Huge, gushing thanks first, and always, to my fabulous editor Alison Hennessey, who has been integral in shaping the finished book you hold in your hands now. Without her wisdom and guidance it would be much the lesser story and I count myself incredibly lucky to have her on my side.
It’s been my pleasure and privilege to work with an energetic, warm and endlessly enthusiastic team at Harvill Secker and Vintage. Heartfelt thanks to Maria, Vicki, Bethan, Anna and Áine, along with everyone else behind the scenes who helped turn those sheets of loose paper into a finished book. And then took such wonderful care bringing it onto the shelves and out to readers.
The crime scene is notorious for its supportive nature – as well as its hard drinking, filthy humour and general all round magnificence – and like most authors, I find myself drawing on the hive mind for practical advice and moral support throughout the writing year. In a solitary profession knowing friends are just a click away makes all the difference. I couldn’t begin to name everyone but you know who you are and big thanks to you all.
Special honours to Nick Quantrill, Jay Stringer and Luca Veste, who have kept me sane, laughing and fully appraised of developments in lower league football. They say it’s rare to make proper, lasting friendships as adults but only because they haven’t met you boys.
Thanks as well to all those in the blogging and reviewing community who have generously given their time and expertise to read early copies of this and all the previous books. Your support is so important to writers and, as a reader, you’ve led me to many brilliant authors too. There are just too many to name but please know I am deeply grateful to you for helping Zigic and Ferreira find their audience.
The highlight of the bookish year has to be festival season and I owe massive thanks to the teams at Bloody Scotland, Book Week Scotland, Edinburgh Book Festival, ChipLitFest, Essex Book Festival and Noirwich for allowing me on their stages and giving me the very best excuse to slip away from work. If you’ve been thinking about attending any of these marvellous events, think no longer – book those tickets and go enjoy!
Finally, to my family, thank you for the shopping trips and lazy lunches and the occasional bolts of crazy inspiration. Love you guys.
Long Way Home
Tell No Tales
After You Die
Eva Dolan is an Essex-based copywriter and intermittently successful poker player. Shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for unpublished authors when she was just a teenager, the first novels in her series starring two detectives from the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit, Long Way Home and Tell No Tales were published to widespread critical acclaim. Tell No Tales was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year and the third in the series, After You Die, was longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.
The body is found by the river, near a spot popular with runners.
With a serial rapist at work in the area, DI Zigic and DS Ferreira are initially confused when the Hate Crimes unit are summoned to the scene. Until they discover that the victim, Corinne Sawyer, was born Colin Sawyer.
Police records and interviews with a local support group, the Trans Sisters, reveal there have been violent attacks on trans women in the local area. Was Corinne a victim of mistaken identity – killed in a blind rage by the serial rapist when he realised what her clothes and surgery had initially concealed from him – or has the person who has attacked other trans women stepped up their campaign of violence? With tensions running high, and the force coming under national scrutiny, this is a complex case and any mistake made could be fatal…
‘Is that you or me?’ Ferreira asked, not enough energy to lift her head from the pillow and check the source of the ringing.
A warm hand curled around her middle and cupped her breast. ‘I think it’s you.’
‘It sounds like mine.’
‘It’s on your side.’
‘Must be then.’ She reached out blindly and patted the table, brushing a condom wrapper onto the floor, finding her lip balm and a handful of change, and finally came up with the phone, swiped her thumb across the screen to answer. ‘What?’
‘Sir?’
She swore and rolled over, holding out Adams’s phone, mouthed, ‘Yours.’
He grinned at her, one eye stuck shut and his face sleep-creased, giving him a distinctly untrustworthy look. The stubble didn’t help, or the yellow smear of a healing black eye he’d picked up last week when a suspect kicked off in an interview room.
‘I’m not on today,’ he said, holding her gaze as he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, his thumb brushing circles around her nipple.
Abruptly his hand stopped and his mouth set into a hard line.
‘Where was this?’
He kicked off the duvet and jumped out of bed, fully alert now, already straightening up into detective chief inspector mode as he paced in front of the window.
‘Who found the body?’
Ferreira watched him move, saw the scratch marks she’d left on his buttocks, dug deep through his light tan. The sight of them made her twitch, remembering how he’d grunted as her hips bucked, his fingers in her hair, quickening breaths on her throat, and she wanted him back in bed, could have knocked him down and fucked him where he fell.
‘Any witnesses?’
The corpse wasn’t getting any deader. Maybe she could draw him back between the sheets. She didn’t have to be in for another hour. All quiet in Hate Crimes, just a couple of low-level harassments rumbling on, minor assaults with no suspects, and an attempted murderer they were trying to track down with little expectation of flushing him out.
‘Sounds like our man,’ Adams said wearily, turning and catching her eye, giving a slight shrug of apology or regret. ‘I’ll be there in twenty.’
He tossed his phone down on the windowsill.
‘You’re lucky that wasn’t Murray,’ he said. ‘She’d have recognised your voice for sure.’
‘I said one word.’
‘She’d have made you.’
‘Be more careful where you leave your phone then,’ Ferreira told him.
He leaned across the bed, the smile back in place, wide and hungry. ‘If Riggott finds out about this you’ll be for it.’
‘You’re the superior officer, I’ll say you took advantage of me.’
‘Nah, the old man knows you better than that.’ He kissed her. ‘I’ll tell him you were using me to improve your chances of promotion.’
