Long Way Home (20 page)

‘You want to guess how he died?’

‘A fire?’

She shook her head. ‘He was hit by a train. The body’s in pieces apparently. They’ve got most of them, which is something I guess, but he was spread along half a mile of track. The head was undamaged though. Weird how that happens.’

Zigic dropped into a chair on the other side of the desk, a sudden weariness coming over him. They needed Viktor alive. Whatever Jaan Stepulov was killed over seemed inextricably linked with his brother and now there would be no information from that quarter. Last night, lying in bed, staring at a shaft of moonlight cutting up the ceiling, he had begun to wonder if Jaan had found Viktor after all. And the idea had taken hold, a sinuous voice in the darkness, persuading him that Viktor was the nub of this, Viktor who didn’t want to be found, who had always been trouble, always looking for a quick way to make money, dirty or clean. Wasn’t it possible that Jaan had found him and they argued, over something or nothing the way brothers did, and maybe Viktor was their murderer?

This morning he was going to add him to the suspects column. So much for that idea.

‘Where did they find the body?’

Ferreira was rolling a cigarette and she plucked a strand of tobacco from her tongue before she answered. ‘One of the crossings on Holme Fen.’

‘What was he doing out there? It’s the back end of beyond.’

Holme Fen was a desolate spread of black farmland, thousands of acres cut by narrow, winding roads, with deep ditches on either side, fringed by bulrushes, and isolated farmhouses surrounded by crumbling outbuildings and paddocks where a few mangy horses waited for the end. There was a village with around a hundred homes, but it wasn’t the kind of place many migrant workers washed up in, and the pub near the main railway crossing was all farmers and shooting parties; someone like Viktor Stepulov would have been made instantly unwelcome, Zigic guessed.

The second crossing was buried deep in the fen, off the main roads, in a patch of ancient woodland. There was a farm nearby, he thought, but was sure it was derelict. Why would Viktor be there? Miles away from Peterborough. December; not much to be done in the fields, cutting celery perhaps.

‘He must have been working around there somewhere.’

‘The nearest site I can think of’s in Gidding,’ Ferreira said.

They’d investigated a stabbing there a couple of years ago and Zigic remembered the ramshackle farmhouse the gangmaster lived in, a dozen caravans in the field next to it, dirty, broken-looking things up on breeze blocks, net curtains at the windows and washing lines strung between them. When they arrived the gangmaster had their murderer locked up in an old outhouse, badly beaten and covered in the dead man’s blood.

Ferreira’s computer pinged and she flicked her cigarette out of the window quickly, came back to check her email.

A wide smile cracked her face.

‘Got him.’

ZIGIC OFFERED TO
collect Mrs Stepulov from home but she insisted she would drive herself, there was no point him coming all the way over to Spalding to go all the way back, she said. Her voice betrayed nothing when he told her they needed her to formally identify her brother-in-law’s body and when he met her in the cafeteria at Hinchingbrooke hospital he found her calmly flicking through a magazine, a cup of tea on the table in front of her.

‘How did he die?’ she asked, as they rode the lift down to the basement.

‘He was hit by a train.’

‘Drunk again. Stupid man.’

The doors opened onto a chilly white corridor with lino the colour of offal and strip lights encased in mottled Perspex. A moth was trapped inside one of them, batting furiously against the heat of the bulb, the sound very loud in the hush. The scent of pine cleaning fluid was sharp in the air and Mrs Stepulov wrinkled her nose at it.

‘Did Jaan know about this?’

‘No,’ Zigic said. ‘He couldn’t have.’

Their footsteps echoed along the corridor and Zigic became aware of her pace slowing as they approached the silver swing doors. She switched her handbag from one shoulder to the other and straightened her quilted jacket. She wore a light pink uniform underneath, a name tag on her chest from the nursing home at which she worked. In the cafeteria she had said they’d told her to take as long as she needed. They weren’t paying her to be away, what did they care?

‘Last night I think Viktor maybe . . .’ She stopped dead.

‘What, Mrs Stepulov?’

She shook her hair out of her eyes. ‘I think maybe he kill Jaan.’

‘That’s not possible. Viktor’s been dead three months.’

