesting,’ he said, swinging his feet off the desk and coming out to meet them. When he saw the envelope Zigic was brandishing, his face fell. ‘That doesn’t seem particularly interesting.’
‘It was sent special delivery to our murder victim,’ Zigic told him.
‘Well, that’s a bit better.’
Elliot put on a pair of gloves and removed the envelope from the evidence bag. ‘You’re hoping for fingerprints?’
‘We’re more about what’s inside it,’ Ferreira said, leaning on the counter, physically straining towards Elliot as he opened the envelope, looking like she might rip it from his hands if he didn’t hurry up.
‘Ooh.’ He flattened out the single sheet for them to see. ‘It’s a paternity test.’
‘A positive paternity test.’ Ferreira turned to Zigic, eyes lit up. ‘Why the hell would Ainsworth be running a paternity test?’
He spotted the name of a lab on the letterhead, nothing but a couple of lines of text below it.
‘Clue’s in the name,’ Elliot said lightly.
‘Is there anything to suggest who the parties involved might be?’ Zigic asked.
Elliot shook his head. ‘He’d have sent in samples but I don’t suppose a small lab like this is going to be sending them back. Why would he need them? He got his answer.’
‘Maybe the lab still has the samples,’ Ferreira said, snapping upright, her phone already in her hand. She keyed in the phone number from the letterhead and walked away from the counter.
‘If we can get the samples back, you can run them, right?’
‘Your chain of evidence is going to be sketchy,’ Elliot warned him. ‘But, yes, theoretically we can do that.’
Ferreira was speaking, uninterrupted but still impatient, clearly leaving a message.
Saturday morning, Zigic thought, it was unlikely anyone would be at work at some private lab.
‘No point examining this, right?’ Elliot asked, already folding the paper back into the envelope.
Zigic took it back from him. ‘We’ll see about the samples.’
‘I almost got something to do anyway,’ Elliot said, deflated.
He returned to Jenkins’s office and they went down to CID, Ferreira already throwing out potential candidates for the mother.
‘Portia Collingwood, it has to be,’ she said. ‘That’s been an on and off thing for years and she was there the night he died.’
‘Why would she kill him over a paternity test?’ Zigic asked, going to the coffee machine and pouring them a cup each. ‘Especially one they didn’t even know the results of.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ Ferreira was circling her desk, agitated but energised. ‘You get murdered over a paternity test once the results are back, right?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Zigic said, putting her coffee down. ‘Running an actual test suggests dispute over paternity –’
‘Which suggests an affair that has recently come out into the open.’
‘Alistair Collingwo
od has an alibi,’ he reminded her.
‘You’re assuming this is the only relationship Josh Ainsworth was involved in.’ She picked up a marker pen and wrote ‘PATERNITY TEST’ in big letters on the board. ‘We’ve been through Ainsworth’s phone records and it’s all pretty boring. No major unidentified players in there so if he was having another affair, he wasn’t arranging it by phone.’
‘Someone he worked with?’ Zigic asked.
‘What, Ruth Garner?’
‘She’s got a kid.’
Ferreira paused to pull a face at him and went back to pacing. ‘That can’t be our minimum threshold for suspicion – “She’s got a kid.”’
Zigic’s brow furrowed. ‘Nadia Baidoo?’
‘We don’t know the nature of the assault,’ Ferreira said tentatively. ‘But if he raped her, then, yeah, we’ve got to think that’s a possibility.’
‘Meaning they were in contact just before his murder?’ he asked. ‘How else would he have got a sample of the baby’s DNA?’
‘The bloke Mr Daya saw Nadia having coffee with before she left Haven House?’ Ferreira said, then immediately answered herself. ‘No way. He reckoned she looked happy. She’d hardly be happy running into the man who attacked her.’
Zigic wished she’d sit down for a moment, stop thinking with her mouth and actually consider the new evidence they had on their hands.
Because the more she paced, throwing out that chaotic energy, the less he was able to concentrate on the slim thread of an idea, which was looping around in the back of his head.
‘Does the timeline even work for it being Nadia’s baby?’ Ferreira asked, swerving away to the board. ‘She was taken into Long Fleet June last year. But the assault was barely two months ago. There’s no baby to DNA test.’
‘The assault she reported was barely two months ago,’ Zigic said. ‘We need to get in touch with Hammond again and find out if she was pregnant when she left Long Fleet.’
‘I talked to the manager at the hostel and he never mentioned Nadia being pregnant.’ Ferreira stuck her hands on her hips. ‘There’s no way he wouldn’t have told me that.’
‘We should check with local maternity units,’ Zigic said. ‘Just in case.’
