Long Way Home (37 page)

‘Andy’s dead. I’m very sorry.’

Her hands went to her chest. ‘No. He can’t be.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘When? What happened?’

‘Maybe we should do this inside,’ Zigic said softly, moving across the threshold.

She blocked him off, her body filling the narrow gap.

‘No. Tell me what fucking happened to him.’

‘He’s been murdered. There was a fire.’

Her face was blank, eyes wide. ‘Where? This doesn’t make any sense.’

‘On Highbury Street, he –’

‘That shed?’

‘Yes.’

‘The news said it was a Pole or something.’

‘We’ve just received the DNA results,’ Zigic said. ‘It’s Andy. There’s no question now.’

She moved away from the door with small, faltering steps, until she reached the stairs, where she sat down heavily, staring at the pile of shoes kicked off into the corner. The house was a mess, damp towels on the radiator and junk mail on the floor. The walls, painted a chilly blue, were scuffed black here and there, and the zebra-wood laminate was dented and gouged.

‘What was he doing there?’ Tanya Hudson asked.

Zigic closed the front door. ‘We were hoping you might know.’

‘We don’t know anyone over there.’

‘What about Andy’s work?’

‘What about it?’ she snapped.

‘Look, Tanya, we all know Andy wasn’t exactly a saint –’

‘Who the fuck are you to say that?’ She jumped to her feet. ‘My husband’s been murdered and you come round here talking shit about him? Fuck you.’

‘Tanya –’

‘Mrs Hudson.’

‘Mrs Hudson, it’s too late to try and protect your husband’s reputation. We know what he was up to and we’ve arrested the people he was working with.’

‘Ask them then.’

‘They don’t care what happened to Andy,’ Zigic said. ‘Now, what was he doing for them?’

‘Driving. That’s all. He picked the blokes up from the site and took them to work, then he brought them back again. He wasn’t involved with any of that other shit.’

‘But he told you about it?’

She nodded. ‘Tight-fisted bastards paid him eight quid an hour with what they were raking in.’

An alarm sounded and she pushed between them to get to the living room.

It was dimly lit and overheated, the gas fire blasting. Next to it, in an electric wheelchair, was a teenaged boy with Hudson’s dark hair and square head, but the similarity to his father ended there. He was painfully thin and sickly-looking, the left side of his face drooped and immobile, his arm bent at an awkward angle, wrist turned back, fingers in a permanent splay. He watched his mother come towards him, spoke a few mangled words.

Tanya Hudson wiped his chin with a towel.

‘It’s OK, Jake, they’re here to talk to Mummy.’

He threw his head to the right to look at them, more awareness in his bright blue eyes than Zigic expected. Gently, Tanya moved it back again, finding no resistance.

‘Seen enough, have you?’ she said.

They returned to the hallway and Zigic heard her ask the boy what he wanted on television, flicking through the channels until he told her to stop. She said she’d get his dinner in a minute, she just had to talk to Daddy’s friends.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Ferreira whispered, hugging her arms around her body.

‘I don’t know, cerebral palsy maybe.’

Tanya Hudson came out of the living room, closed the door. There were tears in her eyes and Zigic wondered how long she would delay telling the boy about his father, whether she was already trying out the lines in her head, debating lying to save him the pain.
Daddy’s had an accident, sweetheart, he’s with the angels now.

‘Let’s get this over with.’

‘Wednesday morning,’ Zigic said. ‘Did Andy tell you where he was going?’

She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth, eyes closed. ‘We haven’t seen him since last weekend.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think?’ she said, too loud, and glanced at the living-room door. ‘He couldn’t cope with Jake. Alright? He – we – we’re still together but he works a lot of hours. We only see him at the weekend.’

‘Where was he living when he wasn’t here?’

‘He never moved out, we were together,’ she said again, less certainty in her tone. ‘He dossed down where he was working.’

She was lying, or at least evading, Zigic thought. There would be another woman somewhere, another home, without a demanding child and all the problems which went along with caring. Hudson wasn’t bad enough to cut and run, but not good enough to stay and help.

Tanya Hudson wiped a few tears away, set her face hard.

