Long Way Home (40 page)

Four or five years ago Phil built a patio for him. He remembered the pretty limestone cottage in Elton, the prize-winning fuchsias and the vegetable patch at the end of the long, thin garden. The man’s wife was dead, breast cancer, he’d told him, while they sat either side of a wooden picnic table eating fish and chips he’d bought from the village pub.

The man must have recognised him but he wouldn’t acknowledge that link now. A line had been crossed and you could never go back over it.

Phil pressed his face into his hands and let out a muffled cry.

This would be his life. For the next ten or twelve years a cell like this, compact and sparse, reeking of bleach and other men’s sweat. Twelve years with the walls closing in on him. He wouldn’t make it. Ever since he was a boy he’d had a target on his back. It happened when you were big, every little bloke from miles around would come up to take a crack at you, wanting to prove themselves. Renfrew was right, he wasn’t tough enough for prison.

And Gemma would talk. Sooner or later, given the right prompting, she would tell the police the truth. He’d begged her to lie and she’d done it, grudgingly, fearing the consequences of getting caught out. As the sirens blared in the street and the doorbell screamed in the house she stood in their bedroom begging him to come clean. She trusted a jury to be sympathetic. Or maybe she just didn’t realise how much was at stake.

Another option occurred to him now, one which made tears spring into his eyes. Gemma didn’t care about him as much as he cared about her.

EMILIA KOPPEL SAT
tucked close to the wall in interview room 1, making her body as small as possible, arms and legs crossed and her chin tucked down into the collar of her cowl-neck jumper. There was a cup of tea on the table in front of her but she hadn’t touched it.

She glanced up through her lashes as Zigic and Ferreira walked in and quickly dropped her gaze again.

She looked very young with her face scrubbed clean and her bottom lip bitten ragged. Nineteen years old but she could have passed for thirteen right then.

Zigic wondered how Maloney found her, suspected she’d got off the coach behind his pub and never moved on from it. Probably started as a waitress then was coerced into offering extras. Maloney acted the genial idiot but his connections were anything but inoffensive.

Or maybe he’d bought her from traffickers just like any other pimp. She had a lot of freedom if that was the case, though.

‘Miss Koppel, I’m Detective Inspector Zigic, Sergeant Ferreira you already know.’

She nodded.

‘Before we start, do you need a translator?’

‘I speak English,’ she said, a certain fierceness in her voice.

‘And you understand that you’re under caution?’

‘I understand.’

‘Would you like a solicitor?’

She shook her head.

‘If at any time you change your mind, just say.’

‘What good can they do me?’ she said and looked away sharply.

Ferreira moved into the seat opposite her and started to set up the tapes.

Zigic pulled out the other chair and winced as pain shot into the centre of his chest. He needed another pill but they were making him woozy and clouding his thinking, something he couldn’t afford just now.

Emilia Koppel stated her name for the tape, didn’t look up as she spoke, only worried at the flaking, ink-blue varnish on her thumbnail.

‘OK, Emilia, can you tell us what the nature of your relationship with Andy Hudson is?’

She still didn’t look up. ‘He pays for my apartment.’

‘So you’re his girlfriend?’

She bristled at the word. ‘Yes.’

‘How long have you two been together?’

‘Almost one year.’

‘And have you been living together all that time?’

‘We do not live together. He comes sometime. Three nights maybe. Four.’ She kept picking at her nail varnish. ‘He has a wife. Sometime he is with her.’

‘How did you two meet?’

She opened her eyes wide. They were dark green and unremarkable, except for the hardness which could only have come from living a life most young women would never know. Quickly she shut down the anger and they were blank, staring at Zigic across the table.

‘He comes into Maloney’s for a girl,’ she said. ‘First he is with Sofia, then Natasha, then he wants me.’

‘And did you want him?’

‘He is no different to the others.’

‘But you moved in with him.’

She threw her chin up, gathered herself. ‘He tells me he has this place I can live, if I see no other men. I do not want to live at the bar. So I go.’

‘But you were seeing Jaan.’

‘He did not know this.’

‘What did Maloney think to you leaving?’ Ferreira asked.

Emilia smiled with half her mouth. ‘They make arrangement.’

‘Hudson bought you?’

‘What else does arrangement mean?’

