‘Please, Mrs Loewe, Nadia isn’t in any trouble. We just need to speak to her.’
‘About a crime?’
‘She isn’t a suspect,’ Ferreira reassured her. ‘Just a potential witness. She was released from an immigration removal centre a few weeks ago and nobody seems to know where she is now. As you can imagine, she’s in a vulnerable position and we’d like to be sure that she’s okay.’
Deborah Loewe put a shrewd eye on her. ‘Well, which is it? You want to question her or you’re concerned about her safety?’
‘The two things are linked,’ Ferreira said, seeing that the white lie had pricked Loewe. ‘It’s in relation to a murder investigation. Do you think we could come in, please?’
The woman directed Ferreira and Murray through the house to a boiling-hot kitchen overlooking a back garden strung with three lines of washing, sheets limp where they hung. The sliding doors were open but the breeze was so light it barely stirred the paperwork scattered across the small glass table – a series of sketches which looked like logo designs. There was a strong smell of weed but Loewe made no attempt to hide the ashtray it was coming from or the grinder that had prepared it.
They sat down at the table.
‘When did you last see Nadia?’ Ferreira asked.
‘I haven’t seen her since last summer,’ she said. ‘June time. She went out to work as usual in the morning, but she didn’t come back. I started to get worried and called the restaurant. They were very cagey about it, insisted they couldn’t tell me anything because I wasn’t Nadia’s family. So I went down there and made a bit of fuss.’ She smiled at the memory of it, reaching for a pack of cigarettes. ‘Finally, the manager admitted that they’d had an immigration raid and Nadia had been taken away.’ She unpeeled the wrapper. ‘But she’s been released, obviously. Which rather begs the question of why she was taken in in the first place.’
There was an accusatory note in her voice and Ferreira felt the sting of it, hating that it was being directed at her rather than the people responsible.
‘Nadia was given leave to remain in the country,’ she explained. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say any more than that. She was released to a hostel in Peterborough but she only stayed a few days before telling them she was coming back to Cambridge. We were hoping she might have come here. Does she have any family she might have gone to?’
Loewe shook her head. ‘It was just Nadia and her mother. But her mum died a couple of years ago. The rest of Nadia’s family are back in Ghana.’
They knew she hadn’t gone back there, no activity on her passport.
‘Does she have any family over here?’ Murray asked.
‘From what I know of Nadia’s family situation, I doubt very much that she’d make contact with any of them.’ Loewe finally lit her cigarette. ‘You do know why Nadia and her mum came to England?’
Ferreira shook her head.
‘Nadia’s mum – Lola – was gay. Which is not a good thing to be in Ghana. Especially when you’re married to an abusive piece of shit.’
‘She was given asylum because he was violent?’
‘Violent hardly covers it,’ Loewe said bitterly. ‘One day he came home from work early and found Lola with her girlfriend. Not in bed, not really doing anything. They were just together in her kitchen and he put two and two together and dragged Lola out into the street and beat her into a coma.’
Ferreira swore. Murray shook her head angrily.
‘As soon as she’d recovered well enough to walk, Lola grabbed Nadia and got on a plane. Luckily she’d been tucking some money away or she’d have been stuck there with him, and God alone knows what would have happened then.’ She took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘Lola was given asylum on the grounds that her life would be in jeopardy if she returned. Nadia was here as a dependant.’
‘But then she turned eighteen,’ Ferreira said, seeing it all click together. ‘And she wasn’t a dependant any more so they were going to send her back.’
‘That’s what I presumed. Nadia wasn’t facing the same danger as Lola was so there was no reason to let her stay here.’ Loewe’s mouth twisted in disgust. ‘Except for the fact that she’d spent most of her life here and she was a good student and a hard worker. And that she’d been recently bereaved. None of that counted for anything.’
‘Maybe that’s why they let her stay,’ Murray suggested, more to Ferreira than to Loewe.
‘What happened to Lola?’ Ferreira asked.
‘Cancer,’ she spat. ‘She was dead within six weeks of them finding it.’
‘That must have been hard on Nadia,’ Murray said sympathetically.
Loewe sighed heavily. ‘It pretty much obliterated her. Coming out of nowhere like that and then progressing so fast. She didn’t have any time to adjust and she was trying so hard to stay strong and upbeat for Lola that when … the end came, it was like there was nothing left of Nadia.’
‘They were close then?’
‘They were everything to each other,’ Loewe said sadly. ‘Nadia kept it together long enough to get through the funeral and then she collapsed. We got home and she crawled into bed and she didn’t get up for months. Barely ate, I had to beg her to drink so she wouldn’t dehydrate. She didn’t speak, didn’t bathe. I honestly thought she was willing herself to die.’
‘Did you take her to see someone about it?’ Ferreira asked. ‘It sounds like she was dangerously depressed.’
‘It wasn’t depression, it was grief,’ Loewe said fiercely. ‘You can’t medicate grief, you can’t pray it away. You either survive it or you don’t.’
‘So you didn’t get her any help?’ Murray asked, doing nothing to hide her disapproval.
‘Of course I got her help,’ Loewe snapped. ‘I had the doctor in to her, I even called her bloody priest, fat lot of good he did. She
