Tell No Tales (16 page)

Ferreira drained her glass, crunched an ice cube between her back teeth, thinking of Anthony Gilbert lying in his hospital bed, awake now, with the consequences of his actions filling his overdose-addled brain. He had a long night ahead of him to practise his excuses, find somebody else to blame, and she guessed it would be Sofia Krasic when they finally got him in the interview room. Because it couldn’t be his fault, could it?

Wahlia returned with a drink in each hand, a bag of peanuts between his teeth which he spat onto the table.

‘I was wrong – short plaid guy was giving me the eye.’

‘I hope you let him down gently.’

‘Told him my hag was having boyfriend trouble.’

She snatched the peanuts up and threw them at his head. ‘Hag?’

‘I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.’ He opened the bag and offered it to her. ‘Meant to ask, did you go and look at that place on Thorpe Road?’

‘Yeah, it was perfect.’ Ferreira took a handful of nuts, the closest thing she’d get to proper food for a few hours. ‘Or it would be perfect if I could afford it.’

‘Why’d you go and view somewhere you couldn’t afford?’

‘Thought I could knock them down.’

‘How much did you offer?’

‘Two hundred a month less. The agent looked at me like I’d just pissed on the floor,’ she said. ‘You should have seen it, two bedrooms, balcony off the living room, the shower was big enough for three people.’ He gave her a goatish leer. ‘There’s a gym right in the building.’

‘You could take in a lodger. Eighty quid a week, you’ll cover the rent easy.’

‘I don’t want to share.’ She turned her glass around on the table. ‘Christ, the whole point of moving out from Mum and Dad’s is having my own space for once.’

Wahlia took a long drink, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘Have you told them yet?’

‘What do you think?’

‘They’ll probably be glad to see the back of you, coming in at all hours . . . my parents redecorated my room a week after I moved out.’

‘It’s different,’ Ferreira said, staring into her drink. ‘We’re not – I can’t – look, we all came over here as a unit, right? To have a better life. But this isn’t their home and it never will be. You shouldn’t abandon your family in a foreign country.’

He frowned at her, a dash cutting between his thick black brows. ‘That makes absolutely no sense.’

‘You don’t get it.’

‘Mel, come on, I totally get what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. It isn’t disloyal to want your own space. You’re not moving to the other end of the country. You’ll be ten minutes away.’

She lifted her glass to her mouth but didn’t drink, held the rim against her bottom lip. ‘Have you noticed, almost every crime we deal with, nearly every dead immigrant, they’re with their family? You have to stick together.’

‘What, forever?’ Wahlia asked. ‘How is that having a better life? You might as well have stayed in Portugal and rented fucking deckchairs to tourists.’

‘I’m from Lisbon, Bobby, there’s not much call for deckchairs.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yeah.’ She took a mouthful of rum. It was spiced, not want she wanted and not what Bobby would have ordered; he knew her better than that.

He tapped the table. ‘I’m going for a slash.’

The crowd in the next booth slammed down their shot glasses in unison then cheered the achievement, one voice dominating, as it always did, and Ferreira took another sip of her drink, knowing Bobby was right. It wouldn’t help when she broke the news though. There was going to be weeping and shouting and guilt-inducing accusations which would go on for days. She remembered the screaming row when her brother left to move in with his girlfriend last year, their mother calling the girl a witch for stealing her baby boy away, their father trying to be the peacemaker, saying he was too young to get tied down, he should try out a few more women before settling for this one. They’d reached a grudging accommodation but the words couldn’t be taken back.

She took her tobacco tin out of her jacket pocket and started to roll a cigarette, aware of a suited man at a nearby table watching her as he listened to his friend talking about work in a bludgeoning monotone. He looked half familiar and as she ran the tip of her tongue along the paper she realised she’d slept with him a few months ago; not a bad experience but not one she felt like repeating.

He was starting up from his stool as Wahlia returned, drying his hands on the back pockets of his jeans. ‘Get that drunk, if we’re going.’

Ferreira threw down the rum and followed him out through the crush of bodies all smelling of air-conditioned sweat and last-minute deodorant applied from a can in the desk drawer, ducking an arm which flew out of nowhere.

