Long Way Home (19 page)

Across the footing Xin Gao and the Malaysian man were dragging the concrete along the trench with long-handled rakes. The pump droned on, the sound of it drilling through Paolo’s skull and making his eyes throb.

A shout went up and he saw Xin Gao standing with empty hands suddenly, looking into the footing where he must have dropped the rake. One of the English stormed over and Xin Gao shrank back. The man cuffed him around the head and Xin Gao gave a low bow, gesturing to the trench. The man hit him again and pointed away towards the loading bay.

Paolo quickly emptied the blocks and pushed the empty barrow across the quagmire, reaching the loading bay a few seconds after Xin Gao.

‘You OK?’

He nodded but his eyes were shining with tears. There was a red mark on the side of his face.

‘Where?’ He mimed raking, not looking at Paolo.

‘Here, look.’ Paolo went over to the storage shed and found another rake for him.

Xin Gao mumbled a thank you and hurried away.

Paolo slammed the blocks into the barrow.

The unfairness burned him. They worked hard, they did everything they were told to, and yet they were treated with such disrespect. The English were animals. Not just these ones. They were making money from their behaviour, it was to be expected that they would act like tyrants, but the others, the ones who knew this went on and did nothing to stop it, they were no better. They wanted their old and their sick looking after, their offices cleaned and their factories building, but they wouldn’t work like this.

He turned the barrow round and froze, seeing Xin Gao walk in front of the digger. He tried to shout but no sound came out.

The beam fell in slow motion, seeming to take forever to land, and he saw the end of it strike Xin Gao on the back, driving him into the mud.

Then he was running, screaming in English for someone to help.

The driver jumped down from the digger and the English converged on Xin Gao, while the rest of the men stood dumbly watching, tools in their hands, faces blank with shock.

‘Get back to work,’ the boss shouted.

Nobody moved.

Xin Gao was face down in the black earth, arms and legs splayed, the rake a few inches away from his hand. The beam lay across his lower back and Paolo retched at the sight of his flattened torso, bone sticking through his thin shirt, blood welling out of him, flowing fast and seeping into the ground.

‘He’s still alive.’

One of the English, a bald, fat one who wore gold rings like knuckledusters, grabbed the front of Paolo’s jumper and shoved him away.

‘Work. Now.’

‘He needs hospital.’

‘He’s dead, you stupid cunt.’

Xin Gao’s foot twitched.

‘You take him to hospital.’

The man threw a short, straight punch at Paolo’s face and blinding pain exploded in his head. He stumbled back and fell, tasting blood in his mouth, running down his throat. He tried to stand but his knees had turned to water.

Two of the English lifted the beam off Xin Gao’s back and dropped it a few feet away from Paolo. They were going to help him, it was OK, it would be OK. He shouted to Xin Gao, told him they were taking him to hospital.

The English picked Xin Gao up, one taking his arms, the other his feet, and started to carry him towards the trench.

‘On three.’

Paolo got to his knees. ‘No!’

‘One.’

They swung Xin Gao’s body.

‘Two.’

They couldn’t do this.

‘Three.’

They let go of him and Xin Gao landed in the wet concrete with a dull splash.

Paolo forced himself up, the world lurching and blurring as he stumbled over to the trench. There were hands on him but they didn’t hold him back. The bald man grabbed the scruff of his neck and dragged him over to the edge of the footing.

‘You see that?’

Xin Gao was sinking, impossibly slowly, into the concrete, his face submerged but the back of his head still visible.

‘You wanna go in there with your boyfriend?’

Paolo’s knees buckled and he was shoved to the ground. The man picked up the rake and pressed it against the back of Xin Gao’s neck, forcing his head under the concrete, then his shoulders and his back.

The heels of Xin Gao’s work boots sank into oblivion and Paolo heard himself praying softly. The bald man threw the rake into the trench and pulled Paolo to his feet.

‘Now. You wanna go back to work or you wanna go in there? Your fucking choice.’