Ferreira flicked her eyebrow up at him. ‘Climbing the greasy pole?’
He groaned. ‘Let’s find a better name for my boy than that.’
Adams went into the bathroom and switched the shower on, started whistling as he took a piss and Ferreira rolled her eyes. Such an old-man thing to do. There was twelve years between them but it was easy to forget when he made so much effort with his appearance, an almost laughable amount for a copper: the eye cream and the yoga and juicing. Balancing out all the long hours and vices that the job forced on you, the accretion of other people’s suffering which left a mark more persistent than your own ones did.
The thought sent her calves itching and she slipped one leg out from under the duvet, looked at the scars which she’d discovered reacted to cold weather more than hot, irritated when she was tired or run-down or emotional, like they were psychic wounds rather than physical ones now.
Thirty-six individual puncture marks, stabbed into her legs as one of her former colleagues detonated a bomb vest packed with shrapnel, wanting a swift and glorious end to his racially motivated terror campaign.
She still thought about him, but not so often and not so brutally.
At least the scars were finally beginning to fade. Helped by some mossy-smelling oil she’d bought at the Chinese herbalist in Westgate arcade. She knew they’d never heal completely, though, and the prospect of showing her skin still filled her with dread.
Adams didn’t mind. He had scars of his own and when they were together the backs of her legs were the last thing either of them considered.
It wasn’t a good enough excuse to get her out of trouble if Riggott did find out about them. ‘We’re fucking because he’s the only man I trust not to judge the state I’m in.’ The DCS might feel a flicker of sympathy but rules were rules and like most people who broke them he wouldn’t hesitate to punish anyone else who did the same.
Worry about it when it happens, she told herself, burrowing back down under the cover. They’d been careful, she didn’t work directly under him, this was an easily containable situation as long as they kept it casual.
The shower went silent and a few minutes later he returned to the bedroom, snagged his jeans off the floor and stepped into them.
‘You need to get a cleaner,’ he said. ‘There’s so much limescale on that shower door it looks frosted.’
‘I don’t want someone going through my stuff.’
‘Mel, if you don’t get a cleaner in here soon it won’t be safe for someone to touch your stuff. You’ll need a fucking decontamination company.’
It wasn’t like the place was actually dirty. A bit messy, maybe. She knew she could do with picking some of the clothes up, putting a wash in. But the floors were laminate and she was sure you didn’t need to vacuum that or anything.
‘I’ll give you my cleaner’s number.’ He pulled on his shirt. ‘You’ll have to tidy up before she comes round though.’
‘Might as well do it myself then.’
He sat down on the bed to put his shoes on. ‘Or you could call your mum, I’m sure she’d love to keep tidying up after you. Give her a key, she can come round whenever she wants. She might even do your washing.’
‘Shut up.’ Ferreira aimed a lazy kick at his shoulder. ‘What’s the rush, anyway?’
‘Dead jogger in Ferry Meadows,’ he said, retrieving his phone. ‘Strangled.’
‘This your serial rapist?’
‘It’s his stamping ground.’ A look of contempt twisted Adams’s face. ‘Early morning, lone woman with her earphones in … yeah, I reckon. Can’t say we weren’t expecting the bastard to escalate but I thought we had more time. Fuck, it’s only been a couple of weeks since the last one.’
Ferreira frowned, seeing how edgy he was. ‘They get sloppy when they escalate. Might be you find something this time.’
‘Maybe.’ He started out of the bedroom, stopped on the threshold. ‘I’ll call you later, okay?’
‘Sure.’
The front door slammed and she lay back staring up at the ceiling. He was going to be raging tonight. They’d discussed the case already, spent hours talking it around, and part of her thought it was unhealthy how quickly they’d settled into a routine of venting at each other, something slightly sick that minutes after the sex was over their minds turned to crime. The other, less moral, part of her had already realised the sex was better when it came off the back of a bad day. All of that anger and frustration looking for an outlet.
Ferreira climbed out of bed and twisted her hair up into a ponytail, kicking the dumped clothes into a rough pile she would deal with when she got home. There was a single pair of knickers in the drawer so she guessed the situation was approaching crisis point.
She stood under the shower for a long time, the heat lifting the smell of him out of her pores, idly wondering how much messier the flat could get before he refused to step foot in it. Much worse, she decided. All he really needed was a clear channel between the front door and the bed.
Once she was dried off and dressed she shoved a load of whites into the washing machine, thinking how much easier it had been living back at her parents’ pub. There, clothes miraculously disappeared from her bedroom floor and returned neatly ironed and folded, a cleaner came in twice a week and there was never an empty coffee packet in the cupboard like the one she found now.
They couldn’t understand why she’d wanted to move out. Between them her parents came up with endless arguments, mostly centred on the cost, which she could easily cover, and the isolation, which is what she wanted more than anything else.
Not isolation: privacy.
Quiet.
The first few nights in the flat she’d found herself missing the babble and thrum she’d grown used to. Music and voices coming through the floor, lulling her to sleep. But not any more, now she luxuriated in the silence and the knowledge that when she closed the front door nobody would wander in unannounced.
Standing at the fake-wood counter in the kitchen she ate an almost black banana, looking down at the road three storeys beneath her, where a few people with briefcases and satchels were heading into the offices along Priestgate.
