by Eva Dolan
Ferreira shook her head, momentarily tangled in the sheets of the English Lit student she’d dated at uni, listening to all the words he knew for the colour of her skin. She’d been young enough to enjoy the intensity of his attention then, only ended it when he lifted his head from between her thighs and told her she tasted different to English women.
‘Dr Ainsworth was suspicious of Patrick’s behaviour when you were still in Long Fleet, wasn’t he?’ Zigic asked. ‘He wanted you to speak to the governor.’
‘Patrick said if Mr Hammond found out about our relationship, they would deport me immediately. I trusted Patrick to help me. So, I said nothing.’
‘What about when Dr Ainsworth came to visit you last month? Did you tell him about Patrick then?’
‘I will never be able to go back to England,’ she said despondently. ‘But Joseph will, one day. He is half an English boy, they won’t be able to tell him no and lock him up.’ She smiled down at the boy, radiant as she watched him sleeping. ‘Dr Ainsworth knew already. At Long Fleet he asked me if it was Patrick and I would not say. I should have said then. The other women needed to be kept safe from him but I did not understand that when it was happening. Because he didn’t hurt me, I thought what we were doing was not bad. But it is. It is wrong that Patrick lies to women and gives them false hope to get what he wants from them.’
‘Dr Sutherland has been suspended,’ Ferreira told her. ‘He won’t be working as a doctor any more.’
They’d agreed not to share his suspected role in Ainsworth’s death but she thought Dorcus deserved to know this much, to have the guilt she felt lightened slightly by the knowledge that he wouldn’t be going back there.
‘Dorcus, did you give Dr Ainsworth permission to take a DNA sample from your son?’
‘Yes. And from me also. He said he would use it to prove what Dr Sutherland did, so he would lose his job and not be able to be a doctor any more.’ She looked directly into the camera, a new fierceness in her eyes. ‘I am glad he has lost his job.’
Her baby stirred, wriggling against her chest, his small fist fighting the air, alerted by the strain in her voice and the shift in her posture as she leaned closer to the camera. A second later he began to wail. She cooed and shushed him, but he only got louder.
‘Dorcus, we should let you go,’ Ferreira said. ‘You’ve been a great help –’
‘Tell him that.’ Her voice rose over the crying. ‘Please tell Dr Sutherland that I helped you.’
Ferreira smiled. ‘I’ll tell him we wouldn’t have caught him without your help. I’ll make sure he knows you did this to him.’
Dorcus nodded and reached forward and the call ended.
‘Is it less bad that Sutherland groomed her rather than physically attacked her?’ Zigic asked, looking troubled as he stared at the dead screen.
‘I guess that’s a matter for the individual,’ Ferreira told him. ‘From our perspective though – being a cold-hearted bitch for a minute – how can we use this against Sutherland?’
Zigic propped his chin on his fist, still a little dazed.
‘I’m not sure we can. It’s the same behaviour he exhibited with Nadia and we know he doesn’t feel any shame about it.’ Zigic shrugged. ‘Maybe if Nadia found out he’d gone through the same routine with another woman before her, she’d get jealous and turn on him but she’s already turned on him.’
‘You’re back to thinking he’s responsible,’ Ferreira said, hearing the subtle shift in his tone.
‘I’m thinking about the hairbrush.’ He stroked his beard absent-mindedly. ‘Josh only needed a hair or two for the DNA sample, so why take the whole brush?’
‘Maybe he was just being overly cautious,’ she suggested. ‘I guess he didn’t fancy breaking in a second time if the initial test failed because of contamination or something.’
‘Or did he want Sutherland to know it was missing?’ Zigic asked.
‘Why bait him like that?’ She shook her head. ‘No, Ainsworth had no way of knowing Sutherland would find out he was responsible for the break-in, so this doesn’t read as baiting to me. It makes much more sense than he was being thorough taking the whole thing and he just expected Sutherland to think he lost it.’
Zigic’s phone started ringing and he asked her to give him a minute.