Paolo stared at him. Their faces were inches apart and he had never been so close to the man before, this thug, this murderer who controlled all of their lives and now decided on their deaths too. He looked ordinary, like a million other men, bald and pale-skinned, heavy around the jowls and with bags under his eyes. His breath smelled of tobacco and coffee and one of his front teeth was chipped. There were broken veins around his nose, a few long hairs poking from his nostrils. He had just murdered Xin Gao but his expression was neutral, his voice perfectly even.

‘Well? What’s it to be, big man?’

‘Work,’ Paolo stammered.

‘Get to it then.’

The man pushed him away and turned a slow circle, aware that he still had an audience. ‘Any of you other fuckers got summat to say?’

They couldn’t understand him. Not the words, but the gesture required no translation. Heads dropped, feet shuffled in the dirt, and one by one the men went back to their tasks.

‘That’s what I thought.’

Somehow Paolo walked away, his feet taking him back across the ridged ground to the loading bay where the barrow full of blocks was waiting for him. There was blood in his mouth, but he swallowed it, and his hands moved of their own volition, lifted the barrow and pushed it ahead of him.

Why did nobody do anything? Why was he the only one to act?

There were five English and twenty of them. What were they so scared of that they were content to stand by and watch one of their own murdered?

They were broken. He knew that. Knew that he was broken too or he would have gone to the storage shed and taken out one of the big lump hammers they used to drive in the steels and hit the bald English with the cold blue eyes. He couldn’t trust the others to follow him though.

When he returned to the loading bay he didn’t even look at the shed. He just got on with his job, numbly placed more heavy, grey blocks in the barrow, deaf to the sound of them slamming down, not even feeling their rough texture any more. The site had fallen silent to his ears and everything look flat and unreal, the colour bleached out of every surface, the air sluggish and so thick he could hardly breathe.

Around him the other men kept their heads down. He was marked now and they didn’t want the taint on them too.

The bald man could have pushed him into the wet concrete and held him down with the rake until he drowned and nobody would have helped. He would have died unmourned among strangers.

Tomorrow it might happen. Or the day after that.

He had to get out.

ZIGIC WAS UP
just after six, needing to clear another fitful night’s sleep out of his head before the day began. He stretched his calves against the low stone wall in front of the house, taking deep lungfuls of icy dawn air, feeling the chill sharpening him already.

He stuck in his earphones and selected a Radio Moscow playlist the right length for the route he would take around Castor Hanglands – fifty minutes if he ran it flat out. The groin pull which had been plaguing him for months had eased in the last couple of days; Anna took the credit, said it was her healing hands, nothing to do with the stretches his physio had recommended.

Behind him it was still dark but the sky was lightening across the fens and he ran towards it, out of the village along the Helpston Road where a few houses showed life already, commuters who had to make the six twenty train into King’s Cross, light sleepers or night workers getting ready to turn in.

At the edge of the village he passed a girl walking a vicious little Jack Russell which yapped at him as he ran past; she yanked on its lead and tugged it after her, in no mood to be up so early, Zigic thought, judging by the pyjamas she wore under her brown tweed coat.

Half a mile ahead of him, on the straightest stretch of Heath Road, he saw another runner, a flash of white gone round a curve within seconds.

He caught sight of her again as he crossed the strip of grassland towards Wild Boar Coppice and wondered how any woman could plunge into that isolated tangle alone, at this time of morning, and not worry about her safety.

The Hanglands were notorious for attacks during the seventies and eighties and Zigic knew they had a dozen or so unsolved ones on the books still. They’d arrested a man last autumn for the murder of a young woman whose body had been found in the spinney he was running through now. A shallow grave and thirty years with no resolution for her family.

Zigic pushed on. The track was soft and yielding from last night’s rain and it dragged at his feet, making his muscles burn. He focused on his breathing, the music in his ears and the woman’s white top pulling away from him.

In a few weeks the Hanglands would be thick and green but for now it was a mass of knotted brown hedgerows with a sparse dressing of last year’s dead leaves clinging tenaciously on. There were buds on the hawthorn trees, he noticed, and the buckthorns were tinged green here and there. He might bring Stefan up to pick sloes this autumn if the crop was good. He’d gone at that age, dragged out by his grandfather. He remembered hating every second of it but Stefan was a different kind of kid to how he’d been, always out in the garden, elbow-deep in the compost pile.

