After You Die (38 page)

And all the time, in the background, his mother’s murder, images no child should ever have to see imprinted forever on his young mind.

There was a limit to what he could tell them and Zigic wasn’t sure he knew how to get the information out of him. He needed a child psychologist, someone versed in post-traumatic stress, but he knew Rachel wouldn’t allow it.

‘Do you like Matthew?’ he asked.

‘He’s alright.’

‘Does he watch films with you?’

Nathan shook his head.

‘What kind of man is he?’ No answer. ‘Nice?’

‘I s’pose.’

Rachel brought a packet of gum out of her handbag. ‘I had him checked out. He’s clean.’

‘Everyone’s clean until they’re not,’ Zigic said.

She folded a stick of gum into her mouth. ‘Granted. But he’s your standard-issue frustrated intellectual. Teaching thick posh kids about the Tudors when he’d rather be lecturing wide-eyed undergrads. Boring, stable. Not the best fostering material in the world but okay.’

‘He were in the garden,’ Nathan said suddenly, his open mouth full of claggy white bread. ‘I went to get a drink and he were setting fire to things in the garden.’

Zigic thought of the ash Jenkins’s team had recovered from the incinerator, more of it from the garden. Several burn sites, Ferreira had told him, and it hadn’t seemed particularly strange then, because there were a dozen innocent reasons to use your incinerator, but now the timing sent a jolt of energy up his spine.

‘What was he burning?’

‘Garden stuff.’

‘What time was it?’

Nathan looked to Rachel for help.

‘Was it dark?’ she asked.

He nodded.

‘After nine then,’ she said.

They would need to speak to the neighbours again. Uniforms had already performed a first round of door-to-door and found every house that bordered the Campbells’ garden empty. A second round after six thirty would be necessary if they were going to find witnesses who might have seen Matthew stripping off bloodstained clothing and stuffing it into the incinerator.

‘Did Matthew ever take you to Dawn’s house?’

‘No.’

‘Never?’

‘We went with Julia.’

‘Or on your own,’ Rachel said, the disapproval clear in her voice.

‘She never minded. She liked having us round.’

‘I’m sure she did, but you weren’t supposed to go out on your own, were you?’

Zigic shot her a look and she shook her head slightly. She was just as tired as Nathan, the stress of his disappearance lingering around her, compounded by the change in plans it had necessitated. A safe house organised by Riggott that he just knew she wouldn’t trust. The ramifications when she finally reported back to her boss. This was a career-changing case for her and Fallon, he guessed, and it wasn’t playing out how either would have wished.

‘Did Dawn ever come to your house when Julia was out?’ he asked.

‘She never came to the house,’ Nathan said. ‘She couldn’t leave Holly, could she?’

‘Okay, so, going back to Thursday night – you were watching a film and Matthew was in the garden. What about Caitlin? What was she doing?’

‘She were in her bedroom,’ Nathan said.

‘All evening?’

‘I think so. She has a lot of homework.’ He looked at Rachel. ‘She’s clever. Like you.’

Rachel bristled at the compliment and Zigic couldn’t understand why.

‘Was Caitlin friends with Dawn?’ Zigic asked.

‘She went round there with Julia a lot. Dawn used to paint her nails.’ He put down the rest of his sandwich. ‘Holly never liked her.’

‘Why not?’

‘She said she were thick.’

‘But she isn’t?’

‘No. It was just what Holly said.’ He wiped his nose across the back of his hand. ‘Holly were dead clever.’

Rachel patted him on the back and stood up. ‘I need a coffee. Can you show me where the machine is, Dushan?’

He followed her out into the corridor, pointed towards the stairwell. ‘The machine’s along there but the coffee’s dire. If you go down to Hate Crimes, there’s a pot on.’

‘God almighty, are you serious?’ She sighed. ‘I don’t want a fucking coffee, I need to talk to you without Nathan listening.’

‘You’re all charm, aren’t you,’ Zigic said.

She bowed her head for a second, came up serious faced. ‘Have you spoken to Caitlin yet?’

‘My sergeant has. She’s the one who gave us the photograph of Nathan.’

Rachel smiled thinly. ‘Of course she did. She wanted you to find him.’

