After You Die (13 page)

‘Yeah. I suppose so.’ Inside the cuff of her sweatshirt her fingers were nervously working at something. ‘He used to go up and sit with her.’

‘And do what?’

‘Talk. I don’t know.’ Her fingers kept twitching. ‘What else would he be doing up there?’

Mrs Fraser reached out and closed her hand around Caitlin’s, told her in a soft voice not to be scared. ‘Just tell the lady what you saw, Lin.’

‘I didn’t see anything,’ she snapped. ‘Nathan’s a little kid, what do you think he was doing? What, you think he was fiddling with her or something?’

‘Nobody’s saying that,’ Mrs Fraser said gently.

Caitlin wasn’t listening, though. She was looking at Ferreira, a challenging stare shooting through the shards of her fringe, daring her to voice a contradiction.

Ferreira had her full attention now.

‘Why do you think Nathan ran away from home?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did he tell you why he’s in care?’

‘He’s there for the same reason I am. Because nobody wants him.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘He won’t talk about it,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like talking to anyone. Except Julia.’

‘And Holly?’

‘He wouldn’t hurt her,’ Caitlin said, a surprising vehemence in her tone. As if she was defending her own blood. ‘You don’t know him. You think everyone’s shit. Just because we’re in care it doesn’t mean we’re shit.’

Ferreira forced herself to sit back, wait, let the girl’s words fade slightly before she went on. She didn’t know how to deal with children, always thought it best to treat them just the same as adults because it’s what she would have wanted at that age. She reminded herself that Caitlin was grieving and worried about Nathan. She obviously needed to be at home and Ferreira wondered why Julia sent her in to school today.

Mrs Fraser took a packet of tissues out of her bag and handed one to Caitlin. She wadded it up tight in her fist.

‘No one cares about us,’ she said, chin tucked down into her chest.

‘Julia cares.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Caitlin started to shred the tissue into her lap. ‘If she cares why isn’t she on the telly trying to get Nathan back?’

Ferreira didn’t have an answer. Or not one she was going to share.

‘That’s how you find missing people, isn’t it?’ Caitlin asked. ‘You go on the news. You use Twitter and that.’

‘I’m sure the officer in charge will involve the media when he thinks the time’s right.’

‘She.’

‘What?’

‘Rachel. It’s a woman looking for him.’

Ferreira tried to think of a Rachel serving on the local force. There were none she knew of in plain clothes and it was unlikely a uniform would be involved in any major capacity.

‘Is this your family-liaison officer?’

‘She’s a detective,’ Caitlin said.

‘What’s her surname?’

Caitlin cocked her head. ‘Shouldn’t you know that? You’re looking for Nathan, you should talk to her.’

‘We should,’ Ferreira conceded. ‘But she’s not been in contact. I guess because she’s working so hard on getting him home right now.’ Caitlin looked unconvinced. ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

‘Saturday night. She came to the house.’

‘This is when Nathan ran off?’ Caitlin nodded. ‘And Julia called nine-nine-nine?’

‘No. She called Rachel. Rachel looks after Nathan. She’s supposed to make sure he doesn’t get in t—’ Caitlin stopped herself.

‘Trouble?’

Quick blinking, brain whirring. ‘Doesn’t get into danger.’

‘Why does Nathan need a detective to look after him?’ Ferreira asked, an uncomfortable sensation spreading across the back of her neck. ‘What’s he done?’

Caitlin brushed the flecks of tissue off her thighs, onto Talbot’s pristine blue carpet. Delaying answering, trying to dredge up a lie or a denial.

She was convinced the girl knew much more about Nathan than she was letting on but getting it out of her would be tough. Especially once Julia became involved, which she was entitled to do as her legal guardian.

‘Caitlin,’ Ferreira said. ‘You know it isn’t normal for Nathan to have a detective looking out for him, don’t you?’

She stiffened. ‘This isn’t anything to do with you.’

‘Yes, it is. Because your friend Dawn has been murdered and Holly’s dead and now Nathan’s run off.’ Ferreira straightened up. ‘All in a matter of a couple of days. You’re a smart girl, how do you think that looks for him?’

‘He didn’t do it,’ she said, a flush rising on her face.

