Tell No Tales (23 page)

Zigic only knew him by reputation, most of that second-hand from Ferreira, but he was every inch the ageing thug, weathered and battle-hardened with old scars visible above his eyes and across his cheeks, a strange spray down the left side of his jaw which might have passed for acne pockmarks until you looked closer and saw the shape of them was more consistent with shards of broken glass, a souvenir from his time with a Luton football firm. And Zigic imagined whatever he’d received he’d given out threefold, an unmistakable air of competent aggression around him, the confidence which came from knowing you’d taken the hardest blow that could be thrown and climbed to your feet again.

He saw the same thing on their unnamed suspect and thought what a perfect team the men would make. He could see them swapping war stories and propaganda, both knowing their years in the cause were for nothing, that they were fighting a losing battle against multiculturalism and liberal values, small men in a changing world wanting to make a mark while they were still capable.

Because wasn’t that what terror came down to, a toxic blend of narcissism and fear and self-righteous indignation?

Poulter glared at Ferreira as she set up the recording equipment, stated his name in a clear, hard voice. Which was more than you could say for his solicitor, Mr Hall, a fresh-faced young man who seemed to be suffering from stage fright and had to repeat his name twice before Ferreira was satisfied.

Zigic took a deep breath, placed his hands on the file in front of him.

‘Mr Poulter, why don’t you start by telling us where you were between ten o’clock and eleven last night?’

‘I was down Midgate,’ he said placidly. ‘Watching you lot getting your arses handed to you.’

‘Did you join in?’

He snorted. ‘I leave that stuff to the young lads these days.’

‘How did you know it was kicking off?’ Zigic asked.

‘Jungle drums. Something like that gets about.’

‘So things were in full swing when you arrived?’

‘Gearing up to it, I’d say.’ Poulter smiled, showing very white teeth, a chipped incisor. ‘Didn’t really get going till you tried to calm things down, did it? Fine job you did there. Thought they trained you for that sort of thing.’

Zigic fought the urge to touch the cut in his hairline. ‘Where were you before that?’

‘Where d’you think I was? I’m a cabbie,’ Poulter said. ‘I was driving people round town.’

‘And then someone called you and you headed down to Midgate for a gawp?’

‘’Bout the size of it, yeah. Not a crime, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t. It’s ghoulish and distasteful but that’s all I’d expect from someone with your record.’ Zigic tapped his fingertips against the file. ‘So you arrived once the area was sealed off?’

‘That bunch of Muzzis, you mean? Seems unlawful to me, letting a group of armed civilians close off a road. Have them threatening anyone who comes up. This isn’t fucking Syria.’ He smiled. ‘But you’re the inspector, sure you had your reasons.’

‘You believe in community action,’ Zigic said. ‘I’ve seen your literature. If a young man was murdered outside your front door, wouldn’t you want to protect the crime scene from gangs of marauding drunks?’

‘Wouldn’t happen where I live. It’s a nice street.’ He puffed his chest out as he spoke, as if he didn’t live on one of the roughest squares on the roughest estate in Peterborough, surrounded by drug dealers and petty thieves and dozens of kids who couldn’t move beyond their front doors without their electronic tags going off.

It was fairly white though and that would be enough for Poulter.

Zigic opened the file he’d brought with him, took the top photograph from the pile and closed it again.

‘If you only arrived once the scene was cordoned off maybe you could explain how you came to take this.’ He placed a still they’d lifted from the video on Poulter’s Facebook page in front of him. ‘You filmed this after Asif Khalid was murdered.’

Poulter swallowed hard and stared at the photograph.

‘Well?’

‘That doesn’t prove anything.’

‘It proves you were at the scene.’

‘I didn’t kill him.’ Poulter unfolded his arms and leaned across the table, covering the photo with both hands, trying to block out its existence. ‘You arrested the bloke who did it already. You can’t put this on me.’

‘We’ve arrested one of the men responsible.’ Zigic leaned forward too, their faces inches apart, close enough to see the fear in Poulter’s eyes. ‘And when we’re done with you we’re going to bring him in here and he’s going to try and get himself off by laying the blame on you.’

Poulter was breathing fast now, his mouth hanging open, wanting to say something, anything, which would get him off, but the evidence was there in front of him. Undeniable.

‘I was there,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t kill the lad.’

