Long Way Home (24 page)

‘Is she dead?’

‘No. She’s in a bad way apparently but she’ll survive.’ She came out of her office with her hair scraped back into a ponytail, pulling on a pair of gloves, a clipboard tucked under her arm. ‘Have we got a name?’

‘Viktor Stepulov.’

‘Any relation?’

‘Brother.’

‘Your case just got complicated, Ziggy.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Jenkins put the clipboard aside.

‘Alright, let’s see what smells so bad in there, shall we?’

She opened the blue plastic bag and rolled it down to get at the contents. The smell bloomed into their faces and Zigic turned away from it. He’d brought a faint echo of it with him from the mortuary, the odour of Viktor’s chilled corpse lingering in his hair and on his clothes, and that was OK, he could ignore it. This though, a full, deep blast, was more than he wanted in his lungs.

‘Do we know how he died?’

‘He was hit by a train,’ Zigic said.

‘Explains this then.’ Jenkins took out a bundle of shredded fabric, blue check cotton tangled up with the remains of a grey sweatshirt and pieces of bright red nylon which had been a waterproof jacket. His combat trousers had been cut off his body, the legs slit from hem to waistband.

She checked the pockets, turned each one inside out, finding nothing more useful than fluff and crumbs. Zigic would have liked a detailed map or a business card with a mobile number scrawled on the back, but he was past expecting such things.

Jenkins started jigsawing the pieces together on the stainless-steel counter. The annihilating white lights brought out every stain and snag, blood dried brown and blobs of purple and black from his minced organs. The cuffs of Viktor Stepulov’s shirt were frayed and there were barbs in the fabric of his sweater, vicious grey hooks which looked like thistles. The thick cotton of his trousers was ripped low on the left leg where his shin bone had broken through, first the skin and then the fabric, and the sight of it put a sick knot in Zigic’s stomach.

Jenkins kept rearranging the pieces, intense concentration on her face, her mouth set in a firm line, and finally, when she had them assembled to her satisfaction, she took half a step back from the table and looked at Zigic, one slender brow flicked up.

‘Well?’

‘What?’

‘Tell me what’s missing,’ she said.

‘His shoes.’

‘They’re still in the bag. Tell me what’s missing from the clothes.’

Zigic looked at the ragged costume laid out in front of him, like something stripped from a scarecrow. He put Viktor’s body back inside it, seeing how the tears matched the terrible jumble of limbs in that tray at Hinchingbrooke mortuary, thinking of the nauseating pile of intestines and pulped organs.

‘There isn’t enough blood,’ he said.

‘Nothing like enough. Did you see the body?’ Zigic nodded. ‘And it was in pieces, I imagine?’

‘Cut in half pretty much, right across the torso, under the breastbone approximately.’

‘OK,’ Jenkins said, picking up her clipboard, writing quickly. ‘That fits. But the deposits on here aren’t consistent with that kind of trauma. If he’d been alive this lot would be totally saturated. We’ve got some . . . internal matter here and there, but the only place he’s bled heavily from is his left leg.’

‘His shin was broken. It looked like a pre-mortem injury to me. Not that I’m an expert, but there was heavy bruising, a lot of swelling.’

‘Sounds like you’re right then. When’s the PM scheduled?’

‘I’m hoping Monday,’ Zigic said. ‘But if you can get anything for me before that . . .’

Jenkins looked at him expectantly.

‘I will be very grateful.’

THE AFTERNOON TICKED
down in a grey torpor and Zigic stood at the window for a long time watching the clouds darken over Peterborough, the rain which had followed him from Huntingdon to Great Gidding and back to the station becoming finer but heavier, settling in for the weekend.

Typical. He was planning to take the boys down to Ferry Meadows tomorrow morning, cycle around Gunwale Lake then stop at the cafeteria for milkshakes and chips. They’d bought Stefan a new trike for his birthday and Anna was getting annoyed with him riding it around their small back garden, tearing up the turf and running over the edges of her flower beds. He needed more space but she didn’t like the playing field in the village as much as she did when they moved in, too many big dogs running off their leads and kids hanging around getting stoned at the weekends. She didn’t want Stefan and Milan seeing that kind of behaviour.

