Between Two Evils

by Eva Dolan

  ‘They can do without me for the day.’ He eyed her warily. ‘You’re not planning on going in, are you?’

  ‘I just want to get this over with.’

  ‘Riggott won’t be expecting you today.’

  ‘What else am I going to do?’ she asked. ‘I can’t go anywhere nice looking like this.’

  ‘You look fine.’

  ‘For someone who took a battering.’

  ‘Can you eat?’ he asked, taking a bag of pastries out.

  ‘I’m not really hungry.’

  ‘I’ll make you a smoothie. You shouldn’t be taking those pills on an empty stomach.’

  He was putting a brave face on, working at this carefree display as if he hadn’t walked into a massacre last night. She wondered at his ability to compartmentalise.

  Zigic was taking it hard. She’d seen that last night when they found her in A & E. Zigic looking about ready to collapse, face slack, eyes dark, and as Billy explained what they’d found at the Walton house in an oddly neutral voice, she could see Zigic turning further in on himself.

  If he’d been in charge of the cold case, it wouldn’t have happened, she thought. He would have been more delicate, more circumspect. Ziggy never would have started pitting people against one another to see what happened.

  She felt the guilt spread heavily across her own shoulders. Dani and her son, Walton’s mother, all dead because he knew he was heading back to prison and couldn’t stand the idea that their lives would continue without him.

  And then he’d come for her.

  She wished he’d made her the first stop on his spree. Or that Dani had just listened to her when she told her not to come back to Peterborough.

  She watched Billy pouring fruit into the blender, concentrating on it like it was a far more complex task than it was.

  She wanted to tell him how badly he’d fucked up, but she guessed he already knew. Last night he’d been all apologies for leaving her at home alone right when she needed him, for bringing Walton to their door. There were endless apologies and promises but she wasn’t the person who needed them. The people who did were all dead.

  The blender whirred into life, painfully loud in her tiny kitchen. She closed her eyes, seeing again the blood on the floor and the chemical burns across Walton’s face. Her own injuries throbbing harder now, the pain carrying the remembered fear through her bloodstream once again, flooding her with adrenaline she had no use for.

  ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

  In the bedroom she searched through her clothes for something suitable, but there was no proper outfit for this. Or if there was it wasn’t here. Seeing the gaps on the rails, she realised how much of herself she’d moved into Billy’s place.

  Eventually she would have to go back and collect some of it. But the thought of walking back through that door was unbearable. She wasn’t sure she would ever be ready to do it.

  She pulled on a pair of jeans and a light T-shirt, stuffed her feet into a worn pair of trainers and laced them with her head swimming.

  Dutifully she returned to the kitchen and drank the smoothie he’d made her, only distantly aware of the taste of banana and mango and honey running dulled over her tongue. A side effect of the painkillers, she told herself. Nothing more than that.

  Billy kept up a monologue as she sat at the breakfast bar, his voice bright, saying nothing. Did he think she needed this relentless, upbeat talk? Or was he doing it for himself? Trying to keep his own dark thoughts at bay?

  Last night as he drove her home from the hospital, he asked what happened. She’d told him already while Zigic was there but he thought she was holding back, wanted to ask if Walton’s attack had gone further than she’d said, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to shape the words.

  In the end she said them for him, assured him that she’d already told him everything.

  ‘I’m going to sell the flat,’ he said, as he washed out the blender.

  ‘You don’t have to do that on my account.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while.’ He put the jug on the drainer, turned back to her. ‘It’s too small and with you being over so much … it feels like the right time.’

  ‘In this market?’

  ‘It’ll sell,’ he said. ‘You could let this place go as well. Pool our resources.’

  ‘You are all about the romance,’ Ferreira said, giving him a smile that made her jaw feel freshly traumatised.

  ‘Will you think about it?’

  She nodded. ‘But let me get this out of the way first, okay?’

  ‘Do you want me to drive you in?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m probably not safe with this much codeine in me.’

  At the station she managed to avoid going into the main office, heard the focused quiet of people conscientiously cleaning up after a murder that needed minimal investigation. Forensics to be collected and collated, the grim business of the post-mortems that would happen this morning. Eyewitness reports and statements from PCs Green and Sands, who would be facing disciplinary action for managing to miss Walton as he went into the building through the entrance they were supposed to be watching.

  When Ferreira had made it down to them, bleeding and battered, they didn’t notice her until she hammered on the roof of the patrol car.

  Riggott’s secretary winced when she saw her face. ‘You can go straight in. He’s expecting you.’

  ‘I should see the other fella, right?’ Riggott said, rising from his desk and going to close the door behind her. He peered at her, not quite so sharp without his reading glasses. ‘You must have strong fucking bones, girl. Fella that size laying into you and you’re in pretty good shape still.’

  ‘Is there a commendation for that?’ she asked.

  ‘Ought to be.’ He smiled briefly, then took her elbow and steered her towards the sofa. ‘No messing now, how are you feeling?’

  An involuntary sigh forced its way out of her. Something about the earnest expression from him knocked her flat. She’d intended to come in here all calm and poised, show him what she was made of, that she was tough enough to go through that and walk into work the next morning like usual.

  As much as she pitied Billy for needing Riggott’s approval, she realised she felt the same way. Too many years working under his guidance, too many secrets shared and disasters averted; he’d made her what she was and even though she rarely stopped to consider what that meant, it swam up at her now. How much she owed him and how much she had to lose.

