by Eva Dolan
‘Where did he get that idea from?’ Zigic asked.
Baxter opened her hands wide. ‘He hadn’t mentioned prison at all up to that point. He was so convinced his innocence would keep him safe. He had absolute and total trust in the system, Inspector Zigic. He was like a child that way; he thought the police protected good people like him and that they wouldn’t do anything to harm him. DCS Riggott exploited that trust to manipulate Neal into confessing.’
Zigic thought of Riggott going down to the basement once Baxter had left Thorpe Wood Station, being let into Neal Cooper’s cell, let into his soft and vulnerable head. No solicitor to protect him, no recording equipment to capture what precisely Riggott had said.
But Zigic knew him well enough to guess at it.
Keep lying and we’ll send you to a category A prison; confess and we’ll make recommendations of leniency. You’re only sixteen, you can go to a young offenders’ institution; they’re just like college, you’ll be safe there. We’ve got you Neal, the choice now is how much it hurts.
A few minutes later, interview over, back in the car, Adams asked, ‘Do you believe her?’
‘You don’t?’
He squirmed in the driver’s seat. ‘She’s got her own agenda here. I don’t think we should take what she says as gospel.’
Adams had pushed for this, tried to shrug off the weight that would come down on them if Riggott was found to have acted inappropriately. He’d made this happen almost single-handedly, and now the evidence was in front of him, he was scared where it would lead them.
There was a reckoning coming. A conversation none of them would survive completely clean.
‘Baxter isn’t the only person who knows what Riggott did in that cell,’ Zigic said. ‘You want verification? Let’s get it.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
They were almost back at the station when DC Wahlia called, his voice coming through the speakerphone fast and tight, sending them down the parkway and onto Oundle Road, heading for an address on the more sedate side of the sprawling Orton estates. To a modest detached house at the bottom of a quiet cul-de-sac where most of the neighbours were at work and those at home were more the type to peer through their slatted wooden blinds than to come out and shout encouragement at the two women trying to tear each other’s heads off in the front garden of a corner house.
A pair of uniformed officers were already on the scene, trying to separate the women. But Wendy Darby was too determined to be held. Her maternal fury driving her on, trying to shake off a man fifty pounds heavier and five inches taller, sending her feet flying towards Jackie Walton, who was doing more shouting than fighting and letting herself be gently removed to a safe distance.
Zigic was out of the car before it stopped moving, running over and between the two women, into Wendy Darby’s eyeline.
She didn’t see him, trying to twist free of the big hands holding her firm.
‘You know what he is, Jackie!’ she shouted.
‘Wendy, this isn’t helping,’ Zigic said, gently, taking a step towards her.
He could smell the alcohol on her breath, guessed the PC holding her didn’t know who she was or what she was doing here, maybe hadn’t even realised that the Mrs Walton they were dragging her away from was the same one whose son they’d spent thousands of man-hours tracking. He’d smelled gin on Wendy Darby’s breath at 11 a.m. and assumed she was the person in the wrong.
‘How long did you know, Jackie?’ she shouted. ‘How long have you been lying for him?’
‘She’s unhinged,’ Jackie Walton said desperately, addressing the group of police and the neighbours.
‘You were my best friend,’ Wendy choked out. ‘You came to my house and you sat with me, and all the time you knew Lee killed my girl. How could you do that? What is wrong with you?’
Her hair was plastered to her face, her eyes watery and red. She looked like she’d spent every minute since they went to speak to her at the garden centre in a state of pure hell.
Zigic felt the guilt like a knife between his ribs.
Hoped Adams felt it too.
His attention was on Jackie Walton though, and all Zigic could hear was her demanding Wendy be arrested, putting on a more refined accent than she usually used, scandalised and indignant at what was happening. But the tremble was real, as was the way she held her arms clasped around her body.
Her eyes met Zigic’s and she changed tack.
‘You need to take her to hospital,’ she said to him. ‘She’s clearly not in her right mind. I think she needs sedating before she hurts herself.’ She turned to the PC standing beside her. ‘Really, please. I’m worried about her. She needs help.’
‘Expert on psychology are you now?’ Adams asked. ‘Shame you didn’t spot that your son was a serial rapist a bit sooner.’
‘She knew!’ Wendy shouted.
Zigic tried to dip into her eyeline again but her gaze was locked on Adams and Jackie Walton, so intensely focused that she managed to drag herself and the PC a full two steps closer to them, until she was virtually toe to toe with Zigic.
‘She told me years ago she was worried about him,’ Wendy said. ‘Always hanging around his little cousins, disappearing into the garage with them …’
The PC hauled her back again.
‘Shut up!’ Jackie cried.
‘You knew what he was and you did nothing. Not even when it was your own family he was hurting.’
‘This is your fault,’ Jackie Walton said, stabbing a finger at Adams, her attempt at decorum forgotten. ‘You fitted my boy up and now look what I’m having to put up with. This mad bitch coming around reeking of supermarket gin, accusing me of all sorts.’
‘Not all sorts,’ Adams said, leaning towards her. ‘Just one thing – covering for Lee when he killed Tessa.’