If the rain didn’t lift it would have to be the cinema again. He made a mental note to check the listings later, thinking about taking them to Stamford Arts Centre rather than the multiplex on Eastern Industrial Estate, it was smaller and quiet, and he thought Anna might enjoy a couple of hours to herself, wandering around those chichi boutiques she liked so much.

She seemed frazzled lately and he knew she wasn’t coping with Stefan as well as she had with Milan when he was that age. He was inquisitive and demanding, wouldn’t focus on anything for more than ten minutes at a time, and Zigic could understand how exhausting it was for her.

She wanted girls. That was part of the problem too, even though she would never admit it. Every time Stefan brought a handful of worms into the kitchen or fell off the rabbit hutch she’d be thinking how different life would have been but for the sake of that single chromosome.

They’d discussed having another baby over Christmas and agreed to wait until Stefan started school, but the way she’d been on at him lately made him suspect she had other ideas. Not that he minded. He’d always pictured himself with a big family, some leftover from childhood when they’d been to visit his cousins in Somerset, a dozen kids all running wild around the family’s farm, staying out in the orchard until it got dark, coming home to a long table on the veranda, food piled up end to end, drinking watered-down wine and stealing sips of imported slivovitz that tasted of metal and fire. They lived like they were still in the old country and it appealed to him, spoke to something deep in his bones.

It was a fantasy though. He knew that.

Anna didn’t get on with his family and he had never been accepted by hers. There would be no warm gatherings at the Zigic homestead.

He folded his arms across his chest and watched the beginnings of the evening rush on the parkway below. Friday night and people wanted to get home. Freed from the shackles for forty-eight hours they drove more aggressively than usual, recklessly cutting lanes and hanging on each other’s bumpers. They were desperate to get in and wash the day off, grab a drink then another one, vegetate in front of the TV, or dress up as a different, more alluring person and try their luck in town.

He envied them the ability to shut out work for a couple of days. It was a luxury he hadn’t enjoyed for years.

He knew some coppers said they could forget the job the moment they walked out of the station but he didn’t believe them. You didn’t choose this occupation if you didn’t care. Even the most politically motivated officers were consumed by cases, not to avenge the victims or console their families, but because any slip would blot their record and threaten the carefully plotted trajectory of their career. They had it worse, he guessed.

A patrol car pulled off the road, blue lights strobing but no siren, and when it stopped the uniforms hauled a man out of the back. He made his body a dead weight and they struggled to get him off the tarmac. Zigic remembered that manoeuvre, trying to get a belligerent suspect into the station without damaging them. They did it to provoke you, wanting to push you into using a non-approved method of restraint they could complain to their solicitor about later.

He’d done less than a year in uniform and almost quit the job. It was an endless grind of verbal abuse and senseless violence, glassings and stabbings on the weekend shift, neighbour disputes and antisocial behaviour, one domestic after another ending unresolved.

That year he’d seen parts of Peterborough he never knew existed despite living here all his life.

He could deal with that though, chalk it all up to experience; he didn’t want to be one of those university-educated detectives the old school hated, unconnected and soft. What almost finished him was the locker-room atmosphere of the uniform section. It didn’t take long to realise the people he was supposed to stand shoulder to shoulder with were no better than the ones they were facing down.

His first week he was given a crash course in how to keep his fucking mouth shut from a forty-something PC with two marriages behind him and a catalogue of disciplinary issues. He watched PC Galton shake down shopkeepers, carried the boxes of beer they were ‘gifted’ out to the patrol car, saw him take freebies from prostitutes working the Triangle and bribes from motorists who couldn’t afford another three points on their licence. Galton fancied himself a Wild West sheriff and at first Zigic thought it was a joke, but as the weeks went on and Galton opened up he realised it wasn’t. Galton’s world was sharply polarised, decent people and scum, and as it transpired almost everyone fell into the latter category. Not just the criminals they arrested, but their families and their neighbours; their victims too more often than not.

Zigic wondered what he would make of the Stepulov brothers.

