Either he was guilty and everything kicked off.
Or he was innocent and they were back to square one.
‘Okay.’ Zigic rubbed his face, hoping some of the blood he brought to the surface might redistribute itself into his brain. ‘What about a urine test? That’s quicker. We can have her urine tested in an hour, right?’
‘We can, but it’ll only tell us if she’s taken anything within the last day or two.’
He swore.
‘Let’s just go up there and take a run at him,’ Ferreira said, her body already turning towards the door. ‘He’s getting seriously stressed out, we need to push him as hard as we can.’
She had a point and it was tempting but Zigic shook his head, walked over to the coffee machine and poured another cup, ignoring the palpitations fluttering in his chest.
‘I really don’t enjoy being the voice of reason but I can see you vibrating from here,’ Ferreira said. ‘For God’s sake, have a chamomile tea or something.’
He put the mug down, the sound shooting through his head.
‘Or maybe a nap,’ Ferreira suggested in a tone so reasonable he wondered if there was something wrong with her.
‘If you think I’m going to close my eyes while you’re desperate to go and interview Sutherland again, you’ve got another thing coming.’
A stronger tremor shuddered across his chest and for a second he thought he was actually having a heart attack until his phone chimed and he realised he’d put it in his shirt pocket. He took it out: a message from Parr.
Important incoming.
‘What is it?’ Ferreira asked.
He dialled Parr’s number and he picked up after two rings.
‘What’s “important incoming”?’ Zigic demanded.
Parr turned down the music playing far too loud in his car. ‘Sorry, sir. Shouldn’t have been so cryptic, should I?’
He sounded hyper, a thrill in his voice Zigic didn’t think he’d ever heard before.
‘What have you got for us?’
As he started to answer Zigic switched the phone to speaker, watched an expression of dark delight spread over Ferreira’s face, felt his own smile become a little twisted as Parr finished explaining himself.
‘I’ll be fifteen minutes,’ he said.
‘We’ll be waiting.’ Zigic ended the call. ‘I think that’s worth a fifteen-minute delay, don’t you?’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Back to Interview 1.
Sutherland had been fed and watered, but didn’t look any more lively for it. Even his solicitor seemed slightly less crisp second time round. He’d brought a massive cup of coffee in with him, the smell of it deep and rich in the close confines of the small white room. Strong, but not strong enough to cover the sharp, sour odour rising from Patrick Sutherland’s body.
Zigic fixed his face in a neutral expression as Ferreira set up the tapes, aware of Ben Lawton watching him, trying to get a steer on where this would go, what they’d returned with and how it was going to affect his client. Sutherland kept his eyes down, arms folded on the desk, nervously picking at the buttoned cuff of his shirt, which he’d made some attempt to straighten out. As if that could give him an air of respectability at this late stage.
‘The good news is we’ve found out why Josh broke into your house.’ Zigic opened the folder he’d brought with him and took out the paternity test results, pushed them across the table to Lawton. ‘The day before Josh was killed he sent off this paternity test to a private lab. As you can see the results came back positive.’
Sutherland should have been shocked.
But he wasn’t. Didn’t even attempt to fake it. He already knew about the test.
Zigic removed a photograph from the folder and pushed that across the table too.
‘Do you recognise this hairbrush, Patrick?’
He gave it a cursory glance. ‘No.’
‘This is yours,’ Zigic told him. ‘It still has some of your hairs, not to mention your fingerprints, on it.’
The photograph was clear and precise, taken under aggressive lighting, the dust still faintly visible through the plastic, and the strands of his dark, wavy hair that were snagged in the bristles.
‘Your hairbrush was recovered from Joshua Sutherland’s house. Hidden in a plastic bag in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe. Did you look for it after you killed him?’
Lawton put a hand on Sutherland’s arm, as if to silence him. But Sutherland had already gone mute.
‘You took the time to find his phone and his iPad because you thought stealing them would convince us that it was a burglary gone wrong.’
Sutherland only looked back at him, mouth pressed tightly shut, palms pressed tightly together. Zigic could see the vein at his temple pulsing.
‘This was what Josh broke into your house for,’ Zigic said, pointing at the brush. ‘And you knew it was missing. Nadia told us you went crazy looking for it but you couldn’t find it.’ Sutherland’s jaw clenched even tighter. ‘The second you realised it was missing you knew what Josh was planning, right?’
Lawton cleared his throat. ‘This paternity test is from some shady online DNA testing firm, let’s not read too much into it.’
‘They’re an accredited lab with an excellent reputation,’ Zigic told him. ‘You thought you’d got away with it, didn’t you, Patrick? Dorcus was deported, nobody was going to see that suspiciously light-skinned baby of yours she was carrying.’
Sutherland was sweating right through his shirt.
Another photo came out of the file, screen-grabbed during their conversation with Dorcus.
‘Your son,’ Zigic said, pushing it slowly across the table into Sutherland’s eyeline. ‘She named him Joseph.’
He expected Sutherland to deny it but he didn’t seem capable of speech. Tentatively he reached out and his fingertips crept over the edge of the photo, drawing it slightly closer to himself.
‘You groomed Dorcus, just like you groomed Nadia,’ Zigic said. ‘Played on her fear of being deported and her isolation. Told her you loved her.
