So why say she wasn’t taking them if she was?
‘She wasn’t downstairs,’ Sutherland said. ‘She wasn’t anywhere in the house. I panicked. Of course. She never went out of the house at night.’
‘Did you go and look for her?’ Ferreira asked. ‘Call her mobile?’
‘I was getting dressed to go out when she came in.’ He rubbed the back of his neck, eyes averted but Zigic could see the tension running up the line of his jaw. ‘She was covered in blood.’
Ferreira glanced at Zigic quickly and he saw his own doubts reflected back at him.
‘Was she hurt?’
‘It wasn’t her blood,’ he said, almost whispering. ‘She said she couldn’t stand it any more. The waiting.’ He looked desperately between the two of them. ‘It isn’t her fault. You know what he did to her. You see that, don’t you? She’s so damaged. So traumatised. I don’t think she really understood what she’d done until the next day. She came home so … numb. It was like she was in a trance.’
Zigic sat back in his chair, watching Sutherland’s eyes lose focus just like Nadia’s did when she recounted her time in Long Fleet, like everyone’s did when they dredged up the really bad stuff.
Next to him Ferreira was leaning forwards, forearms on the table, palms flat, her fingertips inches away from Sutherland’s hands. The same short distance between them there had been at the first interview. He’d picked up on the charge between them at the time, sensed it remerging now, but he wasn’t sure if it was real or a ploy.
Ferreira came in here convinced Nadia was innocent but she was too good a detective to ignore what they were hearing now. Not the words that could so easily be a lie, but the emotional undertow, that stripped throat quality to Sutherland’s voice, the loss in it.
‘What did Nadia say?’ she asked. ‘Did she tell you what she’d done?’
‘She didn’t mean to do it,’ he said defiantly. ‘It was self-defence. If there’s any justice in the world, people will see that. I’ll make them see it. Nadia is the victim here.’
‘She is,’ Ferreira agreed.
‘She couldn’t defend herself against Josh when he attacked her that first time, but she wasn’t going to let it happen again.’
‘Except,’ she said, her fingertips drumming the table lightly, ‘Josh didn’t attack Nadia.’
Confusion clouded Sutherland’s face.
‘Nadia told us herself. Josh never touched her.’
He groaned into his hands. ‘No, she’s just saying that now because she doesn’t want you to think she has a motive to kill him. I examined her myself, I know exactly what Josh did to her.’
‘What you told Nadia to say Josh did to her,’ Ferreira said, but there was the bum note of doubt again in her voice. ‘You told Nadia to fabricate an allegation to increase her chances of avoiding being deported.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘I didn’t tell her to do any such thing. Josh attacked her. And yes, when she told me about it I pleaded with her to report it to Hammond because it was important that he know what kind of man he was employing to work with vulnerable women. And yes, of course I didn’t want her to get deported. Nothing had happened between us then but I already had feelings for her. I didn’t want to lose her.’ Sutherland’s face hardened. ‘But I did not say it would improve her case. Being attacked doesn’t improve anyone’s chance of staying in the country. Obviously. Think about it, do you really believe the Home Office could be swayed that easily?’
‘Then why was she allowed to stay?’ Zigic asked.
‘I don’t know the intricacies of her case,’ Sutherland said impatiently. ‘I’m just a doctor, I’m not involved in those decisions. My guess is she just got lucky. It happens sometimes. She’s been here since she was a child. Maybe someone took pity on her.’
It sounded unlikely but without verification from Hammond they couldn’t judge whether it was true or not, and Zigic suspected they’d got as much from the governor as they were going to. Despite the promise he’d made them at his house, he hadn’t even come through with the report into the alleged attack. He was clearly hoping this would quietly resolve itself without his input. A hope which was looking more likely by the minute.
‘You don’t know what that place does to people,’ Sutherland said, all the energy drained out of him. ‘It breaks them. And it isn’t like a real prison but it creates a lot of the same behaviours in people that a prison does. They get … closed off and anxious, the slightest thing can trigger disproportionate emotional responses. And that’s just what the day-to-day reality of being locked up does.’ He rubbed his mouth. ‘But what happened to Nadia, the violence of what Josh did to her, that is something else altogether.’
‘She doesn’t seem like a violent person,’ Ferreira said.
‘She’s not,’ Sutherland replied sharply. ‘She’s not dangerous, she’d never hurt someone for no reason. But when Josh came to the house something shifted in her. She was never going to feel safe as long as he could just jump the back fence and get to her.’
Zigic thought of Lee Walton and the effect he was having on Ferreira. As accustomed to violence as she was, as trained in dealing with dangerous people. He thought of the way Walton was dictating her movements and limiting her life, how his mere presence had dragged them all into a situation that could ruin them.
How would someone like Nadia Baidoo deal with that pressure?
Alone and scared, traumatised already.
It was horribly credible.
‘Nadia needs help,’ Sutherland said desperately. ‘The level of trauma she’s been through, you couldn’t even say she was fully mentally capable of knowing right from wrong. She has PTSD. Any doctor talking to her for five minutes will tell you that.’
For
