Between Two Evils

by Eva Dolan

  He had cleaned it, Kate Jenkins had told them as much. But he hadn’t done a very good job, hadn’t got right into all the nooks and crannies where she knew to search for evidence, because people always missed the same places.

  ‘What time did Nadia get home?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was the early hours of the morning.’

  ‘Was it light?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you cleaned her up and put her to bed, is that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sutherland said, getting testy now, not wanting to repeat himself because maybe he was smart enough to know that lies fell apart in the repetition of them.

  ‘Did you go to bed at the same time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So when did you burn her clothes?’ Zigic asked.

  Another fumble, another slightly too long delay in answering a question about a moment that should have been seared into his memory.

  ‘The next day. I went outside and burned them in the garden incinerator with some old newspapers and things so it wouldn’t look suspicious.’

  ‘Your neighbours can’t have liked that,’ Zigic said. ‘Setting a fire while they’ll have wanted to be enjoying their gardens over the weekend.’

  ‘I did it early. Before eight. Nobody was up at that time.’

  Zigic nodded, as if he was convinced. ‘Yeah, nobody wants to be up that early at the weekend.’

  He lifted up the cardboard file and took out the tablet he’d been keeping, half hidden, underneath it, tapped the screen. A video player opened, a clip paused, ready to run.

  ‘There’s one other thing we’d like you to explain for us, please, Patrick.’ Zigic positioned the screen between Sutherland and his solicitor. ‘At 12:45 a.m. on the morning of Sunday August 5th – that’s around an hour after Joshua Ainsworth was murdered, so you’re clear – one of your neighbours was searching for her dog. It slips its lead quite a lot apparently.’

  Lawton’s manicured fingers twitched.

  Zigic noted the action with a slight smile, reached out and set the video playing. The neighbour had recorded with sound and despite the hour the image was clear enough to make out the number plate of Patrick Sutherland’s vehicle parked up in his front drive.

  The woman hadn’t been interested in that though, panned over it in a split second as she focused on what she’d really thought worth filming: Patrick Sutherland, barefoot and naked except for a pair of tight white boxer briefs, getting out of his car.

  Her supressed giggle was absurdly light in the interview room. Beyond it the sound of Sutherland closing the car door with exaggerated care, not wanting to wake the neighbours and create a potential time frame when they might later be questioned. Then a metallic noise as he dropped his car keys. An appreciative murmur broke out of the woman as he bent to retrieve them and Zigic wondered how Sutherland hadn’t heard her.

  Was the blood still rushing in his ears? Could he hear nothing but his own heartbeat and the breaths, which refused to come slow and calm again even an hour after he’d beaten Joshua Ainsworth to death?

  On screen Sutherland let himself into his house and closed that door almost silently. There were no lights on in the windows, only the porch light burning and he turned it off as soon as he was inside. It was too late though, he’d been caught perfectly framed under it: slack-faced and wide-eyed. Guilty.

  Zigic tapped the screen and stopped the video.

  Sutherland was balled up tight in his chair, fists punched into his underarms. He was staring at the tablet like he was trying to make it combust with the force of his mind.

  ‘Where were your clothes, Patrick?’

  Sutherland’s voice came out at a croak. ‘No comment.’

  ‘What happened to your shoes?’

  ‘No comment.’

  They had him. He was falling apart in front of their eyes, but one more ‘no comment’ and his solicitor was going to call for a break and they would risk losing the momentum they’d worked so hard to build. Patrick Sutherland was stripped of his charm and looks, all poise gone, all intelligence spent. They had him reduced to his true self now, the liar, the predator, the man who’d groomed a woman right out of Long Fleet and into his house and then, very nearly, into a prison sentence that should have been his.

  One more question to finish him.

  Zigic took a breath.

  ‘Why did you leave the porch light on when you left?’ he asked, but didn’t allow Sutherland space to answer. ‘You didn’t expect to be sneaking back into your house in your underwear, did you? You didn’t actually go to Josh’s house intending to kill him. You just wanted to talk, right?’

