by Eva Dolan
‘Why didn’t you tell us about this the first time we asked you?’
‘Because of Nadia,’ he said, as if it was obvious. ‘I didn’t want her to have to suffer through explaining everything he’d done to her. And it’s my house, I didn’t think it was anyone’s business if we had a break-in. There’s no legal requirement to report a crime.’
‘But there’s a moral one,’ Ferreira told him. ‘Because your one unreported crime could keep us from solving other linked ones.’
‘I wanted to call you,’ Sutherland said earnestly.
He took a seat at the table finally and Zigic saw an admission in the move: Sutherland needed to concentrate now. He was opposite the empty seat but directing his story across the table to Ferreira.
‘I was scared,’ he told her. ‘I’m ashamed to admit it but I was scared for Nadia and for me. I knew that calling you would expose our relationship and I wasn’t ready to deal with that yet. But I was more afraid of Josh and what he’d do to Nadia. I told her we’d have to call you and she begged me not to.’ He pursed his lips. ‘She was convinced that any contact with the law would have her leave to remain revoked. And I tried to explain to her that it only happened to people who’d committed crimes, not victims of them. But she was just so … terrified. She wasn’t thinking straight. That level of fear … it’s impossible for any of us to understand, I think.’
Zigic slid into the free seat. Sutherland gave him the merest flicker of acknowledgement before turning back to Ferreira.
‘Nadia was trapped,’ he said, his hands locking together on the tabletop. ‘Between her fear of being deported and her fear of Josh coming back.’
‘It must have been very difficult for her,’ Ferreira said softly, giving him an earnest look now. ‘And you.’
‘She wasn’t in her right mind.’ Sutherland shook his head helplessly. ‘You have to understand, Nadia has PTSD. She was and is incapable of rational thought where Josh is concerned.’ He closed his eyes, pressed his fingers to his mouth. ‘It was self-defence. She was in fear for her life.’
‘What are you saying, Patrick?’ Ferreira asked. ‘What did Nadia do?’
‘Saturday night,’ he said, looking queasy as he forced out the words. ‘I woke up and realised I was alone in bed. I thought maybe she couldn’t sleep and had gone downstairs to watch TV – she was having trouble sleeping but she won’t take pills because of the side-effects.’
Zigic felt a cold, tumbling sensation in his stomach. Something in the pitch of Sutherland’s voice and the inward-turned expression on his face, led to an indefinable, entirely illogical feeling that this was the truth coming out of the mouth of this well-practised liar.
Nadia had claimed to be a long-term user of sleeping pills. Sutherland, as a doctor, would know how easily they could test her blood for their presence.
So why say she wasn’t taking them if she was?
‘She wasn’t downstairs,’ Sutherland said. ‘She wasn’t anywhere in the house. I panicked. Of course. She never went out of the house at night.’
‘Did you go and look for her?’ Ferreira asked. ‘Call her mobile?’
‘I was getting dressed to go out when she came in.’ He rubbed the back of his neck, eyes averted but Zigic could see the tension running up the line of his jaw. ‘She was covered in blood.’
Ferreira glanced at Zigic quickly and he saw his own doubts reflected back at him.
‘Was she hurt?’
‘It wasn’t her blood,’ he said, almost whispering. ‘She said she couldn’t stand it any more. The waiting.’ He looked desperately between the two of them. ‘It isn’t her fault. You know what he did to her. You see that, don’t you? She’s so damaged. So traumatised. I don’t think she really understood what she’d done until the next day. She came home so … numb. It was like she was in a trance.’
Zigic sat back in his chair, watching Sutherland’s eyes lose focus just like Nadia’s did when she recounted her time in Long Fleet, like everyone’s did when they dredged up the really bad stuff.
Next to him Ferreira was leaning forwards, forearms on the table, palms flat, her fingertips inches away from Sutherland’s hands. The same short distance between them there had been at the first interview. He’d picked up on the charge between them at the time, sensed it remerging now, but he wasn’t sure if it was real or a ploy.
