It was the school, Zigic thought, with a plunging sensation that drove him away from the window and onto the foot of the bed.
They’d been full of it on Friday evening when he got home. He’d expected that from Stefan, who went wild about anything new he came across, but Milan was just as excited. He’d tried to hide it, too aware of the mood in the house and its cause to openly come out and say he wanted to go there.
Instead when Zigic asked him what he thought, he beamed and said, ‘It’s just like Hogwarts.’
And that was it.
Milan wanted to go and if Zigic somehow stopped that happening, then he knew Milan would never forgive him. Even if the bullying didn’t continue next term and he was fine at the new secondary school he was due to attend. Because what kind of monster would stand in the way of their child going to Hogwarts?
The school wanted an answer by Tuesday.
Anna was going to say yes no matter what he thought.
They were lucky to get two places at such short notice, she’d told him. An unfortunate side effect of the economic downturn, the headmistress said. They’d lost quite a few pupils between terms so they had openings. For the right kind of people.
Zigic cursed himself for his stubbornness. Told himself all his arguments were petty and egotistical, kept repeating it to himself because that was the only way he could force himself to believe it. Anna knew best. The boys would be happy there. It didn’t matter that her parents were paying. It was a kindness. It was what you did for family. He didn’t have to let it eat him up inside. Once he saw how happy the boys were there, he’d feel nothing but relief and gratitude.
If he held on to those thoughts, drilled them into his brain, then maybe he could convince Anna he believed them too and everything would go back to normal between them?
But he couldn’t do it today.
Not with her parents here, poised to gloat over his acquiescence.
Tomorrow, he told himself, his gaze straying to the wardrobe. He could almost feel the presence of the envelope like some toxic substance he’d brought into his home, slowly polluting everything around it.
If the worst happened, he thought, if it went as badly as it could, at least his boys would be safely tucked away in a nice school. At least Mr and Mrs Healey’s money could insulate his family from the effects of his bad judgement.
DAY SEVEN
MONDAY AUGUST 13TH
CHAPTER FIFTY
Monday morning. The big briefing.
The office was packed and pungent with the scent of shea butter and aftersun, everyone slightly damp and rumpled from the weekend, which had been too hot for rest and recuperation but just right for drinking heavily and falling asleep in the garden without any sunscreen on. Ferreira counted five instances of serious burns, including one civilian support officer who’d apparently nodded off with his arm thrown across his eyes, leaving a fat strip of white skin between two expanses of furious redness and freckles that probably needed a dermatologist.
Most of the weekend shift were still in place too, working on an attempted murder that had hit in the early hours of Saturday morning: gunshots fired at a house in the middle of a nice village on the side of the A1, blood found in the drawing room but no sign of the victim so far. The gun was legally owned, the man who fired it insisting it was a burglar whose description he couldn’t give them.
At the front of the office, DI Greta Kitson had just wrapped up her briefing and Adams took over, giving the most basic rundown of the cases that had stalled. The minor tasks to be done and old ground to retread. Nobody looked very happy about getting those jobs, but it’s what police work frequently boiled down to. Watch that CCTV footage for the fifth time, combine that information with your third reread of every single interview transcript, then try to find some new angle in it all and decide who best to throw it at in the hopes of scaring them into letting slip something fresh.
It was often the way cases got cracked, but everyone resented doing it because nobody joined the police to do paperwork. They all wanted to corner the bad guy in a dark alley and take him down hand to hand.
Until they actually found themselves in that position.
Ferreira’s fingertips went to the back of her calf, the first time it had itched in months and she straightened again, knowing it was a psychological itch and she didn’t need to scratch it.
‘Marseilles police have lost George Batty,’ Adams said, eliciting a few groans. ‘But they tell us Batty was seen hanging around a lorry park on the edge of the city, trying to find an English driver who’d give him a lift.’
‘Where was he heading?’ someone piped up.
‘If we knew that, do you think my face would look like this?’ Adams asked. ‘Hopefully the stupid bastard’s trying to get home. But we still need to nail down the remaining eyewitness statements.’
Ferreira tuned him out, her attention on Ainsworth’s board and the timeline of his murder, starting at a point two years before he was killed, the point where he’d reported multiple guards for sexual assault and coercion of Long Fleet inmates.
Zigic thought it was unfeasibly far back to go. That nobody would wait two years for revenge and so far the list of sacked staff members had returned nothing but strong alibis and insistence of innocence.
But she was wondering if they’d gone far enough.
The paternity test wasn’t a coincidence. It couldn’t be.
And Zigic
