‘But you discussed some deeply personal things with the women whose complaints you reported,’ Ferreira said, opening her hands up. ‘You clearly have a very good idea of what goes on in the rest of the building.’
Ruth brushed away some hair that wasn’t really there.
‘I feel like there’s something you want to ask me,’ she said. ‘So why don’t you just say it?’
‘Did you know Nadia accused Joshua of attacking her?’
‘No.’
But she wasn’t shocked, Zigic saw. So either she was lying or there had been gossip about it, which had reached her ears and which she’d decided not to tell them before.
‘There must have been talk about it?’
‘Not that I heard.’
‘Nadia accused Joshua of attacking her and then he was told to resign,’ Ferreira said, trying and failing to catch Ruth’s eye. ‘Do you seriously expect us to believe something like that never got talked about?’
‘All I heard was that Josh left with stress,’ Ruth said carefully. ‘I was away and when I came back he was gone and I was told he resigned.’
‘Dr Sutherland was there when it happened,’ Ferreira said. ‘There are guards who were there. None of these people talked about it? At all?’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe they didn’t know either. Maybe Hammond wanted to keep it all quiet and he made sure nobody outside of admin found out about it.’
She believed the accusation, Zigic saw.
‘I still don’t understand why we’re talking about Nadia,’ Ruth said, picking up a damp cloth from the draining board and laying it over the tap.
Ferreira waited until she was facing them again before she replied.
‘Because Nadia has disappeared,’ she said. ‘She was released from Long Fleet seven weeks ago and she disappeared a few days later.’
Ruth straightened sharply, her hand going to her throat.
‘You think she murdered Josh?’
Another flicker of annoyance crossed Ferreira’s face because it was the obvious and logical assumption and not the one she wanted to be true.
‘Why would Nadia murder Josh?’ she asked.
Ruth’s hands made incoherent gestures in the air in front of her chest. ‘I don’t know. Revenge maybe.’
‘Revenge for attacking her?’ Ferreira suggested and got a small, doubtful nod in return. ‘Ruth, given that you’ve obviously reconsidered your opinion of Josh, is there anything further you’d like to tell us?’
‘I haven’t reconsidered,’ she said sadly. ‘I don’t know what to think any more.’
A shutter came down in front of her face but Ferreira pressed on regardless, hoping there was some way of reaching through it. She tried to impress upon her how much danger the young woman could be in and how important it was they talked to her. Ruth was looking at her the whole time but Zigic wasn’t sure she saw Ferreira any more, and though she murmured and nodded here and there, she didn’t really speak again.
Zigic left his card and asked her to call them if she thought of anything, walked out of the house dogged by frustration.
His phone rang as he got in the car.
‘Is this Detective Inspector Zigic?’ a man with a broad fen accent asked.
‘It is.’
‘You said I were to ring you if there were owt else I could tell you about young Josh,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve got summat here I reckon you’ll want’a see.’
‘What is it, Mr Edwards?’
But he’d hung up.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
‘Let’s just open it,’ Ferreira said excitedly, holding the letter Josh Ainsworth’s neighbour, Mr Edwards, had signed for on her lap. Ainsworth’s name printed on the front of it, nothing else to give away the contents.
‘We need to preserve any evidence on it,’ Zigic told her, again. ‘I know you know this, Mel.’
‘There might not be any forensic evidence.’ She turned it over in her hands, the evidence bag crinkling, as if something new might have appeared on the plain white envelope in the minute since she last did that. ‘We should open it.’
Zigic glanced away from the road and plucked it from her grasp, tucked it into the side pocket of the car door.
‘Anything that was sent to Ainsworth special delivery is too important to mess about with,’ he said. ‘Forensics are opening it.’
She huffed lightly, folded her arms. ‘You could stick your foot down, at least.’
He accelerated along the narrow fenland road, a group of cyclists up ahead all wearing the same Team Sky jerseys. He slowed as he approached them, staying well back but getting some disgusted looks from the riders at the rear all the same. When the road was clear he overtook.
‘What happened with Patrick Sutherland yesterday?’ he asked. ‘You never did tell me.’
‘Not much to tell,’ she said. ‘Sutherland’s so terrified of breaching his contract I’m not even sure you could torture anything helpful out of him. I mean, he bolted pretty much as soon as he realised why I’d got him in there.’
‘You didn’t get anything out of him, then?’
‘I got to see him without Long Fleet’s watchful eye on his back,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘That was useful.’
It didn’t sound very useful, but Ferreira’s approach was different to his own; more psychologically based, she’d claim. More gut-driven, he’d say. If she was left to her own devices she’d bring suspects to the interview room over and over again, grind them down with the same questions and statements until they cracked. But that wasn’t how you built a case. It was how you got a confession.
Momentarily Neal Cooper popped into Zigic’s head and he pushed the image of the broken-down man aside. He was a problem for Monday morning.
‘I did find out one very interesting thing,’ she said. ‘Sutherland was behind the hidden camera footage.’
‘I still don’t think that’s as interesting as you do,’ he told her, his attention drawn away from the road to a field where a couple of metal detectorists were working their way up and
