‘There’s recorded evidence of abuses,’ Ferreira said, giving him a look that could have stripped his skin from his flesh. ‘You saw the footage. That isn’t up for debate.’
‘And it doesn’t alter the fact that those employees have a strong motive for going after Ainsworth,’ Zigic reminded him. ‘They lost their jobs, they were outed as predators. These are people with an axe to grind and we need to track them down and question each and every one of them.’
Hammond had emailed them the list of former employees and it was up on the board now, twelve fresh names in the persons-of-interest column, printed in angry block capitals by Ferreira. Ten men, two women. All guards.
‘You need to divide them up and get around to them today,’ she said. ‘Sooner we know where we are the sooner we can discount or dive deeper into this lot.’
‘Alright,’ Zigic said, clapping his hands. ‘You know what to do. Get on it.’
He walked away from the board, heading for the door with his keys in his hand.
Ferreira caught up to him at the stairwell. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Family stuff. I’ll be as quick as I can.’
It should have been family stuff, he thought, as he turned onto Thorpe Road, heading in the direction of the school where Anna would already have arrived with the boys done up in their smartest clothes, told to be on best behaviour; she believed in always being early for things. It would have been easy to slow and turn down the tree-lined driveway, call her and apologise for everything and ask her to wait for him before she went in to plead her case before the headmistress.
But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Knew he was going to fight this to the bitter end.
Because he couldn’t stand ten or fifteen years of Anna’s sanctimonious, superior parents rubbing his nose in his inability to pay for his children to have the kind of education he didn’t even want for them. Every holiday he’d be reminded of it, every birthday, every new term when their money would fly into the school’s bank account, he would have to deal with their smug faces, even if he didn’t actually see them. He would know they were at home, delighting in their act of charity, congratulating themselves on the good sense of their investments and the efficacy of their tax planning.
He kept his eyes on the car in front of him as he passed the turning to the school, kept driving with the temptation to turn around gradually fading the further across the city he went, until he was pulling up outside a bungalow in Fletton and all that was left of it was a faint hint of regret buried deep in his chest.
Adams had already arrived, was standing talking to a woman with a pair of dachshunds on the small area of scrubby parkland at the centre of the development, under a tree that looked so dry Zigic half expected it to spontaneously combust. Adams was smiling and squatting down, fussing the animals while the woman talked. Even from a distance of twenty metres, Zigic could see she was flirting with him.
The address they wanted was a couple of doors along the road and Zigic eyed it from inside the car, knowing this estate was patrolled by a particularly attentive neighbourhood-watch scheme and that anyone lingering on the paths would soon come to their attention.
It was a 1960s bungalow, hard grey bricks and metal window frames that had been repainted a disconcerting shade of blue, in contrast to the brilliant white of the surrounding properties. The front garden was untended, had been a single gravelled parking space at some point in the past but was now mostly weeds, or more charitably an urban wildflower meadow, Zigic thought, given the preponderance of dandelions and thistles.
Finally Adams broke away and trotted over the road.
‘Neighbourhood watch,’ he said.
‘Had you down as a wrong ’un, did she?’
‘She clocked you right off, mate. Thought you were a dealer.’
‘Racial profiling.’
‘Or the stoner beard,’ Adams suggested. ‘How are you standing that in this weather anyway?’
Zigic ignored the comment.
‘I didn’t think Cooper would be out yet,’ he said.
‘Confessed and apologised profusely to the family.’ Adams shrugged, as if that wasn’t the single biggest reason they shouldn’t be there. ‘Makes life easier for us anyway, means we can get to him.’
Adams started towards Neal Cooper’s place and everything in Zigic’s body was screaming at him to drop back, get into his car and away from this mad scheme. He could still make the appointment at the school, slip into Anna’s good graces again and extricate himself from the position he was poised to assume in Riggott’s bad ones.
But he knew deep down that this was the only way.
Adams rang the doorbell, eyes on the toes of his shoes until the moment the lock clicked. Then his warrant card came out and the smile switched on, cold and unfriendly.
‘Neal, we’d like a word. Don’t mind, do you? That’s great.’ Adams barrelled in, hand going to Cooper’s shoulder, walking him backwards into the hallway. Cooper stumbled over his feet, one arm bracing against the floral-papered wall. ‘Let’s head through into the living room, yeah?’
Zigic felt an immediate prickle of discomfort, watching how little resistance Cooper put up, not even so much as a question about what they wanted before he complied. He moved unsteadily, his whole body tilted to the left, shoulder hanging slightly too low, like it had been dislocated and never properly reset, his steps slow and uneven, each one seeming to require a degree of thought as he made it.
He was barely forty, younger than either of them, but he looked at least ten years older. Prison had been tough on him Zigic guessed, the way it could be on men who killed pretty girls. It only
