The call came while Ferreira was stuck in traffic over the railway bridge; Evelyn Goddard with a name she admitted was fake and a location on the edge of the city which she was to head for straight away, the man already waiting for her.
‘He won’t go to the police station, so don’t even ask him,’ she said. ‘And go alone. It’s taken me the better part of two hours to convince him to talk to you. Just you, do you understand? He won’t speak to a man about this.’
‘How will I recognise him?’ Ferreira asked, already eyeing the road ahead of her, trying to decide if she could get away with pulling a swift three-point turn.
‘I’m sending you a phone number.’
Goddard rang off before Ferreira could thank her and a few seconds later the message came through. A fake name and a number which was likely untraceable; it should have concerned her. In any other context it would have made her suspicious of the man but in this case the air of secrecy felt like a guarantee of authenticity.
He was protecting himself because he was scared and if he was scared it was because he knew something important.
As she walked into the cavernous atrium Ferreira realised it would afford them greater privacy than some out-of-the-way pub or lay-by. A sprawling service station on the side of the A1, bustling at this time of evening with commuters and workers heading home; high churn, low-attention spans.
She made a slow circuit of the central seating area, passing half a dozen fast-food outlets, all packed with people queuing in various states of agitation, the smell of fried chicken and toasted bread and salty, sour noodles making her stomach rumble. She’d somehow got through the day on nothing but coffee and chocolate bars from the vending machine and it took every ounce of willpower she had not to commandeer some chips from the man who crossed her path, hurrying towards a table with a family bucket hugged to his chest.
There were lots of lone men in there. Eating with joyless determination, closed off from the babble of voices and piped eighties pop playing too loud and tinny; a suicide soundtrack.
She scanned the tables but saw no one she thought might be her man. Then again, what was she looking for? Someone who’d look good as a woman, she realised. And it was a stupid assumption.
One bloke was staring at her and she held his gaze until he looked away, then took out her phone and dialled the number.
‘Hello?’
‘Where are you?’
‘In Costa,’ he said. ‘I can see you.’
As she walked towards the cafe she turned on her phone’s voice recorder – no promises made to Evelyn Goddard about that – and slipped it into her jacket pocket.
He sat cowed on the banquette along the back wall, trying to make himself invisible, but even sitting down she could see he was a lean, long-limbed guy, with thick black hair and a face which struck her immediately as beautiful. Not a word she’d often found use for when it came to men, but he was, and it made him conspicuous whether he wanted to be or not.
He’d hardly chosen the best seat for intrigue either. Eyes out, facing the queue for the counter and the plate-glass front which everyone who entered the building walked past. He wasn’t made for informing.
‘Aadesh?’
‘Yes, please, sit down, people are looking at us.’
‘Nobody’s looking at us,’ she said reassuringly, as she took the seat opposite him. ‘They’re all knackered and far too self-obsessed to even notice me and you.’
Behind her a woman was talking loudly on her mobile and it distracted Aadesh for a few seconds, the tight, high pitch of her voice as she laid into whoever was on the other end.
‘I appreciate you agreeing to talk to me,’ Ferreira said, leaning on the table as casually as she could, wanting to get close enough that he could whisper if he felt the need. ‘Did Evelyn tell you what happened?’
He nodded.
‘How well did you know Corinne?’
‘Not very well at all. I’d met her a few times, but we weren’t friends.’
Finally he lifted his eyes from the large cup of green tea he was holding on to like it was the only thing anchoring him and looked straight at her. He had pretty eyes, long-lashed and very dark, the skin around them perfectly smooth and unlined. He was younger than she’d thought, mid-twenties, but on the side of his face she noticed a spray of tiny dents dimpling his skin, too regular in size for acne scars.
Aadesh touched his fingers to them self-consciously and Ferreira apologised. He blinked slowly, dropped his hand.
‘Did he do that to you?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
Pavement grit, she thought, driven into his skin as he fell, and the thought of those tiny, hard pieces puncturing his skin made her calves sting. A sympathy reaction she pushed away quickly.
‘You think the man who – you think he murdered Corinne?’
‘There’s a strong possibility. My job—’ Ferreira stopped as a woman approached the next table to clear the cups left behind by its previous occupants. ‘My job right now is to try and gather as much information as possible about any earlier attacks.’
‘I’ll tell you everything I can,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t see him.’
She tried not to let her disappointment show. ‘That’s all I’m asking for, Aadesh. Whatever you remember.’
His shoulders straightened. ‘I can’t go to court. Did Evelyn tell you that? It’s completely out of the question.’
‘I won’t ask you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.’
