‘Was it to do with his job?’ he asked, barely moving his lips.
‘We’re not sure yet,’ Zigic told him, surprised at the assumption. ‘Did Josh feel unsafe there?’
‘He can’t have been safe, can he? Working in a prison. With that sort of people.’
‘It’s an immigration removal centre,’ Zigic said. ‘The women in there aren’t criminals in the usual sense, they’ve just violated their visas.’
‘And what about the people they associate with?’ Ainsworth asked, fixing a beady eye on Zigic. ‘You know as well as I do, lots of them are trafficked over here by real criminals. Now those people are dangerous. That’s what you want to be looking into. Someone getting at Josh to get to one of them.’
‘Had Josh been approached by anyone like that?’
‘Josh wouldn’t tell me if he was,’ Ainsworth said, his voice thick with a peculiar blend of anger and regret. ‘I never wanted him to go and work there. All that money for university, all those bloody textbooks at three hundred quid a pop, and for what? To work somewhere like that. He could have done anything, he was so bright. Naturally gifted, he never had to work at it. He could have done research or brain surgery or anything, but he wasn’t ambitious.’
Mr Ainsworth looked around his cavernous, double-height living room, the gargantuan sofa and armchairs, the twelve-seater dining table and the striking chandelier hanging over it, all crystal and chrome. He’d been an ambitious man, Zigic imagined. Worked hard, wanted the best for his son, couldn’t understand how intelligence wasn’t always allied to aspiration.
‘Did Josh mention the protest at Long Fleet to you?’ Zigic asked. ‘There’s an ongoing leaflet campaign in the village.’
‘I know about the protest, yes,’ Mr Ainsworth said. ‘We saw them sometimes when we went to visit Josh. Were they getting at him?’
‘We found some leaflets in his house, it looks like he was saving them for some reason.’
Mr Ainsworth appeared perplexed. ‘Some people will protest anything, won’t they?’
‘Whoever is responsible was targeting Josh very directly.’
‘Saying what?’
‘That he had blood on his hands.’
Anger flared across Mr Ainsworth’s face. ‘That’s complete nonsense.’
‘We’re regarding it as part of a harassment campaign right now,’ Zigic said. ‘We don’t think it’s necessarily linked to his murder, but we need to keep in mind the possibility. Especially as it was obviously bothering him enough to keep the threatening material. Perhaps he mentioned pressing charges?’
A brief shake of the head from Mr Ainsworth.
‘Had you seen much of Josh lately?’ Zigic asked. ‘We understand he’d been on holiday recently?’
Another shake. ‘No, to be honest, this is the first I’m hearing of holiday time.’
Across the room Mrs Ainsworth was slipping a photograph from a frame and handing it to Ferreira. She promised they would return it as soon as they could, thanking his mother, who stood staring at all the other images, reaching out to straighten a couple of them.
‘How did he die?’ Mr Ainsworth asked in an undertone.
‘It looked like there was a fight,’ Zigic said, reluctant to go into the painful details.
‘Josh never was a scrapper.’ He frowned regretfully, knocking his knuckles together. ‘I should have tried to toughen him up. I never thought he’d need it.’
They left the couple with assurances that they would keep them updated, the offer of a family support officer declined. Zigic tried to impress the value of their presence, especially during the difficult process of identifying Josh’s body, but Mr Ainsworth waved it away and his wife didn’t object. Ferreira seemed uncomfortable with their stoicism too, offered to go along with them if they’d like, directing the suggestion more towards Mrs Ainsworth. Another polite refusal.
In the car, pulling off the driveway, Ferreira said, ‘They don’t seem like they were very close.’
‘Did you tell your parents about every boyfriend you had?’ Zigic asked.
‘The important ones,’ she replied, but the vagueness of her tone made him doubt that.
‘Have they met Billy?’
She turned away and stared out of the window. ‘I’m not sure he’s important yet.’
But he clearly was, Zigic thought, which meant she had another reason for keeping him away from her family. Embarrassed about him or them, scared they wouldn’t get along and she’d find herself caught in the middle.
He wondered if that was the case with Josh Ainsworth and his mystery woman. Whether there was something about her he feared his parents wouldn’t like.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By 2 p.m. the first round of information from the door to door enquiries in Long Fleet had come in. It was mostly retirees and stay-at-home parents in to speak to the officers and they had nothing to report. A few knew Ainsworth by sight, none called him a friend. No one had seen anyone suspicious hanging around the village over the weekend, just the usual walkers drawn by the nature reserve nearby. The other residents of the row of cottages on the green were all out at work, bar the neighbour Zigic had already spoken to, and all they could hope for was a phone call when they returned home this evening. Fourteen cottages tucked so close together, the odds were good, they thought.
Ferreira had set DC Weller the task of going through recent crime reports in the village and the ones surrounding it, looking for anything that might suggest a pattern of returning offenders drawn to the frequently empty homes. There had been a spate of shed break-ins, a few thefts of vehicles, but nothing jumped out as a possibility. Ainsworth’s car was an eight-year-old Renault Clio with rust around the rims and a radio still boasting a cassette player, and his bike, which looked expensive, remained safe and sound in the small shed behind his kitchen.
Despite the absence of his mobile phone and laptop, burglary didn’t look like a motive.
Zigic wouldn’t rule it out, but Ferreira doubted anyone would be killed over them.
She added the information they had to the murder board, placing it up there
