Long Way Home (3 page)

Ferreira’s mobile vibrated and she went into the hallway to answer it, closed the living-room door behind her. The Barlows already had their story straight, no point letting them overhear what she was saying.

‘What you got for me, Bobby?’

‘They’re all clean,’ DC Wahlia said. ‘The Lunkas and the Barlows.’

‘What, nothing?’

‘I know, what’s the fucking world coming to?’

‘I’d have laid money this arsehole had form.’

‘Is he giving you shit?’

‘Just the usual.’ Ferreira checked the mail on the hall table, bills and circulars, the new Lakeland catalogue. Tucked behind the table was a hefty red crowbar. ‘They’re hiding something. The atmosphere’s like cancer.’

A car pulled up outside the house, an insistent bass line pounding for a few seconds after the engine stopped. Forensics had arrived.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Wahlia asked.

‘That’s it for now. Unless you’re going to come down here and beat some answers out of them.’

‘
YOU WANT COFFEE?’
Alec Lunka asked, the pot already in his hand, a battered aluminium stovetop which looked like it had crossed continents.

‘Black with one. Thank you.’

Lunka poured a shot of espresso into a mug and returned to the kitchen table while the kettle boiled. He picked up a bowl of milky porridge and tried to spoon some into his daughter’s mouth. She was grizzly and stubborn though and turned her head away no matter how gently he coaxed her, twisting and dipping like she might escape the high chair at any moment.

‘They’re great at that age, aren’t they?’ Zigic said.

Lunka wiped her chin with her bib and she scowled at him.

‘She only eat for Mama.’ He said something to her in Romanian, his voice soft and hopeful, the tiny pink spoon held to her firmly closed mouth. ‘You have children?’

‘Two boys, five and three.’

‘And they eat?’ The kettle rattled to a boil just as the little girl opened her mouth. Lunka gestured away. ‘You make.’

Zigic finished his coffee, added sugar from a canister and dropped the spoon into the washing-up bowl, checking the view out of the kitchen window. The Barlows’ shed was less than thirty feet away, close enough to lay a sooty film across the glass. The inside was sparkling clean, like the rest of the small white kitchen.

At the table Lunka was making an elaborate display of trying the porridge; he mugged it up but the girl wasn’t buying. Zigic remembered doing the same thing with Stefan; he was finicky, would eat something one day and not the next, refused it off a plastic spoon, had to be fed from the grown-ups’ cutlery. Eventually they realised the only way to make him eat was giving the food to Milan first, then he’d scream and snatch at it.

Lunka sat back, defeated. ‘They will feed she at nursery.’

Zigic sipped his coffee, the little girl watching him now, wondering who this strange man was.

‘Can you tell me what happened this morning, Mr Lunka? Right from the beginning.’

He shrugged, frowning. ‘I am in bed. I hear noise, wake up. I go to window, see fire in shed.’ Another shrug. ‘I call 999.’

‘What noise woke you?’

‘Some noise. A bang maybe.’

‘Did you see anyone near the shed?’

‘No.’

‘But you knew there was someone inside,’ Zigic said. ‘You told the dispatcher that you thought there was a man in there.’

Lunka nodded.

‘How did you know he was in there?’

‘I hear, last evening. He come home, is drunk, singing.’

Zigic put his cup down. ‘Came home? He lives there?’

‘Some time, yes I think.’

‘But not every night?’

‘I am not policeman, stand at window watch neighbour. I see when I see,’ Lunka said. ‘If these people want make money for he to sleep in shed . . . plenty people do this. When I am come to Peterborough first I sleep in garage. Pay old woman fifty pounds week.’

‘How long’s he been there?’

‘Two week. Three. I do not count.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘If is same man, yes.’ Lunka picked up the tiny pink spoon and turned it between his fingers. ‘He is . . .
cersetor
. . .’ He cupped one hand at Zigic. ‘
Cersetor
. . . for money?’

‘A beggar.’

‘He come here, want money – I say fuck off. He want food. I say him leave or I get knife.’

Zigic nodded, waiting for Lunka to realise what he had just said to a police officer, but his expression remained neutral. It looked like innocence and Zigic decided to go with his gut unless the post-mortem uncovered a stab wound.