Jackie Walton’s face flushed a deep crimson. ‘This is harassment. I’m going to get my lawyer onto you. This is a gross abuse of police power. My Lee was found innocent and you’ve got no right to keep coming after him like this.’
‘Get in touch with your lawyer,’ Adams said. ‘Something tells me Lee’s going to need her again in the very near future.’
She stammered around a reply and backed away, stepping into a flower bed filled with bright orange marigolds, crushing a plant underfoot.
The fight drained from Wendy just as abruptly and Zigic noticed the relief on the PC’s face. He started to walk her towards the patrol car and she let herself be taken and eased into the back with no resistance.
‘I want to press charges,’ Jackie Walton said in a wobbly voice, arms still folded, chin down. ‘She attacked me, she made me feel unsafe.’
‘Yeah?’ Adams asked. ‘Do you really want to come down to Thorpe Wood and make a statement? We can put you in the same interview room where Lee denied raping all of those women you know he actually attacked. Would you enjoy that, Jackie? Seeing where your boy did some of his finest lying?’
Without another word she turned away and retreated inside her house, the front door closing very softly.
Zigic told the PC to take Wendy Darby out of the patrol car and put her in the back of Adams’s instead, thinking the least they could do now was see her home safely and with the dignity she deserved. She moved with the same exhausted compliance and Zigic hoped she felt better for coming here and confronting Jackie Walton, her former best friend.
The thought of her sitting in Wendy’s house, bringing her tea and passing her hankies as she cried for her dead daughter, sitting there knowing there was a possibility her own son was responsible …
How had she done it, he wondered. What feats of denial had Jackie Walton performed over the years to allow herself to keep hugging him and saying, ‘I love you, son’?
As he stooped to get into the car, a movement in the living-room window stopped him; Lee Walton, standing staring back at him.
He’d been in the house the whole time. Had seen everything. And now he knew they were onto him for Tessa
Darby’s murder.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
‘I don’t understand,’ Greg Ainsworth said. ‘Why wouldn’t Josh have told me about something this important?’
Ferreira was wondering the same thing. They clearly weren’t the closest of brothers but something as significant as this … surely, Ainsworth would have needed to unburden to someone.
‘Maybe he didn’t expect the child to be his,’ she suggested.
‘Still, it’s huge news.’ In the background she could hear cartoons playing and a relentless tinny drumming as one of his boys bashed away at what sounded like an upturned saucepan. ‘Finn, please stop doing that, Daddy’s on the phone.’
‘Do you have any idea who the mother might be?’ Ferreira asked. ‘Did Josh mention anyone he’d been seeing recently?’
‘Apart from Portia?’ he asked.
‘We’re speaking to her again.’
‘It wasn’t necessarily a relationship, was it?’ he said tentatively. ‘It might have been a one-night stand.’
Ferreira had been thinking the same thing, knew that if that was the case they were relying on the woman coming forward at a time when she had absolutely nothing to gain by helping them. All she’d be doing was potentially putting herself in the frame for murder.
‘You don’t think that’s why he was killed?’ Greg carried on, horrified. ‘If he’d been sleeping with someone who already had a boyfriend and they found out?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Ferreira admitted. ‘But until we can identify the woman, it’s very difficult for us to understand if it has anything to do with his death.’
The banging at Greg’s end intensified, accompanied by a high, atonal singing, and then a dog started to bark and he sighed heavily. A sliding door opened and closed and the sound was muffled as he went outside.
‘Was the test positive?’ he asked. ‘Was Josh the father?’
‘It’s a positive match, yes.’
He let out a small groan, sounding genuinely upset. ‘Well, what happens now? We must have some rights, right? The baby is our family too. Mum and Dad are going to want to know about this. They’ll want to be involved.’
Ferreira didn’t know what to tell him, felt out of her depth.
‘I mean, if the woman is involved, if she goes to prison or whatever, what’s going to happen to the baby?’ he asked. ‘Will we be able to adopt or something? I’ll have to talk to my wife but I’m sure she won’t want her niece or nephew going into care.’ The panic was rising in his voice, sending him babbling, and she felt a sharp stab of sympathy for this sweet-natured man and his protective instincts. ‘I don’t understand how you can’t know who she is. There must be records somewhere.’
‘We don’t have Josh’s phone,’ she explained. ‘It’s pretty much impossible to find out who she is if we can’t access his communications. Not unless somebody can tell us who she is. What about your parents? Is there any chance Josh talked to them about it?’
‘No, if Mum knew about this I’d have known about it two minutes later.’
She promised Greg that she would contact him if they found the mother, knowing she could do nothing more than encourage the woman to contact them herself.
Unless she was the killer.
Ferreira ended the call, thinking about how the woman must have given Joshua Ainsworth the DNA samples, that she must have wanted him to be the father because why do it otherwise?
What did she want from him? Financial support or something more significant?
He clearly hadn’t believed he was the father, or why even take the test?
Unless the DNA test was because there was another candidate for paternity, she thought, as she unpeeled the lid of her avocado and quinoa salad.
That was definitely the kind of thing that could lead to murder. And it might explain how the mere fact of the test had escalated into violence before the results were through.
