Tell No Tales (13 page)

Ferreira was a few houses ahead of him now, talking to a woman in a short, silky robe and the kind of stacked red heels he always associated with strippers. Or maybe it was because the woman was dressed like that in the middle of the day.

There were suburban brothels scattered throughout the city, in semi-detatched houses just like these, no different to their neighbours at first glance, neat and tidy, and the only thing which marked them out was the curtains which stayed closed all day and the men who came and went at regular intervals.

The woman tottered out onto the driveway, pointed across the fence between the houses and Ferreira went up on tiptoes to look.

From the road Zigic could see the place clearly, a single-storey brick building the size of a double garage, tight on the rear boundary of the neighbouring house. It looked newly constructed, probably without planning permission like so many of the recently erected outbuildings in the area, or if it did have planning permission it would have been called a workshop or a studio, anything to explain why it needed running water and electric. But it was living accommodation, no doubt about it.

The woman went back inside and Ferreira was smiling slightly when she met him on the path.

‘His name was Pyotr,’ she said. ‘At least that’s what he told her.’

‘This was a professional relationship I take it?’

‘Couple of times a week for the last six months,’ Ferreira said, as they started up the gravel driveway. ‘He was Polish, same as her. From Łódź. She said he was going home for a few days to see his family, which explains why he had so much cash on him I guess.’

‘But he was coming back?’ Zigic asked.

‘He told her he was.’

They walked down the side of the house, bins lined up against the wall and a lot of empties in the glass recycling. The back garden was just a square of grass in need of cutting and a small grey-slabbed patio with some ancient plastic furniture on it. A couple of bikes were leaning against the fence, so somebody was home, and as they approached the outbuilding the back door of the house opened.

A rangy young man in a black tracksuit strode over to them, his body set ready for aggression.

‘
Kim jesteś
?’

‘
Policja,
’ Zigic said, showing his identification. ‘Do you speak English?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Adrian,’ the man said, looking from Zigic to Ferreira. ‘Adrian Mazur.’

‘Do you know the man who lives here?’

‘Pyotr, yes. He has gone home.’

Zigic brought out the photograph. ‘Is this him?’

Mazur barely flinched. ‘Yes, this is Pyotr. How is he dead?’

‘He was hit by a car yesterday. On Lincoln Road. Do you know his last name?’

‘No. We are not friends. Only neighbours.’

Zigic put the photograph away. ‘I need to speak to your landlord, we’re trying to find Pyotr’s family, to let them know the bad news.’

‘I have here.’ Mazur took his mobile phone out of his pocket and recited the number. ‘He was good neighbour. No trouble.’

Zigic thanked him for his help and he returned to the house. A couple of seconds later his face appeared in the kitchen window, watching them as Ferreira unlocked the narrow door with the key they had recovered from Pyotr’s belongings.

Zigic went in first, found the light switch, receiving a small electric shock as he turned it on.

He swore and rubbed the stung tip of his finger.

It was a single room, twelve by fifteen, lit by a lone bulb in a round paper shade. The walls were painted off-white, the floor covered in a cheap, bright blue carpet so thin he could feel the uninsulated concrete beneath it. In one corner was a kind of kitchen area – two double cupboards, a small round sink and a hotplate. In the opposite corner was a shower cubicle and toilet which could be screened with a curtain but wasn’t right then. There was a single bed pushed against the rear wall, a stack of newspapers on the floor and a well-worn rug placed to put your feet on when you swung them out first thing in the morning. An ancient portable TV sat on an upturned crate next to the bed, a couple of paperbacks on top of it.

The air in the room was several degrees colder than outside and the smell of damp so strong Zigic was surprised there wasn’t mould climbing the walls.

‘It’s like a cell,’ Ferreira said, picking up one of the books. The spine was cracked, the cover bent. She threw it on the bed. ‘What are we looking for?’

‘Anything with a name on it,’ Zigic said.

Ferreira checked under the bed, lifting the mattress and tossing the sheets, while he searched the kitchen cupboards. There were more cleaning products than he expected, and while the tins and jars of food were unbranded Pyotr had bought expensive multi-surface cleaners and extra strong bleach.

