It was gone four when they pulled into the car park at Thorpe Wood Station, the sky beginning to darken. Zigic was sick of coming to work before first light, returning after sunset, never seeing his home in daylight. Winter had seemed longer this year, damp and miserable without even the consolation of snow, but he realised it was likely the sleepless nights which had stretched the last couple of months out for him.
He didn’t remember feeling so worn down when the boys were babies and couldn’t believe he’d got that much older since Stefan was born.
Anna was sailing through it of course, buoyed up by happy hormones and the quiet hours she enjoyed while he was at work, Emily saving her crying for when Daddy got home.
He prayed she’d behave herself tonight while Anna was out.
‘Your press awaits,’ Ferreira said, as she switched off the engine.
There were three vans parked up in front of the station, print reporters chatting away, a few new faces among them, all very young.
Dead women brought out hacks like nothing else. A dead trans woman … he wasn’t sure how that would play. Would it bring more publicity to bear on them or less? He suspected the tabloids might start sniffing around, work the story from the cheapest, most sensational angle. The real pressure would come from the broadsheets though. He’d read the recent articles in the Guardian, their coverage of transphobic murders in America, and he knew those reporters must be itching for a home-grown one to cover.
The press pack stirred as he and Ferreira moved quickly up the station steps but fired off no questions yet. They’d save that for the lights and the cameras, when he was under pressure not to misspeak, hope to shock him into voicing an unwise reaction.
Ferreira split away from him in the corridor, headed in the direction of the canteen.
Hate Crimes was almost empty when he went up, only Wahlia in his seat, files stacked up and spilling onto Ferreira’s side of their shared desk.
It felt wrong, the office being so quiet when they had a murder on the board, but he tried to see the air of calm as a good thing, meant they had space to think, analyse.
‘Sir, bad news.’ Wahlia rose creakily from his chair, stretched the hours he’d sat there out of his neck, eliciting a sick crunch. ‘Someone’s already named Corinne Sawyer on Twitter.’
‘Do we know who?’
‘Local news account. They just aggregate anything that’s hashtagged.’ He brought it up on-screen and Zigic gave it a cursory glance. ‘They’ve only got a few hundred followers so it didn’t make much impact initially, but it got picked up by a couple of trans bloggers and it’s started to spread during the last hour.’
Zigic shrugged out of his parka and dumped it on an empty desk. ‘What’s the response been? Anything useful?’
‘The usual Twitter mourning bullshit for the most part. A few people who seem to have known her but it’s hard to tell. This crowd like to feel involved in a tragedy.’
‘Anything less supportive?’
‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got a lot of that already,’ Wahlia said. ‘It’s like seventy per cent abuse and trolling right now, arseholes piling in from all angles. There’s stuff we could prosecute but I’m guessing that’s not a priority.’
‘Not unless it escalates offline, no. Can you keep an eye on it?’ Zigic asked. ‘This isn’t a priority but we need to be aware of anyone who might have known her. And any threats that look linked.’
‘I’ve given Gilraye a heads-up,’ Wahlia said. ‘Some press officer she is, supposed to be monitoring social media and she didn’t know a damn thing about it.’
‘She’ll be finessing the narrative as we speak, I’m sure.’
Wahlia smiled. ‘Only narrative she finesses is the one that keeps her in a job.’
It wasn’t entirely fair on Gilraye but not that far off the mark. She was good at handling the local press, kept them in line during routine investigations, giving just enough to make them feel informed and inclined to report developments in a positive light. When it came to major incidents she wasn’t so sharp though, seemed prone to grandstanding and flattery, especially when the nationals were involved.
‘She dropped off your statement,’ Wahlia said, hooking his thumb towards Zigic’s office. ‘You want a coffee? Fresh pot.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’ He went to retrieve the statement, frowning immediately at what she’d written.
Despite the message he’d sent earlier she’d insisted on referring to Corinne Sawyer as Colin, used the male pronoun throughout and gave no indication at all that she’d been living as a woman at the time of her murder.
‘This is useless.’ He screwed it up and threw it at the bin, missed by half a metre in his anger. ‘Christ Almighty, what decade is she living in?’
Ferreira came into the office, glanced at the balled-up paper and shoved a plastic-wrapped muffin into his hand.
‘It’s stale and disgusting but you obviously need the sugar.’
She retrieved the statement, smoothed it out flat on her desk and Zigic read it again across her shoulder, angrily shoving bits of the banana muffin into his mouth, wondering how Gilraye could really have believed this was suitable. Prejudice aside, it didn’t even help their case because it in no way reflected the reality of what had happened this morning at Ferry Meadows. Nobody could have seen a male jogger get attacked and murdered. There would be no useful witnesses to that non-existent crime.
‘Do you want me to fix this?’ Ferreira said finally.
‘We need to, don’t we?’
‘Unless you want Evelyn Goddard and Sam Hyde and everyone else who cared about Corinne to form a lynch mob and storm the station, yeah.’
Wahlia handed Zigic a coffee, brow furrowed, reluctance in his step as he moved back round to his seat.
‘What, Bobby?’
‘She’ll have run it past Riggott,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you want to change something he’s already okay’d?’
He was right. No way had something this sensitive not passed across the DCS’s desk already. Then again, the fallout from going onto the steps and reading it as written was bound to be worse than the carpeting he’d take for changing it.
Ferreira was waiting, pen already uncapped and poised, a rebellious glint in her eye.
