Tell No Tales (2 page)

The desk sergeant told him to be grateful – they had an image of their driver from it. Not that it showed much, medium build, dark clothes, the man’s face a pale smudge as he sprinted off towards the rat runs of bedsit land, escaping along the same side street that Zigic turned down now.

Ahead of him a car was executing a three-point turn, finding the access onto Lincoln Road blocked off by the police cordon. Zigic flashed to let them pass then pulled onto the kerb outside a new development of three-storey houses.

As he got out of the car he checked for CCTV along the narrow lane, spotted a single camera mounted under the sagging gutters of the building on the corner, trained, bizarrely, on one of the upstairs windows.

Zigic ducked under the perimeter tape and entered the crime scene.

Everything looked washed out and insubstantial under the early-morning light and he realised he’d never seen Lincoln Road at a standstill before. Cars were backed up from either end of the crash site but nobody was honking or shouting and the hush which had descended only added to the sense of unreality.

The car was real though. A bulky, old model Volvo with a replacement driver’s side door badly resprayed in a slightly off shade of white. It had ploughed through the group waiting around the bus shelter and only finally lost momentum when it slammed through the front wall of the terraced house behind it.

He saw the interior of the living room, stripped back to bare plaster and shrouded in dust which hadn’t yet settled, a light fitting hanging from the ceiling, no bulb in it. A new bathroom suite still swaddled in plastic was shoved into a corner, waiting to be shifted upstairs. That was something, he thought. No fatalities there.

But it felt like a small mercy when he looked at the shattered carcass of the bus shelter, its Perspex walls snapped and bloodstained, its red plastic seats tangled under the Volvo’s rear wheels. Nearby sat a rucksack, split open, spilling two Tupperware lunch boxes and a flask.

A blue-suited scenes-of-crime officer shouted at him.

‘Ziggy – shift or smile.’

He saw the photographer at distance and got out of his sight line, stood in the middle of the road, watching the man move in closer, panning slowly across the body of the Volvo, then moving closer, up to the open driver’s door and the airbag which was still inflated and spotted with blood. The photographer focused on the shattered windscreen and the buckled bonnet, then a shallow dent on the roof of the car where a body had landed, blood still tacky on the paintwork. The wipers had kicked in on the rear windscreen and dragged the blood across the glass.

At the north end of the crime scene a small crowd was gathering, corralled by a couple of community support officers in high-visibility jackets. The onlookers were too far away to see anything, but Zigic noticed at least half of them had their phones held out, recording the action for whatever fleeting posterity it would find online.

‘We’ve got two survivors,’ DS Ferreira said, coming across the street to him.

She had been the first on the scene just after dawn and from the way she was dressed he imagined she hadn’t been home long at that point, a creased black top under a short leather jacket and jeans tucked into knee-high boots; last night’s clothes still on.

She lived a couple of minutes further along Lincoln Road, too close to escape being involved.

‘Witnesses?’ Zigic asked.

‘Dozens, yeah, and they’re all saying the same thing. He accelerated up here from the south, jumped the lights and swerved across the traffic to hit them.’ She frowned. ‘The driver made it out. Took off up the road there on foot.’

Two more vehicles sat smashed in the middle of the road, their front bumpers locked together, bonnets crumpled, a red Seat and a courier’s van. They were lucky it hadn’t caused a major pile-up.

‘There’s no way this was an accident,’ Ferreira said.

‘Let’s not jump to conclusions, Mel.’

‘Riggott’s given us it, he obviously thinks it’s deliberate. And racially motivated.’

‘He’s got a heavy caseload.’

‘Like we haven’t.’

The photographer gave the all-clear and moved away to pack up his equipment. Within seconds three more interchangeable, androgynous figures descended on the car and Zigic watched them work with a vague feeling of envy. It was a standardised procedure for them, the same at every crime scene: photograph, document, collect, collate. And once that was done the messy process of extracting guilt from the information became someone else’s problem.

‘Have we got IDs on the victims yet?’ he asked.

‘Two of them, yeah. The paramedics had the other one away before I arrived. I sent them back to the office a few minutes ago. Hold on, I’ll give you them now.’ Ferreira took out her mobile, swiped the screen. Zigic’s phone beeped as they hit his inbox. ‘I talked to the driver who was coming to collect them – he’s pretty shook up.’