Ferreira went back out into the main office, ate the rest of the now slightly melted chocolate bar she’d left on her desk.
She kept thinking about Sutherland and Dorcus, what kind of man he was to exploit his power over her and how they could turn that against him. But it felt like an impossible task. She had a terrible feeling he was going to get away with this. If they couldn’t definitively prove his guilt, and it came down to his word against Nadia’s in front of a jury, she knew which way they’d rule.
And meanwhile, what would he do?
He’d be another Lee Walton, accused but evading justice. Still free to practise medicine, still with his life all ahead of him to keep using and abusing women from behind the protective façade of his good job and his nice hair.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Now it was a matter of pulling everything together.
Ferreira was desperate to drag Sutherland back to the interview room, storm in there and take his story apart, but they needed to be thorough, Zigic insisted. Sutherland had proven to be a tricky customer and while they had enough compelling evidence to prove he was a liar, they still didn’t have the silver bullet he wanted.
Murray had returned from Joshua Ainsworth’s house with the hairbrush he’d stolen from Sutherland’s place. She took it up to forensics, waited while they retrieved enough strands to run a DNA test and dusted it for prints, came back down with it in an evidence bag.
Zigic looked for Bloom, wanting her to chase forensics, but there had been a sudden shift in Adams’s attempted murder case and he’d commandeered her and Weller into the manhunt.
The board with Adams’s missing suspect George Batty’s mugshot stuck at the top of it had been moved to a position of greater prominence and a list of known associates was being examined, as they tried to work out where to deploy their limited resources for his return to Peterborough. Wanting to pick him up and get him into custody before the embarrassment of losing him the first time deepened any further.
Joshua Ainsworth had been shunted aside in the process and as Zigic was looking at the board, considering yet another ill-advised coffee, Kate Jenkins called.
‘Blood in the car,’ she said. ‘Type match for Ainsworth. The usual provisos but hopefully that helps you.’
‘It does, thanks, Kate.’
Buzzing from the caffeine and the elation of finally having some forensic evidence to tie Sutherland directly to Ainsworth’s dead body, he added her initial findings to the board, Ferreira looking on.
‘Doesn’t tell us which one of them drove over there, though,’ she said.
‘It’s blood in the car. You should be much happier than that.’
‘I’ll be happier when we have the results of Nadia’s tests and we know which one of them is lying to us about the sleeping pills.’
‘Did you get an ETA on the results?’ he asked.
‘Twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The usual.’
‘They can do it quicker.’
‘I know they can,’ Ferreira said. ‘And I told them that, but apparently they’re short-staffed and they’ve got a lot on and that’s how long we’ve got to wait.’
Zigic let out a low growl of frustration. It felt like each incremental move forward was being countered by a heavy backward drag. Logically he knew they were doing well, that the case had actually progressed quite swiftly, even with his attention divided between Ainsworth and Lee Walton, but it felt like he’d been pulling double shifts for the last few days. Sleeping badly, eating badly, the disagreement with Anna rumbling away in the back of his mind, disturbing his equilibrium and making it impossible for him to rest when he was at home.
It was because they we
re so close. He knew that. His mind and body were preparing for the inevitable collapse, which came after closure.
And he couldn’t afford that collapse, because while the tests they needed on Nadia Baidoo were going to take up to forty-eight hours, the one they were all waiting for – but not acknowledging since this morning’s bollocking from Riggott – the one that would prove Lee Walton’s guilt or innocence, was due today.
Either he was guilty and everything kicked off.
Or he was innocent and they were back to square one.
‘Okay.’ Zigic rubbed his face, hoping some of the blood he brought to the surface might redistribute itself into his brain. ‘What about a urine test? That’s quicker. We can have her urine tested in an hour, right?’
‘We can, but it’ll only tell us if she’s taken anything within the last day or two.’
He swore.
‘Let’s just go up there and take a run at him,’ Ferreira said, her body already turning towards the door. ‘He’s getting seriously stressed out, we need to push him as hard as we can.’