He crossed a clearing where half a dozen ewes were penned off waiting to give birth. He’d wanted to take the boys to Sacrewell Farm to see the lambing but Anna had vetoed that, sure it would warp them in some deep and irrevocable way.

The woman in front of him was getting nearer and he decided he was catching up rather than her dropping back.

They went through Lady Wood, the water tower standing ominously to the north, grey and monolithic, the pair of them in step now, the distance between them stabilised at eighty yards. Zigic checked his watch, behind time but doing well, and no pain in his groin yet.

The track would split off soon and he decided that whatever way she went he would follow, a feeling in his gut that they might not be the only people out there this morning.

She went on straight, taking the longest route, leading him through another clearing, sprays of snowdrops and wood anemones in the long grass, dozens of felled trees with their branches stripped stacked in neat piles, and Zigic caught the briefest glimpse of a roe deer as it sprang out from behind one, a blur of rust-red hide before it disappeared into the undergrowth.

His mobile vibrated in his pocket and he slowed to a jog to work it out.

‘Yeah?’

‘Have I called at an inopportune moment?’ Ferreira asked. ‘You sound a bit breathy.’

‘Running. What is it?’

‘I think we’ve got a lead on Viktor Stepulov.’

‘Great. Where is he?’

‘Hinchingbrooke mortuary. I got a – the photograph –’

‘You’re breaking up, Mel.’

‘ – like him –’

‘The signal here’s rubbish. Are you at the station?’

‘No, I’m –’

The call cut dead and he swore at his handset and the trees and the lack of mobile phone masts. Everyone complained about them in the countryside but where were they when you needed one?

He cut across a clearing on Ailsworth Heath, went over a fence into a section of field where a few sheep were penned up, a ram among them, but he sprinted off before it decided to charge him and vaulted the fence at the other side, getting onto the track alongside the old Roman road which took him back down to the main drag within ten minutes.

It was busier now and he saw a couple of cars parked up near the entrance to Wild Boar Coppice, people out dog walking, seven o’clock approaching, the day starting for real.

Home, he stripped off his sweaty running gear off and jumped in the shower, starting to build a plan of action in his head. Someone would need to go to the mortuary, they would have to get a positive ID – how did Hinchingbrooke even know that was Viktor Stepulov? Bloody cranky phone signal.

Anna opened the shower door and stepped in with him. He protested, told her he didn’t have time and he was knackered from the run, but she just smiled and kissed him, one hand in his hair and the other on his cock, found an energy reserve he didn’t know he had and charmed it out of him.

Afterwards she went down to make breakfast and by the time he was dressed the boys were at the kitchen table, squabbling over their boiled eggs and soldiers, and he grabbed a quick slice of toast which he ate while he drove, listening to the local news on the radio; no mention of Stepulov’s death now. There would be another spike of interest when they formally identified him but no one was much bothered about a dead migrant worker.

In the office he cleaned the coffee machine, dumped yesterday’s filter in the bin and started a fresh pot with the last few spoons left in the bag. Ferreira arrived as the final drops came through, tired-looking, her hair scraped into a greasy ponytail and a too-bright lipstick which dulled her tan skin.

‘Rough night?’

‘A late one,’ she said.

He handed her a coffee and asked what she had on Viktor Stepulov.

‘I sent his details out to the local hospitals, thought maybe he’d had an accident or something. Hinchingbrooke got back first thing – and I mean first thing – they’ve got an unclaimed corpse that matches his description.’

‘Did he have ID on him?’

‘No. Nothing. They’re waiting on a copy of the photograph we got from the family.’ She booted up her computer, the start music jangling. ‘I’ll send it now, should have an answer pretty quick.’

‘How long have they had him?’

‘Twelve weeks.’

‘No wonder Stepulov couldn’t find him.’

Ferreira stabbed at the keyboard for a minute, then sat back, holding her cup between her hands, inhaling the steam.