She’d need to go shopping after work. Put something in the cupboards besides that bag of pasta and the cereal she didn’t have milk for. She kept meaning to set up a regular delivery but with work so unpredictable it was impossible to arrange a time she’d definitely be home.
All that could wait; right now she needed coffee.
There were five cafes within a minute’s walk – one of the factors which swung the place for her – and she was in Caffè Nero paying for her triple shot Americano when her mobile rang.
‘Mel, you up?’
‘Can’t you hear the jazz?’ she asked, speaking loud enough to be heard above the music pumping out of the speakers overhead. ‘Do you think I’d have that on at home?’
‘I need you to get to Ferry Meadows.’ Zigic’s voice was strained, the sound of engine noise under it. ‘We’ve got a body.’
She almost slipped, told him it was Adams’s case, but caught herself in time.
‘On my way.’
It was a morning for finding corpses, Zigic thought, as he walked towards the metal bridge that spanned the Nene. Clouds were gathering from the west, black and boulder-like, the charred and meaty smell of the crematorium in Marholm blowing in on the rising wind, strong enough to taint the sweetness of green shoots and damp grass.
A few onlookers were hanging around on the platform of the small Victorian railway station which served the decommissioned track running alongside the river. It was a tourist attraction now, saw only steam trains offering Agatha Christie afternoons or rides on Thomas the Tank Engine. They’d brought the boys last summer, Milan already too old to enjoy it, Stefan so hyper he’d been sick.
‘Hey, hold up!’
He turned and saw Ferreira running towards him, bag slung across her body under her jacket, banging against her thigh. She tossed a cigarette butt away as she drew closer to him.
‘You look knackered,’ she said.
‘Thanks.’
‘Emily still keeping you up?’
Zigic started off across the bridge and she fell in step beside him. ‘She’s going to be a night owl, judging by her sleeping pattern.’
‘Can’t you give her something?’
He smiled. ‘Whisky in her late feed?’
‘I don’t know, like baby Night Nurse or something?’
‘They don’t make Night Nurse for babies.’
‘Oh.’
Despite the fact that she’d helped raise her own brothers, four of them all younger than her, she knew almost nothing about babies. Still, she was making an effort and it was funny watching her try to talk about something she clearly wasn’t that interested in. Not as funny as the look on Anna’s face when he took home the Che Guevara Babygro Ferreira had bought for Emily.
‘Why are we here?’ she asked.
‘All Adams said was he thinks it’s one of ours.’
‘Have they got an ID already?’
‘Not that he told me.’
They ducked under the tape and followed the path single file as it narrowed, Zigic pushing branches aside, noticing the broken glass and discarded condoms. Orton Mere was notorious for cruising but not this stretch, as far as he knew, and he wondered if there were witnesses who’d scarpered, scared of having to explain what they were doing there.
The tent was just ahead of them, a block of white erected in the sparsely planted copse to their right, eight or ten metres away from the path. Suited forensics officers were searching the ground around it, bagging and tagging, plucking things from the mess of last year’s leaves, the mud and wind-blown rubbish.
Adams was waiting for them, suited up, hood pushed back to reveal a flushed face, dark hair plastered to his skull.
He held two more up, prepared for their arrival.
‘You look like shit, Ziggy.’
‘Noted.’
‘He’s not getting much sleep,’ Ferreira said, pulling on her suit.
‘Paying the daddy tax?’
‘She’s worth it.’
Zigic got dressed, tugged on the plastic foot covers which were never quite big enough and followed them into the tent. They stayed near the doorway, well clear of the body which showed signs of attention from forensics, hands in clear bags, areas of the ground in small cordons, coloured tags flagging each of them for further examination.
‘Who’s on this?’ he asked.
‘O’Mara.’
‘Where’s Jenkins?’
‘Skiing,’ Adams said. ‘I tried calling her back but you can imagine what kind of response that got.’
Zigic wanted to move closer but knew better.
The woman was flat on her front, damaged face turned towards them. Her nose had been broken, cheekbone too, Zigic thought, but he didn’t need a pathologist’s report to tell him the most likely cause of death was strangulation. He could see the white wire of a pair of earphones hanging at her throat and the marks it had left behind, the scratches she’d clawed into her skin there too, desperate and painful-looking.
‘What makes you think this is one for us?’ Zigic asked. ‘Do you have an ID? Is she already on the system?’
‘I don’t recognise her,’ Ferreira said.
‘Not “her”,’ Adams said. ‘“Him”.’
They turned as one. ‘What?’
‘Yeah, I didn’t see it either until the doc told me. He comes down, takes a quick shufti at her, notices the size of her wrists – she was big-boned girl considering how skinny she looks – starts making that fucking whistling noise he does when he wants you to know he’s on to something.’
‘I hate that,’ Ferreira said, inching towards the body, peering at the corpse. ‘It’s like, just tell us already.’
‘So then he clocks the scars behind her ears, full facelift he reckons.’ Adams shrugged. ‘Then the old bastard squats down and peeks into her leggings … we’ve got a “him”.’
Zigic stared at Adams for a few long seconds, waiting for him to crack a smile and admit it was a wind-up. He wouldn’t put it past the DCI.
He wasn’t smiling, though; he was watching Ferreira take another tentative step towards the body.
‘I don’t know … she looks like a woman.’
‘Well, you’re going to have to take my word for it.’
Zigic thought he detected a slight heaviness at the woman’s brow, a coarseness to her hair which looked wrong somehow.
But it was nothing you’d pick up on from a distance.
