Long Way Home (4 page)

It was light now, and so cold he could see ice sparkling on the tarmac. A biting wind swirled around the yard, where the dogs were prowling, five vicious mutts in a pack. Paolo hurried to get inside the van away from them.

The gates opened automatically and the vans pulled out in convoy, four of them full of men, and this morning two went off to the left and two to the right, heading away to different jobs. That only meant one thing – they would work much harder than usual today.

Paolo shrank down in his seat and tucked his chin into his chest, hugging his arms to his body for warmth. Next to him Jakub radiated heat and he couldn’t understand how the man was never cold. When it snowed he would work with no jacket and at the first sign of sun stripped down to bare skin, showing a broad back covered in acne scars and strap marks which became livid with exertion. Paolo had asked where he was from and when he couldn’t make himself understood Jakub drew a crude map in the dirt with his finger.

Eastern Europe, Paolo guessed, one of those cold, grey countries run by gangsters and thugs.

He let his head fall against the window, watching the countryside swipe past, the fields shrouded by freezing fog. Saw the vapour trails of aeroplanes heading north, people flying away to new lives or maybe back to their old ones, freshly rich and full of plans.

He closed his eyes and imagined his own homecoming, finding Maria’s smiling face among the crowd at arrivals, hurrying to her waiting arms and seeing the realisation light up her eyes as she felt the fatly packed money belt strapped around his middle. Later, in the bedroom, she would unfasten it and he would watch her count the cash into neat piles on the mattress, amazed by how much there was. Then he would spread it out, all that hard-earned money, and make love to her on it like they did in the movies.

INTERVIEW ROOMS HAD
a way of deflating people, Zigic had noticed, and it started the moment the door opened and they saw the grey metal table and the four plastic chairs, two on either side, everything neatly squared.

He hung back and let Phil Barlow sit down first, curious which side of the table he would choose. Facing the camera or hiding from it?

He pulled a chair out and sat down.

‘Other side please,’ Zigic said.

‘Why?’

He pointed to the camera mounted high in the corner of the white-walled room.

‘Sorry, I never saw it.’

But he had. Clocked it the second he walked in.

Zigic took the seat opposite him and they sat in silence while Ferreira set up the recorder, running through the date and time in a brisk, businesslike tone. She prompted Barlow to state his name and his voice caught in his throat so that he coughed the words out.

The room was making him small already. Two minutes in there and his shoulders were hunched, chin tucked into his neck, hands clasped on the scarred tabletop with his forearms pressed together right up to the elbow.

It looked like guilt. Right away, without a single question asked, he looked like a guilty man.

Zigic gave him the benefit of the doubt though. He knew the room induced fear in the most innocent of people, something about its tight dimensions and the way the soundproofed walls flattened every noise out. It changed your voice, made you sound alien to yourself, and once you couldn’t trust your own voice what could you trust?

‘Why did you lie to us, Mr Barlow?’

‘What? I haven’t.’ He looked quickly between Ferreira and Zigic. ‘What is this? You said you wanted a statement.’ His foot scuffed the floor. ‘This is a fucking interrogation.’

‘When you’re being interrogated you’ll know about it,’ Zigic said. ‘This is your opportunity to tell us exactly what happened last night.’

‘I don’t know what happened, I was asleep.’

‘Someone got into your garden and set fire to your shed – which is right outside your bedroom window – and you didn’t wake up?’

‘No.’

‘And when Mr Lunka, your neighbour, shouted through your letter box to tell you your shed was on fire –’

‘I never heard him.’

‘What about when Mr Lunka rang your doorbell?’ Zigic asked. ‘And kept ringing it and ringing it and hammering on your front door?’

‘That never happened.’

‘Mr Lunka says it did.’

‘Well, maybe Mr Lunka’s a liar, you think of that?’ Barlow said, throwing his chin up suddenly. ‘Maybe Mr Lunka set fire to my shed.’

Zigic sat back in his chair, watched the lie develop on Barlow’s drawn and stubbled face, a light coming into his eyes like inspiration.

‘Why would he want to do that?’

‘How’d I know? Bloke like that, could be anything. Maybe he don’t like having English neighbours. Maybe one of his mates wants to buy my house, turn it into bedsits for two dozen fucking Albanians. You’ll have to ask him.’

