Tell No Tales (12 page)

The little boy said something to his father and the man shushed him gently, drew him into a brief hug then pinched a chocolate button out of his bag and winked as the boy protested. He should have been in school but Ferreira knew a lot of recent arrivals were having trouble placing their kids. The local primaries were overstretched, hadn’t been able to adapt quickly enough to the city’s changing demographics.

She rang the bell again and as the tone faded a dark-haired man with bleached teeth and a spray tan that clashed badly with his purple shirt came out of the door behind reception, carrying a stack of files he slapped down on the desk. She eyed his name badge – Euan – as she flashed her warrant card.

‘We were expecting a call from you yesterday.’

‘Something you want to tell me?’

‘No, I only meant, well, they were our people.’ The files began to slip and he caught them just in time. ‘Mrs Pickman is absolutely beside herself. She told me to send flowers. White lilies, very nice.’

Several thousand employees, each pimped out at a margin of two pounds an hour. They could afford to send an ostentatious arrangement, pop a condolence note on headed paper and add it to the shrine at the bus shelter Ferreira had seen this morning on her way in. It was cheap advertising. Showed they cared.

She took her mobile out the back pocket of her jeans.

‘I need you to take a look at something for me.’ She swiped through menus. ‘Just to warn you, it isn’t pretty.’

Euan leaned across the reception desk, propped his elbows on the chest-height section of the counter, already trying to get a look at the screen.

‘We’re having trouble identifying one of the men who died,’ Ferreira said. She found the photograph she had taken yesterday afternoon at the mortuary. He looked worse than she remembered, the stark white light and the camera’s resolution picking out every pore, every bristle, each small tear in his weathered skin. ‘Do you recognise him?’

‘Bloody hell.’ He took her phone, studied it for a few seconds with an expression that went from shock to repulsion to curiosity. ‘No, I don’t think he’s one of ours.’

‘But Sofia and Jelena Krasic were?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was waiting for collection with the rest of them though,’ Ferreira said. ‘He must have been going to Boxwood Farm. Could you check the staff lists, please?’

‘I’ll check,’ he said, handing her phone back, ‘but I’m positive he wasn’t working there.’

‘You’ve got thousands of employees. Don’t tell me you remember every face.’

‘I don’t. But I know everyone who works at Boxwood.’ He tapped away at the keyboard, eyes on the screen. ‘They’re very particular about the kind of staff they want so I deal with them personally. And he definitely wasn’t working there. But . . . here we go.’

He turned the computer screen round so she could see it. A long list of names on the left, most in black but two of them were highlighted, Sofia and Jelena Krasic, times on the right, eight-digit codes ‘for official use only’.

‘This is this morning’s shift rota from Boxwood Farm,’ Euan said. ‘See, they punch in and the system sends the details straight back to us so we can arrange payments. Everyone present and correct apart from – well – you know.’

‘Could he have been waiting for a pickup to another job?’ Ferreira asked.

‘He could have been waiting for a bus.’

The telephone began to ring and he excused himself to answer it, spoke to the person on the other end in halting Polish. She thought it was Polish anyway, picked out a couple of words she recognised. Across the room the little boy had curled up with his head in his father’s lap, tucked his trainers under his chair before he put his feet up.

Euan put the phone down. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Is there anyone else who might have dealt with this man?’

‘Angie, maybe. She’s up in Accounting – shall I fetch her?’

‘Thanks.’

He disappeared back through the heavy oak-panelled door marked ‘Staff Only’ and Ferreira dialled Zigic’s number, waiting five rings before she got an answer.

‘Are you still with Sofia Krasic?’

‘Just left.’ She heard the remote locks pop on his car. ‘She thinks Gilbert was trying to hit
her
now.’

‘Risky manoeuvre,’ Ferreira said. ‘Look, I’m not getting anywhere here. They claim not to recognise our mystery man. Can you ask Sofia? He pushed her out of the way of the car, he must have known her to do that.’

The remote locks shot again. ‘Alright.’

