‘Bolting from an attempted murder charge really does broaden the horizons, doesn’t it?’
‘He’ll have some interesting stories for his cellmates, anyway.’ Billy dropped his cigarette butt and crushed it dead. ‘You coming back in?’
‘Got a call to make.’
Once he was gone she dialled her voicemail and braced herself.
Evelyn Goddard laughed in her ear, a sound throaty and dark and utterly without humour.
‘It doesn’t surprise me one little bit that you aren’t brave enough to actually answer your phone to me, Sergeant Ferreira.’ Goddard took a deep, shuddering breath and Ferreira could imagine the tightness at her jaw and the imperious way she would be holding herself for this. Even at this distance it made her feel small. ‘My God, the things we went through for you. What we’ve lost. I let you into our community. We stripped ourselves bare so you could put that animal in prison where he belonged.’
She wanted to stop now. Delete the message, never know what else Goddard had to say to her, but she kept listening, every word stinging.
‘And what did you do?’ Goddard asked. ‘After I gave you his victims? After I gave you the bloody evidence of what he did to Jasmine. You still managed to screw everything up.’
It wasn’t me, Ferreira thought. But it was a weak and unconvincing statement. Because it might not have been specifically her, but it was very much them.
Goddard took another deep breath, sighed it out. And when she spoke again she sounded weak and saddened rather than angry. ‘I hope you understand this – the next woman he attacks, every moment of hell he puts her through, it will be your fault.’
For a long moment she listened to the silence, the reverberation of Goddard’s words rattling around in her head, feeling every drop of poison in them seeping through her ear. She couldn’t blame the woman for her fury and indignation, even though it was misdirected.
And at the back of Ferreira’s mind was the thought that the next woman Lee Walton raped or killed might be her.
She deleted Goddard’s message, pulled herself together and went back upstairs.
Zigic was standing at the board, marker pen in hand.
‘That’s Alistair Collingwood out, then.’ He drew a black line across the photo they’d lifted from Collingwood’s LinkedIn account.
‘What’s this now?’ Ferreira asked.
‘His alibi’s rock solid. Flew out of Stanstead the Friday morning, live-tweeted a series of seminars about 3D-printing techniques for two days straight then shows up in a bunch of group shots taken by one of his colleagues in a cabaret bar at two a.m. Sunday morning.’
During the morning they’d crossed out Ruby Garrick too. Parr went through the CCTV on her building three times but there was no sign of her leaving at any point during the Saturday evening Josh Ainsworth was murdered. The fire escape was a possibility but the door was alarmed and sent a report directly to the property management company, which said it hadn’t been breached.
Ferreira stood next to Zigic, seeing their options narrowing down.
Portia Collingwood was still in the frame.
The Paggetts were very much a possibility.
Parr was busy checking their alibis, going through the long list of people who’d attended the same barbecue on the Saturday evening. He seemed pretty content to be welded to his seat, had already worked his way through an entire McDonald’s breakfast and a couple of doughnuts from the big bag he’d arrived with this morning, ‘for the office’. Somehow he could eat in the spaces between asking questions, by taking quick bites, hardly chewing. Maybe that was why he was good at this stuff, she thought, because he listened more than he talked, mouth always otherwise occupied.
A few minutes after she sat down at her desk again, she heard Parr’s voice lift with a sudden surge of excitement.
‘Could you bear with me for a moment, sir?’ he said into the handset, gesturing furiously to Ferreira. ‘I’m just going to pass you over to my sergeant.’
He hit the hold button.
‘Boss, we’ve got a defector,’ he said. ‘Michaela Paggett’s brother-in-law, Ian Carver, I think you’ll want to hear what he’s saying.’
‘Send him over.’ She picked up the call. ‘Mr Carver, thank you for waiting.’
‘No problem, I’m happy to help,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Should I just tell you what I told the other officer?’
‘If you would, please.’
‘Well, like I was saying, Damien and Michaela were pretty wasted so I’m not sure how seriously you want to take this. And frankly, they’re always full of plans for what they’re going to do to “tear down the system”.’ She heard the air quotes he threw around the words, the hint of contempt. ‘If they spent half as much time actually working as they do complaining about every tiny thing that’s going on in the world, they’d probably be a lot happier and better off.’
Ferreira sat back, decided to let him run on unprompted, getting a sense of the man as he talked.
‘They’d cornered one of our neighbours, young guy, he was wearing a Corbyn T-shirt so I suppose Damien thought he’d found a soulmate.’ In the background a photocopier whirred softly into life. ‘Damien starts talking to him about the importance of grass-roots movements and how change has to come from the bottom, all of the usual crap. And, I mean, I’d had a couple of beers so I was in a baiting mood, if I’m honest. I started asking him if he really thought that was going to change anything. At Long Fleet, right, because he’d been talking – at painful length – about what they’re doing there. And suddenly Damien gets this look in his eyes, all faraway like, and says, “The best form of protest is spectacle,” and I’m like, what do you mean, and he goes, “If you want people to stand up and take notice, you need to do something too big for them to ignore.” And then Michaela
