They had been in and out of the various East European stores around the city and the suburbs, trying to stop a spree of violent armed robberies, and everyone they talked to reported the same thing: business was down. There was less footfall, fewer new people arriving. He could sense the fear, the uncertainty.
Eventually they’d caught the gang responsible, when one of them met the end of a baseball bat wielded by a shop owner who’d decided to stand his ground. It was risky and something they had explicitly warned against. The man was stabbed in the shoulder but he was a hero now. On the front page of the local paper, smiling with his bandaged wound on show.
The shops could go about their business with one threat removed, but the greater one remained.
Zigic slowed as they entered a small village of houses built close to the road and ramshackle farm buildings, a warning sign flashing his speed at him.
In the passenger seat next to him, Ferreira muttered something under her breath.
‘What?’
‘This place,’ she said, throwing her chin up towards a row of old white-painted council houses. ‘This is where we used to live. Before my parents took us to Peterborough.’
‘And you’re not feeling the nostalgia?’
She snorted. ‘I don’t even drive through here if I can help it.’
He waited for her to say more but she fell silent again. She’d been doing that more and more lately, and he was beginning to wonder if it was only the move out of Hate Crimes that was preying on her mind. He wasn’t happy about it either but the decision was taken many levels above them, and there was no point fighting it at the time, even less brooding on it now that it was over and done with.
Their job hadn’t changed. Not really. Even though the trappings and the setting were different. He wondered why she couldn’t see that.
Was it Adams? he thought. Was there trouble between them? It was a question he couldn’t ask her, a line he shouldn’t ever cross. But with each passing week, with every one of these pregnant silences, it became more difficult not to broach the issue.
Zigic tightened his fingers around the wheel and accelerated out of the village towards and through the next, near identical one, catching sight of the bank of wind turbines standing sentry-still at the edge of Long Fleet, blades all stopped at different angles. Beneath them the village sat huddled around a central green, a few narrow lanes radiating away from it. A pub and a shop, a tiny primary school that he remembered visiting years ago as a newly recruited constable to talk to the children about stranger danger.
It was a pretty village. Barely heard of beyond the immediate ten-mile radius back then.
But now Long Fleet was synonymous with the Immigration Removal Centre that sat at its northern edge. The site had previously been an RAF base and would have passed for one still, with its long rows of barracks-style structures set around drab courtyards and the one grand building, all red brick and long windows and peaked gables fronting the road. Some effort had been made to hide it with screen planting, but it was too substantial to fully obscure. As they passed the village’s welcome sign, the sunlight glinted on the barbed wire and flashed off the signs held up by the small band of forlorn protestors stationed across the road from its main gates.
Zigic held his breath for a Ferreira tirade but when he glanced over, he saw her attention was fixed on her mobile phone.
A moment later he spotted the coroner’s distinctive vanilla-coloured Alvis coming the other way. She flashed her lights and he put his hand up, glad to know she’d done her part already and they could get started.
The place they wanted was on the edge of the village green, with a bus stop nearby and the pub opposite, the shop less than 100 metres away. It was the middle house in a row of Victorian workers’ cottages, built low and listing away from the road, the ground around them eroded by the vicious winds that blew across the fens, leaving the houses standing like teeth in receding gums. But it looked neat and well maintained, wooden shutters drawn in the windows, a copper fisherman’s lamp next to the front door and a boot brush set beside the low, worn step where a uniformed officer was currently standing, squinting into the sun and sweating profusely.
‘This us?’ Ferreira pocketed her phone and climbed out of the car, immediately pointing at the red Golf parked across the lane behind the forensics van. ‘Kate’s back? I thought she had another week’s sabbatical yet?’
‘No, back today,’ Zigic told her. ‘You’ve still got your holiday head on.’
He popped open the boot of the car and grabbed a couple of overalls, as she dragged her long dark hair up into a ponytail.
‘I thought she was done, you know.’ Ferreira stepped into her suit. ‘She took it so hard.’
Zigic remembered sitting with Kate Jenkins in her office the day after the story about the corrupt lab broke, seeing just how devastated she was. There was no blame attached to her but watching so many of the cases she’d worked on slip away made the job seem pointless, she’d said, looking out at her own lab. He’d told her he felt the same way but that it was no reason to leave. They all had ones that got away, the lack of evidence and the absconders and the juries blinded by tricky lawyers and handsome defendants. It happened. Far too often. But they came intermittently, he’d realised, and you had time to process the rage and disappointment and the weighty burden of guilt you