‘I think you’re probably right,’ Ferreira told her. ‘I think Nathan saw something or someone and he got scared. That’s why he ran away.’

‘I’ve been calling him,’ Caitlin said. ‘I’ve messaged him. He won’t answer.’

‘Can you give me his number, please?’

Caitlin brought out her phone and Ferreira saw how few numbers Caitlin had in her contacts as she scrolled down to Nathan’s. Two years at the school but she obviously hadn’t settled as well as Talbot’s notes suggested; kids were too sharp and too cruel and any hint of difference or suffering was just an invitation to strike harder. Being ignored by her classmates was probably the least bad outcome.

‘Are you going to find him?’ Caitlin asked.

Ferreira smiled as warmly as she could. ‘We’re going to try.’

The post-mortem report arrived while Zigic was trying to make a dent in the mountain of paperwork covering his desk and he opened it, grateful for the distraction, even one as grim as this.

Dawn had died, as expected, from multiple stab wounds, impossible to tell which was the killing blow but most likely the small nick across her windpipe. The pathologist noted the ferocity of the attack, the force necessary to drive a blade clean through to her back – a blade at least six inches long, he suggested, which meant their murder weapon was probably one of the missing knives from the wooden block in her kitchen.

She would have died within minutes, choking on her own blood. Estimated time of death, Thursday evening between six and midnight.

Holly hadn’t been so lucky. She’d hung on until Saturday evening before suffering a massive stroke brought on from the build-up of toxins in her system. A death which could have been avoided if only someone had been there to empty her catheter.

He put the report down to answer his mobile, a caller-withheld number on the display and a woman’s voice on the other end.

‘We need to talk.’

‘Who is this?’

‘If you need to ask that you shouldn’t be a DI.’

‘I’m an idiot,’ Zigic said. ‘Humour me.’

‘I’m Nathan’s guardian angel.’ There was engine noise at her end, expensively insulated. ‘The lay-by at Norman’s Cross, meet me there in fifteen minutes.’

‘Come into the station.’

‘It’s Norman’s Cross or nothing,’ she said, and killed the call.

Zigic made the meeting point in under ten minutes, wanting to get there first and gather as much information about his shadowy contact as he could. He’d debated taking someone else along with him, just to see how she’d react, but decided against it. Ferreira was still out of the office, everyone else fully occupied.

He felt uncomfortable about this meeting taking place off the record, just the two of them present, knowing that anything he got from Nathan’s mysterious guardian would become legally debatable because of the circumstances. No decent copper carried on like this.

She’d picked a suitably cloak-and-dagger spot for it. The lay-by was on one of the main roads into the city centre, just off the A1, which he could hear roaring as he climbed out of the car, engine noise driven in on a stiffening wind that carried an autumnal edge. There were no houses nearby and the passing traffic moved quickly, drivers still set at motorway pace, but the fast-food van parked up tight to the hedgerow was doing a brisk trade, enough to warrant the presence of a couple of chrome cafe tables, both taken, with more people eating in their vehicles, radios playing, doors open. No women, though.

Zigic bought a Coke and drank it sitting on the bonnet of his car, looking across the road to an empty grass field bordered with trees just beginning to turn. It was the site of a Napoleonic prisoner-of-war camp, the first purpose-built one in the world, and had housed thousands of captured soldiers and ‘enemy aliens’ in varying degrees of luxury according to their means. The wooden barracks were long gone, only the agent’s house and the stables remained, substantial white-painted buildings which looked grander than their origins and somehow retained a besieged air, standing in this stagnant hinterland between the motorway and the suburbs.

The old stable block was an art gallery now, selling paintings and small sculptures by local artists, and for a moment he assumed the woman walking along the path must have come from there. But it wasn’t a place you walked to or from and he doubted she was heading back into Peterborough from the Premier Inn on the side of the road either, although she was dressed like a cleaner who’d just come off shift, in jeans and a loose cotton shirt, open over a white vest.

She was careful, he realised. Paranoid even. Had parked along the road somewhere so he couldn’t identify her from the number plate on her car.

It didn’t bode well.

She waited impatiently for a gap to appear in the traffic and finally managed to get across the road when a delivery van pulling out of the lay-by blocked off one lane, the driver waving her across. She put a hand up to him and strode over to Zigic, her finger already jabbing the air.

