Long Way Home (13 page)

When she went back to the office Wahlia put her Porto mug in her hand, gave a small, ironic bow and returned to his side of the desk.

She took a sip of coffee, it was hot and bitter, an aftertaste of tobacco. ‘Suspects then?’

He snatched up a mugshot from his cluttered desk.

‘Recognise him?’

‘Yeah,’ Ferreira said slowly, but she didn’t know why or where from.

He was a grubby-looking white guy with large green eyes under thick brows cut with old scars. He wore a few days’ worth of stubble and his shaved head showed the shadow of an unevenly receeding hairline. Mid-forties, Ferreira guessed, or younger maybe if he’d had a hard life. The prison tattoos on his neck suggested he had, a string of nonsensical letters and a crude Britannia figure.

‘This can’t be the guy Adu and Maloney mentioned, can it?’ she said. ‘No one’s going to mistake those tattoos for a bird.’

‘It’s Clinton Renfrew.’

She stood sharply. ‘He’s not out already? Didn’t they give ten years?’

‘Ten years, yeah, knocked down to five. They let him out just before Christmas,’ Wahlia said. ‘Must have been a model prisoner.’

He stuck the photograph up in the suspects column of Stepulov’s murder board. Clinton Renfrew looked made for it.

‘Where is he now?’ Ferreira asked.

‘I’m waiting on a call from Littlehey.’

‘You think he’s come back to Peterborough, after what he did?’

‘Where else is he going to go?’ Wahlia said, folding his arms across his chest. ‘He’s a fucking hick. Blokes like him always come home.’

Ferreira started to roll a cigarette, thinking of the last time she saw Renfrew; Peterborough Crown Court, the public gallery packed and more people waiting in the corridor outside. The jury took less than an hour to deliberate and when they returned to the stuffy courtroom the crowd broke into furious whispers which took minutes to subside, despite the judge banging his gavel and threatening to clear them out.

Renfrew stood stone-faced as they found him guilty, threw his chin up in the air and weathered the fury coming from the public gallery. It was easy to ignore when he couldn’t understand what the largely Portuguese crowd were shouting.

Ferreira lit up and typed Renfrew’s name into Google.

The first ten results were old news items, archived pages from the
Evening Telegraph
and the
Citizen
, heavy on local colour; a couple of the nationals had picked it up too and they used the incident as launch pad into the larger issue of immigration and a lack of social cohesion, making Peterborough a microcosm for the rest of the country.

She stopped.

‘Clinton Renfrew is on Facebook.’

‘Of course he is.’

His timeline was headed by a St George’s cross and she saw familiar names in his friend list, local ENL activists and BNP members, affiliates of the various, smaller right-wing groups which came and went.

Wahlia’s phone rang and he listened for a long time to the person at the other end, writing fast notes on a scrap of paper.

Ferreira leaned back from the computer screen and smoked her cigarette, watching Wahlia’s expression harden. His hand froze.

‘Yeah, we know it.’ He grinned at Ferreira. ‘Yeah, thanks, John . . . yeah yeah, definitely. I owe you one.’

He ended the call and walked over to the murder board, uncapping a red marker pen.

‘Come on then, where is he?’

Wahlia marked a circle on the map of New England.

Ferreira grabbed her keys, already dialling Zigic’s number. ‘Call Littlehey back, get everything they can give you. And find out who his probation officer is and call them –’

‘I know.’ Wahlia waved her out of the office. ‘Go, I’m on it.’

‘
LATE TO THE
party again, Inspector,’ Dr Irwin said, pulling his latex gloves off in a puff of chalk. ‘Anyone would think you were squeamish.’

It’s just meat, Zigic told himself, looking at the wrecked remains of Jaan Stepulov laid out on a gleaming stainless-steel table. Thin pink juices dripped into the drain below, the sound intermittent but resonating around the white-tiled mortuary, percussive against the medley of humming freezers and a droning light which flickered at an epileptic rate, making his eyeballs throb.

It’s just man-shaped meat.

The burnt ones didn’t usually bother him. His first corpse was the victim of a house fire in Paston, an elderly woman murdered by her grandson for the savings she kept hidden between the yellowing pages of her Mills & Boon novels. The house was alight for hours before they managed to bring the fire under control, fuelled by piles of old newspapers and magazines she’d hoarded over the years, and by the time her body was recovered it was nothing more than a jumble of brittle black sticks.