  There were tears in Sutherland’s eyes now. Everything falling apart around him, his lies catching up with him, his counter-accusation against Nadia rendered ridiculous.

  ‘Did Josh taunt you?’ Zigic asked.

  ‘He –’

  ‘Don’t say anything, Patrick,’ Lawton snapped.

  ‘Josh beat you and he wanted to rub it in,’ Zigic said. ‘He let you into his house so he could tell you exactly what he’d done. He wanted you to know he’d beaten you. He was going to ruin your life just like you ruined his. How did that feel, Patrick?’

  ‘I just went round there to talk to him,’ Sutherland said, the words so low Zigic almost thought he’d imagined them until he spoke again. ‘He started it. He wasn’t in control of himself. He was drunk and raving. He went for me.’

  ‘You look fine.’

  ‘He grabbed me,’ Sutherland said, finding his voice again, latching onto the only lifeline he could see, the one he’d tried to throw to Nadia: self-defence. ‘I didn’t have any choice but to fight back.’

  Zigic nodded, showed him an understanding face.

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill him.’

  Ten blows, Zigic thought. Ten times he hit Joshua Ainsworth across the temple with the table leg but that was a distinction for the courtroom. For now all he needed was the admission and he had it.

  He leaned back in his chair, watching as Sutherland broke down, burying his face in his hands.

  ‘Okay,’ Zigic said, hearing the satisfaction in his voice. ‘Interview terminated 5:07 p.m.’

  A round of applause greeted them as they returned to the office, whipped up by Adams who strode between the desks in full DCI mode, grinning broadly.

  ‘Very nice work, Ziggy,’ he said, clapping him on the shoulder. ‘He was a sneaky piece of shit but you weren’t having any of it, were you? Nailed him to the fucking table.’

  ‘It was a team effort,’ Zigic said, looking around for his team and finding them bundled in with Adams’s lot on the opposite side of the office, working his escalating case. ‘Great stuff, everyone. Thank you.’

  The faces all turned back to their tasks, that brief, uncomfortable interlude over. Much to Zigic’s relief.

  ‘What are you doing about Nadia Baidoo then?’ Adams asked.

  ‘We don’t have anything to charge her with,’ Ferreira said.

  ‘She might not have known all the details but she knew Sutherland had done something seriously wrong,’ Zigic reminded her. ‘She should have come forward the second she knew Ainsworth had been murdered.’

  ‘Not worth making anything out of though, is it?’ Adams said, a command decision buried in the seemingly friendly suggestion. ‘Given what she’s been through. I’d imagine she didn’t come forward because she was in an abusive, controlling relationship and she was scared of the consequences of reporting him.’

  ‘I’ll write it up and see how it looks,’ Zigic told him, still not entirely sure what he thought about Nadia’s involvement.

  She’d made a false accusation of serious assault. Claimed ignorance of a murder via the handy excuse of sleeping pills they now weren’t sure she was taking.

  If it got to court he was confident she’d be found guilty of assisting an offender, but he wasn’t ready to pass judgement on the young woman yet.

  ‘Bail her,’ Adams said, directing
the order to Ferreira. ‘But make sure the solicitor knows her obligations.’

  She headed down to the custody suite to deal with the paperwork.

  ‘Quick drink to celebrate?’ Adams asked, gesturing towards his office.

  ‘Not tonight,’ Zigic said. ‘I’ve got family stuff.’

  He looked wounded by the refusal but Zigic had bigger concerns than professional courtesy.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  They waited until the kids were in bed, then they went into the living room with their second glasses of the wine from dinner,the curtains drawn against the last of the late evening sun and the lamps lit in the corners, the television on to give some cover to the conversation they were going to have now.

  ‘Okay,’ Anna said, taking a seat in the centre of the sofa, perched on the very edge of the cushion. ‘Let’s talk about it then.’

  Zigic sat down opposite her, placing his wine glass on a coaster, knowing what he was going to say but still not quite ready to do it. There was a small core of resistance in him that he couldn’t put aside, convictions too long held and firmly set for him to simply ignore.

