He returned to Jenkins’s office and they went down to CID, Ferreira already throwing out potential candidates for the mother.
‘Portia Collingwood, it has to be,’ she said. ‘That’s been an on and off thing for years and she was there the night he died.’
‘Why would she kill him over a paternity test?’ Zigic asked, going to the coffee machine and pouring them a cup each. ‘Especially one they didn’t even know the results of.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ Ferreira was circling her desk, agitated but energised. ‘You get murdered over a paternity test once the results are back, right?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Zigic said, putting her coffee down. ‘Running an actual test suggests dispute over paternity –’
‘Which suggests an affair that has recently come out into the open.’
‘Alistair Collingwood has an alibi,’ he reminded her.
‘You’re assuming this is the only relationship Josh Ainsworth was involved in.’ She picked up a marker pen and wrote ‘PATERNITY TEST’ in big letters on the board. ‘We’ve been through Ainsworth’s phone records and it’s all pretty boring. No major unidentified players in there so if he was having another affair, he wasn’t arranging it by phone.’
‘Someone he worked with?’ Zigic asked.
‘What, Ruth Garner?’
‘She’s got a kid.’
Ferreira paused to pull a face at him and went back to pacing. ‘That can’t be our minimum threshold for suspicion – “She’s got a kid.”’
Zigic’s brow furrowed. ‘Nadia Baidoo?’
‘We don’t know the nature of the assault,’ Ferreira said tentatively. ‘But if he raped her, then, yeah, we’ve got to think that’s a possibility.’
‘Meaning they were in contact just before his murder?’ he asked. ‘How else would he have got a sample of the baby’s DNA?’
‘The bloke Mr Daya saw Nadia having coffee with before she left Haven House?’ Ferreira said, then immediately answered herself. ‘No way. He reckoned she looked happy. She’d hardly be happy running into the man who attacked her.’
Zigic wished she’d sit down for a moment, stop thinking with her mouth and actually consider the new evidence they had on their hands.
Because the more she paced, throwing out that chaotic energy, the less he was able to concentrate on the slim thread of an idea, which was looping around in the back of his head.
‘Does the timeline even work for it being Nadia’s baby?’ Ferreira asked, swerving away to the board. ‘She was taken into Long Fleet June last year. But the assault was barely two months ago. There’s no baby to DNA test.’
‘The assault she reported was barely two months ago,’ Zigic said. ‘We need to get in touch with Hammond again and find out if she was pregnant when she left Long Fleet.’
‘I talked to the manager at the hostel and he never mentioned Nadia being pregnant.’ Ferreira stuck her hands on her hips. ‘There’s no way he wouldn’t have told me that.’
‘We should check with local maternity units,’ Zigic said. ‘Just in case.’
Ferreira made a note and stuck it to Keri Bloom’s desk for Monday morning, straightened up, sucking her teeth.
‘We need those fucking samples.’
‘It’s the weekend, Mel. Some people have them off, remember.’
‘They must have an emergency number.’ She slipped into her seat and started tapping at her keyboard. ‘All of those DNA tests going out to peoples’ houses … how don’t we see murders about this on a weekly basis?’
‘I guess most people keep the results to themselves,’ Zigic said, swivelling to consider the board. ‘But looking at how close this has come to Ainsworth’s return from his holiday, it can’t be coincidence.’
‘No,’ Ferreira agreed. ‘The lab’s website promises a forty-eight-hour turnaround so Ainsworth sent the test in within a couple of days of coming home.’
‘We need to pin down exactly what he was doing between landing and getting killed,’ Zigic said, looking at the yawning chasm those days presented.
Without Ainsworth’s devices they’d found it nearly impossible to ascertain what he’d been doing with himself in the days just before his death. His neighbour wasn’t nosy enough and Portia Collingwood apparently didn’t go in for conversation, simply turned up at his door for sex and left when she’d had it.
Somebody must know, Zigic thought.
He hadn’t locked himself away for four days straight, had he?
At some point he’d met the mother of this child, been given a swab of DNA to send in with his own. Meaning she wanted him to be the father of her child. For financial or emotional reasons, they wouldn’t know until they identified her.
Or was it Ainsworth who wanted to prove his paternity? Claim the rights he was due under law.
And where was the other man in all of this?
Nervously waiting for them to knock on his door and start asking questions he would have no good answers to?
DAY SIX
SUNDAY AUGUST 12TH
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Ferreira lay on the sofa, flicking through a magazine from the Sunday paper. There was nothing much in it but she couldn’t seem to hold her attention on anything more substantial than photographs and snippets of anodyne text. The book she was reading was splayed on the coffee table exactly where she’d left it last night, and even television felt like too much of an effort. She’d scrolled through the channels, settling on one thing for a few minutes before switching again, couldn’t find anything she wanted to watch among the programmes she’d saved on Billy’s planner.
No matter what she tried to concentrate on, her brain kept circling back to Billy and Zigic and what they were doing about Walton.
Last night she and Billy had gone out to the little cinema in Stamford he liked and watched some French film she knew he didn’t want to see but which she would normally have enjoyed. All through it she was aware of him glancing over and checking on her, hardly seeming to watch the screen. And then, afterwards in the cellar bar with all the other couples who looked just like them, he’d been too close and attentive, as if he thought Walton was in