Outside the wind surged up the road, stirring the scattered litter, and Ferreira lingered a moment in the recessed doorway to light up, before they headed towards Cathedral Square, passing the shuttered fronts of cafes and sandwich places, one estate agent’s after another. A couple were standing peering at the particulars filling the window of Bairstow Eaves and Ferreira wondered how drunk they were to be doing that in the dark, then the man wandered away from his girlfriend and relieved himself in the alleyway next to it.

‘Classy guy,’ Wahlia said.

‘It’s true what they say – all the good ones are taken.’

A cab stopped in the middle of the road and a gaggle of women in high heels and short dresses tumbled out, holding onto one another as they scrambled to find cash for the driver, too drunk or happy to notice the expression of contempt on his face.

‘What do you think to Grieves?’ Wahlia asked.

‘You can do better.’

‘No.’ He smiled. ‘Thanks though. I mean what do you think to her as a copper?’

Ferreira took a deep hit on her cigarette, blinked against the rising smoke. ‘We were in uniform the same time.’

‘And?’

‘She should still be there.’

‘You just don’t like having another woman in the office.’ There was a teasing note in his voice but the subject felt forced and abrupt and she wondered if this was Zigic’s doing. He’d pick up on the tension, he was that kind of person, fine-tuned to hidden conflict, and she guessed he’d get Bobby to do his dirty work, knowing she’d be more likely to confide in him.

He was right.

‘Do you remember that kid who died down in the cells about five years ago? He was sixteen, King’s student.’

‘Drug dealer?’

‘He had an eighth on him when he was brought in,’ Ferreira said. ‘We’re not talking Scarface.’

‘He had a fit. Epilepsy or something.’

A moped buzzed past them, weaving ominously on the narrow road, the driver’s helmet hanging from the handlebars.

‘Yeah, he had a fit,’ Ferreira said. ‘And that’s technically what killed him, but one of the uniforms got him in a choke hold and slammed his head into the wall.
Then
he fitted.’

Wahlia stopped dead on the pavement. ‘Grieves did that? You’re fucking kidding me. She can’t weigh nine stone.’

‘Of course she didn’t do it, but she was there and she lied about it to get her mate off.’

Wahlia looked down at his feet, dropped the butt of his cigarette and stepped on it very deliberately. ‘So, how do you know about it?’

‘She told me,’ Ferreira said, starting off up the street again, eyes on the cathedral’s serrated spires poking up into the night sky, stone lit the colour of rose gold. ‘She asked me what she should do and I told her to report it. The guy was a thug, total piece of shit, this wasn’t a momentary lapse of judgement, it was his style. And she covered for him.’

They turned onto Long Causeway, more people about now as they drew closer to the clubs, gangs of young men dressed up in their second-best shirts, girls in two and threes, walking briskly with their arms linked, a dozen women on a hen night laughing and yelping as they skipped across the cobbles, angel wings shaking, the lights on their halos flashing.

‘Does Zigic know about this?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Are you going to tell him?’

‘What’s the point?’ Ferreira said. ‘It was all hushed up. It’s my word against hers.’

‘I think your word carries a fair bit of weight,’ Wahlia said, as they crossed the road. ‘He won’t want someone like that on the team.’

Ferreira shrugged. ‘They’ll be gone in a few days when this case is cleared up.’

They passed a cluster of smokers shivering outside Yates’s, a couple of muscular blokes with buzz-cut hair among them, louder than the rest, flexing as they talked. Squaddies, Ferreira thought, bussed in from the base near Stamford for the night, looking to fight or fuck whoever wouldn’t put up too much resistance.

‘This case isn’t going to get cleared up in a few days and you know it,’ Wahlia said. ‘The hit-and-run maybe, the other thing . . . I don’t see where we’re heading with it.’

Ferreira’s mobile vibrated and she unzipped her jacket pocket to answer it. Frowned when she saw Zigic’s name on the display.

‘This isn’t going to be anything good.’

21

SOFIA KRASIC WAS
pale under the strip light in Interview Room 2, a bluish cast to her skin, except for the livid patch on her right cheek where her face had struck the floor. She looked scared, sitting with her arms wrapped around her middle, her chin down, and in the silence Zigic could hear her breaths coming fast and shallow, almost but not quite hyperventilating.