‘How did her attacker know she was actually a man?’ he asked.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong here,’ Adams said. ‘But you had a trans woman attacked last year, didn’t you?’
Ferreira glanced back across her shoulder. ‘Yeah, she was beaten up pretty bad.’
‘And you’re suggesting this is the same man?’ Zigic asked. ‘You’ve got a serial rapist attacking joggers – she’s far more likely to be another of his victims.’
‘Nope, she’s too old,’ Adams said. ‘A good twenty years too old, I reckon.’
‘He wouldn’t know that until he got close to her.’
‘For Christ’s sake.’ Ferreira straightened up. ‘What, neither of you want to deal with this?’
‘I want her dealt with right,’ Adams said firmly, giving her a warning look she absorbed with only the barest blush. ‘Now, my particular sadistic piece of shit uses a knife, okay? He wants compliance so the first thing he does – always – is nick the back of their necks so they know he’s serious. We’ve not got that here.’
Zigic rubbed his face, already getting impatient.
Three hours’ sleep last night, five the night before, and he was stuck listening to a man he basically loathed explain why he was going to hand over a challenging case which had no place in Hate Crimes.
He should have applied for extended paternity leave. He could be at home now, dozing on the sofa, Emily soundly asleep in her cot. Because of course she slept while he was at work.
‘So, what do we see?’ Adams asked. ‘No disturbance of clothing. No cut. And a victim who’s not only too old to be a target but she’s also got the wrong hair colour. Our man always targets brunettes.’ He pointed at Ferreira. ‘Mel, no running along the river, yeah?’
She scowled at him.
‘Maybe your guy only realised what he was dealing with after he’d knocked her down,’ Ferreira said. ‘Her hair’s covered, he wouldn’t have been able to see her face from behind. So, what does he see? A great pair of legs and good arse, which you don’t often get on older women.’
Zigic cringed internally, wanted to remind her that Adams was technically their boss and needed to be afforded a degree of respect even if it was entirely fake.
She kept going though.
‘He takes her down, she shouts at him, maybe she reverts to her male voice and he realises he’s made a major fuck-up.’ Ferreira’s hands wheeled in front of her. ‘Then what’s he going to do? He’s probably already aroused. He’s got a hard-on for another man. He won’t be able to deal with that head fuck, so he has to kill her. Maybe that’s why he’s escalated now.’
Adams sighed and Zigic prepared to weigh in in support of the theory, take some of the heat off Ferreira, but the sigh turned into a nod.
‘You might have something there,’ Adams said. ‘Yeah, I don’t hate that explanation at all.’
‘So you’ll keep it in CID, then?’ Zigic asked.
‘No.’
‘What? That’s a perfectly workable theory.’ Zigic turned to Ferreira, who was walking around the body now. ‘Mel, for God’s sake don’t stand on anything.’
‘I’m being careful.’
He blinked away the grittiness under his eyelids, knowing that his fatigue was making the conversation feel so off-kilter, like the two of them were dancing around something he wasn’t quite grasping.
Focus.
‘Who found her?’
‘Old girl out walking her dog,’ Adams said. ‘I’ve sent her in to give a statement but sounds like she didn’t see anything.’
Ferreira had moved to the woman’s feet, looking at her trainers.
‘Did he drag her away from the path or was she running off-piste?’
‘We’ve got drag marks.’ Adams gestured somewhere away beyond the tent’s walls ‘Must have been strong, whoever did it.’
Zigic went back out of the tent, into the fresh air and the fine drizzle which had begun to fall, turned his face up into it as he shrugged out of the plastic coverall. He could hear Adams and Ferreira still talking inside and wondered why she thought she could change his mind. Wondered too why Adams put up with her being so blunt. He had a mixed reputation around the station, was one of those polarising inspectors who inspired loathing or blind adoration from his officers but nothing in between.
A minute later they were both out too, stripping off their suits.
‘You get why this needs to be in Hate Crimes, right?’ Adams said, slightly less aggressively now. ‘A murdered transwoman, we can’t have any mistakes. Someone makes a stupid slip of the tongue and we’re going to be accused of prejudice against the LGBTQ community. How’s that going to look?’
Zigic nodded agreement, thinking that yet again they were being used for PR purposes. He knew Adams was right but it didn’t mean he had to like it.
‘It’s not going to look great if it turns out this was a CID case that got passed down to us in error, either.’
‘That’s why I’m sending Murray over to you. She’s been leading on the serial rapes, so she’s totally up to speed. We’ll have her liaise, work it from that angle. That way nothing gets missed.’
‘And Riggott’s good with this?’ Zigic asked.
‘I’ll square it with him,’ Adams said confidently. And why not, he was Riggott’s hand-picked successor according to the station rumour mill. ‘You’ll want to get a jump on the press with this, too.’
‘I’ll do that.’ Zigic meant it to come out cold but all he heard was exhaustion in his voice.
A shout went up from the cordon and a couple of seconds later a PC came running towards them, one hand on his belt, the other at his radio, jogging along like he didn’t do that as often as he needed to.
‘Sir.’ He looked to Adams. ‘Woman here wants to speak to you, says she knows the victim.’
Adams stepped back, swept both hands towards Zigic.
‘You’re up, Ziggy.’
They had a name – Corinne Sawyer.