She looked at her feet, pressed her lips together and for a few long seconds her face held an unreadable expression. It would have been an unpleasant explanation, but understandable, and Zigic imagined she was stuck now, between relief and fresh uncertainty. Everyone wanted closure in these situations, no matter what the immediate emotional cost.

‘I am ready,’ she said finally.

There was a small lounge next to the mortuary, pale green walls and a two-seater sofa with hard cushions, a low coffee table with a vase of plastic flowers and an empty tissue box in front of it. A flat screen hung on the opposite wall. It could have been anywhere if it wasn’t for the atmosphere, a strange, airless quality created by all of those moments of held breath and hope and then the screen would come to life and you would see a corpse on it, breaking the thin illusion of normality.

‘Could you wait here please, Mrs Stepulov?’

‘We are not going to see Viktor?’

‘The identification is done on-screen,’ Zigic said. ‘You don’t have to see the body. If you want to you can, but there’s no need.’

‘I want to see.’

He nodded. ‘If you could wait though, I have to talk to the attendant first.’

She perched on the edge of the sofa, handbag clasped on her knees, back very straight.

Zigic went into the mortuary. It was still and empty, the same pine scent so thick he could taste it, but there was another smell here, stronger than it could mask, meat and shit and chemicals, and Zigic was half convinced he was imagining it because the bodies were all stowed away and every surface was sparkling clean.

He went to the office, the door standing open.

The attendant was a gangly young man with red hair standing spiked on his head and heavily freckled skin. He had his earphones in, bleeding tinny music while he played some game on his computer, entirely absorbed by it.

Zigic rapped on the door. Nothing.

You probably shouldn’t sneak up on people who worked in mortuaries, he thought, and pounded the door again, hard enough to get attention this time.

The young man swivelled away from his desk and pulled out his earphones. He was wearing a T-shirt with ‘Capitalism Kills’ printed across the front.

‘What can I do you for?’

‘Detective Zigic. You spoke to my colleague earlier.’

‘You’re here for the train man?’ He stood up, stuck his hand out. ‘Chris. We’ve been wondering when someone would come for him. Real mess. Mess like you wouldn’t believe. But you step in front of a train it’s not going to be pretty, is it?’

‘The sister-in-law wants to see the body.’

‘Why?’ He went over to the bank of stainless-steel drawers, twenty of them, humming softly and chilling the air. ‘Does she want to make sure he’s dead or something?’

‘You better tone this shit down when she comes in.’

‘Alright, I’m a professional, you know.’

‘Act like one then.’

He opened one of the drawers, pulled it halfway out. Viktor Stepulov made an odd shape inside the body bag, flattened and incomplete-looking.

‘How much of him’s in there?’

‘Everything they managed to scrape up. The head’s totally intact, you’d never guess what happened to him. You want to take a look before you bring her in?’

Zigic gestured for him to open it up and braced himself for the worst. He’d seen the result of enough car crashes to know the human body didn’t come out of them well, and despite what Chris said he was expecting damage. Mortuary workers were a sadistic breed.

‘See what I mean?’

Viktor Stepulov’s head was almost untouched. His skin had taken on the usual waxy cast and his eyelids were held closed with tape but if that was all he’d seen Zigic would have guessed he’d died without violence. Then he looked lower, saw a right shoulder but not a left one and the abrupt termination below his collarbone, the wound raw and uneven, a mess of purple and red and very white bones splintered and shattered.

‘Let’s see the rest of him.’

Chris pulled the drawer out further, unzipped the bag the rest of the way.

Viktor Stepulov had been reassembled as far as possible but there were gaps and his body reminded Zigic of a skeleton in an anatomy class, hung together but disconnected. The rest of his right arm was there, the left one cleanly severed, wiry black hair on it, an old scar above the elbow. Most of his torso was missing and what they’d recovered of his hips and stomach was badly damaged, twisted and cracked, pulp held together by skin, coils of slick intestines. His legs were relatively unscathed though, thick and powerful-looking until you reached the left shin. The bone was broken and it stuck out through his skin at a forty-five-degree angle, somehow more painful-looking than everything else. The flesh around it was swollen up and tinged with incipient bruising.