  Anna was just as firm in her decision; he could see it in the tilt of her head and the tension in her toes as they gripped the rug under the coffee table.

  ‘I was reading this article in the paper,’ she said. ‘About how the numbers of hate crimes in schools have exploded in the last year. These were reported figures from police forces. Not anecdotes from teachers or on social media, these were incidents that were severe enough for the police to be called.’ She pressed her fingertips together, flexing her knuckles. ‘Muslim girls having their headscarves ripped off, threats of lynchings and jokes about gas chambers. And what about all the things that happened without anyone seeing them? Because you know how insidious racism is, Dushan. You know that better than anyone.’

  He looked at the pattern on the rug, the curlicues and flourishes, going exactly where she wanted him to and he couldn’t help it.

  Back to the school he hated, the trouble starting on day one when a teacher didn’t know how to pronounce his surname and her mistake stuck for the rest of the term, despite endless corrections. The stupid cruelty of children which turned Dushan into ‘Dustpan’; it was a meaningless insult, he saw that now and maybe understood even then how petty it was, the kind of joke which would only raise a laugh in the narrowest mind. But the laughter kept coming and the viciousness of stupidity knew no end, he’d found. Didn’t stop with reasoned argument or physical violence. In fact once he’d resorted to violence, the nickname got thrown around even more by girls who’d realised he wouldn’t hit them and by bigger boys who were giving him a reason so they could hit him back.

  He’d got good at fighting. Got used to black eyes and busted lips and bruised ribs.

  His father told him it was important to stand up for himself, that he learned how to take pain and give it back, because he would meet as many bullies in adult life as in the schoolyard and the sooner he equipped himself to deal with them the better.

  They never went to the school to complain.

  His mother washed the blood off his shirts and his father would smile as he took hold of his scuffed knuckles: ‘You are becoming a man, Dushan.’

  He imagined Milan coming home with his face swollen and his knuckles cut from fighting, and the thought of it set his heart aching. He didn’t want that kind of childhood for Milan and Stefan. Or Emily, he realised, because girls were no better than boys, less likely to indulge in open violence perhaps, but perfectly capable of making her life hell once they’d fastened on the particular difference that would allow them to target her.

  Even in a city as multicultural as Peterborough.

  He did want to insulate his children from that.

  He wanted the best for them, a childhood that felt as safe as he could make it for as long as he could manage. The world was going to be cruel to them, as it was to everyone, but he wanted them to be prepared for it as well as possible.

  And this school would do that.

  ‘Are we just delaying the inevitable though?’ he asked, looking up at Anna. ‘Say we send them there and it’s all lovely and idyllic and there’s this great zero tolerance policy on bullying. What about when they leave? They won’t know how to handle aggressive people.’

  ‘You’re worrying about what’s going to happen in seven or eight years’ time,’ she said stiffly. ‘I’m worried what happens next month when Milan goes up to that big new school, and his bullies fall in with an even bigger group of bigoted shits and they all decide to gang up on him.’

  ‘Maybe it won’t be like that at secondary,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Well, from what I remember of school, everything got worse at secondary. And the teachers get a lot less interested in stepping in because they don’t want to risk the bullies turning on them.’

  Anna was crying now.

  ‘Why won’t you just back me on this?’ she asked. ‘I’m not suggesting we sell their organs or sign them over to the foreign legion. I just want to keep Milan safe.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, going over to her, feeling the ache in his chest that her crying always provoked. ‘I’m worried about him too. I don’t want the kids to dread school, either.’

  ‘You’re not here,’ she said. ‘You’ve got no idea how terrified he’s been about seeing those little shits again. He packed a bag.’ Anna reached for her wine glass so sharply that a few drops sloshed onto the hem of her sundress. ‘I found it under his bed – that little suitcase we bought him – he’d packed it full of clothes and books and one of Emily’s stuffed toys. And when I found it and asked him why he just started … wailing. Like he hasn’t done since he was a baby.’