The room didn’t smell particularly clean though. Not even a hint of the products in the air and when he looked in the kitchen sink he found it was grubby, the toilet too, urine-stained and coated with limescale from the area’s hard water. The shower was cleaner but far from sparkling.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Ferreira said. ‘The landlord’s going to be our best bet.’

They locked up again and Zigic dialled the number he’d been given as they walked back to the car parked at the top of the road. A woman answered. ‘Best Lets, how can I help you?’

He gave her the address, didn’t go into details but told her it was a matter of urgency. She said she’d call back in a few minutes.

‘Have you noticed?’ Ferreira asked.

‘What?’

She pointed to a rough square of black spray on the wall of a motorbike showroom.

‘No, I don’t get it,’ Zigic said.

‘That was EPP graffiti a couple of weeks ago. Now I’m pretty sure the council don’t deal with it by sending out a guy with a paint can, so who’s done that?’

‘The people who own the shop probably.’

‘It’s not the only one though,’ she said, shoving her hands into the pockets of her cropped leather jacket. ‘There’s another up near the Triangle that’s been blacked out, and one outside that halal butcher’s round the corner.’

‘I didn’t realise you were a spotter.’

She shrugged. ‘I notice these things. There isn’t the new stuff around either.’

Zigic unlocked the car and they climbed in, Ferreira reaching for the heat controls as he started the engine, turning it up full blast in the footwell.

‘I think it’s them, you know.’

‘Them who?’

‘The EPP.’

‘Why would they do that?’ he asked.

‘Bad PR maybe, having your name sprayed on walls,’ she said, an acidic edge to her voice. ‘Especially walls which are within spitting distance of a racially motivated murder.’

‘That halal butcher’s?’

She nodded. ‘It was painted out before Manouf was killed, but still, you have to wonder if there isn’t some significance to it.’

‘I hate what the EPP stands for just as much as you do, Mel, but they’re a political party, not a vigilante group.’ He indicated and overtook a wobbling cyclist with a DVD player balanced on his handlebars. ‘They wouldn’t get involved with something like that with an election coming up.’

‘The people in charge might not but what’s their membership made up of? Thugs and cranks. When we find this piece of shit he’s going to be a member of one of their arsehole offshoots.’

‘This is about Ken Poulter, isn’t it?’

‘That alibi was bullshit and we both know it.’

‘DNA ruled him out,’ Zigic reminded her.

But he remembered the way Poulter grinned when they showed him the photograph of Didi’s obliterated head, how genuinely impressed he looked by the damage, aiming his amusement directly at Ferreira, trying to get a reaction she barely managed to stifle. She left the interview room convinced of his guilt, but even before the DNA tests cleared him Zigic realised he was innocent.

Poulter was a coward, a football hooligan who’d drifted into neo-Nazism when the FA and police started cracking down on him and his ilk, those who needed the weekly violence and sense of belonging which came from standing in a gang of drunken, baying idiots.

Zigic’s mobile rang and he asked Ferreira to get it as he negotiated the roundabout in front of Queensgate shopping centre, where an old red double-decker was straddling two lanes, provoking punched horns and hand gestures.

‘Can you send over everything you’ve got for him?’ Ferreira asked. A pause as she waited. ‘We’re trying to contact Mr Dymek’s next of kin, but if you want us to come down there with a warrant we can. Maybe we could bring someone from the council with us and see how many of those slums you’re renting come up to legal standards too . . . No, that’s what I thought.’ She turned to Zigic and grinned, gave the woman an email address and thanked her for being so very, very helpful.

‘The wonders of shotgun diplomacy,’ he said.

‘Only kind that gets the job done.’

17

THIS WAS THE
England they were fighting for, Shotton thought, as he walked through the George Hotel’s lounge; the stone walls and the mullion windows, a fire crackling in the inglenook. Middle-aged, middle-class couples held muted conversations on the velvet armchairs and leather sofas, all fine, upstanding folk; good jobs worked at assiduously for years, kids gone off to uni and lives of their own. Now all they had to do was come for afternoon tea and flip through the complimentary newspapers, content that they would leave the world no worse than they found it.