She blinked slowly and turned away from Ferreira, back to Zigic who was watching her carefully, trying to decide if she knew Hudson was dead already. She would feel no grief, he guessed. She’d been traded like any other commodity, why would she care?

‘When did you last see Andy?’

‘Last week. I think Tuesday maybe.’

‘Was he with you Tuesday night?’

She hesitated, looked between them again and there was a flicker of panic in her eyes.

‘Maybe.’

Zigic sighed and the action made the muscles in his chest burn. The bruising was deep, not enough fat on his thin frame to absorb it. It went right down to his lungs and his heart. He took a couple of shallow breaths.

‘What time did he leave?’

‘Ask him.’

‘We can’t,’ Zigic said. ‘Andy’s dead.’

She closed her eyes for a long few seconds.

‘But you knew that already.’

‘No.’ It was a whisper in the hush of the interview room. ‘I think he is with his wife and his son. I do not know he is dead.’

‘So why are you leaving town?’

‘I am not.’

‘We’ve been inside your flat,’ Zigic said. ‘We’ve seen the bag you were packing. We saw everything.’

‘I must go home to see my mother,’ Emilia said, forcing herself to look up at him. She put a tremble in her voice. ‘Mama is ill. She has problem with her heart. She needs me to be at home now.’

‘What’s your mother’s number?’ Ferreira asked.

Emilia stumbled, ‘I cannot remember.’

‘Is it in your phone?’

She nodded hesitantly.

‘This phone?’ Ferreira brought the mobile out of her jacket pocket, an old Nokia with a dented steel casing and scratched screen. ‘The one which was in your handbag?’

Emilia made no move, said nothing.

‘This is your phone, isn’t it?’

Another bare nod.

In the office Zigic had rung the numbers, got Maloney’s, then a gruff man with an Estuary accent who killed the call the moment he spoke. They were tracing that one. The final number rang straight through to a message service.

‘Where’s Jaan?’

‘I do not know.’

‘But you know he’s still alive?’

She sighed, beaten now. ‘Yes.’

‘Then you know all about the fire,’ Zigic said. ‘You knew he was still alive when you spoke to Sergeant Ferreira. And you also knew that Andy was dead.’

Zigic opened the file he’d brought in with him, nothing inside it but a claret-coloured passport with a gold crest on the front. The words ‘Euroopa Liit Eesti’ were embossed at the top of it. They’d found it in her handbag, tucked into a brown envelope zipped away with her mobile and a wad of crumpled cash.

‘Do you recognise this passport, Emilia?’

‘Yes.’

He went to the photograph in the back of it, Jaan Stepulov clean-shaven and freshly bald, wearing a white shirt and pink tie. He looked a completely different man, some middle-aged semi-professional who you wouldn’t give a second glance to. It was only the hard bones of his face and the striking, bright blue eyes which were the same.

Jaan Stepulov was now Ivo Kask.

Or at least he would have become that man if Emilia had gone straight to him rather than returning home.

‘You were going to give him this. So you must know where he is.’

‘No.’

‘Do you know what the penalty is for aiding an offender?’ Zigic asked. ‘You’ll go to prison, Emilia. And not for a couple of months. You’ll be inside for years. Is he worth it?’

‘He did not kill Andy.’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘He is not that type of man. He is kind.’ A wistful smile lit her face and she brushed her fingertips across her bottom lip. ‘One day we are together and there is a mouse in the room. Under the bed. I tell Jaan to kill it but he will not. He caught her and let her go in the hallway.’ She looked at Zigic. ‘Is that a man who will kill someone?’

‘Maybe Andy started it,’ he said. ‘We know he is that kind of man. We know he murdered Viktor.’

Emilia turned to Ferreira. ‘You said he was hit by train.’

‘That’s what it looked like initially,’ Ferreira told her. ‘But Viktor was murdered. We have witnesses who saw Andy do it. And we have footage of him dumping Viktor’s body.’

‘How did he die?’ she asked. ‘Why did Andy do this?’

‘Viktor stepped in to protect someone Andy was beating up,’ Zigic said. ‘Andy turned on Viktor and stabbed him to death.’

Emilia buried her face in her hands. ‘This is my fault. I sent him there.’