‘The impression I got was that Caitlin was worried about him and she wanted him bringing home safely. Nothing more to it than that.’

‘So you’ve not looked into her background yet?’

‘I imagine it’s fairly innocuous or you wouldn’t have placed Nathan there. You seem to have done your homework on Matthew.’

‘I made a judgement call,’ Rachel said. ‘I’d heard good things about Julia and I thought she was the best option. The rest of them passed my lowest bar, just about. Caitlin Johnson almost changed my mind.’

‘Why?’

Rachel reached into her roomy leather shoulder bag and came up with a grey cardboard file, half an inch of paperwork inside it.

‘This did not come from me.’

She handed it over and Zigic only needed to look at the top page to know what he was holding: Caitlin Johnson’s juvenile record.

‘How did you get this?’ ‘I’ve got clout,’ she said. ‘And a thank you would be nice.’

‘Why are you giving me it now?’

‘Because you obviously need some help and there’s no way you’d manage to get a copy on your own.’

‘There’s a good reason for that,’ Zigic said. ‘This is supposed to be a sealed record.’

She held her hand out. ‘Give me it back then.’

‘You brought this with you to take the heat off Nathan.’

‘Yes, I did, but that doesn’t matter now, does it?’ Her brow furrowed. ‘Whatever you might think of me, I’m a good copper, and I don’t want two people’s deaths going unpunished.’

Zigic tapped the file against his knuckles, feeling the weight of the paper inside, all of that ink detailing the parts of Caitlin’s life they knew nothing about and would never uncover any other way. Not just secrets but offences. Criminal offences which had led to prosecution and punishment.

No amount of moral unease on his part could outweigh the detective’s instinct to know what the file held.

Rachel smiled, deeper this time, as if she knew she’d corrupted him.

‘Just read it, Dushan.’ She paused at the lounge door. ‘Then you can thank me.’

Caitlin Johnson had a history of violence.

That was the simplistic way to interpret the file Rachel had given him. A serious offence committed when she was just eleven years old. The judge who presided over the case had taken a lenient view and sentenced her to twelve months in a young offenders’ institution, suggested intensive psychological treatment to address the underlying cause and went so far as to state that her actions were understandable even as he refused to accept her solicitor’s claim of self-defence.

After reading all the details Zigic came to the same conclusion.

He guessed Rachel had too or she wouldn’t have put Nathan in the same house as the girl.

The mugshot showed a sullen child with long brown hair hanging limp either side of a slim, almost malnourished face, eyes pink from crying when it had been taken, black smudges on her skin.

According to the police report she hadn’t tried to run, just waited on a bench opposite the house she’d set fire to, and handed herself in when the first patrol car arrived. Along with a laptop she was clutching to her chest. The occupants of the house, her foster parents, were screaming from an upstairs window, glass smashed, smoke pouring out into the night.

Caitlin never explained why she did it, refused to talk at all, but when the investigating officers finally got around to examining the computer she’d saved from the fire they got their answer. Tens of thousands of images of child abuse, many of them filmed in the destroyed house, some of them featuring her. The husband and wife both involved.

Zigic closed the file, sickened and angry at Rachel for thinking she could use this to move their suspicions away from Nathan and onto a child who had suffered so much.

Nothing he’d read suggested Caitlin was a murderer. She’d committed an act of violence but when he imagined himself in her position – scared, damaged, hopeless – he could fully understand why she’d acted as she had.

Knuckles rapped on the office door and snapped him out of his thoughts.

He called Ferreira in.

‘I’ve got Julia downstairs,’ she said. ‘She’s really pissed off.’

‘She’ll have to wait. Come in and shut the door.’

Ferreira took the seat opposite him. ‘What’s up?’

‘Caitlin’s got a criminal record.’ He pushed it across the desk. ‘A pretty serious one.’

‘Where did you get this?’ she asked as she opened it.

‘Rachel.’

‘She wants to serve Caitlin up as a suspect so we ignore Nathan?’

‘That’s about the size of it, yeah.’

Ferreira wrinkled her nose but didn’t reply, reading already. Fast. Turning through the arrest sheets and witness statements, the photographs of Caitlin’s crime, which made her shake her head and let out low curses under her breath.

