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.