Ferreira reached into her handbag and took out the photograph they’d found in the boxes from Cambridge, the one of Nadia with her mother.
‘I thought you might want this back,’ Ferreira said, passing it to her across the coffee table.
Nadia let out a small sob as she took it, hiding her mouth with her hand. Tears sprang up in her eyes. ‘I thought I’d lost this.’
‘Mrs Loewe kept it for you,’ Ferreira told her. ‘She kept all your things. I think she was hoping you’d go back home when you could.’
‘This is the only photo I have of Mum,’ Nadia said, touching her fingertips gently to the image. ‘I had loads on my phone but they took it when they arrested me, and when I asked for it back, they told me it got lost somewhere.’
‘Are they saved to your laptop?’ Ferreira asked.
She nodded.
‘We’ve got that at the station.’
The relief was there and gone in an instant, smothered by fear. ‘Can you send me it?’
‘We’ll sign it over to you,’ Ferreira said, seeing how desperate Nadia was not to be taken in again.
They’d anticipated this. Prepared for it. In the car on the way over, they discussed Nadia Baidoo’s vulnerability and the importance of handling her carefully. Neither wanted to retraumatise her. But Zigic had insisted she was a suspect as well as a victim, and at some point they were going to have to take her in.
He’d agreed that an initial informal conversation here might make it less difficult on her, but Ferreira was aware of all the more serious questions they would have to ask her soon.
‘How are you coping?’ she asked. ‘Being out of Long Fleet?’
Nadia flinched at the name of the place. ‘It’s better here. The village is nice.’
No mention of Sutherland and it occurred to Ferreira that Nadia perhaps thought they were unaware that this was his house.
‘Why didn’t you go back to Cambridge?’
‘There’s nothing there for me,’ Nadia said, curling up a little tighter in the chair, her eyes still fixed on the photograph she held against her knee.
‘What about your friends?’
‘They’re not my friends any more,’ she said sadly. ‘People like that, they’re your friends as long as you’re the same as them, but when something happens, when you – when your life gets difficult, it’s like they think the bad stuff is catching and they run away from you as fast as they can.’
Ferreira thought about what Mrs Loewe had told her, how Nadia was left to her grief for months. No visits, no calls. It was understandable that she felt like this. And maybe she’d said the same to Sutherland and he’d seen the opportunity to snatch her up out of her isolation. No mother to disapprove of him, no girlfriends to wrinkle their noses and say, ‘But he’s so old, babe.’
‘Mrs Loewe tried to find you,’ Ferreira told her. ‘She’s been really worried about you.’
Nadia chewed on her bottom lip thoughtfully, but didn’t reply, and Ferreira wondered whether things had been so warm at that house as they’d been led to believe. Mrs Loewe hadn’t looked very hard for her after all.
‘The people at Haven House are worried too,’ Ferreira said. ‘Why did you leave there so suddenly?’
‘They told me I could stay as long as I wanted to.’ Still Nadia wouldn’t look at either of them.
Ferreira glanced towards Zigic, saw how troubled he was by her behaviour, how he strained as he sat there, wanting to do something but not knowing what he could do. For all his talk of Nadia being a suspect, Ferreira could see the father rising up in him, the nurturing instinct that was never far from the surface.
‘They were going to help you get sorted, weren’t they?’ Ferreira asked. ‘Find you somewhere to live, get your paperwork all straightened out.’
‘What’s wrong with my paperwork?’ Nadia said, looking up sharply. ‘I was given permission to stay. You can’t just take it away from me. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve just been here, I’ve been studying. What have I done?’
‘We’re not here about your paperwork,’ Zigic said, putting out a calming hand. ‘There’s no problem with it, okay?’
Nadia nodded, a little of her defiance bleeding away.
But it remained in the air between them, a certain heaviness. They were fighting against what they needed to do as police officers, trying to be people first, feeling their way through the impossible contradictions of those two positions.
The longer the three of them sat here the more unavoidably obvious it became that Nadia knew why they were here, too. The anxiety was coming off her in waves, written in the stiff line of her jaw and the way she held a defensive arm across her body, every muscle straining against the urge to run, right down to her toes, which gripped the seat pad.
‘How did you get here, Nadia?’ Ferreira asked.
‘I don’t understand.’ Her voice was tremulous. ‘You mean, how did I get here from Peterborough?’
‘Why are you living with Dr Sutherland?’
She hesitated and Ferreira realised that Sutherland hadn’t considered the possibility of them finding her and asking these questions. Wouldn’t he have warned her? Given her an explanation to pass onto them?
‘I needed a place to stay,’ she said, as if it was that simple.
‘You had somewhere. Haven house.’ Ferreira watched a shutter come down in front of Nadia’s face, but her fingers twitched against the photo frame and her toes flexed against the chair. ‘Did you call Dr Sutherland while you were there?’
Abruptly Nadia got to her feet. ‘I need some water.’
Ferreira followed her to the kitchen at the back of the room, watched her take down a glass from a wooden shelf, hand trembling as she turned the tap. She concentrated on filling the glass, eyes downcast, lips pursed.
‘Why did you have Dr Sutherland’s phone number?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said quietly, bringing the glass to her mouth. ‘He came to find me.’
Ferreira glanced quickly at Zigic, saw the shock on his face.
‘Why did he