He didn’t looked comfortable, was becoming more agitated by the second. Ferreira could feel a clock ticking on this interview already and as she went to speak he reached into his pocket for his mobile, brought it out pulsing with an incoming call. His thumb hovered between call and reject, a young woman’s smiling face on the screen.
‘Your wife?’ Ferreira asked.
‘Not yet. We’re getting married next year, when she’s finished studying.’ The phone kept vibrating in his hand but he couldn’t reject her call and with each rumble she could see him becoming more agitated, maybe wondering how he would explain this absence, what excuse he would give for not picking up.
Finally it stopped but the silence did nothing to calm him.
She’d hoped to ease into the worst of it, take some time to build up a rapport with him, let him settle. But that wouldn’t be happening.
‘Can you tell me when the incident occurred?’
‘Last December,’ he said. ‘No, sorry, the December before last. 2014. The 4th.’
‘Okay. What time?’
‘It was late.’ He stared into his tea, a thin film forming on it. ‘I’d been drinking … I, it was gone midnight. It was probably much later.’
Ferreira wondered if his vagueness was real or if it was an attempt to make his account seem too weak to stand up in court. He’d get ripped to shreds by any halfway competent defence barrister.
‘You’d been out,’ she said. ‘Where?’
‘The Meadham.’
Of course.
‘I decided to walk home,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It was stupid of me. I should have taken a taxi but I only lived ten minutes away.’
Going through the same process of accepting blame that every attacked woman Ferreira had ever spoken to experienced. I should have done this, I shouldn’t have done that.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she told him, trying and failing to catch his eye. ‘None of this was your fault.’
‘I took the underpass.’ He spat the words out like a curse. ‘I knew there was someone behind me but I kept walking. I didn’t think. I’d taken that underpass dozens of times and nothing happened.’
‘When you were—’ What was term Zac Bentley had used? ‘When you were en femme?’
‘No.’ He met her gaze then. ‘That was the first time.’
Internally he’d still been male, Ferreira thought, he didn’t make the calculations every woman made when she picked her route home. A man could walk through a badly lit underpass and expect to come out the other side perfectly safe. He’d done it before and wouldn’t have expected it to be different just because he was dressed as a woman.
‘When did you realise someone was following you?’
His brow furrowed. ‘I can’t remember very much of what happened. The doctor said that’s not unusual with head trauma, the memory loss.’
‘What can you remember?’
He let out a wobbly breath and hunched over the table. Ferreira caught the scent of sweat, acidic through the remnants of his aftershave; fear as he relived the disjointed moments.
‘He was heavy,’ Aadesh said, voice thickening. ‘He was on top of me. He knocked me down from behind. I never saw his face but he was a big man. I can remember his teeth …’
He was back in the underpass, laid flat, helpless.
‘I could feel his teeth on my ear.’
‘Did he bite you?’
‘No, he was talking, whispering in my ear. He called me a freak. He said I was disgusting.’ Aadesh pressed his lips together, struggling to remain still, and Ferreira prepared herself to go after him if he bolted.
Unthinkingly she reached across the table to pat his hand, the way she would with another woman, and he snatched it away from her. His eyes were glistening under the soft lights, huge and haunted.
He started talking again, nervously, stumbling over his words and repeating himself, not giving her a chance to interrupt. He told her how he’d come to in a pool of his own blood, one eye swollen shut, teeth broken, his face throbbing from the impact with the ground. He remembered walking home across the railway bridge, shrinking every time a car’s headlights washed over him, feeling exposed and vulnerable even though the worst thing that could happen already had.
When he got home he called Evelyn Goddard, then passed out in his hallway again for a time, overwhelmed by shock and pain. He didn’t want to go to hospital but she made him. Wouldn’t go there dressed as a woman.
Evelyn had cleaned the make-up from his face, very carefully, undressed him and put him in men’s clothes again, drove him to the hospital and, at his insistence, dropped him at A&E. He wouldn’t let her go in with him, knew she wouldn’t support the lies he was going to tell the doctors there. He said it was a robbery. Claimed his phone and wallet had been stolen. They called the police who took a statement but it got swallowed up in the system, just as he’d hoped. Without a description they couldn’t do anything.
He’d spoken for ten minutes and Ferreira heard nothing which would help her catch the man responsible, a lot which sounded like an attempt to overwhelm her with details so she would forgot the only question she needed an answer to.
‘I’m sorry, Aadesh, but I have to ask this – was there any sexual element in your assault?’
He shook his head.
‘Do you think he thought you were a woman?’
Aadesh smiled grimly. ‘He knew I wasn’t.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘He ripped my wig off.’
The same as in Simone Trent’s attack. The same man attacked both of them and maybe there were more victims out there yet, too scared to come forward. Ones who might have seen the man’s face.