They were his people and they had finally started to accept it.

Unfortunately this particular parcel of Middle England lay outside his constituency but the candidate they were fielding would serve them well he was sure. A formidable woman of distinctly Marine Le Pen-ish bearing, educated at the local girls’ school, married to a landowner who could trace his roots here right back to Domesday, prime parlimentary material with nary a skeleton in her closet.

An elderly gent in a pair of garish red trousers swerved into Shotton’s path, gripping a gin and tonic in his left hand, offering his right to be shook.

‘Excellent job you did on Jon Snow.’

Shotton smiled. ‘Ah well, he isn’t the force of nature he used to be.’

The man was still pumping his hand, grinning. ‘He’s got too used to those pasty-faced London liberals. Doesn’t know how to deal with a real political beast any more.’

‘Not sure I could claim to be that,’ Shotton said, disengaging from the man’s grip. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to tackle Robin Day at his peak.’

‘Are you not in the House today?’ the man asked, adopting a wordly tone.

‘Constituency matters,’ Shotton said. ‘That’s far more important.’

The man raised his glass a touch and winked. ‘Absolutely. We’re the ones who put you in power after all.’

Shotton nodded as genially as he could and headed into the back bar, where the person who’d actually put him in power was waiting, suited but shambolic as ever, with his slightly too long hair and his greasy-looking designer stubble.

Walter was a man who could only take power by proxy, too many dodgy deals and expensive bastards in his past to ever stand for office.

Shotton ordered a Scotch from a passing waitress then joined him at a table in the corner, only the most perfunctory of niceties before they got down to business.

‘I’m hearing worrying things, Dick. If these murders turn out to be one of your foot soldiers getting out of line you can forget the whole deal.’

‘They are not my anything,’ Shotton said.

Walter shuffled forward in his seat, lowered his voice but upped the menace. ‘I distinctly remember sitting in this very spot twelve months ago, listening to you explain how you were the only man who could keep the peace long enough to get elected.’

‘Which I did.’

‘By-elections are dry runs,’ Walter said. ‘We both know that. You got in on a protest vote and if you want to make the position permanent you’d better get your house in order up here.’

Shotton began to protest but stopped as the waitress came over with a tray balanced on her palm, squatted to place his drink on the low table between him and Walter.

He waited for her to retreat, said, ‘It’s the dead girl’s boyfriend. Nothing for us to worry about. The police are waiting to question him and then this will all go away.’

‘Not the fucking hit-and-run,’ Walter said. ‘Do you think I’m worried about that?’

‘I think you worry about everything.’

Walter pulled a newspaper out from the side of his chair, opened and refolded to an inside page. He shoved it at Shotton. ‘This is what’s going to kill your re-election campaign, Dick.’

Page 11, photographs of two men dominating, some young black lad and an Arab with a sparse grey beard and heavy eyes.

‘Third paragraph,’ Walter said.

Shotton followed his prompt.
A confidential source within the English Nationalist League revealed that a dozen of their members have been questioned by police and released without charge during the last two weeks, but as yet no arrests have been made.

‘Released without charge,’ Shotton said, tossing the paper onto the glass-topped table. ‘They’re just rounding up the usual suspects so it looks like they’re doing something.’

‘And what happens when they drag the right one in there?’

‘I’m not sure how much clearer I can be on this matter, Walter.’ Shotton felt his hand curl into a fist and brought it down slowly on the arm of the wing chair. ‘The groups you’re concerned with are not going to make waves for us. I have assurances of that. Whatever else you might think about these men they want what we want and they realise that I am their best chance to get it.’

‘Rational types, are they?’ Walter said, not hiding his disgust. ‘You think they’re cognisant of the political process at kicking-out time when they’re full of lager and some black kid gives them a dirty look?’

Shotton smiled thinly. ‘If you were a little better informed you’d realise that that “black kid” was murdered in Little Poland. Not many bovver boys round there at kicking-out time.’

‘And yet it’s being handled by the Hate Crimes Department,’ Walter said. ‘Why do you imagine that is?’