  Her eyes started watering and she willed down the emotion.

  ‘Alright, girl.’ He patted her back lightly. ‘None of us get away from it easy, believe me.’

  ‘Fucking painkillers,’ she said.

  ‘Aye, they’ll do that to you.’ He went to his desk and fetched a box of tissues she couldn’t believe he actually kept in his drawer. ‘Getting a faceful of CS gas isn’t much fun either.’

  She exhaled slowly, dragged herself together again.

  ‘You need me to make a statement?’

  ‘We’ll do that later. First up, I want you to tell me what happened. Not just last night, from the first time you saw him outside your flat.’

  Ferreira went through it with him, from the moment she’d caught Walton standing under the street light across the road, staring up into her window, through the threats in the parking area and the ones on the phone, up to the second she realised that the whirring sound was someone – him – breaking into Billy’s flat.

  ‘He punched me in the face,’ she said. ‘I cut him with a kitchen knife.’ She gestured high up on her own arm. ‘He dragged me into the living room. We fought – I threw a lamp at him. He hit me again. I got the CS spray out of my bag and used that. He hit me in the jaw, then when I was down he tried to choke me. I gassed him again. Close range.’ She took a deep breath, could still somehow taste it. ‘He was losing a lot of blood. Eventually he just passed out.’

  Riggott’s brows knitted together. ‘We’ve got the
preliminary report on Walton’s death,’ he said.

  She wasn’t expecting that, didn’t think it would be a priority given how he died. But she’d been naïve.

  ‘You caught his brachial artery,’ Riggott said.

  ‘Okay. That explains why he was bleeding so much then.’

  ‘The pathologist has it down as a fairly minor wound. Long but shallow.’ She heard the warning in his tone. ‘He put the bleed-out time around twenty to thirty minutes.’

  Ferreira said nothing.

  ‘Your injuries won’t be considered consistent with an attack of that duration.’

  He chose his words carefully and made sure that she realised where he was going with this, giving her one of his meaningful looks.

  ‘I’m going to assume you were knocked unconscious,’ he said slowly. ‘I think what must have happened is that after you sprayed him in the face, he lashed out and hit you in the jaw there.’ He gestured towards her swollen face. ‘And that blow knocked you out cold. By the time you came around he was already dead. You did your duty as a police officer and immediately checked for a pulse but couldn’t find one, at which point you rushed downstairs to the officers guarding the building and raised the alarm.’

  Ferreira nodded.

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said, remembering how she’d watched the pool of blood around Walton growing larger, minute after minute, spreading under the sofa and reaching towards her no matter how many times she backed away from it. Watched his protests become weaker, his breathing more laboured, thinking of all the women he’d watched as they suffered, all the pain he’d caused, the lives he’d ruined. She’d watched his skin flush then pale and then, when she was sure all the fight was gone out of him, she put two fingers to his throat and waited until his pulse slowed and weakened and finally stopped.

  She met Riggott’s flinty gaze.

  ‘That’s exactly what happened.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My deepest gratitude first and foremost to Alison Hennessey for her wisdom and guidance as Zigic and Ferreira returned from their brief hiatus. She has always been their fiercest champion and without her continued support they might have detected their last in 2017. All authors should be so blessed.

  Gushing thanks as well to Marigold, Ros, Lilidh, Lindeth and Sara Helen for everything they’ve done over the last year in shepherding this book to its final form and then taking it out into the world. The team at Raven really is special, passionate about good writing and dedicated to producing beautiful books, they are a continuing delight to work with.

  Thanks to my agent Phil Patterson and the team at Marjacq for all their hard graft behind the scenes.

  Thanks, as well, to Jay Stringer, Nick Quantrill and Luca Veste, for vital moments of distraction and occasional lapses in good sense.

  As always I owe thanks to all the lovely reviewers and critics who have supported the series, and to all of the festival organisers who have been kind enough to let me on their stages, sincerest thanks.

  Final thanks to my amazing family, for absolutely everything else.

  NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Eva Dolan was shortlisted for the CWA Dagger for unpublished authors when only a teenager. The four previous novels in her Zigic and Ferreira series have been published to widespread critical acclaim: Tell No Tales and After You Die were shortlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year Award and After You Die was also longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. In 2018 Long Way Home won the Grand Prix Des Lectrices. Dolan’s first stand-alone thriller, This is How It Ends, was longlisted for the 2019 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. She lives in Cambridge.

  @eva_dolan

  Also available by Eva Dolan

  This Is How It Ends

  ‘Stupendous. The thriller comes of age’ Sarah Hilary

  This is how it begins.

  With a near-empty building, the inhabitants forced out of their homes by property developers. With two women: idealistic, impassioned blogger Ella and seasoned campaigner, Molly. With a body hidden in a lift shaft.

  But how will it end?

  ‘A tense, intelligent, politically charged thriller, expertly crafted by a writer at the top of her game’ Mari Hannah

  ‘A thrilling tale that builds to a surprising twist and a shocking finale’ Daily Express

  https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/eva-dolan/

  https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/this-is-how-it-ends-9781408886618/

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  BLOOMSBURY, RAVEN BOOKS and the Raven Books logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published in Great Britain 2020

  This electronic edition published 2020

  Copyright © Eva Dolan, 2020

  Eva Dolan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-8644-1; TPB: 978-1-4088-8645-8; eBook: 978-1-4088-8642-7

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