  Zigic pressed his hand over his mouth, tears in his eyes.

  His boy, that scared, but he never said anything, didn’t come to him and talk about it. Just held it all in his tiny chest, the fear and the desperation, until running away became the only logical option for him.

  He thought of the last time Milan had packed that case, fastidiously folding his summer clothes on the final day of their holiday, and how confidently he’d wheeled it through the airport, his little man, the world traveller, so open-minded and bold.

  And now this. One incident robbing him of his self-assurance.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?’ he asked.

  She wiped her face dry. ‘Because I didn’t want you to feel like I was emotionally blackmailing you. I hoped you’d come to the right decision on your own but you’re not going to, are you? So now you know. That’s how bad things have been these last few weeks. That’s how scared Milan is. And I’m not going to let him live out his childhood in a state of permanent terror.’

  Zigic rubbed her shoulders until she stopped sobbing but the feeling of helplessness had settled in his chest, a feeling so strong it was like a physical restraint on every breath he took.

  Suddenly all the complaints he had felt petty and futile. So what if he wasn’t comfortable taking money from her parents? So what if he didn’t like the idea of his children being whisked off into some privileged enclave?

  His principles felt like self-indulgence compared to what Milan was going through. The high-minded ideals of someone who wouldn’t have to live with the consequences of their actions.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, kissing her head. ‘This is the right thing to do.’

  Anna turned and slipped her arms around him, buried her face in his neck, and he felt the pain in his chest begin to dissipate instantly.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  The phone woke her, the ringtone blaring at such an urgent pitch that she was on her feet and looking around for it before she’d fully shaken off the dream she was having.

  ‘It’s alright, it’s mine,’ Billy said, digging it out from between the sofa cushions where her head had been a moment before.

  Ferreira sat back down, letting the wooziness clear. She looked at the time on the BBC news chann
el: it was barely eleven and she’d fallen asleep on the sofa. It had been a long day, she reassured herself, as she picked up the book she’d dropped and put it on the coffee table.

  Billy was pacing around the room, nodding. ‘Good stuff, Col. You called it. I owe you a fiver.’

  He looked wired, his missing suspect George Batty back in town by the sound of it.

  ‘Yeah, wait for me. I’ll be ten minutes, tops.’

  Ferreira followed him into the bedroom, flopped onto the mattress, watching him dress for action.

  ‘Where did Batty show up?’ she asked. ‘Not at his mum’s?’

  ‘His dealer’s. That boy’s priorities are all messed up.’

  ‘He’ll be docile when you bring him in, anyway.’

  ‘And we get the dealer for harbouring,’ Billy said, looking almost obscenely pleased with himself.

  She knew the case had been weighing on him, even with the Walton investigation running alongside it. Nobody liked losing a suspect. It felt like a personal affront, the sense of failure only deepening with every day you didn’t bring them in.

  ‘You look shattered,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, get some sleep.’

  ‘No,’ she said, but she stayed where she was, curled up at the foot of the bed. ‘I’m going to wait up for you like a dutiful girlfriend.’

  He grinned, slapped her backside and walked out of the room.

  A couple of seconds later his phone rang again and she heard him stop to answer it in the hallway.

  ‘We’ll go for him now,’ he said firmly, listened briefly, then lowered his voice. ‘I’ll meet you there, don’t go in without me.’

  The door opened and closed, slamming hard.

  Ferreira looked at the clothes he’d left on the floor, wondering why Murray had called back only to have the same conversation. Or were Weller and Bloom already overstepping the mark? He’d taken them in for extra eyes but they were both eager to stake their claim in the office.

  She rolled off the bed and went into the living room, closed the curtains and switched on an extra lamp. She’d stay up for a while yet, have another go at the book she felt like she’d been reading for weeks now. There never seemed to be time for it as much as she was enjoying the story. Long days leaving her brain numb by the evening with not enough mental energy left for anything but the simplest TV programmes. She’d tried reading in bed before work but Billy was a morning person and seemed to consider any book she had in her hand as a rival and would do his damnedest to distract her from it.