‘You need to back off,’ she said.

‘And you need to tell me who the hell you are.’

Across her shoulder Zigic noticed a young man climb out of his parked vehicle, watching to see how this went and if he needed to intervene. The woman followed his gaze and, as she turned, the young man asked if she was okay.

‘Fine, thanks. No worries.’ She glared at Zigic. ‘We’re not talking here.’

With a sharp nod of the head she started across the tangled verge, stomping through wind-blown branches and barbed blackberry crawlers, expecting him to follow her over the thigh-high mesh fence and onto the gated service road beyond. Zigic swore at her retreating back, knowing he was ceding ground and the best thing to do was get in his car and drive away, but there was something amiss in the Campbells’ household and she was the only person who could explain it to him.

Assuming he could persuade her to.

Her attitude suggested he was more likely to end up in the water-filled knothole she was leading him towards, moving as if she was magnetised.

He ran around these old clay pits occasionally and he always felt the sheer scale of the man-made lakes tugging at him as he got closer, an elemental and unfathomable compulsion. It was a blasted terrain, studded with piles of building rubble and fly-tipped household waste, only the hardiest plants able to find nourishment, breaking through the patches of tarmac and grey gravel paths. The gunmetal water sparkled as the low afternoon sun hit its rippling surface, but he knew how deep the pit was, how cold and dark its depths went.

‘Rachel,’ she said, when he reached her.

‘Rachel what?’

She braced her foot against a chunk of concrete spiked with rusted reinforcing bars. ‘That’s as much as you get.’

‘It’s not enough,’ Zigic said. ‘Are you police?’

‘What else would I be?’

‘You’re not acting like it.’

‘This is a delicate situation and I can’t tell you any more than what I’m going to.’ The wind whipped her long blonde hair across her face and she brushed it away behind her ear. ‘My superior officer will be in touch with your DCS. Riggott, isn’t it? He’ll square what we’re doing.’

‘And what is that, exactly?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Because it’s delicate,’ Zigic said, fighting the rising annoyance. ‘I’ve got a murdered woman and a dead child and there’s every chance Nathan can help me find who’s responsible. I need to talk to him.’

‘He’s gone.’

‘I know that. And I want to know where he is.’

She looked over the shimmering lake. ‘We’re working on it.’

Across the lunar-like scrub a volley of shots rang out and she flinched, cocked her head to try and read their position, assess the threat level. They’d come from a shooting club a few hundred yards to the south, the light pop of .22 handguns discharging into paper targets, but the peculiarities of the landscape bent the sound so they seemed much closer.

‘What’s Nathan done?’ Zigic asked.

‘You don’t need to know that.’

‘Social services have got no record of him being placed with the Campbells – why is that?’

‘It’s not your concern,’ she said, turning on him. ‘You need to stay the fuck out of this.’

She was losing it, Zigic thought. She’d been given a job and she’d failed to see it through and now there would be pressure mounting, more than she could cope with, and until Nathan was found it was only going to get worse. Offering to help wouldn’t soften her, he realised, although it was his first instinct.

Which only left one option.

‘There’s strong evidence that Nathan was present at the murder scene,’ he said. ‘Forensic evidence. I can’t ignore that and I won’t have my investigation limited by your inability to track this kid down.’

She crossed her arms, fists bunched tight. ‘What evidence?’

‘You don’t need to know that,’ Zigic said, taking a small pleasure in throwing her words back at her. ‘It’s enough to arrest him. Especially when we consider his … unusual relationship with the dead girl and the fact that he’s run away.’

‘Nathan isn’t a murderer,’ Rachel said fiercely.

‘I’ve only got your word for it and frankly, the way you’re behaving, I’m inclined to trust the evidence more.’

‘He’s a good boy.’

‘Why’s he in protective custody then?’

‘It isn’t what you think,’ she said. ‘If I could tell you the background to this I would, but I can’t. It’s a highly complex, highly dangerous situation, and Nathan’s safety is my primary concern right now.’ She gave him a meaningful look. ‘We’re not the only people trying to find him.’

‘You don’t seem to be trying very hard,’ Zigic said. ‘Why didn’t you alert us?’

She just shook her head.