Maybe it was pain tightening her hard features. The doctor had checked her out, said she was fit to be questioned, but Zigic wasn’t so sure. She should never have been allowed to walk out of the hospital this morning, shouldn’t have been mixing painkillers and vodka, and from PC Walsh’s version of events she’d taken a blow to her already damaged ribs, a much heavier one than he would admit to throwing probably.

Would anything she said in here stand up in court?

She’d refused a solicitor and that could complicate matters too, create space for charges of bullying or coercion. They would have to tread carefully with her.

So far she’d said very little, only asked if she could smoke, and when she was told no said she needed something to drink.

He left the tapes running while Ferreira went to fetch her a bottle of water, sipped his vending-machine coffee, trying to drown the wine he’d drunk with dinner.

The door opened and Ferreira came in with a bottle of mineral water and a bar of chocolate.

‘Ten thirty-eight. Sergeant Ferreira entering the interview room.’

Sofia ignored the chocolate, spent a couple of seconds fighting the bottle’s lid, then took a long drink, putting it down again half empty.

‘Why did you go to see Anthony Gilbert?’ Zigic asked.

‘To talk to him.’

Zigic placed his palms flat on the table. ‘Let me explain something to you, Sofia. PC Walsh has written up a full report of what happened and he makes it very clear that you were standing over Gilbert, with your hands on his throat.’

‘I was only trying to wake him,’ Sofia said firmly.

‘By strangling him?’

‘I was not strangling him. I was shaking him.’ She gripped her own shoulders, close to her neck. ‘Like this, see. You cannot kill someone like this.’

‘But you slapped him?’

She gave Zigic a dead-eyed look. ‘You cannot kill someone like that either.’

‘What did you really want with Gilbert?’

‘I tell you already. I went to talk to him.’ She shook her head. ‘I thought if I could look him in the eye I would know whether he killed her.’

‘What did he say?’ Zigic asked.

‘Nothing. I could not wake him.’

‘And what if he’d told you he did it?’

She looked away. ‘You cannot arrest me for something I did not do.’

She’d come close though.

Walsh’s report described how he’d stepped away to go to the bathroom and found her with Gilbert when he returned, alerted by her shouting, then the sound of her palm striking Gilbert’s face, trying to slap him back to consciousness. Her hands were on him when Walsh burst into the room and she only let go when he dragged her away, fingertips clawing the air above Gilbert’s face. She didn’t stop shouting though, but turned on Walsh instead, kicking out at him until he wrestled her to the ground.

‘You’ve assaulted a police officer, Sofia. It’s a very serious charge.’

‘Your police officer attacked me.’

‘PC Walsh used an approved method of restraint.’

‘He punched me,’ she said.

‘If you wish to make a formal complaint you’re welcome to do so.’

She threw her chin up and Zigic saw an old scar lightly puckering the skin under her jaw, long and thin, a shallow cut intended to threaten more than damage, and for a moment he imagined a blade running slowly across her neck, but he pushed it away. Whatever violence she’d once suffered wasn’t the issue here.

‘You are all corrupt,’ she said. ‘You lie to protect each other.’

Next to him Ferreira shifted in her seat, feet scuffing the floor under the table.

It had been a long and frustrating day and Zigic imagined she was as irritated as he was at being dragged away from her evening. An hour ago he’d been on the sofa with Anna dozing against his chest, finishing the bottle of Shiraz they’d opened with dinner, watching a film he’d already guessed the ending to. Just drunk and dozy enough to forget about work for a while.

Sofia’s impatience and arrogance had snatched him back here and watching her across the table, seeing the self-righteous indignation on her face, he momentarily forgot her suffering and wanted to punish her for ruining the rare few hours’ peace he’d been enjoying.

His shoulders squared as he leaned forward.

‘Why did you lie about Tomas?’

She blinked. ‘What is this to do with him?’

‘You told me he was coming home,’ Zigic said. ‘And that wasn’t true. So why did you say it?’

Sofia started to run her thumbnail along the bottle’s paper wrapper, attention fixed on it. ‘It is none of your business.’

‘Why did he leave you?’

She looked up at that, her dull green eyes darting between them. ‘Who says he left me?’

‘Hasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ Through gritted teeth, glaring at him. ‘Are you happy? I am alone. There is nobody who cares what happens now. I have nobody who will help me so you can arrest me and put me in prison and nobody will stop you.’