‘Long Fleet made a big song and dance about clearing out all their abusive staff members, but they didn’t get all of them.’ Damien Paggett wet his lips. ‘Ainsworth was just as guilty, but he got the accusations in first so he looked clean.’
Ferreira groaned. ‘This is rubbish, Damien.’
‘No, you look into it and you’ll see I’m right.’
‘Where did you get this from?’ Ferreira asked wearily. ‘We need names.’
‘It’s all online.’
‘Oh, it’s online, is it? Well then, it must be true.’
‘Just because people maintain their anonymity, it doesn’t mean they’re lying,’ he said hotly. ‘They’re scared.’
‘Great, online and anonymous.’ Ferreira smoothed her hand back over her hair and turned to Zigic. ‘Do you want to listen to any more of this?’
‘I don’t think he’s got anything sensible to say,’ Zigic told her and gestured for her to end the interview.
They had Damien Paggett taken back down to the cells and returned to the office.
‘Are we giving any credence to that?’ Ferreira asked, taking out her tobacco and beginning to roll a cigarette.
‘It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?’ Zigic perched on the corner of her desk, remembering the sly expression that had crossed Damien Paggett’s face as he spoke. ‘He was going to tell us that whatever. It’s like he’d worked out a way of shifting attention off him and Michaela, and he was going to run with it regardless of how stupid it was.’
‘The governor purged Long Fleet two years ago. I don’t think Ainsworth would have survived that if he was guilty.’
‘He’s got no evidence,’ Zigic said. ‘If he’d really seen an accusation coming from a reliable source, he would have given us their details.’
‘I’m pretty sure Michaela would have mentioned it too.’
‘There’s no way he knows about it and she doesn’t, if it’s true.’
‘We need to stay on them.’ Ferreira was looking at the private Facebook group, still open on her screen. ‘My guess is it went down how we think. It’s too much of a coincidence that they’d identified a doctor as a good potential target and then Josh is killed.’
‘But we haven’t got enough to hold them.’
‘No,’ she admitted irritably. ‘And without forensics we’re not going to be able to charge them, are we?’
He blew out a frustrated sigh. ‘We need a witness.’
‘I’ll send their photos over to the couple from the holiday let, see if they saw them. It’ll give us a stick to beat them with if nothing else.’ She snatched up her lighter. ‘After I’ve smoked this.’
She left the office and he sat there for a moment, looking at the conversation on her screen, thinking of the lack of forensic evidence at the scene and Damien Paggett’s careful use of latex gloves when he was just making fliers. Had they gone into the house prepared? Covered up to make sure they left nothing of themselves behind?
‘Ziggy.’ Adams gestured at him from his office door. ‘Need the benefit of your experience here.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Adams all but hauled Zigic inside, fizzing with energy as he closed the door and went back around his desk, where a case file was spread out around his lunch. Crime scene photos and an image of the victim: a round-faced teenaged girl with dark brown hair in a high ponytail, the grey and white of a school uniform.
Bobby Wahlia saw Zigic looking at it. ‘Tessa Darby. Murdered in ’98.’
He remembered the case, or rather her murder. Back in ’98 he hadn’t signed on yet, was just out of university and taking a gap year, doing field work out on the fens to get some money together so he could start his adult life on the right footing. He’d been living in a shared house in Wisbech with three Polish guys. Grafting hard and drinking too much, getting into fights he gradually started to win, getting hardened when he didn’t need to be but wanting it all the same. To prove what kind of man he was.
Tessa Darby had been a few years younger than him, a student at the city tech college, and her murder was so high profile in Peterborough it even came to dominate the conversation of the migrant workers isolated on the outskirts. What they would like to do to the man who killed her. How he should suffer. How the English didn’t punish the beasts in their midst properly.
A beautiful girl, they’d all said sadly. As if it doubled the tragedy. Such a waste.
‘Sit down,’ Adams said impatiently.
He drew a chair up to the desk.
‘Why are you looking at this case?’ Zigic asked Wahlia. ‘It’s closed. Someone confessed. One of her friends or something. He went down for it.’
‘Yeah,’ Adams answered, before Bobby could. ‘And you know who another one of her friends was? Lee Walton.’
Zigic took a deep breath, trying to dampen the agitation he felt stirring in his gut.
‘Right, okay. So she knew Walton. But someone still confessed.’
‘Fuck me, Ziggy, you know as well as I do how easy it is to get a confession out of someone.’
Zigic laughed, humourlessly. ‘If it’s that easy why do you have two open murders on the boards out there? Just pick a suspect and make them confess.’ He swore under his breath, started to stand up.
‘There’s more to this,’ Wahlia said.
Zigic stopped. Bobby wasn’t stupid and he didn’t have the handicap of ego that Adams carried. If he’d seen some possibility in this case, then Zigic needed to listen.
‘First thing I went looking for was Walton’s victim type,’ Wahlia said. ‘Maybe that’s an imperfect method but we all know he doesn’t deviate from that type. At least not in the cases we’re aware of.’ He crossed his legs, curled his hand around his ankle, thumb tapping the heel of his red suede trainers. ‘And I’m not a psychiatrist or a profiler or anything flash like that, but even I know a
