She’d agreed a safe and sedate catch-up with Kate Jenkins at her house next weekend, promised she’d bring dessert. Hadn’t told Billy yet that it would be a couples thing. Or that he’d be making the dessert. This was more uncharted territory for them but Kate’s husband was a nice enough bloke, funny and smart and a big boxing fan, so she figured they would have something to chat about.
Parr got up from his chair and began to execute a series of side stretches with a perfectly straight face, seemingly unaware of the smiles he was raising from the surrounding desks. With a small, satisfied grunt he sat down again.
Ferreira shook her head and went back to Michaela Paggett’s last arrest report: a caution she’d taken for assaulting a demonstrator outside her local polling station during the recent council elections. It was little more than a shove and when Ferreira checked out the guy she’d injured, she found a similar history of agitating in his record.
‘What about this one?’ Colleen asked abruptly, turning her phone to Ferreira.
She leaned over her desk and looked at the photograph of a bloke that might have been lifted from an erectile dysfunction advert. All teeth and hair and leathery tan.
‘He looks like someone who murders rich older women for their life insurance.’
‘Joke’s on him then,’ Colleen said. ‘I’m brassic.’
A text vibrated Ferreira’s phone and she saw that the couple from the holiday let next door to Josh Ainsworth had finally picked up the message she’d sent them an hour ago – the Paggetts’ photographs and a query about whether they’d seen them.
They’d hadn’t. Sorry. Wish we could be more helpful.
She swore under her breath.
She was thinking about running a second set of door-to-doors in Long Fleet with their photos, see if they could build a pattern of loitering for the Paggetts. It would be thin and barely even circumstantial but it would be something. And, she figured, some of the locals who said they’d seen nothing might actually remember these two, as distinctive as they looked.
‘Him?’ Colleen asked, brandishing her phone at Ferreira again.
This one’s teeth were a slightly more natural colour, but there was a hardness around his eyes and a shallowness to his smile that she didn’t like.
‘He’s a bit EDL, Col.’
Murray sighed and picked up her Poldark mug. ‘This one?’
‘You know my feelings on Poldark.’
‘This job’s warped you,’ Murray said, tossing her phone aside.
‘No, I was definitely warped before I got here,’ Ferreira told her.
‘How did you manage to date when you don’t trust anyone?’ Murray asked, exasperated. ‘They can’t all be pieces of shit.’
Ferreira just shrugged, wasn’t about to admit that she’d always been on high alert, always prepared for the man she was with to snap and reveal some side of himself he’d managed to hide through drinks in the pub and the journey back to his place or her own.
She returned to Michaela Paggett’s arrest record, more of the same stuff, going back twelve years, and as she read it she kept thinking about what Murray had said and realised she was pushing away an instinct she didn’t want to admit to.
Damien Paggett’s accusation about Josh Ainsworth was playing on her mind, had been from the moment he tossed it at them across the interview-room table.
She didn’t believe it.
Knew exactly what Paggett was trying to do.
But some small part of her was wondering …
Everything she’d seen about Long Fleet suggested that the house clearing by the new governor had been deep and wide-ranging, the abuse problem so thoroughly entrenched that the only proper way to deal with it was sacking everyone who was implicated. Ainsworth had been a key informer according to the other medical staff, whose own testimonies backed him up.
If Ainsworth was anything but an absolute paragon of virtue, he wouldn’t have survived that purge, would he? His own accusations would have triggered counter-accusations if he was guilty. And the governor would have been forced to thoroughly investigate or risk sacking people on tainted evidence. Opening the company up to wrongful dismissal suits and tribunals that might go embarrassingly public.
The problem was they couldn’t get access to any of the reports around the purge, couldn’t speak to any of the sacked employees because they simply didn’t know who they were.
For a few minutes she debated contacting the other doctor, Sutherland, or the nurse, Ruth Garner, who had worked alongside Ainsworth. But she remembered how spooked they had both been during the initial interviews at Long Fleet and doubted that they would be any more forthcoming now.
She could speak to Damien Paggett again, but that felt like an admission of defeat. She wouldn’t even consider talking to Michaela about the accusation, knew she would spin out whatever story she could think of to try and muddy Ainsworth’s name and raise the prospect of other suspects.
There were other suspects though.
All of those sacked staff members with grudges against Ainsworth. Two years was a long time to seethe without taking any action, but not unheard of. A smart person would wait, she thought. Let their victim amass other enemies.
She looked at the board where Ruby Garrick’s photo had been struck through. She hadn’t left her flat on the night of Ainsworth’s murder, had no opportunity as well as no motive.
Portia Collingwood too. Home by half past nine just as she claimed.
Ferreira knew they were only half investigating this murder. Focusing on the suspects they had identified easily, the ones they could actually get to and question. They needed the Long Fleet management to lower their guard and start helping to find whoever murdered their highly valued and well-liked doctor.
So, why weren’t they helping? They should have turned over a list of ex-employees
