‘We’ve got a call,’ Zigic said to her. ‘We need to get going.’
‘I’m pretty sure this is bad news. We should probably …’
Zigic glanced at his watch, grimaced. ‘Okay.’
They filed in, Adams closing the door behind them. His face was hollowed out with concern, mouth a sick line.
‘What is it?’ DS Colleen Murray asked, taking one of the free seats at his desk, her eyes fixed on him. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I’ve just had a call from a mate at the prison,’ he said, dropping heavily into his chair. ‘Walton’s been released. Friday gone, they let him out.’
There was a moment of silence as they digested the news. A case that had consumed Adams and Murray for the better part of eighteen months, one which Hate Crimes had been pulled into in the weeks before they were shut down; CID’s most prolific serial rapist had strayed into their territory when he was suspected of murdering a trans woman as she took her morning run around Ferry Meadows Country Park, a case that had led them to tying Walton to several more attacks on local trans women. They’d built an airtight case, which saw him sent down for life. A case built almost entirely on forensic evidence.
Which was where the problem lay.
In March a technician at the forensic lab had been exposed by a BBC documentary investigating instances of bribery and corruption at laboratories in the Midlands. As they were looking for blood alcohol tests bent to slip driving offences, they uncovered a more interesting story: a leading expert in DNA analysis who had faked their credentials through a twenty-year career, opening up two decades of convictions across the Midlands to new scrutiny. Detective Chief Superintendent Riggott had kicked into gear the morning after the documentary aired, instructing DC Bobby Wahlia to start a comprehensive review of every potentially affected case, in the hope that with some, at least, they could give the Crown Prosecution Service a second line of attack. There had been a slew of appeals already, the majority ending in overturned convictions, but this was the first to hit their team.
They’d argued the appeal and lost.
‘We knew it was coming,’ Wahlia said at last, his voice toneless, but the defeat written all over his face.
Ferreira imagined she looked just as beaten as he did, saw it on Zigic too, the grim resignation. Murray wasn’t taking it quite so calmly; her shoulders squared with anger, face and neck flushed such a deep red Ferreira was sure she could see the rage glowing through her off-white blouse. But Colleen had been closer to the case for longer, had shepherded more of the victims through complaints which went nowhere, had to sit with them and explain why their particular attack didn’t meet the CPS’s standards for prosecution. Then, finally, she got to tell each and every one of those women that Lee Walton was finally going down. Not for what he did to them, but for something, at least.
Murray was hunched over now, fists between her thighs. ‘Right, what are we going to do about this? We’re not going to let this piece of shit back out on the streets to do whatever the hell he likes, are we?’
‘There isn’t much we can do,’ Zigic said softly. ‘We threw everything we had at Walton, there’s nothing left we can use. It was all on the forensics.’
‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Murray snapped, twisting in her chair to face him. ‘What do you suggest then, we sit around and wait for him to do it again?’
‘We’re not waiting,’ Adams said, drawing himself up where he sat. He pointed at Wahlia. ‘Clear everything else off your plate, yeah? I want you totally focused on Walton, go back through every case file we have on him, every stalled investigation, every dropped charge, every withdrawn complaint. Burrow into this fucker’s history and find something we can nail him for.’
Wahlia was on his feet and out of the office instantly.
Murray watched him go, turned back to Adams.
‘Is that it?’ she asked, incredulous. ‘That’s what we’re doing?’
‘It’s what we can do right now,’ he told her, and Ferreira heard the familiar conciliatory tone he hardly ever used at work.
She caught Zigic’s eye, nodded towards the door. They slipped out, leaving Adams to try and talk Murray down from the peak of her rage.
CHAPTER TWO
They drove out of the city in silence, skirting the suburbs and endless housing estates, making fast progress on the parkway that snaked through the blocky landscape of warehousing and big-box megastores, heading into the bustle of the sprawling Eastern Industrial Estate, with its scent of green waste and rubble dust and epoxy. Then the city fell away with an abruptness that always struck Zigic as slightly unreal and ahead the fenland unfolded, wild and flat, and near lawless, all the way to the Wash. The sky was vast and cloudless, heat shimmering up off the road, haze in the distance, the light wind stirring up the threat of dirt storms as the fields lay parched from the rainless weeks. Crops were wilting, standing unharvested, vegetation yellowing, fruit dying on the stem. The shortage of seasonal labour was beginning to tell now. Hardly any sign of activity in the fields they passed. People who went home for Easter had decided against returning, heading for more welcoming options instead.
Peterborough felt quieter, Zigic thought. As if it had become a smaller city during this last eighteen months. Shops were closing, pubs were closing, companies relocating or just folding. Everyone seemed to be