‘This didn’t happen when the train hit him,’ Zigic said. ‘The bruising looks hours old.’

‘That’s probably why he couldn’t get out of the way. Breaks his leg, drags it after him . . . you’re not going anywhere very fast like that.’

‘What did the pathologist make of it?’

‘He’s not been PM’d,’ Chris said. ‘He was hit by a train.’

‘Well, what about the coroner’s report?’

‘Off the top of my head? Are you serious?’

Zigic swore under his breath, took a final look at the break in Viktor Stepulov’s leg, wondering how that got overlooked.

‘Alright, make this presentable. I’ll fetch Mrs Stepulov.’

He returned to the small green lounge and she gathered herself slowly. She had removed her quilted jacket in the overheated room, and she folded it carefully over her arm before she left, walking with a firm step and a hard expression on her face, steeled for what was to come.

Zigic paused with one hand on the door. ‘I should warn you, Viktor’s body is – it isn’t complete, do you understand?’

‘He is hit by train, of course I understand. I am nurse, you think I don’t see these things?’

She shoved through the doors and went straight to the open drawer. Viktor’s head was the only thing visible now, the body bag zipped tight up to his jaw.

‘Yes. This is Viktor.’ She turned to Zigic. ‘Why is he here? Where did he die?’

‘On Holme Fen.’

‘Where is this?’

‘A few miles outside Peterborough,’ Zigic said. ‘Did he know people there?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Did he mention a job there maybe? Did Jaan?’

She shook her head. ‘We do not know this place.’

There was paperwork to sign and she signed it in a flowing hand, businesslike and unquestioning, but as they left she asked to see Viktor one more time and when the bag was unzipped she hesitated for moment, then placed her hand on his forehead and gently kissed his eyes.

IT WAS THE
quietest Ferreira had ever seen Maloney’s. Quarter past ten and only a few of the tables were taken, men who looked like they’d just got off a coach, drinking beers and eating fry-ups off massive oval plates. The smell of bacon and sausages filled the place, good enough to make her think she could force something down herself.

Maloney was sitting alone at his regular corner table, studying a copy of the
Racing Post
, a pot of coffee on a tray in front of him and a cigarette smoking itself on a saucer. So much for the ban.

The girls were doing all of the work, shuttling between the kitchen and the customers, clearing away plates and wiping down the tables, a couple of them restocking the fridges behind the bar while a third, a new girl she thought, dusted the rows of optics, making sure they sparkled.

Maloney glanced up as a fruit machine paid out in a riot of clank and jangle, a look of annoyance flitting across his face. He noticed Ferreira then and waved her over.

‘Got any tips for me?’ she asked, pointing at his paper.

‘You don’t want to get started on this game, Sergeant. She’ll bleed you white.’ He closed the paper and folded it neatly in half, took off his gold-rimmed reading glasses. ‘Any news on Stepi?’

‘We’re getting there.’ Ferreira sat down on one of the blue velveteen stools.

Maloney whistled sharply. ‘Olga, bring the sergeant a cup, there’s a good girl. I heard you arrested Andrus Tombak.’

‘Is there anything you don’t hear, Maloney?’

‘We’re the centre of Peterborough society,’ he said, that infuriating glimmer in his eye. ‘Tombak’s a piece of work, wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was behind it. Wouldn’t get his hands dirty of course, man hasn’t got the graft in him to kill someone. Be one of his workers.’

‘You want to give me a name?’

‘Just speculating.’

They were running the records of Tombak’s tenants, but it was slow going, foreign police forces to deal with, obscure protocols and strange working hours, the language barrier not so much of an issue as they feared, but the list was long and already Wahlia had identified two men who were in England on stolen passports, the original owners still in the old country, minding their own business, when Stepulov was murdered.

Olga came over and placed a cup and saucer on the table, poured coffee from the pot without being told and asked Maloney if there was anything else, an edge in her voice which made him grin. Then he slapped her on the backside and told her to put the big screen on.

‘She’s a diamond that one,’ he said, watching her walk away. ‘Grandmother sold her to a couple of Kosovans – you imagine such a thing? Old mare wanted a few more acres of land to graze her goats on and these fellas said they’d see her right. Fourteen years old she was, a child.’