Ferreira came in here convinced Nadia was innocent but she was too good a detective to ignore what they were hearing now. Not the words that could so easily be a lie, but the emotional undertow, that stripped throat quality to Sutherland’s voice, the loss in it.
‘What did Nadia say?’ she asked. ‘Did she tell you what she’d done?’
‘She didn’t mean to do it,’ he said defiantly. ‘It was self-defence. If there’s any justice in the world, people will see that. I’ll make them see it. Nadia is the victim here.’
‘She is,’ Ferreira agreed.
‘She couldn’t defend herself against Josh when he attacked her that first time, but she wasn’t going to let it happen again.’
‘Except,’ she said, her fingertips drumming the table lightly, ‘Josh didn’t attack Nadia.’
Confusion clouded Sutherland’s face.
‘Nadia told us herself. Josh never touched her.’
He groaned into his hands. ‘No, she’s just saying that now because she doesn’t want you to think she has a motive to kill him. I examined her myself, I know exactly what Josh did to her.’
‘What you told Nadia to say Josh did to her,’ Ferreira said, but there was the bum note of doubt again in her voice. ‘You told Nadia to fabricate an allegation to increase her chances of avoiding being deported.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘I didn’t tell her to do any such thing. Josh attacked her. And yes, when she told me about it I pleaded with her to report it to Hammond because it was important that he know what kind of man he was employing to work with vulnerable women. And yes, of course I didn’t want her to get deported. Nothing had happened between us then but I already had feelings for her. I didn’t want to lose her.’ Sutherland’s face hardened. ‘But I did not say it would improve her case. Being attacked doesn’t improve anyone’s chance of staying in the country. Obviously. Think about it, do you really believe the Home Office could be swayed that easily?’
‘Then why was she allowed to stay?’ Zigic asked.
‘I don’t know the intricacies of her case,’ Sutherland said impatiently. ‘I’m just a doctor, I’m not involved in those decisions. My guess is she just got lucky. It happens sometimes. She’s been here since she was a child. Maybe someone took pity on her.’
It sounded unlikely but without verification from Hammond they couldn’t judge whether it was true or not, and Zigic suspected they’d got as much from the governor as they were going to. Despite the promise he’d made them at his house, he hadn’t even come through with the report into the alleged attack. He was clearly hoping this would quietly resolve itself without his input. A hope which was looking more likely by the minute.
‘You don’t know what that place does to people,’ Sutherland said, all the energy drained out of him. ‘It breaks them. And it isn’t like a real prison but it creates a lot of the same behaviours in people that a prison does. They get … closed off and anxious, the slightest thing can trigger disproportionate emotional responses. And that’s just what the day-to-day reality of being locked up does.’ He rubbed his mouth. ‘But what happened to Nadia, the violence of what Josh did to her, that is something else altogether.’
‘She doesn’t seem like a violent person,’ Ferreira said.
‘She’s not,’ Sutherland replied sharply. ‘She’s not dangerous, she’d never hurt someone for no reason. But when Josh came to the house something shifted in her. She was never going to feel safe as long as he could just jump the back fence and get to her.’
Zigic thought of Lee Walton and the effect he was having on Ferreira. As accustomed to violence as she was, as trained in
dealing with dangerous people. He thought of the way Walton was dictating her movements and limiting her life, how his mere presence had dragged them all into a situation that could ruin them.
How would someone like Nadia Baidoo deal with that pressure?
Alone and scared, traumatised already.
It was horribly credible.
‘Nadia needs help,’ Sutherland said desperately. ‘The level of trauma she’s been through, you couldn’t even say she was fully mentally capable of knowing right from wrong. She has PTSD. Any doctor talking to her for five minutes will tell you that.’
For a moment nobody spoke and Zigic could hear a voice in the corridor, muffled but pitched at anger, and then the creak of Lawton’s chair as he shifted his weight slightly.
‘I think now might be a good moment to take a break,’ he said.
Ferreira gave Zigic a questioning glance and he nodded, letting them have it.