That was all they managed to get from her girlfriend before she crumpled to the ground at the edge of the cordon. She knew something was wrong, Corinne should have been home an hour earlier, was never late, always ran the same route, was always back by eight sharp. She kept repeating the words, I knew, I knew it.
Ferreira drove her home to a village a few minutes from Ferry Meadows, followed her mumbled directions past a small shop and onto a narrow lane with two churches facing each other down; they needed a lot of religion here apparently. The cottage they stopped at was built close onto the lane, a white-painted place with a thatched roof recently redone, a woven fox slinking along its apex.
A nice house, Ferreira thought as she got out of the car, eyeing the potted box plants either side of the low front door and the wooden shutters closed across the windows. The dead woman was a right fit for it.
The girlfriend … she wasn’t so sure.
Sam Hyde hadn’t moved from the passenger seat and Ferreira opened the door to coax her out.
She was much younger than Corinne, mid-twenties, but scruffy and plain, dressed in pyjamas with a raincoat thrown over the top. She had an unremarkable face overpowered by heavy black-framed glasses and red hair razed in a brutal undercut. Hardly the trophy girlfriend you’d expect an affluent older woman to have, and a cynical voice in Ferreira’s head asked if that meant anything.
It was too early to make judgements but they seemed like a mismatched couple and that always pricked Ferreira’s suspicions.
Sam Hyde unlocked the front door, jiggling the key with a practised movement and then shoving it open. That would be what they called period charm, Ferreira guessed.
Inside, the hallway was larger than she expected, big enough for a console table covered in photographs and a painted wooden pew piled with coats and bags, shoes kicked off underneath it. She followed Sam Hyde through a living room done out in ox blood and leather, curtains drawn, the debris of the night before still scattered about, into a surprisingly large and modern kitchen extension at the back of the house.
‘Am I supposed to offer you tea?’ Sam Hyde asked, voice dull and flat with the shock.
‘I’ll make it,’ Ferreira said.
‘I don’t want one.’ Sam put a hand to her throat. ‘I don’t think I can swallow.’
Ferreira led her over to a long oak table and made her sit down, told her it was a natural reaction, not to panic, it was just the shock.
‘I don’t understand how this happened. Corinne was strong.’
‘There was probably very little she could have done to defend herself,’ Ferreira said, not wanting to give away too much information.
‘But she was a fighter.’
‘Did she need to be a fighter?’
A grim smile tightened Sam’s face. ‘What do you think? You saw her. Do you think she’s been living an easy life?’
‘All I saw was a very well put together woman.’
‘Shame more people don’t think like that.’
Ferreira took a breath, aware of how delicate this was. ‘Has there been any indication that Corinne might have been in danger?’
‘From who?’
‘You have someone in mind?’
Sam’s gaze drifted away, towards the garden beyond the long glass wall, a wide expanse of empty lawn, nothing to see but a few birds and a tabby cat in hunting mode.
‘There was a fight,’ Sam said. ‘Last night at the club.’
‘What club?’
‘The Meadham. They have a trans night once a month. Corinne always goes.’
Ferreira knew the place. An elegant old Georgian town house a minute’s walk from her flat. It had been converted into a private members’ club, not the kind of clientele for brawls, she thought.
‘Were you there when this happened?’
‘No, I usually go with Corinne but I wasn’t feeling too hot so she went alone. It’s always the same crowd, I wasn’t missing anything.’ Sam wiped at her face, the tears were still coming, but she was moving from the intense first flush of shock into the numbness stage.
‘Corinne said it was something of nothing.’ Sam frowned, fingers turning around the heavy silver ring she wore on her index finger. ‘But … I just got the feeling she was lying.’
‘Why would she lie?’
‘Because I worry about her.’
‘What did she tell you?’
Sam looked up to the vaulted ceiling. ‘Some bloke was giving her verbals. Her and another woman. Corinne said she slapped him down.’
‘Physically?’
‘Verbally. She’d got a sharp mouth on her.’ Sam smiled. ‘I loved that about her.’ The smile faded slowly. ‘But I think she was lying. I noticed bruises on her arm when she was getting undressed. I think he went for her.’
She took off her glasses. Her eyes were smaller without them, not as puffy and red as they’d looked before.
‘This man would be unlikely to have known Corinne’s regular run,’ Ferreira pointed out. ‘Unless she knew him. Did she know him?’
‘She told me he was just a drunk,’ Sam said.
‘We’ll look into it,’ Ferreira assured her. ‘Who did know Corinne’s routine?’
‘Our neighbours, I suppose. Her family. She was a health freak, always had been. That’s why she looked so amazing.’
The doorbell sounded, chiming through the house, and Ferreira went to let Zigic in. He stood with his hand braced against the frame, staring at the ground.
‘What’s wrong?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing, just tired.’
‘I’ll keep the lead, then. Alright?’
‘Go for it.’
He trudged into the house and looked around the place with heavy eyes. He’d seemed okay at the scene but now she wasn’t sure he was up to working the vital first day of the case. Maybe she could sneak into the evidence locker at the station, find him some uppers.
Sam Hyde was still sitting where Ferreira had left her and she gave Zigic the briefest glance as he sat down opposite her.
‘This is Detective Inspector Zigic,’ Ferreira said. ‘He’ll be leading the investigation into Corinne’s murder.’
Sam Hyde nodded, seemingly unimpressed by the figure he was cutting in his crumpled jumper and rain-spattered parka.
‘Have you had any trouble with your neighbours?’ Ferreira asked.