‘Do you know his name?’

‘No.’

‘Is he Romanian?’

Lunka considered it for a moment, watching his daughter’s fists close on air in front of her.

‘Not Romanian. I think . . . Kosovan, maybe. He has nose like Kosovan.’

It would explain why he was dossing down in a shed. Illegal, no papers. It wouldn’t be impossible to get work but it would be badly paid and precarious and if his bosses decided not to pay him at the end of shift what was he going to do about it?

‘Have you had any other trouble from him?’ Zigic asked. ‘Other than the begging?’

‘No. He sees I will not give nothing. What else is here?’

‘Nothing’s been stolen?’

Lunka shook his head. ‘Is accident, this fire. Why questions now?’

‘It’s standard procedure, Mr Lunka, I can assure you.’

‘I do right thing. Call for help. I am not criminal,’ he snapped.

His daughter’s face flushed and she let out a long, extravagant wail which drilled through Zigic’s temples.

Lunka lifted her out of the high chair.

‘You see. You do this.’ He kissed the top of her head. ‘
Shhh, draga.
’

The little girl snuffled, gave a small, half-hearted mew and fell silent against Lunka’s chest.

‘You want ask question?’ he said quietly. ‘Ask why they no answer door when I knock? I ring bell. Five, ten minute I ring, shout through letter box, tell them is fire – no answer. They are in house. And no answer? Why is this?’

Zigic took a card out of his wallet. ‘I’ll need to speak to your wife at some point, Mr Lunka. Can you ask her to call me when she gets in?’

‘She will call.’

‘Thank you for your help, it’s much appreciated.’ They shook hands. ‘I’ll see myself out.’

The group in front of number 63 had moved on and the street was deserted now. Gone seven, everyone was where they needed to be. Some of the residents would be into their second hour of work, talking about the fire perhaps, but whatever they knew wouldn’t come to light until the end of the day when they returned home and found the incident notice pushed through their letter box. Many would ignore it as another piece of junk mail and Zigic knew he would have to organise a fresh round of door-to-doors first thing tomorrow morning, catch them before they left for work.

He didn’t hold out much hope for witnesses though. The countries these people came from, you didn’t trust uniforms of any colour; play dumb, keep quiet, try to stay off the authorities’ radar.

He couldn’t blame them for thinking the situation was no better in England.

His grandparents had been here sixty years and they still spoke in hushed tones when they discussed money or politics, convinced that some shadowy state apparatus was waiting to swoop down and punish their dissent.

Along the street, half a dozen houses away, he saw a civilian support officer talking to a black-haired woman in a dressing gown. She was shaking her head, putting a defensive hand up as the CSO pointed to number 63. A loud
nic
rang out and the door closed with hard finality.

There were still a few Polish on Highbury Street then.

A scientific support van had arrived while he was in with Lunka and he saw Kate Jenkins’s red Mini parked badly, half on the kerb, a couple of doors down. She was heading for the gates, her slight frame bent as she lugged a silver case two-handed, banging it against her thigh.

‘You want some help with that?’

‘It won’t get the job done any quicker,’ she said, but let him take it. ‘Buggered my back up at the gym.’

Two of her team were already at work in the garden, androgynous figures in baggy blue plastic coveralls inching through the long grass where the shed’s window had been blown out by the fire. In the doorway the photographer was squatting down, getting some good tight shots of the dead man’s head.

‘Is it safe for you to go in there?’ Zigic asked.

Jenkins looked up at the clouds gathering overhead. ‘If the wind picks up we could be in trouble. We’ll throw a tent over it, hope for the best.’

‘The roof’s collapsed already.’

‘That’s something, I suppose.’

The photographer moved tentatively into the shed.

‘Watch yourself, Tony,’ Jenkins said.

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘If you were my son you wouldn’t have that bolt through your nose.’

‘But I could keep the one in my dick?’

Jenkins smiled faintly. ‘I didn’t need to know that, did you?’

‘Not really,’ Zigic said. ‘Call me when you’ve got something?’

‘Always do.’

He went round to the front of the house and rang the Barlows’ doorbell, held it down and heard an amplifier echoing inside. Nobody could have slept through that.