Zigic waited, looking at the photographs of his boys, thinking that he should have called Anna to check how Stefan was behaving himself. He’d got up this morning and dressed himself for school, came into the bedroom trailing his bag while they were still asleep. Zigic explained why he was staying at home and got treated to an epic tantrum, the night before’s apology forgotten in a hail of shouting and stamping and red-faced bag throwing. They tried to draw a positive from it; at least he was enjoying school enough that being kept home registered as a punishment. He would phone Anna later, once he was finished with Julia Campbell.

A minute later Ferreira closed the file, placed it on his desk and sat back in her chair.

‘I’d have done the same thing,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you, if you were Caitlin?’

‘That’s not the issue. She’s shown a propensity for violence.’

‘Against her abusers. Do you think Dawn was abusing her?’

‘I’d say it’s highly unlikely but we need to bear in mind what she’s capable of.’

Ferreira sighed. ‘It’s so not the same thing, though. She acted in self-defence.’

‘It’s a short step from self-defence to actual offence once you’ve crossed that line,’ Zigic said. ‘And we don’t have any idea what the relationship between her and Dawn was like.’

‘I bet Julia knows.’

As they were heading down the stairwell an email pinged into both their phones at the same time – forensics coming back on the ash samples from the incinerator. Early testing showed fabric present, along with an as yet unidentified accelerant. More to follow.

‘Still think someone else planted the knife in their shed?’ Ferreira asked.

‘The incinerator’s out in the open, I assume. The same person who hid the knife could have used it.’

‘What?’ she asked, stopping dead. ‘The same time they planted the knife? Or do you think they jumped over the garden fence on Thursday to burn their clothes, then went back on Saturday some time to break into the shed? Come on.’

There was no more space for doubt, he realised. Someone in the Campbell household was responsible for Dawn and Holly’s deaths.

Ferreira had put Julia in the most comfortable room they had access to, the one usually reserved for witnesses rather than suspects. Its walls were painted cream, the chairs padded and the table unscarred. People they spoke to here didn’t scratch their name into any available surface, they were friends or family members dealing with grief and worry, the secondary victims in any given crime.

As he sat down opposite Julia Campbell, Zigic wondered if they had her in the right place.

She was angry, and struggling to hide it, sitting stiffly, hands making tight fists in her lap until she realised he’d noticed, then she placed her palm on her swollen stomach, took a couple of deep breaths, in through her nose, out through her mouth, as if it was a tried and tested technique she used when she felt herself about to snap.

Once Ferreira had the recording equipment set up he took over, explained the situation so she couldn’t later say that she didn’t understand.

‘This is only a chat, Mrs Campbell. You haven’t been cautioned or charged with anything. We simply want to ask you a few questions.’

‘Please don’t insult my intelligence.’ Her voice was low, thick with emotion. ‘Your people have ripped my house apart this morning.’

‘And they found the murder weapon,’ Ferreira said. ‘Anyone could have gained access to our garden. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Thursday evening,’ Zigic said, drawing her attention back to him. ‘Can you tell us where you were, please?’

‘I went to my book club,’ she said, eyes still fixed on the curve of her stomach, fingers twitching there. ‘In Warmington.’

‘What time did you leave?’

‘About seven.’

‘And when did you get home?’

‘Just after ten.’

Zigic asked her for the names of the other people who were there, contact details so they could follow up her alibi and she provided them from memory, Sally Lange among them, two other women. He expected Sally to be the most forthcoming, though.

‘What was Matthew doing when you got home?’

‘Some gardening.’

‘At ten o’clock at night?’

She nodded.

‘Was that usual for him? Gardening in the dark?’

‘We have halogen lights.’

‘He was burning something,’ Zigic said. ‘Do you know what?’

‘Some branches from one of the apple trees. He’d cut them at the weekend but hadn’t got around to clearing them away yet.’ She sounded uncertain. ‘I suppose he didn’t know what to do with himself since I wasn’t at home.’

‘The children were there. He could have spent some time with them,’ Zigic suggested. ‘But he didn’t. In fact, Nathan tells us he didn’t see Matthew all evening. Not until he went to get a drink and noticed him in the garden. Burning something, he said. But we know now it was clothing.’

Julia’s eyes widened. ‘You’ve spoken to Nathan?’