Sam’s face twisted briefly. ‘Not trouble trouble.’
‘But?’
‘We’re not a typical couple,’ she said. ‘Not around here. They’re like, really vanilla, and we stand out, I guess. When we moved in last year one woman seemed really happy she’d got a pair of token lesbians to add to her social circle.’
‘You’re not though, are you? Corinne was still—’
‘Yeah, she still had a cock,’ Sam said, hardness coming into her voice. ‘But she didn’t get it out at social gatherings.’
Ferreira apologised quickly and Sam waved it off.
‘No, I’m sorry. This is all …’ She pressed her fingers to her mouth, squeezed her eyes shut. ‘You need to ask. I get that. Corinne was transitioning. She was living as a woman full-time, she’d had most of the surgery, the cosmetic stuff, but she had to spend a year as a woman before she could have the gender reassignment done.’
‘How was she doing with that?’ Ferreira asked.
‘Fine. Brilliantly.’ Sam’s face brightened. ‘It’s what she always wanted. Corinne was a woman, you have to understand that. She knew when she was four years old that she was a girl. She’d been living a lie ever since and now she was finally getting to be the woman she knew she was. It was like, I don’t even know how to explain it, like she existed at last.’
‘Why did she wait so long?’ Zigic asked. ‘For the surgery.’
The light went out of Sam’s face. ‘Her wife. Nina. That’s why she waited, because that crazy bitch wouldn’t even let her have control over her own body. That’s who you should be talking to. She couldn’t let her go. She wanted to break Corinne.’
Corinne Sawyer’s photograph went at the top of the new murder board. It was the one they’d use for the press, showing her happy and attractive, unquestionably feminine, the kind of victim the public could warm to, whose killer they would want to see punished.
Zigic stood back while DC Bobby Wahlia plotted out the time she left the house and the rough time of death they’d established. The woman who’d found her body came along barely ten minutes later, describing in her statement the moment her little West Highland terrier started barking at Corinne’s prone body, how she’d thought it was an accident until she saw the wire looped around her neck.
First thing tomorrow they would send a team down to the spot near the lock and speak to everyone who passed, catch the regulars who might have seen something out of the ordinary.
But for now all they had was a dead woman whose distraught girlfriend was blaming her ex.
As Sam had handed over Corinne’s laptop and mobile phone she kept up a tirade against Nina Sawyer – who, it emerged, was still legally married to Corinne.
The laptop and mobile were with the techies now. More waiting.
Ferreira nudged him. ‘Drink this.’ She put a mug in one hand. ‘And take these.’
He looked at the pills she dropped into his palm. ‘What are they?’
‘Speed.’
‘You know what, I don’t even care if they are.’ He swallowed them with a mouthful of coffee, nodded towards the photograph. ‘Would you have known she was a man?’
‘She was a woman,’ Ferreira said. ‘You need to get used to saying that.’
‘I don’t need a lecture on gender sensitivity, thanks, Mel. But I’m asking if some random piece of shit – say, the type who’d target trans women for violence – would have thought she was.’
‘Then, no. I don’t think they would. Bobby?’
Wahlia stepped back from the board, capping a red marker pen. ‘No way. She’s got that Gillian Anderson vibe. Good bones, strong-looking but feminine.’
‘So, we’ve established she was passing,’ Ferreira said in a withering tone. ‘Meaning you don’t think she was murdered because she was trans.’
‘Not if it was a random attack.’
‘We know she had a highly predictable routine. What if her killer knew she was trans, hated her because of it, and targeted her where he knew he could find her?’
Zigic nodded. ‘You’d better look back over the attack from last year. See if we’ve got any similarities, anybody they knew in common.’
‘I was just about to pull the file,’ Ferreira said, heading back to her desk. ‘But from what I can remember that one was in town somewhere, looked like a random, pissed-up arsehole.’
‘Let’s be sure, though.’
On the other side of the office DS Colleen Murray was unpacking the material she’d brought up from CID, the serial rape case she was leading for Adams. The board had come with her and now sat behind her desk, four women’s photographs watching over her, and Zigic saw why Adams had been so dismissive of Corinne Sawyer as another victim to join that line-up.
The women were all very young, round-faced and dark-haired. But the map on the board showed that the attacks had all been carried out along the stretch of river which ran from the city centre out westwards to Ferry Meadows. Corinne was murdered in this man’s territory; it was a link they couldn’t disregard.
The phone on his desk rang and he went to answer it – DCS Riggott.
‘Let’s me and you have a wee chat, Ziggy.’
Less than two hours after the body was found and he was already being summoned. Not a good sign.
Zigic went down to Riggott’s office, found the door standing open, disarray spilling out through it. Inside, the DCS stood in his shirtsleeves, surveying the mess he’d created; desk pulled halfway across the room, chairs scattered, a new two-seater sofa pushed up tight against the filing cabinet.
‘Don’t just stand there gawping,’ Riggott said, waving him towards the desk.
Grabbing the other end, Zigic followed his lead, setting it down a few feet from the far wall, in front of the framed mugshots which hung there, every serious criminal Riggott had put away during his career, enough to fill the space from floor to ceiling.
Zigic didn’t think he’d want those men and women glowering at the back of his neck while he worked but it would be preferable to looking at them.
Riggott dropped his end of the desk with a crack. Zigic lowered his with a little more care.
‘Is that what you wanted me for?’
