Had she and Bobby sounded like that? she wondered.
Did Zigic spend years sitting in his office thinking, Shut up, you stupid children?
She rolled a cigarette and found herself in the stairwell, turning the wrong way and heading up to the old Hate Crimes office.
The room was mothballed but open, the air stale-smelling already, a faint mustiness cut with the sharp tang of the plastic covers that had been put over the furniture. She heaved the window open and sat down on the sill as she lit her cigarette.
An unknown number flashed up on her phone and she answered.
‘Hi, Sergeant Ferreira?’ A man’s voice, hesitant but lifted by the need to be heard above the music playing in the background. ‘You were asking about Nadia Baidoo? I’m the manager at Beckett Burgers in Cambridge. I think you talked to my number two, last week?’
‘That’s right,’ Ferreira said, remembering the frustrating conversation they’d had with the assistant manager who seemed to feel her authority didn’t extend to accessing staff records. ‘Has Nadia been back?’
‘No, but I thought you might want to know. Someone got in touch with me about her last month. She’d given us as a reference.’
Ferreira shook her head in bemusement. Wondering if Nadia was naïve or ballsy as hell to give the place where she was snatched by immigration as a reference.
‘Where was this?’ she asked.
‘In Peterborough.’
She felt the excitement beginning to stir.
He gave her the name of a boutique in the old arcade, the phone number and the name of the person who called. ‘I gave Nadia a good reference,’ he said. ‘I hope she got the job.’
Ferreira immediately called the boutique, waited to be put on with the owner, who she’d seen when she’d been shopping there for a new winter coat last year. She remembered a petite woman with jet-black hair and severe eyebrows and a penchant for leopard print that verged on mania.
‘Nadia, yeah,’ she said, in an Essex drawl. ‘Don’t know what happened with her. She ghosted us after a couple of shifts. She was good and all, had a strong look, you know? I like that in my staff, gives the customers something to compete with.’
‘Do you have an address for her?’ Ferreira asked.
‘Yeah, gimme a minute, I’ll call you back.’
She waited, looking out across the front of the station, nervous energy sparking in her chest, already thinking about what she would ask Nadia, about where this new development was going to take them.
Below her she saw Zigic and Adams getting out of the car. Adams full of energy as he bounded up the station steps; Zigic, coming up behind him, was hard-faced and squared off with tension or anger.
She sat down again and waited for her phone to ring.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Zigic had left Wendy Darby curled up on her sofa, under a blanket, because by the time he got her home she was shivering despite the heat. The adrenaline had worn off and the crash that came afterwards had all but knocked her flat. She couldn’t get out of the car when Adams pulled into her driveway, and Zigic had coaxed her out, holding her hands, which trembled against his, and then caught her around the waist and walked her slowly up the short path, noticing for the first time that she was wearing odd shoes. The colour was the same but the style slightly different, and he wondered how incoherent with despair and rage she must have been when she left the house, so focused on what she had to say to Jackie Walton that she hadn’t noticed what she was putting on her feet.
Zigic saw her to the sofa and went to make her a cup of tea, debated emptying out the half bottle of gin, which sat on the worktop, but decided she would need the comfort of it later, no matter how unhelpful he thought it was.
Adams paced the kitchen as the kettle came to a boil.
‘Did you see Walton?’ he said, voice pitched at a whisper.
‘I saw him.’
‘I’m surprised he didn’t come out and get involved.’
‘Why don’t you go back to the station,’ Zigic suggested, opening the cupboards in search of biscuits. ‘I’ll call a taxi.’
‘No, you’re alright. I’ll wait for you in the car.’
Wendy Darby stared straight through Zigic as he placed her tea and a plate of biscuits on the coffee table. He felt impotent in the face of her grief, could hardly bear the knowledge that they’d brought her to this point.
It had been bad enough when they broke the news, but seeing how wild she’d been with Jackie Walton and just how deep that betrayal went was heartbreaking.
He sat down in an armchair, looked at the photographs of Tessa lined up along the mantelpiece, more of them on the bookshelves and hung in clusters behind the sofa. He wondered where her father was. The file had mentioned him briefly, but he’d never been a suspect so Riggott’s interest in him had ended almost instantly. Had he died or had Tessa’s murder ended the marriage like so many murders did?
Twenty years was a long time to bear this burden alone.
‘Wendy, it’s best you don’t approach Jackie again,’ he said gently. ‘We’ve talked her out of pressing charges but that might not work next time.’
She didn’t reply, didn’t stir at all.
‘I know you’re going through a lot right now and if you need to talk to someone, we can help with that.’
He regretted the words immediately, knew there was no one he could send to be with her, no family liaison he could assign for an off-book case.
Again she didn’t respond and all the thin assurances and hopeful sentiments that were rattling around his head smeared together into a meaningless blur. He was doing this for himself, he realised. Was sitting here so he could feel like he’d at least tried to undo some of the damage he’d done.