‘You found him the job?’ Ferreira asked.

‘He said he is unhappy. He needs money to get home. We would go back together when he had enough. Start a new life.’ She let out a long stream of Estonian, her voice hardening as if she was rebuking herself. ‘I ask Andy to find him some work. It is my fault he is dead.’

‘You and Viktor were a couple?’

‘I loved him.’

‘But you were screwing his brother,’ Ferreira said.

‘Viktor was gone.’

Zigic wondered what she would have done if Jaan had found Viktor and brought him back. Did she think neither of them would be jealous? She wasn’t thinking at all, he guessed. She was lonely and sad and, by the time Jaan appeared, she would have grabbed any slim thread which could link her to Viktor again. The same tone whispering in a darkened room and she could pretend they were still together.

‘How were you going to get the passport to Jaan?’

‘I will not help you.’

‘Then you’ll go to prison,’ Zigic said. ‘And we’ll catch Jaan anyway because at some point he’ll go to your flat – he’s waiting for this passport, he needs it – and we’ll be waiting for him. For as long as it takes. But we will get him.’

‘He did not kill Andy. Do you think I would help a man like that?’ she demanded. ‘He swore to me he did not do it.’

‘Then he’s a valuable witness and we need to speak to him.’

Emilia chewed on her bottom lip, fixing him with a penetrating stare, trying to decide what to do. Her judgement couldn’t be very good, Zigic thought. She’d trusted the wrong people many times in her life or she wouldn’t be sitting here now, she’d be back in Tallinn, studying still or working in a shop.

‘If Jaan saw something – if he’s scared to come forward and tell us, he doesn’t need to be.’ Zigic showed her the most reasonable face he could muster. ‘We’re not interested in blaming Jaan for something he didn’t do. That’s not how we work.’

‘He is innocent.’

‘Then he’s got nothing to worry about.’

She stood sharply and paced away from the table, her arms folded across her boyish chest, looking at her feet as they moved across the linoleum floor.

Above her the clock was ticking.

If Jaan knew she was collecting his passport today he would be wondering what the delay was. They would want to get away tonight, Zigic guessed.

Outside, evening was falling. They could get into her building under cover of darkness, hunker down and wait for him to come.

‘Emilia.’

‘No. I want a solicitor. Now.’

A STIFF WIND
was rising as they crossed the Rivergate Apartments car park, heading for the front entrance, and Zigic felt the cold air seep through his shirt, making the muscles in his chest contract, finding the tender point over his heart.

Ferreira ran on ahead to catch the door as it swung closed, held it open for him.

‘Don’t want you pulling anything,’ she said, smiling.

As they waited for the lift his mobile vibrated. A text from the press officer, telling him to keep her up to speed. She wanted progress made in time for the ten o’clock bulletin and charging Emilia Koppel with aiding an offender wouldn’t cut it.

Riggott had said the same thing, less politely, as they left the station. Two shootings, one by a police officer, a slavery ring broken and a man burned to death, all in a single week; the DCS was getting heavy flack from above, Zigic imagined, and it was his right – his responsibility he’d say – to share that with his subordinates.

The lift doors opened and they stepped in, followed by a man in a grey three-piece suit, with a hands-free set stuck in his ear and an expensively branded messenger bag hanging from his shoulder.

Zigic wondered if Emilia Koppel had raised any suspicion among her neighbours. She was too young, too foreign, to be living in the same location as all these washed-out mid-level managers and low-end professionals. She kept strange hours, wore the wrong clothes, and Andy Hudson couldn’t have blended in even if he bothered to try.

They probably thought she was a prostitute. It was the default insult when you saw a girl living outside her element.

He put his hand in his pocket and closed it around Emilia’s mobile. At the office they spent twenty minutes trying to work out the best way to word a text message to Jaan. Did they use English or Estonian? Full words or text-speak? Finally they decided on a time and single x for a kiss; keep it simple.

It was five forty now. They’d told Jaan six.

He had to come. What choice did he have? He needed that passport.

As they stepped out onto the third-floor landing Ferreira dug the key out of her handbag, its small cardboard tag crumpled and smeared with a brown-red lipstick she must have left uncapped. There was a uniformed officer waiting outside Emilia’s flat, his partner already ensconced in the one opposite.