‘Sure, you’re the biggest fella in the station, who else would I call?’ Riggott shot him a thin smile and went for his chair, wheeled it around behind the desk. ‘Get one yourself there.’
Zigic pulled a chair over.
‘Right, your man down at Ferry Meadows,’ Riggott said, taking an e-cigarette from his shirt pocket. ‘What’s the story?’
‘It was a woman. Didn’t Adams brief you already?’
Riggott rolled his eyes. ‘I know how he was dressed and I realise you’re a stickler for notions of political correctness but unless he was legally declared female – which I gather he’d not been – then you’re dealing with a man who happened to be wearing ladies’ clothing.’
‘Corinne Sawyer was transitioning,’ Zigic said firmly, knowing better than to give ground at this early stage. ‘She was living as a woman full-time. Her friends and family knew her as a woman and her killer attacked her as a woman. I think that’s more significant than the state of her genitalia.’
Another eye roll and Riggott propped his elbows on the desk. ‘You’re going to be a pain in my hole over this, aren’t you?’
‘If we want cooperation from the people closest to Corinne we need to respect the fact that she considered herself a woman.’ He watched Riggott process the idea. ‘And, of course, if this turns out to be a transphobic attack then we’re going to be reliant on the trans community for help. Because it probably won’t be an isolated incident. Not something this ferocious.’
Riggott leaned back, drawing deeply on his e-cig. ‘You don’t reckon it was targeted?’
‘Way too early to say.’
‘But your gut?’
‘We’ve got a similar attack on file, it may be connected.’
A phone began to ring somewhere in the office. Riggott didn’t move to unearth it. ‘Adams has similar attacks too but you shouldn’t go thinking you can rely on that paying off.’
‘I don’t think it will,’ Zigic said, bristling at the condescension he detected in Riggott’s tone.
‘And don’t let him derail your investigation because he’s got a hard-on for this shite-stain Lee Walton.’
He’d seen the name on the board Murray had brought up to Hate Crimes with her, knew nothing about the man himself.
‘I’ve got no intention of letting my case go,’ Zigic said.
Riggott gave him a speculative look. ‘Sure, you know what a terrier he can be.’
‘Maybe he should be kept on a shorter leash.’
‘How’d you know what fight a dog’s got in him if you don’t let him loose?’
Zigic was too tired for this, had no interest in verbal sparring or the stupid, trumped-up competition which lay behind it. Riggott was too much the careerist to understand that not all coppers saw their colleagues as fences to be hurdled in pursuit of advancement.
‘If Walton’s responsible I want him caught,’ he said. ‘But until Adams comes up with something more substantial connecting him to this, I’m going to follow the leads we have.’
‘You have leads already?’
‘There’s acrimony within the family. Seems a good place to start.’
‘Certain parties not happy about yon “woman” going for the chop?’ Riggott asked. ‘Must be a hell of a thing for a wife to deal with, that.’
‘The wife’s estranged. New girlfriend on the scene.’
‘Girlfriend?’ Riggott’s eyebrows leapt for his hairline. ‘Sounds like you’ve a good old-fashioned mess on your hands there.’
‘We can hope.’
Riggott dismissed him with an order to keep him briefed and Zigic trudged back up to Hate Crimes. He went into his office, closed the door and looked at the paperwork spread across his desk, checked the emails stacking up in his inbox.
He could grab five minutes’ rest while Wahlia and Ferreira gathered together whatever information they could. Despite the old saw that the first twenty-four hours of a murder case were the most important, policing didn’t always work like that any more.
Previous generations had pumped the first day hard because they relied on door-knocking and street work, getting to witnesses before they forgot vital details or thought better of coming forward, running down informants. Now the first day was mostly waiting, for forensic reports and CCTV and financial records, the extraction of digital footprints from the devices where people lived the greater part of their lives.
The lack of CCTV around Ferry Meadows was going to be a problem for them. No cameras at the entrance on Oundle Road, even assuming that was their killer’s route. None on the path Corinne had taken, obviously, and the park could be accessed from dozens of different points, all unmonitored.
Maybe this case would come down to old-school techniques after all, he thought, as he swung his feet onto the corner of his desk, feeling the tiredness in his bones fighting the pills he’d taken.
His body wanted to rest but his brain kept turning.
With a sigh he pulled his keyboard towards him and found the file on last year’s attack, rubbed his eyes to bring it into focus. Ferreira had worked it and done as good a job as she could with the lack of forensic evidence and the victim’s inability to give a description of his attacker, but they hadn’t managed to find the person responsible.
Zigic remembered the man, had never seen him as a woman except in the photographs taken while he was unconscious in A&E by a doctor who was savvy enough to realise embarrassment might prevent the man from reporting his attack. It was arguably a cruel thing to do, calling the police in without the victim’s knowledge, but Zigic saw from the statement given that if not for the doctor’s actions they might never have known what lay behind this vicious beating.
The photographs showed a similar ferocity as they’d seen at today’s crime scene. A woman severely beaten, eyes swollen shut, cheekbone fractured, nose ruptured so badly Zigic doubted that it could have mended well, and angry red marks around her hairline where a wig had been ripped from her head.