She had a point and it was tempting but Zigic shook his head, walked over to the coffee machine and poured another cup, ignoring the palpitations fluttering in his chest.
‘I really don’t enjoy being the voice of reason but I can see you vibrating from here,’ Ferreira said. ‘For God’s sake, have a chamomile tea or something.’
He put the mug down, the sound shooting through his head.
‘Or maybe a nap,’ Ferreira suggested in a tone so reasonable he wondered if there was something wrong with her.
‘If you think I’m going to close my eyes while you’re desperate to go and interview Sutherland again, you’ve got another thing coming.’
A stronger tremor shuddered across his chest and for a second he thought he was actually having a heart attack until his phone chimed and he realised he’d put it in his shirt pocket. He took it out: a message from Parr.
Important incoming.
‘What is it?’ Ferreira asked.
He dialled Parr’s number and he picked up after two rings.
‘What’s “important incoming”?’ Zigic demanded.
Parr turned down the music playing far too loud in his car. ‘Sorry, sir. Shouldn’t have been so cryptic, should I?’
He sounded hyper, a thrill in his voice Zigic didn’t think he’d ever heard before.
‘What have you got for us?’
As he started to answer Zigic switched the phone to speaker, watched an expression of dark delight spread over Ferreira’s face, felt his own smile become a little twisted as Parr finished explaining himself.
‘I’ll be fifteen minutes,’ he said.
‘We’ll be waiting.’ Zigic ended the call. ‘I think that’s worth a fifteen-minute delay, don’t you?’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Back to Interview 1.
Sutherland had been fed and watered, but didn’t look any more lively for it. Even his solicitor seemed slightly less crisp second time round. He’d brought a massive cup of coffee in with him, the smell of it deep and rich in the close confines of the small white room. Strong, but not strong enough to cover the sharp, sour odour rising from Patrick Sutherland’s body.
Zigic fixed his face in a neutral expression as Ferreira set up the tapes, aware of Ben Lawton watching him, trying to get a steer on where this would go, what they’d returned with and how it was going to affect his client. Sutherland kept his eyes down, arms folded on the desk, nervously picking at the buttoned cuff of his shirt, which he’d made some attempt to straighten out. As if that could give him an air of respectability at this late stage.
‘The good news is we’ve found out why Josh broke into your house.’ Zigic opened the folder he’d brought with him and took out the paternity test results, pushed them across the table to Lawton. ‘The day before Josh was killed he sent off this paternity test to a private lab. As you can see the results came back positive.’
Sutherland should have been shocked.
But he wasn’t. Didn’t even attempt to fake it. He already knew about the test.
Zigic removed a photograph from the folder and pushed that across the table too.
‘Do you recognise this hairbrush, Patrick?’
He gave it a cursory glance. ‘No.’
‘This is yours,’ Zigic told him. ‘It still has some of your hairs, not to mention your fingerprints, on it.’
The photograph was clear and precise, taken under aggressive lighting, the dust still faintly visible through the plastic, and the strands of his dark, wavy hair that were snagged in the bristles.
‘Your hairbrush was recovered from Joshua Sutherland’s house. Hidden in a plastic bag in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe. Did you look for it after you killed him?’
Lawton put a hand on Sutherland’s arm, as if to silence him. But Sutherland had already gone mute.
‘You took the time to find his phone and his iPad because you thought stealing them would convince us that it was a burglary gone wrong.’
Sutherland only looked back at him, mouth pressed tightly shut, palms pressed tightly together. Zigic could see the vein at his temple pulsing.
‘This was what Josh broke into your house for,’ Zigic said, pointing at the brush. ‘And you knew it was missing. Nadia told us you went crazy looking for it but you couldn’t find it.’ Sutherland’s jaw clenched even tighter. ‘The second you realised it was missing you knew what Josh was planning, right?’
Lawton cleared his throat. ‘This paternity test is from some shady online DNA testing firm, let’s not read too much into it.’