‘You just happened to be passing the scene within minutes of a murder?’ Zigic asked, incredulous. ‘How stupid do you think we are?’

‘How stupid do you think I am?’ Poulter snapped. ‘Would I have taken this picture if I was guilty?’

‘You’d be surprised how many idiots post the evidence of their crimes on Facebook,’ Zigic said. ‘You’re not unique.’

‘I didn’t do it.’

‘OK.’ Zigic leaned back in his chair, let the silence stretch for a few seconds, watching Poulter, waiting for him to relax as well, but he didn’t. ‘Maybe you didn’t actually kill Khalid, maybe it wasn’t your boots which kicked his head apart, but you were there, which makes you an accessory.’

‘I was passing,’ Poulter insisted. ‘Afterwards, right. I didn’t even see him get killed.’

Zigic blew out a sigh, turned to Ferreira. ‘That sounds like a lie.’

‘Yeah, he’s definitely lying.’ She shifted forward in her seat. ‘We’ve got CCTV showing two men following Asif Khalid onto Cromwell Road but after the attack neither leave. One of them was detained until we arrived and the other one . . . well, he hung around.’

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘The photograph shows you were in the car park, which, incidentally, is not passing, it’s loitering.’ She snatched it out from under his hand. ‘Where was your cab?’

He hesitated, dropped his gaze.

‘We’ll check, so don’t bother lying.’

‘On the rank,’ he said. ‘Out the back of John Lewis.’

‘That’s a hundred yards from the car park, at least, so you weren’t passing.’ Ferreira dipped her head, getting into his eyeline. ‘But Khalid passed you. He comes down Westgate, walks right past your cab, and you think “yeah, he’s small, we can take him”.’

‘That isn’t what happened,’ Poulter said, a flush burning through his tan. ‘Fucking hell. I was getting a blow job, alright? That’s why I was in the car park. You happy now?’

‘You left your cab on the rank and went to get a blow job?’

‘I’m not fucking proud of myself.’

Ferreira put her hands up. ‘I’m not judging you, Poulter, I just don’t understand why you didn’t do it in your car like a normal person.’

‘My wife cleans the cab.’

‘We need a name,’ Zigic said.

Poulter deflated where he sat. ‘Heather. She works the bottom end of Lincoln Road.’

‘We’ll talk to her.’

‘I don’t know where she lives,’ he said quickly.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll find her.’

‘She didn’t see anything.’

Ferreira smiled at him, cocked her head. ‘How long did it take you?’

‘What?’

‘To come.’

Poulter’s solicitor cleared his throat like he was going to complain but thought better of it. It was a fair question, Zigic thought, seeing where she was going.

‘None of your business,’ Poulter said and turned to Zigic. ‘What the fuck is this?’

‘Answer the question please.’

He shook his head, couldn’t look at them. ‘I don’t know. What’s it matter?’

‘It matters because you took this photograph when you were done,’ Ferreira said, steepling her fingers over it. ‘Which means you and Heather were in the car park, a few yards away from the murder when it happened.’

‘We were right over the other side, we didn’t see anything.’ His voice rose as he spoke, finishing near a shout, and the final syllable hung in the air, loaded with desperation.

Maybe he was worried about it all coming out in court, being forced to give evidence with his wife sitting in the public gallery. Zigic had seen people come close to conviction for the sake of hiding an infidelity, but he didn’t think that was the case with Poulter, suspected he’d seen far more than he wanted to admit, and maybe Heather had too. Someone Poulter knew personally, one of his ENL cronies.

Zigic brought another photograph out of the file, the man they had already arrested.

‘Tell us about him.’

Poulter looked at the mugshot, frowning deeply. ‘Don’t know him.’

‘Come on, you’re a well-connected man,’ Ferreira said. ‘You must know every far-right player in a hundred-mile radius.’

‘I do,’ Poulter said, throwing his chin up, some composure regained. ‘And he isn’t one of them.’

‘He killed Asif Khalid,’ Zigic said. ‘And we believe he’s responsible for two other murders in Peterborough.’

‘He’s not one of us.’

‘Because you’d tell us if he was, right?’ Ferreira said, sneering at Poulter, who loosened a thin smile at her.

‘What do you think he’s going to say when we show him your mugshot?’ Zigic asked. ‘Do you think that loyalty cuts both ways?’

‘He won’t say anything, because he doesn’t know me.’