Ferreira let him in and he followed her into the living room.

The Barlows sat close together on the sofa. Neither looked like they’d had enough sleep. There was thick grey stubble on his cheeks, bags under her eyes.

Phil Barlow stood up as Zigic went in.

‘Are you in charge?’

‘DI Zigic.’ He stuck his hand out and Barlow hesitated a moment before he shook it with a strong grip. ‘I’d like you both to come down to the station and give us a formal statement.’

‘Can’t we do it here?’ Gemma said. ‘I don’t want to go to a police station.’

‘We’ve done nothing. What d’you want statements from us for?’

‘A man’s died in your garden shed, Mr Barlow.’

Barlow drew himself up to his full five eight, six inches shorter than Zigic, but he was broad and powerfully built and Zigic knew he’d have to be quick if the man was stupid enough to throw his bulk around.

‘I can’t imagine any good reason why you wouldn’t want to help.’

WHEN PAOLO FIRST
arrived here he would wake with a sense of dislocation, a few seconds of confusion, thinking he was still at home, expecting to look across the bed and see the familiar curve of Maria’s back, the dimples above her buttocks and the constellation of small brown moles on her shoulder. Before he opened his eyes he would reach for her and only then, when his hand found nothing but cold air, would he finally realise he was alone.

Not alone, of course, he was never actually alone.

Three other men shared the caravan with him, one in this small room, on an identical camp bed pushed hard against the opposite wall, two of the new Chinese out in the main body of the van, sleeping on the benches either side of the table they ate from.

The other man, Jakub, was less than a metre from him, close enough that Paolo could smell the rot on his breath as he snored. At night he talked in his sleep, speaking a language Paolo couldn’t understand, and so close he was forced to listen to every groan in the darkness, every shuddering orgasm he brought himself to, needing comfort or release as he thought of the woman he had left behind.

Outside an alarm sounded, three shrill blasts from an air horn.

Jakub stretched and scratched his stomach, kicking off his duvet cover. Paolo turned towards the wall, not wanting to watch the other man rise from the mattress and dress himself in the small space between their beds.

He stared at the wall, orange-and-brown paper in a floral pattern. He found faces in it, gazing at each other and looking away, strange, uneven profiles and eyes sitting askew.

He thought of the times lying on the beach with Maria, seeing faces in the clouds high above them, talking about the apartment they would buy when they had the money, kids and cars and holidays. She didn’t want him to leave but she understood it was the only way they could make that future happen. They reassured each other that it would be worth it.

Jakub went out into the kitchenette and filled the kettle, whistled to himself as he waited for it to boil. Within a couple of minutes the other men were awake as well and the caravan juddered on its blocks as they moved around. One of the Chinese was coughing up the night before’s cigarettes in the toilet, while he pissed noisily in fits and starts.

They had been here for a few days now. Paolo tried to speak to them but they had very little English and he wondered if he was the only person who had learned it before coming here.

Jakub poked his head in the room. ‘Work now.’

Paolo dragged himself upright and pulled on the trousers he’d left on the floor. Put on a dirty T-shirt and an even dirtier sweater, dried concrete flaking off it, found his work boots and laced them with fingers numb from the cold.

In the kitchenette one of the Chinese handed him a cup of black tea and he thanked the man, got a small bow in return. There was a pan of beans bubbling on the two-ring electric stove and the man gestured towards it.

‘You?’

Paolo shook his head.

Back in Portugal he had read of how the Chinese were smuggled into Europe. They scraped together the money from their families, borrowed the rest from gangsters, all for the promise of better paid work. They were dragged across mountainous borders in the snow, some froze to death, others starved, a few fell into ravines. The ones who survived considered themselves lucky.

The tea turned to dishwater in his mouth and Paolo forced himself to swallow it, didn’t want to offend the kind Chinese man who didn’t know him, had no reason to be nice to him, but had thought to make it.

Outside the second alarm sounded and the men left their breakfasts unfinished on the melamine table, grabbed their coats and hurried out of the door. Jakub trudged after them, eating a slice of stale white bread folded in half, and Paolo closed the door, pulling it up sharply to stop it blowing open again.