‘They’re an accredited lab with an excellent reputation,’ Zigic told him. ‘You thought you’d got away with it, didn’t you, Patrick? Dorcus was deported, nobody was going to see that suspiciously light-skinned baby of yours she was carrying.’
Sutherland was sweating right through his shirt.
Another photo came out of the file, screen-grabbed during their conversation with Dorcus.
‘Your son,’ Zigic said, pushing it slowly across the table into Sutherland’s eyeline. ‘She named him Joseph.’
He expected Sutherland to deny it but he didn’t seem capable of speech. Tentatively he reached out and his fingertips crept over the edge of the photo, drawing it slightly closer to himself.
‘You groomed Dorcus, just like you groomed Nadia,’ Zigic said. ‘Played on her fear of being deported and her isolation. Told her you loved her. Told her you’d move heaven and earth to make sure she’d be able to stay in the UK. All so she’d sleep with you.’
Lawton cleared his throat noisily. ‘This would be an internal matter for Long Fleet management, I presume.’
Had Sutherland already flagged this possibility with him? Zigic wondered. It seemed unlikely that Lawton would be aware of the specifics of Long Fleet’s procedures otherwise. Or maybe they’d discussed a potential charge in relation to Nadia Baidoo and that was how he’d planned to head it off.
Sutherland’s attention was still fully fixed on the photograph, mouth hanging open slightly.
‘Josh broke into your house to get a DNA sample,’ Zigic said. ‘He needed it to prove paternity of Dorcus’s baby so he could expose you for what you are. A predator.’
‘All of that may well be true,’ Lawton said, a stirring of unease in his tone. ‘But Patrick was completely unaware of Ainsworth’s plan or his intentions. It isn’t a motive if my client was ignorant of it.’
‘I already told you what happened to Josh,’ Sutherland said, dragging his gaze up to Zigic with an effort that looked monumental. ‘Nadia crept out of the house while I was asleep. When she came home she was covered in blood. She was shaking. I thought she was hurt. I wanted to take her to hospital but when I suggested it, she broke down and admitted what she’d done to Josh. I undressed her and put her in the shower and then I burned her clothes and her shoes.’
His voice was toneless and he sat perfectly still as he spoke in those
short sentences that were maybe as much as he could manage, as he felt the world shifting under him. Or maybe he thought they sounded more honest for their simplicity.
They didn’t though. It was the speech pattern of a caught liar and Zigic knew it only too well.
Sutherland kept going.
‘I know it was wrong of me to do that,’ he said. ‘I destroyed evidence. But I was only trying to protect her. I knew she’d acted in self-defence. Or she believed she did. I was scared for her. I didn’t want to lose her.’ He passed a hand in front of his face. ‘I’m not denying helping her. I’m an accessory to murder. But that’s all I am. I didn’t kill Josh.’
Zigic knew that manoeuvre as well. Admit the smaller crime in an attempt to claim innocence of the larger one.
‘And that’s how Josh’s blood got in your car?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you attempt to clean the interior of the car afterwards?’
He hung his head. ‘Yes.’
‘You destroyed more evidence?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you clean the car?’
Sutherland paused and Zigic saw him fumbling for an answer. He wasn’t expecting them to ask for more details. Thought he’d given them enough already.
‘I always wash the car on Sunday afternoon, I did it then.’
‘In full sight of your neighbours?’
‘I didn’t think it would look strange because I always do it then.’
‘But you’re not usually cleaning large deposits of blood from the upholstery,’ Zigic commented. ‘How did you clean it?’
‘Is this really relevant?’ Lawton asked, seeing that Sutherland was struggling. ‘Patrick has told you everything you need to know. Maybe you should be talking to Ms Baidoo now since she’s the guilty party.’
‘There wasn’t that much blood in the car,’ Sutherland said finally, his brain dredging up an answer by going to the truth for once. ‘I just used the regular cleaning fluid I always use. I don’t know why it matters.’
