‘Yeah, I’m fairly sure he knew all about it,’ Ferreira said, reaching into her bag. ‘Somebody examined Nadia afterwards and he was the only other doctor available at that time. Stands to reason he knows exactly what happened.’
‘So he risks his job smuggling in a hidden camera, but he won’t tell you anything about what happened to Nadia?’ Zigic asked.
She swiped lip balm over her mouth. ‘That was what I told him. But no. Honestly, I got the impression he feels like he dodged a bullet with the initial whistle-blowing and now he’s going to toe the line at any cost, as long as he keeps his job.’
‘Some moral crusader he is.’
She let out a thoughtful murmur. ‘I think we need to stop considering it an “allegation of assault”, you know. Sutherland got all wound up when I suggested Hammond didn’t believe it. And if he did examine Nadia …’
‘He knows it definitely happened,’ Zigic said. ‘You think he might have something to do with the murder?’
‘What’s his motive?’ Ferreira asked.
He shrugged. ‘He’s putting his neck on the line reporting abuses at Long Fleet. Josh Ainsworth was doing the same. So Sutherland feels like the two of them are fighting the good fight.’
‘Then he finds out Ainsworth isn’t quite as upstanding as he thinks and kills him over it?’
‘It’s possible,’ Zigic insisted.
‘But unlikely.’
‘You had no problem with an ideologically driven motive for the Paggetts,’ he reminded her. ‘Now we know about the secret footage, we have to put Sutherland in the same bracket as them. Except he actually did something to back up his beliefs. If anything that makes the motive even more viable for him than it did for them.’
‘I got the feeling you never bought that as a motive for the Paggetts murdering Ainsworth though,’ she said.
‘I thought it was a stretch,’ he admitted. ‘If it wasn’t for them mouthing off about kidnapping someone, I wouldn’t have even considered it a possibility.’
He pulled off the parkway, heading for the entrance to Thorpe Road Station, quietly pleased that he’d distracted Ferreira from continuing the discussion he’d endured on the way to Long Fleet.
‘You want me to push Sutherland some more?’ she asked, as they got out of the car.
‘Check his alibi,’ Zigic said.
They headed up the steps and in through reception.
‘The problem I keep coming back to,’ Ferreira said, as she opened the stairwell door, ‘is we have a staff of – we don’t even know how many – at Long Fleet, right? And any one of them could have some personal grievance against Ainsworth, and as long as we can’t talk to them, we’ll never know about it.’
He’d been thinking the same thing. Right from the moment they first drove through Long Fleet’s gates. The nameless, faceless employees who were each and every one of them suspects until they could be reasonably disregarded.
‘Hammond is never going to allow us to question them all,’ he said, following her up the stairs.
‘Maybe we just need to find another way to identify them,’ Ferreira suggested. ‘We could use the sacked staff members we have to get some names.’
‘Or HMRC?’
Ferreira stopped at the top of the stairs, sheepish-looking. ‘Yeah, I already thought of that. I didn’t want to say anything because you seemed so spooked about getting in Riggott’s bad books.’
‘And?’
‘They’re employed centrally through Securitect,’ she said. ‘There’s no way to know who’s at Long Fleet and who’s just doing property maintenance on their care homes or whatever.’
‘It was a good idea but we might not need to worry about identifying them.’ He held up the plain white envelope in its clear bag. ‘Maybe the murderer’s in here.’
Ferreira rolled her eyes at his jokey optimism and shoved through the door into the lab.
There was only one person on today. Budget issues and holidays cutting them down to the wire. If something major happened, extra bodies would be pulled in from home but for now it was just Kate Jenkins’s right-hand man, Elliot, sitting in her office, reading a fat science fiction book with a heavily cracked spine.
‘Finally, something interesting,’ he said, swinging his feet off the desk and coming out to meet them. When he saw the envelope Zigic was brandishing, his face fell. ‘That doesn’t seem particularly interesting.’
‘It was sent special delivery to our murder victim,’ Zigic told him.
‘Well, that’s a bit better.’
Elliot put on a pair of gloves and removed the envelope from the evidence bag. ‘You’re hoping for fingerprints?’
‘We’re more about what’s inside it,’ Ferreira said, leaning on the counter, physically straining towards Elliot as he opened the envelope, looking like she might rip it from his hands if he didn’t hurry up.
‘Ooh.’ He flattened out the single sheet for them to see. ‘It’s a paternity test.’
‘A positive paternity test.’ Ferreira turned to Zigic, eyes lit up. ‘Why the hell would Ainsworth be running a paternity test?’
He spotted the name of a lab on the letterhead, nothing but a couple of lines of text below it.
‘Clue’s in the name,’ Elliot said lightly.
‘Is there anything to suggest who the parties involved might be?’ Zigic asked.
Elliot shook his head. ‘He’d have sent in samples but I don’t suppose a small lab like this is going to be sending them back. Why would he need them? He got his answer.’
‘Maybe the lab still has the samples,’ Ferreira said, snapping upright, her phone already in her hand. She keyed in the phone number from the letterhead and walked away from the counter.
‘If we can get the samples back, you can run them, right?’
‘Your chain of evidence is going to be sketchy,’ Elliot warned him. ‘But, yes, theoretically we can do that.’
Ferreira was speaking, uninterrupted but still impatient, clearly leaving a message.
Saturday morning, Zigic thought, it was unlikely anyone would be at work at some private lab.
‘No point examining this, right?’ Elliot asked, already folding the paper back into the envelope.
Zigic took it back from him. ‘We’ll see about the samples.’
‘I almost got