‘I can’t believe this.’

Zigic took the photographs of Jaan and Viktor Stepulov out of his coat pocket.

‘Do you recognise either of these men?’

She gave them a cursory glance. ‘No. Did one of them do it?’

‘This man – Jaan Stepulov – was living in the shed where Andy was killed.’

‘I don’t understand.’ She looked at the photograph again, boring into it, brows drawn down in concentration. ‘What the hell am I going to tell Jake?’

Another transient, Zigic thought, as he got back into the car. What was wrong with these men? They had families but they weren’t involved with them. They lived apart and unconnected and it didn’t seem to bother them. There was no question of responsibility.

He knew he shouldn’t be shocked, it was hardly uncommon, but it bothered him so much he hardly answered Ferreira as she sat speculating in the passenger seat, asking him if he thought Tanya was hiding something. She did, but she thought everyone was, all of the time. She had a streak of cynicism much wider than standard police issue and he guessed it came from how she was raised, living in a precarious situation, surrounded by strangers who came and went, different ones every month; that level of insecurity wasn’t good for kids. You adopted mistrust as a default position.

‘I need food,’ she said. ‘Can you pull into McDonald’s?’

He did, thinking of Andy Hudson and Jaan Stepulov, wondering how they had come to know each other. Was Hudson really just a van driver? He thought Tanya was lying about that, it had seemed impossible that she was so ignorant, but that was before their marital arrangements were out in the open. Now he wasn’t so sure.

There was a long queue at the drive-thru, white vans and fleet cars parked bumper to bumper, revving their engines impatiently. Ferreira went inside while he parked up but came out empty-handed two minutes later, dashed across the car park with her mobile clamped to her ear.

She slid into the passenger seat. ‘We’ve got Hudson’s bachelor pad.’

EMILIA STOOD AT
the bedroom window, watching the River Nene glide by three floors below, murky and diseased-looking. She sipped her vodka, needing to feel the burn of it fill her chest, but it was refusing to comfort her today. It was just as fickle and unreliable as everything else, she realised, throwing the rest of it down.

She checked her phone again, no missed calls, no new messages. Only one person she wanted to hear from.

The waiting was the worst part.

She returned to the window and watched people crossing the Town Bridge, men and women in suits, hurrying into the city centre.

She always thought it would be nice to work in an office, have a computer and a telephone, wear a smart suit and eat her lunch at her desk like the women in adverts did. She wasn’t sure what she would do in an office but she suspected many people who worked in them didn’t know either, just moved pieces of paper around and played with their computers.

Then she thought of the Englishmen who came into Maloney’s. They would be the kind of people she worked with, and if she couldn’t stand them for a few minutes how would she manage eight hours?

It wasn’t an issue now anyway.

Back home she would do bar work again or find a job in a shop.

She remembered a ladies’ shoe shop on Vana-Viru when she was a girl. She never went in, only stood outside and looked in through the plate-glass window at the display, black stiletto heels and ballet flats with buckles on the toes, strappy sandals in the summer and leather boots in the winter; all placed just so on white boxes.

She would like to work somewhere like that.

Somewhere with no men to leer at her. She never wanted to be called love or darling or bitch ever again. Didn’t want to hear another English voice as long as she lived.

She turned away from the window and went to count Skinner’s money again. It was sitting on the bed in neat piles, two thousand five hundred pounds, tens and twenties separate from each other, a lot of fives.

The notes whispered through her fingers, sweaty and grubby, tainted by what she had done to earn them. She stuffed them into an envelope and sealed it. She wouldn’t be sad to pass this money over and let somebody else take possession of its filthy history.

She went into the kitchen and washed her hands with antibacterial soap, came back to the bedroom and checked her phone again.

This waiting was hell.

Tuesday he said. And she thought Tuesday must mean first thing. Nine o’clock. So she called in sick, told Olga she had a bad stomach because it was the only illness which wouldn’t be questioned. Olga said Maloney would not be happy but Emilia was past caring about what he thought.

