‘Dorcus, we should let you go,’ Ferreira said. ‘You’ve been a great help –’
‘Tell him that.’ Her voice rose over the crying. ‘Please tell Dr Sutherland that I helped you.’
Ferreira smiled. ‘I’ll tell him we wouldn’t have caught him without your help. I’ll make sure he knows you did this to him.’
Dorcus nodded and reached forward and the call ended.
‘Is it less bad that Sutherland groomed her rather than physically attacked her?’ Zigic asked, looking troubled as he stared at the dead screen.
‘I guess that’s a matter for the individual,’ Ferreira told him. ‘From our perspective though – being a cold-hearted bitch for a minute – how can we use this against Sutherland?’
Zigic propped his chin on his fist, still a little dazed.
‘I’m not sure we can. It’s the same behaviour he exhibited with Nadia and we know he doesn’t feel any shame about it.’ Zigic shrugged. ‘Maybe if Nadia found out he’d gone through the same routine with another woman before her, she’d get jealous and turn on him but she’s already turned on him.’
‘You’re back to thinking he’s responsible,’ Ferreira said, hearing the subtle shift in his tone.
‘I’m thinking about the hairbrush.’ He stroked his beard absent-mindedly. ‘Josh only needed a hair or two for the DNA sample, so why take the whole brush?’
‘Maybe he was just being overly cautious,’ she suggested. ‘I guess he didn’t fancy breaking in a second time if the initial test failed because of contamination or something.’
‘Or did he want Sutherland to know it was missing?’ Zigic asked.
‘Why bait him like that?’ She shook her head. ‘No, Ainsworth had no way of knowing Sutherland would find out he was responsible for the break-in, so this doesn’t read as baiting to me. It makes much more sense than he was being thorough taking the whole thing and he just expected Sutherland to think he lost it.’
Zigic’s phone started ringing and he asked her to give him a minute.
Ferreira went back out into the main office, ate the rest of the now slightly melted chocolate bar she’d left on her desk.
She kept thinking about Sutherland and Dorcus, what kind of man he was to exploit his power over her and how they could turn that against him. But it felt like an impossible task. She had a terrible feeling he was going to get away with this. If they couldn’t definitively prove his guilt, and it came down to his word against Nadia’s in front of a jury, she knew which way they’d rule.
And meanwhile, what would he do?
He’d be another Lee Walton, accused but evading justice. Still free to practise medicine, still with his life all ahead of him to keep using and abusing women from behind the protective façade of his good job and his nice hair.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Now it was a matter of pulling everything together.
Ferreira was desperate to drag Sutherland back to the interview room, storm in there and take his story apart, but they needed to be thorough, Zigic insisted. Sutherland had proven to be a tricky customer and while they had enough compelling evidence to prove he was a liar, they still didn’t have the silver bullet he wanted.
Murray had returned from Joshua Ainsworth’s house with the hairbrush he’d stolen from Sutherland’s place. She took it up to forensics, waited while they retrieved enough strands to run a DNA test and dusted it for prints, came back down with it in an evidence bag.
Zigic looked for Bloom, wanting her to chase forensics, but there had been a sudden shift in Adams’s attempted murder case and he’d commandeered her and Weller into the manhunt.
The board with Adams’s missing suspect George Batty’s mugshot stuck at the top of it had been moved to a position of greater prominence and a list of known associates was being examined, as they tried to work out where to deploy their limited resources for his return to Peterborough. Wanting to pick him up and get him into custody before the embarrassment of losing him the first time deepened any further.
Joshua Ainsworth had been shunted aside in the process and as Zigic was looking at the board, considering yet another ill-advised coffee, Kate Jenkins called.
‘Blood in the car,’ she said. ‘Type match for Ainsworth. The usual provisos but hopefully that helps you.’
‘It does, thanks, Kate.’
Buzzing from the caffeine and the elation of finally having some forensic evidence to tie Sutherland directly to Ainsworth’s dead body, he added her initial findings to the board, Ferreira looking on.
‘Doesn’t tell us which one of them drove over there, though,’ she said.
‘It’s blood in the car. You should be much happier than that.’
‘I’ll be happier when we have the results of Nadia’s tests and we know which one of them is lying to us about the sleeping pills.’
‘Did you get an ETA on the results?’ he asked.
‘Twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The usual.’
‘They can do it quicker.’
‘I know they can,’ Ferreira said. ‘And I told them that, but apparently they’re short-staffed and they’ve got a lot on and that’s how long we’ve got to wait.’
Zigic let out a low growl of frustration. It felt like each incremental move forward was being countered by a heavy backward drag. Logically he knew they were doing well, that the case had actually progressed quite swiftly, even with his attention divided between Ainsworth and Lee Walton, but it felt like he’d been pulling double shifts for the last few days. Sleeping badly, eating badly, the disagreement with Anna rumbling away in the back of his mind, disturbing his equilibrium and making it impossible for him to rest when he was at home.
It was because they were so close. He knew that. His mind and body were preparing for the inevitable collapse, which came after closure.
And he couldn’t afford that collapse, because while the tests they needed on Nadia Baidoo were going to take up to