Even back then Peterborough had a substantial migrant population and Galton wasn’t shy about showing his disapproval, always going on about how much better it was back in the seventies, ‘were a few Pakis and that but they knew their fucking place’.

Galton retired soon after Zigic made sergeant, sold his council house and took his pension over to Spain, where he was probably still playing golf and shouting at waiters in his broad fen accent, complaining to anyone who’d listen about the amount of African immigrants over there, telling them it was much better back in the early noughties when the only foreigners were English.

If he knew his old station now had a dedicated Hate Crimes Unit he’d probably stroke out into his fry-up, Zigic thought, smiling to himself.

Knowing the mess they were in would probably perk him up, though.

Zigic turned away from the window, feeling a weighty fatigue settle across his shoulders. He could blame it on the early start and the long run, tell himself he’d had too much coffee and not enough food today, but none of those things would matter if they were making progress. Seventy-two hours after Jaan Stepulov was murdered they had nothing. No reliable witnesses, no clear motive, no solid evidence. The suspects they’d stuck to the board looked increasingly untouchable too. How was he supposed to charge anyone under these conditions?

And now there was Viktor.

Ferreira was standing at his board, transcribing the information from DI Hawkes’s embryonic investigation, and he noticed her writing was larger than usual, as if she wanted to fill that massive white space at any cost.

It challenged you, the emptiness, shoved your failure at you every time you walked by; a metaphor for every question you didn’t know to ask and every line of inquiry you hadn’t yet identified.

Wahlia sat hunched over his desk, hair pulled about, shirt tails hanging out the back of his designer jeans, staring with a blank expression at the monitor as he played through the CCTV footage from the crossing on Holme Fen near where Viktor’s body was found. Hawkes had got as far as requesting it but they didn’t know if he’d had anyone check it.

Zigic wondered how the case had fallen through the cracks when Riggott reassigned Hawkes’s workload. He could have asked but knew there was nothing to gain by raising the subject. CID were understaffed, Hawkes off on sick leave and Lawrence on maternity, they’d taken a hit in last year’s budget cuts too. No one had been sacked but the money for cover wasn’t there any more, and he guessed that didn’t help. Things got overlooked, priorities changed. A possible accident involving a corpse with no ID was easy to ignore.

Wahlia straightened with a grunt.

‘Got something?’

Zigic went over as he was winding the footage back. On the screen it was night, the train tracks bathed in a pinky-orange glow, the rails glowing silver against the dark swathes of gravel and the rough shape of the verge. Where the rails cut through the road the tarmac bore a slick sheen and when Wahlia started to run the footage again at normal speed the rain was visible, coming down in sheets, like streaks of neon close to the security lights.

The time code at the bottom of the screen showed 9.32 p.m. Sunday, 16 December.

‘Any minute,’ Wahlia said, shifting nervously in his seat.

Zigic leaned on the desk, feeling a stirring excitement in his gut. This was it. This could be the break they needed. Any second.

Ferreira came over and braced her hands on the back of Wahlia’s chair.

‘What is it?’

‘Just wait,’ he said. ‘OK, here they come . . .’

Two cones of white light appeared at the top of the screen, they seemed high off the ground but the vehicle stopped before its front bumper entered the shot.

A stiff wind rattled the barrier where it stood, bolt upright, and Zigic half expected it to come down but it didn’t, just kept rattling, the collapsed skirts chiming against the barriers as one car door opened and slammed shut, then a second, then the distinctive grating whoosh of a van’s side panel shooting back.

Ten seconds passed and the rain lashed down.

‘What’s taking them so long?’ Ferreira said.

‘Just wait, will you?’

The first man was tall and broad, even with the foreshortening effect of the lens. He shuffled into shot, back bent under the weight of Viktor Stepulov’s shoulders. The second man was smaller, whippet-looking inside a white Adidas tracksuit already plastered to his body by the rain. Both had their faces covered, balaclavas or scarves under dark-coloured knitted hats, Zigic couldn’t tell.

‘Can the techies do something with this?’ Ferreira asked.

‘Technology’s come a long way but it can’t uncover their faces.’

‘Yeah, thanks, Bobby, I was thinking of getting a better view of that bracelet.’