Everyone expected him to throw up but the body was so unlike a person that he didn’t react.

Jaan Stepulov was still identifiably human though. Alive he had been lean and fit, and even with the lighter fuel as an accelerant the fire hadn’t done as much damage as Zigic expected. His face was still a face despite the blasted flesh and the empty eye sockets, an arrow of deeper black where his nose had been. His clothes had insulated him well and his body was only superficially burnt. It still had bulk and a terrible solidity.

‘So, what’s the verdict?’ Zigic said, dragging his eyes up from the corpse.

‘The victim was definitely alive when the fire was set,’ Irwin said, coming round the table to stand by the Y-incision, which stood out vivid pink against Stepulov’s charred skin. ‘There was extensive damage to his respiratory system consistent with smoke inhalation.’

It sounded bad but Zigic knew it was an understatement. Stepulov would have breathed fire as tried to free himself from the sleeping bag, blinded first by the lighter fuel then by the flames, which would have turned his eyeballs to liquid. He would have screamed and thrashed but there was nowhere to go and the only saving grace was the more he panicked, the deeper he inhaled and the faster the carbon monoxide would have knocked him out.

‘Any signs of trauma?’

‘He’d been in a fight by the look of things. Hairline fracture to a couple of ribs, some broken teeth, nothing fatal,’ Irwin said. He spread his hands wide. ‘It’s exactly what it looks like, Inspector. Somebody doused him in lighter fluid and set fire to him. I’ll email my full report over to you this afternoon but that’s about the size of it.’

Zigic thanked him and left the mortuary.

In the windowless grey corridor he passed a porter bringing down another body. It was small and insubstantial under the white sheet, no avoiding the fact that it was a child. The man nodded to him and kept walking, the squeak of wheels receding and finally stopping on the other side of the swing doors.

He went up the stairwell and passed through reception into the fresh air. A few people were milling around outside the main doors, waiting for taxis to whisk them away or delaying going in for a few extra seconds, trying to find a happy face for their terminally ill. A man on a drip was smoking in the lee of the wall and he looked freezing in his thin pyjamas, nothing on his feet but a pair of hospital-issue paper slippers.

As Zigic reached the car his mobile rang and he put it on speaker, not wanting to hang around there a second longer than he had to.

‘Clinton Renfrew’s out,’ Ferreira said, her voice echoing.

‘When did that happen?’

‘Christmas.’ Her feet slapped the stairs. ‘He served five years, can you believe that?’

Zigic backed out of his parking space, two cars waiting for it and he left them to fight it out.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Mel, but it isn’t Renfrew’s MO.’

‘He’s dossing at Fern House,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit too much of a coincidence for us to ignore?’

‘I’ll check it out.’

‘I’m on my way now.’ He heard the peep of her remote locking and the car door slammed. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

She ended the call and he pulled out onto Thorpe Park Road, swearing under his breath. The lunch-hour traffic was heavy across the Crescent Bridge, two lanes cut down into one where they were reinforcing the metal superstructure and it took five minutes to get across and onto the roundabout at the shopping centre. As he passed he noticed how empty the car park was, even though half of it was cordoned off for maintenance. Everything in the city seemed to be crumbling.

He cut down Deacon Street, stamping on the brakes as a coach pulled out of the lot behind Maloney’s pub, bound for Krakow or Łód
ź
, packed full of travellers. There were three more parked up waiting, groups of people standing around nearby, bags at their feet.

He turned onto Cromwell Road, heading for New England. The street was busy, kids who should have been at school and women in hijabs carrying bags of shopping. One of the tightly set terraced houses was being renovated and a skip half blocked the road, a cordon of orange tape around it so you couldn’t say you didn’t see it when you lost your wing mirror. A load of smashed plasterboard hit the bottom of the skip as he passed, throwing up dust and a sound like a gunshot.

His grandparents’ first house was on Cromwell Road back in the late fifties and it had been a mix of Italians, Slavs and West Indians then. Peterborough needed their labour but it didn’t want them as neighbours so they were shoved away in the soot-stained ex-railway houses. No heating, no indoor toilets, walls which sweated condensation.