Zigic nodded, leaned across the table into Barlow’s space.

‘So – in your conception of things – Mr Lunka sets fire to your shed for an as yet unspecified reason and he lies about trying to raise the alarm because . . . why?’

‘Shift the blame.’

‘OK. There’s a certain logic to that.’

Barlow was watching him carefully now, seeing if the lie was gaining traction.

‘I mean, yeah, I can see how that might work,’ Zigic said. ‘
If
Mr Lunka hadn’t called the fire brigade. That would undermine his whole purpose, wouldn’t it?’

A muscle twitched in Barlow’s jaw.

‘No,’ Zigic said. ‘I think Mr Lunka hammered on your front door and rang that klaxon of a bell you’ve got. Because he was worried, and rightly so – your shed’s close to his house, the fire could easily have spread over there.’

‘We heard nothing,’ Barlow said firmly.

‘I think you did. And you ignored it.’ Zigic smiled at him. ‘So we’re back to my original question – why did you lie to us?’

Barlow fish-mouthed for a second, eyes darting around the room.

‘Someone rings your bell in the middle of the night, you don’t go and fucking answer, do you? It’s not going to be anything good.’

‘No, it’s probably going to be an emergency. Like a fire or something.’

‘I should have answered the door,’ Barlow said. ‘Alright. I should’ve and I didn’t. That’s not a crime. We’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘You’ve lied to the police,’ Ferreira said. ‘That’s an offence in itself.’

‘And it tends to be habitual,’ Zigic said. ‘People tell us one lie and we catch them out, so they apologise and try to smooth it over. Then we catch them out in another one and another one and before you know it they’re doing a life sentence.’

Barlow’s foot struck the table leg and sent it ringing.

‘That’s your fight or flight response,’ Zigic said. ‘Your conscious mind understands you have to stay right where you are but your reptilian brain knows you’re in trouble and it wants to get you as far away as possible.’

‘We’ve done nothing,’ Barlow said wearily.

‘You knew there was someone in your shed.’

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ Zigic snapped. ‘You knew there was someone in there because you were charging him to stay there.’

‘What?’

‘He’d been living there for weeks.’

Barlow’s neck flushed bright red and he pressed his balled fists to his mouth. He closed his eyes and let out a string of half-formed denials.

‘How much were you charging him?’

Barlow squeezed his eyes tighter shut.

‘How much?’

‘Nothing,’ Barlow roared, slamming his hands down. ‘We weren’t charging him anything.’

‘Very generous,’ Ferreira said. ‘The two of you must have been pretty tight.’

‘What’s his name?’ Zigic asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You let him live in your back garden and you don’t know his name? That doesn’t sound entirely truthful, Mr Barlow.’

‘It is the truth.’

‘Where’s he from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘I never talked to him.’

The words were spoken at a whisper and Zigic felt the air in the room shift.

‘So he was squatting in your shed?’

Barlow nodded.

‘How did he get in?’

‘He broke in about three weeks ago. We went away to Gemma’s parents for the weekend and when we come back he was in there.’

‘Did you ask him to leave?’

‘He didn’t speak English.’

‘Didn’t you try to throw him out?’ Ferreira asked.

Barlow shook his head.

‘Try again,’ Zigic said. ‘That black eye looks a couple of weeks old to me.’

‘I did it at work. A light hit me.’

It was a small lie, rooted in pride, and Zigic decided to let it go for the time being.

‘Why didn’t you call the police about him?’

‘I called,’ Barlow said with a bitter smile. ‘Woman on the other end told me someone would call back about it. Nothing. I tried again, got an answerphone, left a message, never heard anything. So don’t make out you’d have done something about it.’

‘Sounds like your options were limited then,’ Ferreira said. ‘If you wanted a permanent solution to the problem.’

Barlow glared at her. ‘I did not set fire to that shed.’

‘If you believed it was empty at the time . . .’ Zigic showed him open palms, an understanding face. ‘We don’t have to call it murder.’

‘I want a solicitor.’

Zigic stood up and pushed the chair under the table. ‘Interview terminated nine forty-four.’