Euan returned as she finished the call, trailing a well-built woman with chemically straightened black hair and fibreglass nail tips the colour of dried blood. She launched into the same display of sympathy Euan had spouted and looked like she might throw up when Ferreira showed her the photograph of the dead man. She considered it for a couple of seconds, asked, ‘Why do they tape their eyes?’ Then said she didn’t recognise him either.

Ferreira thanked them for their time and left with the sensation that she’d missed something, heard Euan finally call the waiting man over as the door swung slowly to behind her.

She walked back through the narrow, stone-walled precincts, the cathedral bells ringing out, chiming the half-hour, and as she climbed into her car Zigic called back.

‘She didn’t know him either. It was the first time she’d seen him at the pickup.’

‘Maybe he was waiting for a bus then.’

‘With no wallet on him?’

‘I’ll get on to it,’ Ferreira said.

She beat Zigic back to Thorpe Wood Station and went straight up to forensics. She found Kate Jenkins talking to a detective sergeant from CID, both of them standing at one of the long stainless-steel tables which dominated the lab, a set of bloodstained overalls laid out under the searing white lights, the fabric ripped by the telltale marks of shotgun spray.

She hadn’t heard anything about a shooting but little of what happened in CID percolated up to Hate Crimes, even though they were under the same command. Hate Crimes was a small, insular department and that was partly why she liked working in it. There was no points scoring, no cliques, and Zigic maintained only the vaguest kind of hierarchy. It was as close to a democracy as you’d find in a police station.

The DS was complaining about Riggott, his face flushed from a recent dressing-down, and Jenkins made sympathetic noises, already moving along the table, their real business finished, Ferreira guessed.

‘Mel, I was coming down to you lot in a minute,’ Jenkins said.

The DS took the hint and made himself scarce, trudged out of the room with his hands shoved in his pockets, one of his shoes squeaking against the lino all the way to the stairwell door.

‘God, that man.’ Jenkins rolled her eyes. ‘He comes up here, bloody whining about nothing and expects me to listen to it, doesn’t even ask how I am.’

Ferreira smiled. ‘So, how are you, Kate?’

‘Can’t complain.’

‘What’ve you got for us?’

‘Nothing new, I just wanted to get him to leave.’ Jenkins leaned against the counter, glanced at her assistant who was taking swabs from a collection of discarded Coke cans, running a cotton bud along the rim, trying to recover some usable DNA. ‘I sent my preliminary report down to Bobby about half an hour ago if that’s what you’re after.’

‘I’m looking for personal effects,’ Ferreira said. ‘We’ve got an unidentified victim and all the hospital could give me was a house key and a broken mobile. We’re missing his wallet.’

‘I might be able to help you there.’ She went over to a set of shelves lined with clear plastic storage boxes, pulled one out and brought it back to the counter. ‘This was snagged under the car – I haven’t got around to looking through it yet. Grab some gloves.’

Ferreira found a box of them and wriggled her fingers into a pair, watching Jenkins slip her own on effortlessly.

She peeled the lid off and removed a red-and-black rucksack with a broken strap, its gauze front panel shredded. The zip was still working though and Jenkins began to empty the contents across the counter; a pair of jeans and a couple of T-shirts, smelling worn but not quite dirty, bundled socks and underwear.

‘This doesn’t look like he was on his way to work,’ Ferreira said.

‘Looks like he didn’t need to work,’ Jenkins said, bringing out a bundle of crumpled notes held together with an elastic band. She flicked through it. ‘There’s a couple of thousand pounds here.’

‘Any sign of a wallet? Paperwork?’

‘Bus ticket.’

She handed it over.

‘He was heading for Łódź,’ Ferreira said. ‘Why was he waiting for a bus into the city centre? It would have been quicker to walk to the collection point from there.’

Jenkins ran her hand around the inside of the bag, opened a second, small compartment and found a washbag, nothing unexpected in there.

‘That’s it.’ Jenkins frowned over the man’s belongings. ‘Why wouldn’t he have a wallet?’

‘It must have been stolen at the scene,’ Ferreira said, thinking of the men who had given chase as the driver bolted along Green Lane, and the ones who didn’t, who’d gone to tend to the injured. Any of them could have lifted it in the confusion. ‘Fucking jackals.’

‘I’ll run his samples through the system,’ Jenkins said. ‘See if he’s known.’