By the eighties they had moved on and the area was firmly Indian and Pakistani, men brought in to do the heavy work at the brickyards in Fletton. Within ten years the yards were in decline thanks to cheap imports from Belgium and asset stripping by the new bosses. The company was wound down to a skeleton staff, the pits were turned into rubbish dumps and finally deemed fit to build on.

Now Cromwell Road was shifting again with the new influx from Southern and Eastern Europe. The builder’s van belonged to a Polish construction firm and on the crossroads with Russell Street a madrasa faced off with a Portuguese club retrofitted into an old double-fronted house. There were tables and chairs out on the pavement, a couple of men sitting drinking beers.

Hidden behind the houses was a warren of garages and illegally constructed outbuildings catering to migrant workers who couldn’t afford a shared room. Officially the council disapproved but there was a tacit agreement to let them remain, he guessed. Much cheaper to ignore the problem than provide accommodation out of the public purse. Never mind that people were getting ripped off and living in unsafe conditions.

The one-way system took him along Gladstone Street, past the mosque. A
trompe l’oeil
mural filled the end wall of the house opposite it, a multicultural street scene which didn’t look as fresh as it once had. Faces had been blasted off, others grafittied, and again, springing up like melanoma, there was a red ENL tag over a figure in a burka.

He kept driving, caught behind a guy on a bike who was weaving drunkenly between the cars. He shouldn’t have come this way. It was slow and winding, but when he reached the junction with Cobden Street he realised what had drawn him off the main road.

The man on the bike pulled away and disappeared and Zigic sat, hunched over the wheel, looking at the block of recently finished flats which filled the corner plot. A couple had To Let boards screwed up and the developer’s sign was still standing out front. It had taken time to get planning permission, he supposed. The building sat uncomfortably on the street, huge and blocky against the terraced houses, but it was better than what was there before, the burnt-out shell of a takeaway place, decaying behind security fencing, its yard full of debris and overrun with rats.

Clinton Renfrew was known to the police long before he burned the takeaway down. An arsonist for hire, his name linked to a handful of gutted factories around the city. He’d been clever though, always had a rock-solid alibi, never splashed the cash about, and if it was just a matter of property damage he might have got away with that one too. But whether Renfrew knew it or not a man had been asleep in the storeroom the night he turned up to torch the place.

Ferreira was right, five years wasn’t enough.

A few minutes later Zigic pulled up around the back of Fern House. Ferreira was already there, sitting on the bonnet of her car with a cigarette going, talking to someone on her mobile.

‘All evening? You’re positive?’ she asked, nodding to him as he crossed the road, ‘. . . no, I can appreciate that.’ She dropped her spent butt and scrubbed it out with the toe of her boot. ‘Thank you, that’s it right now. We’ll be in touch if there’s anything else.’

‘Who was that?’ Zigic asked, as she ended the call.

‘The first Mrs Barlow. Craig was at home like they said. She doesn’t let him go out on school nights apparently.’ Ferreira rolled her eyes. ‘And I got the distinct impression she doesn’t like him going to his dad’s at all. There was some snark for Gemma.’

‘About what you’d expect from the ex,’ Zigic said, buttoning up his parka. ‘How did you get here so quick anyway?’

‘I don’t drive like a pensioner.’ She slipped her mobile into the back pocket of her jeans. ‘And I got an update from Bobby – looks like Renfrew was radicalised in Littlehey. He celled with Lee Poulter.’

‘Refresh my memory.’

‘Ex-BNP fucktard. He kicked that Pakistani kid to death in Cambridge a few years ago – you remember?’ Zigic nodded. ‘I’ve been on Renfrew’s Facebook page. He’s dropped in pretty tight with the ENL set-up here. He’s only been out a couple of months so they’re probably connections he made inside.’

They walked up Lime Tree Avenue, around to the front of Fern House.

The door was open and the sharp scent of lemon cleaning fluid filled the air. An elderly man in worn jeans and a holey jumper was cleaning the tiled floor.

‘Is Helen here?’ Ferreira asked.

‘Mrs Adu is not home.’

‘What about Mr Adu?’

Joseph came out of the lounge, clutching a bundle of newspapers to his chest.

‘Inspector Zigic, have you found the man who was looking for Jaan?’