‘As you’d expect.’

‘He was running late, so he’s blaming himself now. You know the deal, if he’d been on time they wouldn’t have been standing out here to get run down.’ Ferreira shrugged and it was more like a shiver. ‘He’s gone to Edith Cavell with one of the women.’

‘How bad is she?’

‘The paramedics think she’ll make it but her sister took the full force. She was standing at the kerb.’

A trailer with a hefty orange crane on its cab pulled up to the perimeter tape and Ferreira hollered at the uniforms to let it in. They needed to get the street running again as soon as possible. Almost seven now and the rest of Peterborough was stirring towards work, waking to the news of this horrific event. The speculation would build quickly and DCS Riggott had made it abundantly clear that a swift resolution was needed.

‘Nobody wants this to get politicised,’ he’d said.

But it would. Once the press, and the public, caught on to the fact that it was being investigated by the Hate Crimes Department the racial element would become the focus. Zigic wondered why Riggott didn’t handle it in CID if he wanted to keep a lid on it, and realised he was probably covering his arse already – you didn’t make it to his rank without knowing how to delegate blame.

‘Alright, we need to talk to the families, see if any of the victims pissed someone off recently.’

‘So you do think it was deliberate.’

‘We need to cover all the angles.’

Ferreira planted her fists on her hips, looked away at the car. One of the forensics officers was squatting down by the passenger-side footwell, another had the boot open, going through the contents, bagging an empty water bottle and a travel rug.

The chief scenes-of-crime officer, Kate Jenkins, walked over to them, tucking her springy red hair under the hood of her bodysuit.

‘Don’t know about you two, but I can think of better ways to start the day.’

‘How long do you think you need here?’ Zigic asked.

‘Straight to business. Fair enough.’

‘Sorry, Kate.’

‘I understand.’ She nodded towards the ever lengthening line of cars stretching north. ‘Can’t have a few deaths holding people’s day up. We’ll take some preliminary samples to be on the safe side but we can do the serious work back at the garage.’

‘Have you got anything?’

‘The blood on the airbag’s fresh, almost definitely from the driver judging by the placement,’ she said. ‘Some hairs, fingerprints. He wasn’t careful. Although it looks like he had his seat belt on, so that message got through.’

‘Will it have left a mark?’ Zigic asked.

‘The airbag definitely.’ Jenkins’ mouth twisted. ‘The seat belt? Maybe. Depends on how fast he was going.’

‘The witnesses we have said he was accelerating,’ Ferreira told her.

‘It’s fairly likely then.’

A horn blared across the road, a white van running into the edge of the cordon on Taverners Road, and quickly the note was taken up by more cars. The spell was broken and suddenly the waiting traffic became like a single angry entity, shouting, swearing and gesturing out of open windows.

Jenkins scowled at the van. ‘Guess I should crack on then.’

‘This is going to start getting nasty,’ Ferreira said. ‘Maybe we should draft in some more uniforms just in case.’

‘Call in and see who you can get down here.’ Zigic’s mobile rang. ‘What is it, Bobby?’

‘The Volvo’s registered to a Paul Devlin, lives over in Stanground.’

‘Has he got form?’ Zigic asked.

‘Couple of speeding tickets, nothing major.’

‘Until now.’

3

PAUL DEVLIN LIVED
on a nice quiet development of semi-detached houses with large bay windows and well-maintained front gardens, carports to the side, most of them still occupied at this time of morning. It was an area dominated by retirees now; Zigic’s grandparents lived a few minutes away on the same estate, surrounded by people just like them who had bought from new and never moved on.

His grandparents were among the first foreigners to move into Stanground and back in the 1960s they weren’t made welcome. Their neighbours fancied themselves as professionals, engineers from the long-defunct Perkins plant, people who worked in banks and offices. They didn’t appreciate the sudden influx of Slavs and Italians who brought big, boisterous families with them and filled the classrooms of the local primary with kids who had English as a second language, didn’t like the idea of overpaid brickyard workers dragging the area down.