‘Better to apologise afterwards than ask permission and be refused.’
‘Do it,’ he said quickly, before he had chance to think better of it.
While she worked he went to the board behind DS Colleen Murray’s desk. No word from her during the day and no sign of her now. There were witness statements spread across her keyboard, old ones, nothing to do with Corinne Sawyer’s murder, but when he nudged the mouse he found a CCTV image frozen on the screen. A stretch of road he couldn’t immediately identify, trees a green smudge in the background, a silver car with an indistinct driver. The timestamp at the bottom showed 7.27 this morning.
‘Bobby, where’s Colleen?’
‘Said she was chasing down a lead.’
‘When was this?’
‘About two hours ago.’
Zigic dialled Murray’s number and she picked up on the third ring.
‘I’m on my way in, sir.’ There was an unmistakable thrill in her voice. ‘I’ll be a couple of minutes.’
It was a quarter to five. He needed to be on the steps, in front of the press, in fifteen minutes but he wanted to hear what Murray had uncovered.
‘How’s it coming, Mel?’ He pulled off his jumper as he made for his office.
‘Nearly done.’
Quickly he changed into the navy-blue suit he kept hanging from the filing cabinet. White shirt, black tie. The trousers felt tighter around the waist than they had the last time he put them on.
What was it? A month ago?
He needed to start running again. Had been saying that to himself since before Christmas, but there was always some distraction. He’d find the time, he decided. No way was he giving in to the dad-bod.
‘Mel?’
‘Typing as fast as I can.’ She glanced up from her screen as he re-emerged from the office. ‘That jacket’s looking a bit snug. Sir.’
‘It must have shrunk on the hanger.’
‘Yeah, that’ll be it.’
Zigic went to the window, saw Colleen Murray shove through the press pack like a cannonball in a trouser suit and sensible boots.
A minute later she entered the office, out of breath, her face flushed from tackling the stairs.
‘You found something,’ Zigic said.
She dropped gratefully into her seat. ‘Yes, sir. There’s a bloke we were looking at for the attacks. Real piece of work. Problem is his girlfriend keeps alibiing him.’
‘What have you got on him?’
‘History,’ she said. ‘He’s got a record of violence against women going right back to his late teens, assault, rape, kidnap. Domestic violence off the scale but the women keep withdrawing their complaints, deciding they were to blame. You know the routine.’
‘He threatens them?’
She nodded.
‘Adams thinks that’s enough to put him in the frame?’
‘We have him working near the site of the first attack,’ she said. ‘Second victim was an ex-girlfriend of one of his cousins, she thought it might have been him but couldn’t say for certain. Adams reckons if we can show her enough to guarantee a verdict she’ll ID him.’
‘You can never guarantee a rape verdict,’ Ferreira said.
‘And he was at Ferry Meadows this morning?’ Zigic asked.
‘Yes, sir. I’ve found him arriving just before seven, leaving half an hour later, just the right amount of time for him to murder Corinne Sawyer. She’s not his type but I want to work on the link some more.’
‘Lee Walton?’ Zigic asked, remembering Riggott mentioning the name.
‘Him.’ Colleen nodded to his photo on the board.
It showed a bald, heavyset man with a square face too big for his features. Nothing remarkable about him, bland and ordinary, the kind of face you wouldn’t notice in a crowd, wouldn’t be able to describe in any detail later if you did. Perfect predator camouflage.
‘I’ve been round his regular haunts,’ she said. ‘No sign of him. Girlfriend was at home but she wouldn’t let me in. Best guess is he’s put the fist to her again and she knows I’ll try to get her down here to press charges.’ She shook her head despairingly. ‘Soft mare hasn’t got the sense she was born with.’
Across the office the printer whirred into life, Zigic’s statement done. He was already a minute late.
‘Your bloke has a type,’ Ferreira reminded her. ‘We know Corinne isn’t it.’
Murray shrugged one shoulder. ‘Him murdering her doesn’t fit either, but if Walton was within a mile of a woman who stubbed her toe I’d want to question him.’
Zigic took the statement out of the printer, scanned it quickly, happy with the rewrite. He folded the page so it felt more substantial.
‘Alright, Colleen. Debrief Adams on this, he wants keeping up to speed.’ She nodded curtly, no intention of doing anything but update Adams, he guessed. ‘But tomorrow morning, first thing, I need you at Ferry Meadows with Mel. Best that you do it, just in case it is linked to your case. You’ll know what faces to look for.’
‘Yes, sir. Of course.’
‘Right.’ His fingers kept smoothing the sharp crease in the paper and he realised he was more nervous than he should be. Not because of the cameras or the questions, but because this was the first time in his career he’d disregarded an approved statement on a matter of principle.
He took a deep breath.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Ferreira said.
On the way down, through the stairwell and past CID, he told himself once again that this was the right thing to do. Morally and tactically. He didn’t want Sam Hyde to see her dead girlfriend referred to as a man, didn’t want Evelyn Goddard to turn against them just as they were beginning to win her trust.
Out on the steps a fine raining was falling, like a shower of sparks as it passed through the intensity of the arc lights. Nicola Gilraye had done her best to keep the waiting press calm but there were low murmurs as he stepped out to face them and she shot him a hard look when she turned away, giving him the floor.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.’ He made his voice strong and sure, stilled the nerves fluttering in his gut. ‘At approximately seven fifty this morning the body of a woman was discovered at Ferry Meadows Country Park …’