‘I think now might be a good moment to take a break,’ he said.
Ferreira gave Zigic a questioning glance and he nodded, letting them have it.
He needed a break too, needed to step back and consider this mess in front of them.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
They were silent all the way back to the office and when Ferreira rolled a cigarette, wanting to get a few minutes peace to consider what they’d just heard, Zigic said he’d come down with her. ‘For some air.’
She’d walked into that interview room convinced that Patrick Sutherland was guilty, and despite Zigic’s insistence on keeping an open mind, she was sure he had felt the same way. It had just seemed too unlikely that Nadia had it in her to kill Joshua Ainsworth. From everything they’d been told about her by the people who knew her, from her build and personality and the typical behaviour of women who’d suffered violence. Even knowing that Joshua Ainsworth hadn’t assaulted her in Long Fleet hadn’t changed Ferreira’s opinion. Because, yes, she’d lied about that but at Sutherland’s insistence, and with a broader motivation linked to her desperation to escape the place. It didn’t mean she wasn’t scared of Ainsworth, only that she had a slightly different reason to fear him.
But now, now she felt that certainty had been whipped away.
Outside, tucked around the side of the station, she lit her cigarette, watching the play of doubt across Zigic’s face.
‘I wasn’t imagining it, was I?’ he asked. ‘Sutherland’s story sounds right.’
‘We know he’s a liar,’ she said.
‘And we know Nadia is too.’ He shoved his hands into pockets. ‘And he knows we know that now, so what if he’s using that to try and lay the blame on her?’
‘What if she’s doing the same to him?’ Ferreira suggested. ‘If either of them’s physically capable, it’s Sutherland.’
‘But it doesn’t take much strength to bludgeon someone who’s already down.’
‘Look, we had this conversation at the scene,’ she reminded him. ‘You didn’t think a woman could put Ainsworth down with enough force to break that table.’
‘Kate did say it was flimsy.’
He walked away a few steps, eyes on the ground that was littered with dead cigarette butts and scraps of rubbish blown in on the wind and trapped in the lee of the building. He looked like he was searching for something but it was inside his head and she wasn’t sure he’d find it like that.
‘Sutherland’s a manipulator,’ Ferreira said, needing to say it out loud because she’d found herself beginning to believe him as he gave his version of events. ‘What if he’s playing us?’
Zigic stopped dead, turned sharply. ‘It all hinges on the sleeping pills, doesn’t it? Sutherland claims Nadia wasn’t taking them, she says she was on them every night and that he gave her one on the night of the murder.’
‘So he could sneak out without her knowing what he was doing.’
‘Right,’ he nodded. ‘So that’s the one point where we can definitely prove whose story is true and who’s lying.’
‘Let’s get a blood test then,’ Ferreira said. ‘If they find traces of medication in Nadia’s bloodstream, we’ll know she’s taken the pills recently.’
‘It’ll still be in her hair if she’s been on them long term, won’t it?’
‘That’s going to take more time.’
‘We need an answer,’ he said. ‘It takes as long as it takes.’
When they returned to the office he called Parr, who was still hunting for CCTV at the houses around Sutherland’s, told him to go in and bring back whatever medication he could find. Then he called for the station nurse to organise drawing Nadia’s blood and asked DC Bloom to sort out the paperwork.
As he was giving her the details Ferreira’s phone chimed. A text from Judy telling her that Dorcus was ready to talk to them.
They made the Skype call from Zigic’s office, the pair of them seated on the visitors’ side of his desk with the blinds drawn at the internal window, wanting Dorcus to feel that she had some semblance of privacy for this conversation. It wasn’t going to be easy for her, they thought, and as far as possible they wanted her not to regard this as a police matter.
Ferreira used the email address Judy had texted her and they waited as it rang.
Judy said Dorcus was back with her family, living with a grandmother who had taken her in and was helping with the new baby. Considering the alternatives it seemed as good an outcome as anyone could hope for. When Dorcus answered she was in a pink-painted bedroom, a neatly made bed behind her, clothes stacked on a chair nearby.
She didn’t look much older than Nadia Baidoo, early twenties at most, with a full and pretty face, her brows high and arched, above a pair of cat-eye glasses. She’d put on a slick of brilliant red lipstick that perfectly matched the patterned scarf holding back her hair. She looked more together than Ferreira had expected someone who’d recently been deported to be, and as relieved as she was for Dorcus, it only made her feel worse about what they were doing.
Dorcus held her soundly sleeping baby against her chest. Already much bigger than in the photograph Judy had shown Ferreira and here, where the light was better, she could see that the baby had a white father.
‘Hello, Dorcus,’ she said. ‘I’m Mel. This is Dushan. Thank you so much for agreeing to speak to us.’
She wasn’t quite prepared for this conversation herself, felt the weight on her, the need to be delicate but also to get the information they needed from Dorcus.
‘Good afternoon,’ Dorcus said, eyes lowered. ‘Judy said you want to talk to me about Dr Ainsworth.’
‘If you’re okay with that.’
‘I am sorry to hear that he has been killed,’ she said, stroking