They wouldn’t like the new township being built beyond the estate either, Zigic guessed. Seventy per cent social housing and all the problems which went along with it. Maybe that was why there were so many For Sale boards in the neat front gardens, despite the downturn in the property market.

He turned onto Alma Road and parked behind the patrol car sitting twenty yards away from Paul Devlin’s house. Two uniforms got out, big men ready for action, and they fell in step behind him as they approached the place, boots dull against the pavement, radios squawking into the peaceful morning air, clashing with the birdsong.

The curtains were drawn at Devlin’s front windows, no lights on, but there was a car in the driveway, a brand-new Corsa waxed to a high shine.

Zigic signalled for one of the men to go round the back and heard him bang through the metal gate as he rang the doorbell, a wonky two-tone chime sounding.

He waited, aware of the neighbours stirring. Saw an elderly woman appear in the window to his right, half hidden by thick net curtains bleached a brilliant white. Behind him a door opened and a reedy voice called across the road.

‘He’s at home. He doesn’t work.’

The man was in his dressing gown, bowed legs sticking out, a small black dog between his feet, yapping excitedly.

‘Thank you, sir,’ Zigic said. ‘Please, go back inside.’

He rang the doorbell again and squatted down to peer through the letter box. The hallway was spartan, laminate floor and white walls, coir matting on the staircase. There was a black padded jacket on the post, similar to the one worn by the man he’d seen on YouTube running away from the crime scene.

‘Shall I get the ram, sir?’ PC Blake asked.

Feet appeared at the top of the stairs, began to trudge down slowly in backless slippers.

‘No need.’

Paul Devlin opened the front door in his boxers and a Coldplay T-shirt, one eye half closed and his blond hair sleep-mussed. He looked about the right build for their man, five ten, solid but not fat. He yawned into their faces as he asked what they wanted.

Zigic flashed his warrant card. ‘I’d like you to come with us please, Mr Devlin.’

‘What?’ He made a perfectly confused face, blinked, wrinkled his chin. ‘Why?’

‘Your car was involved in a hit-and-run this morning.’

Devlin took a step back, eyes widening, and Zigic crossed the threshold.

‘One person’s dead, two more might not make it.’

Devlin swayed where he stood, eyes on the open door and Blake’s meaty form blocking it, and Zigic got ready to grab him if he decided to make a run for it.

‘But my car’s outside,’ Devlin said.

‘Your other car,’ Zigic told him, impatience clipping his words. ‘It’ll be better for you if you come quietly now.’

‘Other car? My old Volvo?’ Zigic nodded. ‘I sold it a couple of weeks ago.’

‘It’s still in your name,’ Zigic said.

‘I gave him all the paperwork, he told me he’d sort it out.’

Behind Zigic the PC sighed, like he’d heard this kind of nonsense a thousand times before and he was in no mood to listen to it again.

Did Devlin look like a man who had run away from a fatal crash within the last couple of hours, though? The skin of the left side of his face was reddened, maybe from the airbag deploying, or maybe from a crease in his pillow. Zigic stepped closer to him, saw gunge in the corners of his bloodshot eyes, a smear of crusted drool on his chin.

‘Would you lift your T-shirt please, sir?’

Devlin clutched at the hem. ‘What? Is this some kind of joke?’

‘Just do it.’

He complied reluctantly, someone who was used to being pushed around, Zigic thought.

‘All the way, please.’

Devlin’s exposed chest was milk white and almost hairless, but there was no sign of bruising from the seat belt, not even a hint of abrasion. Zigic told him to cover up again.

‘Who did you sell the car to?’

‘Some guy on eBay. Him and a mate came to the house, paid me cash, and took it away.’

‘I need a name.’

‘He was foreign,’ Devlin said.

‘That isn’t an answer.’

Devlin shoved his fingers back through his hair, stared at the floor for a few long seconds, eyes wide, before he shook his head.

‘I can’t remember. He said he was local, if that’s any help.’

‘You must have a phone number for him,’ Zigic said. ‘How did he arrange when to come?’

‘I’ll check.’

He headed back upstairs and Zigic told Blake to go and speak to the neighbours, see if any of them noticed Devlin go out earlier this morning, or if they remembered two men calling at the house to take the car away. He’d bet someone saw something, the neighbourhood watch was Stasi-like around here.