HATE CRIMES WAS
shoved away on the third floor of Thorpe Wood Station, a claustrophobic beige office with a suspended ceiling six inches too low and arsenic-green lino studded with old cigarette burns. There were half a dozen desks paired up back to back. A run of battered grey filing cabinets lined one wall, whiteboards populated with their current investigations filled another, and on the third side a stretch of metal windows with flaking paint overlooked the bustle and shunt of Bretton Parkway. The engine drone leaked in, along with exhaust fumes and thin draughts which knifed you as you worked.

Even on sunny days it was gloomy. On an overcast February morning Zigic thought it felt like a side room in purgatory.

They’d been promised a refit eighteen months ago but he couldn’t even get maintenance to come up and fix the radiators which never got above tepid and clanged like they were possessed.

‘We’ve got a name,’ DC Wahlia said. ‘Door-to-door turned him up. Jaan Stepulov.’

Zigic went over to the whiteboard where Wahlia had plotted out the scant details beginning to filter through. They were very scant, just a map of the area with the Barlows’ house highlighted in red and their names printed carefully in the suspects column.

‘How do they know him?’

‘The guy came over from Tallinn with Stepulov a couple of years ago,’ Wahlia said. ‘They weren’t friends he reckons, just from the same village. You know how it works.’

Zigic nodded. You wanted to strike out west but you didn’t want to go alone, so you asked around until somebody’s cousin’s friend said they were heading over too and you teamed up for the long, grey bus ride across Europe and the Channel, sleeping six inches away from each other, drinking and playing cards, talking about the pots of cash you were going to make, the house you’d buy, the car you wanted, building a fantasy to ward off the tugging in your gut as home fell further away.

Two days of that and you were blood brothers.

Until you got to England and found out your new kin didn’t share your work ethic.

‘He hadn’t seen Stepulov for eighteen months or so. The guy’s got a job at the hospital – he’s clean by the looks of it.’ Wahlia fetched a sheet of paper from the printer. ‘Stepulov’s got a couple of arrests. This is from the most recent. Fifteenth of December last year.’

Stepulov was a big man, six one by his mugshot, with mid-brown hair cropped close to his skull and a lean, square face all jaw and cheekbones under a patchy beard. Thirty-eight years old but he could have passed for forty-five when the photograph was taken.

‘What’s his record like?’ Zigic asked.

‘He went in for the aggressive begging in a big way,’ Wahlia said. He perched on the corner of his desk, tucked the marker pen behind his ear. ‘He was operating around the cathedral, bothering the tourists, got a couple of cautions.’

‘Violence?’

‘He was wanted over an aggravated burglary that sounds kind of borderline. Guy said he caught Stepulov trying to break into his house, went for him with a baseball bat and got on the wrong end of it. Stepulov broke the guy’s arm and ran.’ Wahlia shrugged. ‘You could call it self-defence maybe. He didn’t hang around to finish the job. Lot of people would have.’

‘Why wasn’t he arrested?’

‘The doctor who treated the guy called it in – they got Stepulov’s fingerprints off the bat, all the evidence is there – but he refused to press charges.’

‘And CID were happy with that?’ Zigic asked.

Wahlia flicked his fingers through his carefully styled hair, lifting the tufted spikes at the front. ‘If the victim doesn’t push it they’re not going to break their arses looking for a vagrant are they?’

‘Is the victim foreign?’

‘Yeah – Andrus Tombak,’ Wahlia said. ‘Lives down Burmer Road.’

Zigic looked at the map of New England. Highbury Street and Burmer Road were half a mile apart, running parallel to each other, a couple more stretches of back-to-backs separating them, old railway workers’ cottages and large semi-detached council houses carved up into bedsits at ninety pounds a week.

‘Do you think Mr Tombak’s got his cast off yet?’

Wahlia grinned. ‘I’ll find out.’

Ferreira came into the office, blowing on a cup of vending machine hot chocolate.

‘Bobby’s got a tentative ID on our corpse.’ Zigic handed her the mugshot. ‘Jaan Stepulov. Have you run into him before?’

She studied the photograph for a moment. ‘Not bad-looking for a derelict, was he?’

‘Your mother must cry herself to sleep at night,’ Wahlia said.

She frowned. ‘I’m not positive but I think I saw him at Fern House last time I was over there. You remember that Latvian guy who got queer-bashed down Rivergate? I’m sure this guy was in reception.’