A love triangle rumbling along, suspicion and accusation. A relationship already in the process of ending and then the question of who the daddy was to push it over the edge.
Everyone was assuming the child was a baby but what if this was something that had been going on for years? A man having raised a child as his own, then beginning to suspect it wasn’t …
Portia Collingwood was the obvious suspect but Ferreira found the idea of her as the mystery mother didn’t quite sit right. It was a long-term affair, seemingly mutually satisfying as a standing arrangement. No reason for that to change. Not that they knew of, anyway.
They’d found no evidence of another relationship but nothing to disprove it either.
If it was someone he worked with there might not be a lot of evidence. Someone he didn’t need to call and text regularly because they were together all day.
She thought of Ruth Garner. Wondered how many other female members of staff at Long Fleet might be in the frame. If only they could speak to them.
She called his parents and got his father, who immediately passed the phone over to Mrs Ainsworth. Ferreira could hear her hastily finishing another call as she came to the landline.
‘Love you, bye. Bye. Yes, I’ll call you back. Bye. Bye-bye.’ She picked up the handset and in a slightly different voice, said, ‘Greg just called me. Why don’t you know who this woman is?’
Ferreira went through the same conversation she’d had with Josh’s brother, but a prolonged and more circuitous version this time as if his mother wanted to talk about Josh just for the sake of talking.
Ten minutes later Ferreira ended the call no wiser than she’d been before it.
She finished her salad, trying to tune out the inane conversation Bloom and Weller were having as they ate their own lunches. She thought they’d hit rock bottom during last month’s obsession with Love Island, but now she realised this was their default setting. Perhaps the minimum requirements for detective-level officers needed to be raised quite significantly.
Had she and Bobby sounded like that? she wondered.
Did Zigic spend years sitting in his office thinking, Shut up, you stupid children?
She rolled a cigarette and found herself in the stairwell, turning the wrong way and heading up to the old Hate Crimes office.
The room was mothballed but open, the air stale-smelling already, a faint mustiness cut with the sharp tang of the plastic covers that had been put over the furniture. She heaved the window open and sat down on the sill as she lit her cigarette.
An unknown number flashed up on her phone and she answered.
‘Hi, Sergeant Ferreira?’ A man’s voice, hesitant but lifted by the need to be heard above the music playing in the background. ‘You were asking about Nadia Baidoo? I’m the manager at Beckett Burgers in Cambridge. I think you talked to my number two, last week?’
‘That’s right,’ Ferreira said, remembering the frustrating conversation they’d had with the assistant manager who seemed to feel her authority didn’t extend to accessing staff records. ‘Has Nadia been back?’
‘No, but I thought you might want to know. Someone got in touch with me about her last month. She’d given us as a reference.’
Ferreira shook her head in bemusement. Wondering if Nadia was naïve or ballsy as hell to give the place where she was snatched by immigration as a reference.
‘Where was this?’ she asked.
‘In Peterborough.’
She felt the excitement beginning to stir.
He gave her the name of a boutique in the old arcade, the phone number and the name of the person who called. ‘I gave Nadia a good reference,’ he said. ‘I hope she got the job.’
Ferreira immediately called the boutique, waited to be put on with the owner, who she’d seen when she’d been shopping there for a new winter coat last year. She remembered a petite woman with jet-black hair and severe eyebrows and a penchant for leopard print that verged on mania.
‘Nadia, yeah,’ she said, in an Essex drawl. ‘Don’t know what happened with her. She ghosted us after a
couple of shifts. She was good and all, had a strong look, you know? I like that in my staff, gives the customers something to compete with.’
‘Do you have an address for her?’ Ferreira asked.
‘Yeah, gimme a minute, I’ll call you back.’
She waited, looking out across the front of the station, nervous energy sparking in her chest, already thinking about what she would ask Nadia, about where this new development was going to take them.
Below her she saw Zigic and Adams getting out of the car. Adams full of energy as he bounded up the station steps; Zigic, coming up behind him, was hard-faced and squared off with tension or anger.
She sat down again and waited for her phone to ring.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Zigic had left Wendy Darby curled up on her sofa, under a blanket, because by the time he got her home she was shivering despite the heat. The adrenaline had worn off and the crash that came afterwards had all but knocked her flat. She couldn’t get out of the car when Adams pulled into her driveway, and Zigic had coaxed her out, holding her hands, which trembled against his, and then caught her around the waist and walked her slowly up the short path, noticing for the first time that she was wearing odd shoes. The colour was the same but the style slightly different, and he wondered how incoherent with despair and rage she must have been when she left the house, so focused on what she had to say to Jackie Walton that she hadn’t noticed what she was putting on her feet.
Zigic saw her to the sofa and went to make her a cup of tea, debated emptying out the half bottle of gin, which sat on the worktop, but decided she would need the comfort of it later, no matter how unhelpful he thought it was.
Adams paced the kitchen as the kettle came to a boil.
‘Did you see Walton?’ he said, voice pitched at a whisper.
‘I saw him.’
‘I’m surprised he didn’t come out and get involved.’