Simon Trent had come to the station patched up and humiliated, with his wife in tow. A small, plain woman with dark circles under her eyes and a lot of grey in her hair. He gave a statement because he had to but reading it through there was very little of use. He’d been out with friends for the night, split off to find a taxi but never made it to the rank on Cowgate. On Cross Street, a quiet road, cobbled and poorly lit, he’d been jumped from behind, his face repeatedly slammed into the pavement. A couple found him unconscious some time later and called an ambulance, stayed with him until it arrived.
They would need to speak to him again and this time his awkward silences couldn’t be accepted. If there was a link to Corinne Sawyer’s murder hiding between the lines of his bare-boned statement they needed to find it.
Attacks on trans women weren’t that common in Peterborough and when Zigic searched the system he found no other unsolveds on record in recent years, the ones there were all closed, the usual drunks and cranks. But he knew it was a growing problem, that this particular form of violent intolerance was kept hidden far more than racism or homophobia because the victims were frequently living double lives which they didn’t want to expose by going to the police. Simon Trent’s wife was aware of his cross-dressing and she came over as broadly supportive, but what about their friends, their families and co-workers?
Did he come to in the hospital, with Ferreira waiting at his bedside, and feel like his whole world was about to come crashing down around his ears?
Zigic looked at the woman on his screen, beaten and unconscious, and wondered if she still existed. If Simone had been knocked out of Simon Trent on that summer night, or if she was hiding now, too scared to reveal herself again.
One thing he was fairly certain of, the Trents wouldn’t be happy to have the police at their door again.
Zigic had driven past the Sawyer house a thousand times and always regarded it with a prickle of envy. It sat in half an acre of woodland, stern old oaks and yew trees looming over it, high hedgerows cocooning it from the traffic on Oundle Road. The hedge wouldn’t keep out a determined intruder though, neither would the electric gates they were driving through, not with such a prize on the other side.
‘Jesus,’ Ferreira said. ‘I thought Corinne’s place was fancy. It looks like a hovel compared to this.’
‘It’s pretty spectacular,’ Zigic agreed.
‘How much do you think it’s worth?’ she asked, pulling up behind a sleek black sports car with an emblem Zigic didn’t recognise. ‘A mil? More?’
‘A lot more,’ Zigic said. ‘I saw one on Grand Designs – the build for a Huf Haus like this was close to a million.’
She swore softly, then turned to him, grinning. ‘I can’t wait until I’m old enough to watch Grand Designs.’
They got out of the car and Zigic paused for a moment, taking in the bulk and sweep of the building. It was cold and sleek, aggressively modern, all black metal supports and toughened glass, sixty-foot wide and with a roof he could only think of in terms of wingspan, the way it seemed to unfold away from the central section where the main door was sited, the eaves overhanging to create long sections of deep shade.
Maybe it was the pills or the fatigue but he was sure he could feel thrumming under his feet. His eye drifted down to the paved area in front of the house, large white pebbles laid with exacting precision in drifting lines. A narrow grey path cut through them up to the door, slabs the size of tombstones.
‘You good?’ Ferreira asked.
He snapped out of it. ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’
She went to ring the doorbell. They’d been buzzed through the gates by Nina Sawyer but she hadn’t come to meet them. Zigic pondered what that meant while they waited, looking at a gnarled olive tree sitting in a polished concrete pot nearby, silvery limbs contorted.
‘They’re not fussed about privacy, are they?’ Ferreira said. ‘I can see right through the house.’
‘It’s a statement, isn’t it?’
‘It’s stupid. People see what you’ve got, they try to take it from you.’ She tipped her head back, staring directly into a security camera mounted discreetly above the door. ‘How do you get this rich and stay that naive?’
The door was opened by a tall, painfully thin woman swaddled in two layers of voluminous, nothing-coloured knitwear and a pair of khaki skinny jeans. She looked quickly between them, the tilt of her head reminding Zigic of a bird of prey, but she gave away nothing, her face all sharp angles, mouth set in a firm line.
‘Please, come in.’ No warmth in her voice.
She closed the door behind them and Zigic found his gaze drawn up towards the double-height ceiling. You could fit his entire house in the entrance hall, he thought, and have space to walk around it.
Behind him Ferreira was making the introductions and he turned to shake Nina Sawyer’s offered hand.
‘You have a beautiful home,’ he said.
Her mouth smiled but the rest of her face held still. ‘Thank you. It was a labour of love but worth the pain. Rather like actual labour.’
It sounded like something she’d said many times before, all the emotion long since lost from the words.
‘I’m afraid we have bad news,’ Zigic said. ‘Maybe you should sit down.’
Nina Sawyer held her hand up. ‘I already know. Sam was thoughtful enough to call me and let me know what happened to Corinne.’ Her eyelids fluttered. ‘I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet.’
Zigic nodded. ‘We’ll try not to take up too much of your time.’
‘Thank you, I am rather busy today.’ She looked around herself, shoulders rising. ‘Although none of that seems very important suddenly.’
‘What do you do?’ Ferreira asked.
‘I manage our property portfolio.’
‘Yours and Corinne’s?’
She stiffened slightly. ‘That’s right. Although Corinne had taken a much more hands-off role in the last few years. She looked after the maintenance side of things and that became rather awkward.’ She inclined her head towards Zigic. ‘As I’m sure you can imagine. We subcontract the work now.’
So Corinne wouldn’t be a loss to her professionally or personally, Zigic thought.
‘I was about to make a coffee,’ she said, forced brightness, playing the good host. ‘Would you like one?’
They both accepted and she directed them away to another room. ‘I’ll only be a moment.’