At the top of the board, a copy of the photograph Josh’s mother had given them showed him beaming delightedly at something off camera. He had a quirkily attractive face, with heavy brown brows and small, clever eyes, a shadow of stubble across his cheeks only broken by the thick comma of a old scar at his jawline, a souvenir from his younger brother’s hot temper and a long-gone metal coffee table. His mother had smiled sadly as she told the story, but all Ferreira could think of was the table leg that had been used to kill him.
‘Maybe the killer took his phone and all that to make it look like a burglary,’ DC Parr suggested, standing watching her as she recapped her pen. Inexplicably he was still wearing his jacket, despite the heat in the office, but had weakened enough to loosen his bright orange tie slightly, allowing the sweat on his neck some extra space to gather. ‘Did they nick his wallet?’
‘Nope, it was still at the house.’ Ferreira took a mouthful of tepid coffee from the mug on her desk. ‘Did you get in touch with the pizza delivery place?’
Parr nodded. ‘Driver would have been wearing gloves but he’s giving us prints for elimination on the box. Couple of other staff members coming in tomorrow as well.’
‘You get any pushback from them on it?’
‘No, they were happy to cooperate,’ he said. ‘I’m as surprised as you are.’
She made a note of it but her eye kept drifting to the part of the board where she’d stuck up images of the leaflets that Joshua Ainsworth had hoarded in his bedroom office, feeling her gut inexorably drawing her back to them.
The box file was on her desk now, the leaflets and fliers already dusted for fingerprints, and she wasn’t entirely surprised to find that while the more professional and considered leaflets had yielded prints, those angry black-and-white fliers showed only Ainsworth’s. Whoever produced them had been scrupulous when they handled them, wore gloves to keep their identity hidden. Meaning they were either in the system already or paranoid about protecting themselves from charges of harassment down the line.
Jenkins had managed to lift DNA samples from two fliers, though, and Ferreira was praying it wasn’t just a matter of Ainsworth sneezing while holding them.
She tucked in her earbuds and went back to the briefing she was compiling on Long Fleet Immigration Removal Centre. Zigic had suggested putting a package together so they could be confident that the whole team was up to speed on what was happening there, giving them some background on the protest and the ongoing harassment campaign. She’d started with the basics, intending to keep things brief – Long Fleet Immigration Removal Centre opened in 2008 and held up to 300 women and children at any time, awaiting decisions on their asylum status or deportation. It employed 150 staff, had processed 35,000 cases to date – but quickly she realised more was needed than the Wikipedia version.
It was a time-consuming job to undertake during the first, vital hours of a murder investigation and the fact that Zigic had insisted she do it now suggested he considered it a significant avenue of enquiry.
They’d already checked out the women they’d spoken to outside Long Fleet’s gates and they all came back clean. No criminal activity in any of their histories, at least none that had escalated to the point of police involvement, but he’d scented something there and she agreed. The serious agitators, the dangerous kind, wouldn’t be hanging around the gates with placards, she suspected. They wouldn’t be satisfied with peaceful protest.
She’d found the group behind the leaflet campaign quickly enough – Asylum Assist’s website was printed on the back pages of each sheet, their Twitter handles and the Facebook group they’d launched to try and disseminate their message of lobbying local politicians and press, anyone who might be able to raise the profile of the cause and that of the women inside Long Fleet.
The website contained interviews with released women and testimonies from those still inside passed to their family members and friends or their legal representatives. All told tales of lives upended, of jobs and homes lost when they were taken in, of raids in the middle of the night. One woman had been arrested when she was a witness to a street robbery of a pensioner; she’d gone to help and the attending PC had reported her to immigration officers. Several had been caught as they went to A & E for emergency treatment, their overstayed visas ensuring that they were treated by Josh Ainsworth and the rest of the medical team in Long Fleet instead of their local NHS hospital.
It made for emotional reading but didn’t help locate Ainsworth’s murderer.
Ferreira added it to the file anyway.
Added as well the multiple news reports that had followed in the wake of a whistleblower who had exposed the myriad failings at Long Fleet two years ago. The abuses that the shopkeeper in the village she’d spoken to denied had ever happened.
But there they were, in black and white, with video footage too. Guards were fired, apologies were made and assurances given that important lessons had been learned. The former governor was released by mutual consent and the management brought in someone new. This was the man Zigic was currently trying to convince to allow them inside the centre so they could interview Ainsworth’s colleagues.
They knew Ainsworth was working at Long Fleet two years ago, so apparently he wasn’t implicated in the abuses, but she wondered about the whistleblower. Their identity had been protected but surely the staff members who were fired had some idea who exposed them. How could you possibly keep that secret in such a closely contained environment?
She leaned back and stretched her shoulders, music still blaring in her ears, watching the office go about its business, sound-tracked by the Dead Weather.