He needed a break too, needed to step back and consider this mess in front of them.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
They were silent all the way back to the office and when Ferreira rolled a cigarette, wanting to get a few minutes peace to consider what they’d just heard, Zigic said he’d come down with her. ‘For some air.’
She’d walked into that interview room convinced that Patrick Sutherland was guilty, and despite Zigic’s insistence on keeping an open mind, she was sure he had felt the same way. It had just seemed too unlikely that Nadia had it in her to kill Joshua Ainsworth. From everything they’d been told about her by the people who knew her, from her build and personality and the typical behaviour of women who’d suffered violence. Even knowing that Joshua Ainsworth hadn’t assaulted her in Long Fleet hadn’t changed Ferreira’s opinion. Because, yes, she’d lied about that but at Sutherland’s insistence, and with a broader motivation linked to her desperation to escape the place. It didn’t mean she wasn’t scared of Ainsworth, only that she had a slightly different reason to fear him.
But now, now she felt that certainty had been whipped away.
Outside, tucked around the side of the station, she lit her cigarette, watching the play of doubt across Zigic’s face.
‘I wasn’t imagining it, was I?’ he asked. ‘Sutherland’s story sounds right.’
‘We know he’s a liar,’ she said.
‘And we know Nadia is too.’ He shoved his hands into pockets. ‘And he knows we know that now, so what if he’s using that to try and lay the blame on her?’
‘What if she’s doing the same to him?’ Ferreira suggested. ‘If either of them’s physically capable, it’s Sutherland.’
‘But it doesn’t take much strength to bludgeon someone who’s already down.’
‘Look, we had this conversation at the scene,’ she reminded him. ‘You didn’t think a woman could put Ainsworth down with enough force to break that table.’
‘Kate did say it was flimsy.’
He walked away a few steps, eyes on the ground that was littered with dead cigarette butts and scraps of rubbish blown in on the wind and trapped in the lee of the building. He looked like he was searching for something but it was inside his head and she wasn’t sure he’d find it like that.
‘Sutherland’s a manipulator,’ Ferreira said, needing to say it out loud because she’d found herself beginning to believe him as he gave his version of events. ‘What if he’s playing us?’
Zigic stopped dead, turned sharply. ‘It all hinges on the sleeping pills, doesn’t it? Sutherland claims Nadia wasn’t taking them, she says she was on them every night and that he gave her one on the night of the murder.’
‘So he could sneak out without her knowing what he was doing.’
‘Right,’ he nodded. ‘So that’s the one point where we can definitely prove whose story is true and who’s lying.’
‘Let’s get a blood test then,’ Ferreira said. ‘If they find traces of medication in Nadia’s bloodstream, we’ll know she’s taken the pills recently.’
‘It’ll still be in her hair if she’s been on them long term, won’t it?’
‘That’s going to take more time.’
‘We need an answer,’ he said. ‘It takes as long as it takes.’
When they returned to the office he called Parr, who was still hunting for CCTV at the houses around Sutherland’s, told him to go in and bring back whatever medication he could find. Then he called for the station nurse to organise drawing Nadia’s blood and asked DC Bloom to sort out the paperwork.
As he was giving her the details Ferreira’s phone chimed. A text from Judy telling her that Dorcus was ready to talk to them.
They made the Skype call from Zigic’s office, the pair of them seated on the visitors’ side of his desk with the blinds drawn at the internal window, wanting Dorcus to feel that she had some semblance of privacy for this conversation. It wasn’t going to be easy for her, they thought, and as far as possible they wanted her not to regard this as a police matter.
Ferreira used the email address Judy had texted her and they waited as it rang.
Judy said Dorcus was back with her family, living with a grandmother who had taken her in and was helping with the new baby. Considering the alternatives it seemed as good an outcome as anyone could hope for. When Dorcus answered she was in a pink-painted bedroom, a neatly made bed behind her, clothes stacked on a chair nearby.
