‘Someone had been harassing Dr Ainsworth.’ Ferreira swept the crowd and Zigic followed her gaze, looking for a reaction, a moment of fear. But they were all too well hidden behind their hats and glasses. ‘We’re already aware of your leafleting campaign in the village.’
‘It isn’t illegal to inform people about what’s going on in their community,’ the woman said. ‘And speaking the truth isn’t harassment. It’s the responsibility of every right-thinking woman and man who cares what happens to their fellow human beings.’
Zigic tried to picture her slamming that table leg into Josh Ainsworth’s face, found the image came to him quickly and not entirely unconvincingly. She was perhaps fifty, strongly built and with a low centre of gravity, easy enough to see this fervour converting into fury and the violence she wouldn’t be able to stop until she’d fully exorcised it.
‘We’re not interested in your leaflet campaign,’ Ferreira said, an edge coming into her voice. ‘And we can see that you’re good people fighting for something you believe in. But there’s a chance that the person who murdered Josh Ainsworth has passed through this group. And if when we find them they claim an allegiance with you, that’s going to seriously damage your cause.’
Another murmur circled the crowd and Zigic heard the word ‘blackmail’ pitched low but strong. Couldn’t see who’d said it.
The mood was shifting again, hardening.
‘If anyone at the periphery of your movement has suggested a more direct kind of protest, we need to know about it,’ Ferreira said, taking a box of cards from her pocket and beginning to hand them out. ‘If there’s been any threat of violence made towards Long Fleet staff, even jokingly, we need to know who made it.’
The women didn’t want the cards, but they were nice middle-class ladies who’d had good manners drilled into them from an early age and they couldn’t refuse Ferreira’s polite requests or ignore how she thanked them, even under these circumstances.
‘I know there are people working in there who are no good,’ she said. ‘But Dr Ainsworth was not one of them.’
Zigic glanced over the road towards the security hut at the main gate, saw that the guard was watching them, arms folded, chin thrown up. This was beyond his territory, but it might not stop him investigating and passing back what he saw.
Zigic would have liked to walk in there without giving the management warning, but that wasn’t an option any more.
‘Please,’ Ferreira said earnestly. ‘Ask your compatriots to contact us if they can think of anything. Anyone who made them uncomfortable, anyone who didn’t seem to share your principles. We really don’t want this to mar the important work you’re doing here.’
A soft snort went up from within the crowd and Ferreira ignored it. Maybe she heard how thickly she was laying it on too, Zigic thought. But of the available options she’d taken the right tack.
In the car, a few minutes later, with Long Fleet falling away behind them, he found himself thinking of his grandparents again, remembering going through his grandfather’s effects after he died and discovering the small booklet of common English phrases he’d been given on arrival here. It was creased and careworn, stained with the oil from his hands and, Zigic imagined, the nervous sweat that came over him when he was called on to speak at any length in his adopted language. His grandmother had been fluent, did the speaking for both of them most of the time, but his grandfather had always been a man adrift in a foreign country.
Would he pass a citizenship test now? Zigic wondered. If they hadn’t died would they be fearing for their homes once again, seeing out their old age in the same terror they began their married life in? His chest ached at the thought of his grandfather trying to convince some dispassionate official of his need to stay in broken English, or his grandmother being taken through the gates of Long Fleet under the gaze of that same guard.
CHAPTER SIX
‘I hate doing this,’ Ferreira groaned, as they turned down the long driveway onto Wansford Marina, the water opening up ahead of them, sunlight glinting off it in shards so vicious that Zigic felt every one pierce his shades.
‘Nobody enjoys it and it never gets any easier.’
They could have sent someone else to inform Joshua Ainsworth’s parents of his death, but Zigic thought it was important for a senior officer to speak to them, so they would know it was being taken seriously and that everything that could be done for him would be done. He remembered being sent out as a young DC to make the dreaded death knock and how completely unprepared he’d been for it, too inexperienced to provide the requisite level of comfort and reassurance, too raw to protect himself from the force of their grief. It wasn’t fair on anyone involved, sending a constable to do an inspector’s job.
The Ainsworth house sat at the centre of the development, one of around two dozen houses sited facing the modest lake. It was a three-storey clapperboard place painted in a Scandinavian shade of dirty blue, with a neat little pathway running up the centre of a manicured lawn, still lush despite the heat.
For a moment after he switched off the engine, they both sat, gathering whatever inner resources they had.
‘Come on,’ he said, finally, getting out of the car.
He led the way, knocking on the brilliant white front door, feeling Ferreira behind him, reluctance radiating off her.
The door was opened by a petite, deeply tanned woman in a pair of shorts and a man’s shirt, one hand still in a floral gardening glove, clutching its twin. She wore a polite smile, tinged with mistrust. They wouldn’t get cold callers here, Zigic imagined. Not with the security on the gate.
‘Yes, can