She had worked her last shift and he didn’t know where to find her, so let him rage and thunder, get all red in the face and smack one of the girls if he felt like it. He wouldn’t lay a finger on her again.

She poured another vodka and took it into the bedroom, started to pack a bag. She would travel light. Enough to look like she was returning home rather than running away.

Her clothes were spread across the bed and she felt a painful twinge as she remembered packing her things the night before she left home, choosing the best clothes she had because she was going to England and she didn’t want to look like a poor foreigner who didn’t know how to dress.

She had a lot of English clothes, she knew what fashionable girls here wore because she bought their cast-offs from a woman on the market who had them sent over in bulk by a brother in London; Topshop and Zara and River Island. She liked River Island the best and that night, sleeping with her bag stowed under her bed so her mother wouldn’t see it, she had dreamed of walking around a huge, brightly lit shopping centre, gathering armfuls of clothes she would buy with her tips.

New clothes, still smelling of the factory, not second-hand things which came with odd receipts in the pockets and packs of gum, the odour of other women’s bodies at the underarms and groins.

As she was folding a pair of skinny black jeans the phone rang.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s ready,’ Skinner said. ‘You want me to come to the pub?’

‘No. I will meet you.’

‘Yours then?’

‘My break is in twenty minutes,’ she said and hoped he didn’t realise that it was too quiet for her to be at Maloney’s. She didn’t want him here again under any circumstances. ‘The Costa in Queensgate. I will meet you there.’

‘Bit public, isn’t it?’ Skinner said. ‘Best come to mine.’

‘No.’

‘Look, I’m not handing this over to you in the middle of a fucking shopping centre.’ He muffled the phone and shouted at someone at his end. ‘Right. This is what we’re gonna do. I’ll pull up round the back of Westgate House, you get it from me there. A black Golf. You know what they look like?’

‘Yes.’

‘Twenty minutes then.’

IT TOOK AN
hour to get a search warrant and another fifteen minutes to drag the letting agent out of his office on Cowgate to open up Andy Hudson’s flat.

The agent – Damon – arrived in a black cashmere overcoat and a three-piece suit, half a pound of flashy Swiss engineering weighing down his wrist when he shook hands with Zigic and Ferreira. He punched a code into the entry system and proceeded to give them a run-down of the benefits of living so close to the centre of town, concentrating his attention on Ferreira, obviously figuring her for an upwardly mobile career woman who needed to be in the middle of things.

‘This location is great for the clubs,’ Damon said. ‘You’re a five-minute cab ride home. There’s the supermarket of course but you look a bit more discerning than that.’

Ferreira rolled her eyes.

‘There’s a great little deli in the arcade,’ he said, ploughing on. ‘I use it all the time. Banging antipasti. And you’re handy for the courthouses, which has got to be a bonus in your line of work.’

‘How long’s Hudson been renting the place?’ Zigic asked.

‘Coming up for a year.’

‘Did you deal with him?’

‘No. One of my colleagues did. I don’t handle the properties in this price range.’

‘Is there anyone else on the lease?’

‘No. Just Mr Hudson.’

He took a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door, ushering them inside like he was showing the place.

‘The views are stunning too.’

Zigic went in ahead and left Ferreira to deal with the formalities, get the key and hand over a receipt for it. He heard Damon still trying to reel her in, talking about a new development on Thorpe Park Road, executive apartments, very exclusive, another one overlooking the park which had just come in; he had a place there himself, maybe she’d like to see it . . .

The living room was decorated like a furnished let, sisal on the floor and a shaggy rug, a cheap brown leather sofa and a single armchair, shelves with nothing on them but a few knick-knacks, the kind you bought from Tesco or Dunelm to make a place look homely; wooden balls in clusters and little boxes covered in shells, every one of them empty when Zigic lifted their lids. There were no books or DVDs, and every photo frame still held the image which had been slipped into it at the factory.

In the kitchen he found a bottle of vodka standing on the drainer next to a lip-stained tumbler.

Hudson had been dead six days but someone had been here since. There were drops of water in the stainless-steel sink and when he opened the fridge he found fresh milk and a loaf of bread still soft to the touch. Someone had restocked since Wednesday.