She didn’t look much older than Nadia Baidoo, early twenties at most, with a full and pretty face, her brows high and arched, above a pair of cat-eye glasses. She’d put on a slick of brilliant red lipstick that perfectly matched the patterned scarf holding back her hair. She looked more together than Ferreira had expected someone who’d recently been deported to be, and as relieved as she was for Dorcus, it only made her feel worse about what they were doing.
Dorcus held her soundly sleeping baby against her chest. Already much bigger than in the photograph Judy had shown Ferreira and here, where the light was better, she could see that the baby had a white father.
‘Hello, Dorcus,’ she said. ‘I’m Mel. This is Dushan. Thank you so much for agreeing to speak to us.’
She wasn’t quite prepared for this conversation herself, felt the weight on her, the need to be delicate but also to get the information they needed from Dorcus.
‘Good afternoon,’ Dorcus said, eyes lowered. ‘Judy said you want to talk to me about Dr Ainsworth.’
‘If you’re okay with that.’
‘I am sorry to hear that he has been killed,’ she said, stroking her son’s head gently. ‘He was a very kind man. He did not deserve to die in such a manner.’
‘He came to see you recently, didn’t he?’ Ferreira asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you stay in touch with him after you were deported?’
The question felt crass, but Dorcus seemed unfazed.
‘No, he found me on Facebook,’ she said. ‘He told me he was coming to Kampala for a holiday. He asked me about the city. He had not been here before.’ She smiled slightly. ‘He did not know anybody in Kampala. Only me.’
‘And he came to see you when he arrived?’
‘Yes, he brought medicine for Joseph’s eyes.’
‘Are they better now?’ Ferreira asked.
‘Much better, yes.’ She looked down at him, taking hold of his tiny hand and stroking his fingers.
Dorcus seemed happy despite everything, and Ferreira struggled to imagine how she could possibly feel that way. Given what she’d gone through, how she’d managed to come to terms with falling pregnant while she was locked up and then being deported in the middle of the night. Ferreira felt angry on her behalf, wondered how Dorcus had found this calm within herself.
She noticed the small gold cross she wore and supposed maybe that helped.
‘Did Dr Ainsworth tell you he’d left Long Fleet?’
The contented expression on Dorcus’s face faltered momentarily, as she lifted her eyes towards the camera, but then she returned to her baby, cradl
ing his head and rocking him from side to side.
‘He told me this, yes.’
‘And did he tell you why?’
Her face turned grave. ‘At Long Fleet the good people are punished for helping. This is why he left. He was made to leave for telling the truth.’
‘He wanted to tell the truth about what happened to you, didn’t he?’ Ferreira asked, watching Dorcus carefully for any sign that she needed to pull back, but she only nodded.
‘I did not want to make trouble. If anyone made trouble they were the first to be sent away,’ she said. ‘But they took me anyway.’
‘Did Dr Ainsworth know who attacked you?’
Dorcus lowered her eyes again, her face becoming pensive. ‘I was not attacked.’
‘We were told you fell pregnant in Long Fleet,’ Ferreira said. ‘Was that not true?’
‘I was blessed with my boy there, yes. But I was not attacked. Dr Ainsworth said it is the same thing though. When a man has power a woman does not, there is no reason for him to be violent. His power is his violence.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Judy told me this too, but I did not believe her. My nana, she said, “Never believe the words of a man who wants you.”’ Dorcus smiled wanly. ‘I believed Patrick. He said he loved me and he would make sure I was not sent away.’
Zigic let out a low breath next to her.
The same story as with Nadia, except Sutherland’s ploy worked in her case.
‘How was he planning on stopping your deportation?’ Zigic asked.
‘He said there were medical troubles he could make it seem like I had. If I had some of these things wrong with me, I could not be deported.’
Ferreira was sure that wasn’t true, but could imagine being convinced by the lie in Dorcus’s situation. When you were desperate it would sound logical enough to hang your hopes on.
‘Patrick said he couldn’t live without me.’ There was something like scorn in Dorcus’s voice now and Ferreira wondered if it was directed at Sutherland or herself for believing him. ‘He called me his “ebony queen”.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Those are not the words of a man in love, are they?’