‘Thanks, Kate.’

In Hate Crimes Grieves and Parr were standing in front of Ali Manouf’s board, talking in undertones, their faces drawn into expressions of fixed concentration. Parr had a file open across his forearm and Ferreira could see the lurid red splash of a crime-scene photo on the top.

They wouldn’t find any answers there, she thought.

Zigic was under pressure though and this was about being seen to have tried more than making genuine progress.

She found the CCTV footage from the hit-and-run, picked the camera on Lincoln Road opposite the bus stop and saw the group standing waiting for their ride. Sofia Krasic was a few feet away from the unidentified man, who was turned away from her, checking the timetable screwed to the Perspex wall.

She went back, saw him arrive in shot from the north and switched cameras again, kept switching as she caught him passing other groups waiting for other drivers, walking with his shoulders rounded and his head down, always a straight line, never moving for people coming towards him, letting them get out of his way.

Zigic came up behind her and watched what she was doing without commenting. She switched cameras again, lost him, went back, tried another one. Couldn’t find him.

‘Oxford Road then,’ Zigic said, patting her on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go knock on some doors.’

16

THE TOP END
of Oxford Road was dominated by commercial properties, a double-fronted Ladbrokes doing brisk trade, a carpet place with a cluttered lot, a dingy Internet cafe next to a closed-down accountant’s with a steel roller shutter locked over its front entrance. The houses were 1930s semis, all with the same terracotta roofs, and as they started knocking on doors Zigic noticed how many of them were occupied by small businesses, plaques screwed up on front walls for gardening services and bespoke wedding cakes and Chinese medicine practitioners.

More people were home than he expected and they divided up the street, him on the left, Ferreira on the right, both using the same careful introduction, a flash of the warrant card followed by an apology for what the person was about to be shown.

Reactions to the dead man’s photograph varied from shock to prurient glee but most people shook their heads sadly, said how terrible it was. A few of them had heard the accident, the crash site was less than two hundred yards away, and several said they couldn’t believe it would happen somewhere like this. It was a nice area.

Zigic guessed a typical English person wouldn’t call it that, but just off Lincoln Road there weren’t many English to complain about the ethnic mix on the street.

It was decent though and that was part of the problem. If it was blighted by crime there would be CCTV cameras up and they would have been able to follow their unidentified dead man back to his home.

He walked past a semi-derelict garage with metal posts set in its forecourt to deter parking or ramraiders and knocked on the door of the neighbouring bungalow. The paint was flaking on the windows and thick, sun-yellowed net curtains blocked his view of the interior, but he could hear children inside, cartoons playing loud enough that he recognised the voices.

A harried-looking Indian woman opened the door a few inches, holding back a curious little boy with her leg.

‘I’ve got plenty of tea towels,’ she said, her accent pure Peterborough. ‘I don’t want new windows or my trees cutting down or whatever it is you’re selling.’

Zigic showed her his warrant card and her brows drew together.

‘You’re that one off the news.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He smiled at the boy, who was clinging to the woman’s leg now, his thumb in his mouth. ‘This isn’t going to be suitable for little ears.’

She shooed the boy away and her body filled the gap in the door.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ she said. ‘Not that time of morning.’

‘We’re trying to identify the man who was killed,’ Zigic told her. ‘We believe he lived on this road but he didn’t have any ID on him.’

‘There’s a lot of comings and goings here.’ She nodded across the street. ‘There’s been three different lots in that house since the beginning of the year.’

‘You should brace yourself,’ Zigic said. ‘We only have a post-mortem photograph.’

She took it from him, frowned.

‘Poor man.’

‘Do you recognise him?’

‘I don’t know him but I’ve seen him on the street, coming home from work or what have you. He lives further up that way.’ She handed the photograph back. ‘Sorry I can’t help you more.’

‘You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.’

He turned away as she closed the door and looked along the street. There were only another twenty houses to go but beyond the T-junction was Alexandra Road and if the man used this as a short cut onto Lincoln Road that was a hundred more doors to knock on. He’d have to call into the station for some uniforms.

He wanted to find out where the man was living today, felt they needed to make some progress.