Zigic studied Poulter’s face, trying to read the meaning behind the remnants of his amusement. Was it defiance or arrogance, or did he already know the man wasn’t talking because they had arranged a vow of silence in the event of getting caught? Old soldiers might do that.

‘Interview terminated two thirty-seven.’

Poulter rose from the table and started towards the door, muttering under his breath about them wasting his time, and almost bounced off the chest of the uniform standing guard.

‘You know the drill better than that,’ Ferreira said. ‘Take him down.’

Poulter took a few hurried, backward steps. ‘Now hold on. You’ve got no right to keep me here.’

‘We can keep you for at least twenty-four hours.’

‘Listen to me, I didn’t do anything. I’m fifty years old for fuck’s sake.’ He clenched his fists, muttered under his breath. ‘Talk to Joe Selby. You want to know who killed those blokes, talk to Joe.’

Ferreira stepped up to Poulter. ‘Why him?’

‘He’s been skulking around asking questions, wanting to know who you lot have pulled in, what they told you. I’m telling you, he’s shit-scared.’

‘Keep talking.’

30

BACK IN THE
office Zigic told Wahlia to run the name Heather through the system, check for recent soliciting arrests, hoping they would get lucky and she was using her real name. It wasn’t the kind women assumed for business purposes, not flashy or sexy enough.

Parr was still out canvassing the area around the earlier murders, no new developments from that direction. Grieves had gone off to the canteen.

When Zigic checked his mobile he found three messages from Nicola Gilraye, increasingly impatient, wanting something for the evening news bulletin. He called her back, heard pub noise in the seconds before she spoke, voices and laughter, a quiz machine beeping.

‘The Sundays are bombarding me with requests,’ she said. ‘
The Times
are running a profile on Shotton in their magazine. A very sympathetic one from what I can gather.’

‘His PR team are doing good work.’

‘Which is bad for us.’

‘It has nothing to do with us,’ Zigic said.

The sound of tonic fizzing into a glass at her end. ‘Please tell me you’ve identified the victim at least.’

‘I’ll send you over the details.’

Zigic ended the call and told Wahlia to give her the basics, nothing more, no matter how hard she pressed him.

Ferreira was pulling her jacket on, grabbing her bag with her free hand.

‘Where are you going?’

‘For Selby.’ She pocketed her tobacco, snagged her keys from the desk. ‘Are you coming?’

Zigic crossed his arms and she froze.

‘What?’

‘So you’ve thought this through,’ he said. ‘You’re confident you’ve got enough of a reason to drag him in here?’

‘He’s involved,’ she said. ‘You heard Poulter. Why else would Selby be asking questions if he didn’t have something to hide? He’s worried one of them’s implicated him.’

‘Which they haven’t.’

‘Poulter has.’

‘He’s told us nothing,’ Zigic said. ‘He wanted kicking loose so he gave us a name off the top of his head, hoping we’d be stupid enough to believe him.’

‘Selby’s involved in this.’ Her hand shot away towards the murder boards. ‘Poulter said he was with him in the Red Lion last night, that’s a very short walk through the centre of town to Cromwell Road.’ She went over to the board, stabbed a point on the map. ‘He’s less than half a mile away forty minutes before the attack.’

‘Did you see him on any of the footage?’ Zigic asked.

‘No. And that’s suspicious in itself. First sign of trouble he should have been wading in with the rest of the wankers. But he wasn’t. Don’t you find that strange?’

Zigic gave a non-committal murmur, knowing Selby’s absence from the scene was strange but not wanting to encourage her any further.

It would be easy to get sidetracked now. Selby was a decent fit but so was every other ENL foot soldier they’d pulled in, now that a second man was implicated in the murders. They wouldn’t know for sure until they had a DNA match but it looked highly likely that the mute in the cells had left his spit on Ali Manouf’s dead face. The evidence which had blacked out every name in their suspects list was suddenly meaningless and they were all back in the frame. Dozens of men with the same form and prejudices as Joe Selby, and the only thing that distinguished him right now was Ken Poulter’s say-so.

Poulter, who looked by far the most likely suspect.

‘Got an address,’ Wahlia said. ‘Heather Crane, multiple solicitation charges, lives on Midland Road. That’s got to be her.’

‘Selby can wait,’ Zigic said.

Ferreira hitched her bag onto her shoulder. ‘You’re the boss.’