Wahlia was grinning at his computer when they got back to the station.
‘What’s so funny?’ Zigic asked. ‘Aren’t you going through the list from Trans Sisters?’
‘Yeah, nothing incriminating yet. This woman organised a disco flash mob to protest a boutique that threw her out of their changing rooms.’ He rocked back in his chair. ‘You’ve got to admit that’s a pretty cool way of making your point, even if it did get her an ASBO.’
‘Shame she had to do it,’ Ferreira said, passing Wahlia a brown paper bag. ‘Parma and mozza ciabatta. What was their problem anyway? Loads of places have unisex changing rooms now.’
Wahlia shrugged. ‘Bigots, I guess.’
‘Bigots with no business sense, judging by the size of Corinne Sawyer’s wardrobe.’ She took a bite of the roll she’d made Zigic drive out of his way for. Insisted they went to the Italian deli in Woodston where the queue was long but the food was excellent. ‘Corinne was spending serious money on clothes.’
‘Have we got her financials yet?’ Zigic asked.
‘On the way,’ Wahlia told him. ‘And the post-mortem report’s in. Forensics too.’
‘Just in time for lunch,’ Ferreira said. ‘As usual.’
‘Like it’s going to stop you eating.’
Zigic went into his office, put his own lunch aside for the time being. He’d never been queasy but he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was disrespectful to the dead to stuff your face while you were picking over the most intimate details of their murders.
He set the emails to print, wanting everything on paper before he started to look at it, and went back out to Corinne Sawyer’s murder board, wrote her son’s name in the Persons of Interest column. Murray had added Lee Walton but he looked wrong, floating there, nothing to anchor him to Corinne, except for the sighting yesterday morning.
Behind him Wahlia was reading out another highlight from the Trans Sisters’ criminal sorority and Ferreira laughed, the sound so rare in the office that it felt like a transgression. But he understood it, sometimes you need to step back from the darkness.
It was a shame the crimes currently on their boards weren’t so puckish.
The power imbalance was painfully clear. Trans women lashing out against prejudice with humour and spectacle, because they didn’t want to be punished yet again. The men who hated them, they lashed out in the usual way, with brute strength, knowing it generally achieved the result they wanted.
Almost without thinking he added Nina Sawyer to the suspects column. They knew she had the means to attack Corinne and the motive. Living so close to the murder site gave her ample opportunity. Togged up in sports gear she might pass for a man, with her flat, lean figure and height.
Assuming the man who’d been sighted running behind Corinne was actually her killer. There was every chance he’d sprinted past her within seconds of being seen, continuing his usual morning run, a missed witness rather than a suspect, but until he came forward and ruled himself out they wouldn’t know for certain.
His description was on the board, a black silhouette of a man’s head tacked up by Wahlia, giving them something to focus on.
‘Harry Sawyer, you piece of shit,’ Ferreira said.
Zigic turned away from the board. ‘What’s he done?’
‘Homophobic attack on a man back in ’o9. He was given a suspended sentence and ordered to undertake anger management.’
‘He got off light,’ Wahlia said.
‘Eighteen years old, no record. I guess he just got the right judge.’
Wahlia grunted. ‘Another bigot.’
Ferreira tapped away at her keyboard. ‘Oh, here we go. Mitigating circumstances, family problems, psychological issues owing to his father’s decision to come out as a transsexual. I can’t believe anyone bought that.’
‘It’s probably about right, though,’ Zigic said. ‘Jessica told us Harry was struggling with Corinne’s emergence, it must have had a knock-on effect to his own sense of masculinity.’ He held his hands up at the look she gave him. ‘I know, it’s no excuse, obviously.’
‘You do know most men who cross-dress aren’t actually gay,’ she said.
He didn’t. Hadn’t even thought about it much until yesterday and he realised he was going to have to put some time in on the research front if they were going to progress with this case.
‘It’s a common misconception,’ she went on. ‘Most stay with their wives and girlfriends, the ones who are happy to put up with it. So Harry was way off base.’
‘He won’t have known that, though.’
‘No, I guess not.’
Across the room the printer fell silent for a few seconds then started up again, slower now, bringing Harry Sawyer into the frame line by line, his mugshot emerging into the tray.
‘So, we know he’s got a capacity for violence,’ Ferreira said, picking up her sandwich again. ‘Murdering Corinne doesn’t look like that much of a reach, does it? Especially now she’s going for the final op. That’s his dad gone forever. Maybe he starts questioning his own gender and sexuality. Like, is it genetic? Has he got “the gay gene” in him? That’s why it’s harder for boys, they worry they’re going to go the same way.’
‘Is this speculation or fact?’ Zigic asked.
‘I did some reading up last night after I talked to Aadesh. It’s common for sons of trans women to break all contact, they don’t deal with it anywhere near as well as daughters, because they see themselves in their fathers and they don’t want to consider the possibility of being feminised. You know, because that’s basically the worst thing a man can be.’
Zigic collected the post-mortem results and forensics report, bringing Harry Sawyer’s mugshot with him. It showed a smooth-skinned young man, blue-eyed, dark hair worn close-cropped to his skull, a face not fully developed into manhood yet. He didn’t look like he’d been in a scrap, which meant he’d targeted someone smaller than him probably, who couldn’t or wouldn’t fight back. Or jumped them in a such a way that it was over before they could get in any shots of their own.
‘He’s a bit effeminate, don’t you think?’ Ferreira said, as he pinned the photo to the board.
‘Where are you getting that from?’
‘Don’t listen to her,’ Wahlia said. ‘She’s got the worst gaydar.’
Ferreira turned back to her screen, jaw clenched tight, and Zigic expected her to snap at Wahlia but she didn’t. Maybe it was a flippant comment. Maybe he didn’t know how hard it would hit home. They were too close for him to be putting the knife in deliberately, Zigic thought.
‘We’ll talk to Harry Sawyer later, see what we can get.’
Zigic sat down at a free desk, thought, not for the first time, of how the promised funds for Hate Crimes had never materialised. A room kitted out for a staff of six, running with three permanent officers and whoever was spare during major cases. There was a whisper that Anti-Terrorism was due for expansion and this was the space being earmarked for them, but that rumour had been circulating for almost two years and they were still here.
It was only a matter of time though. Arrests of suspected terrorist sympathisers and recruiters were on the rise, fighters returning from Syria to their inconspicuous Midlands homes. Sooner or later they would find their way to Peterborough and this outpost would become a hub.
He put the thought aside, opened the post-mortem results.
Dr Irwin hadn’t been allowed the same leeway Zigic took for his statement to the press and the paperwork was headed up as ‘Colin Sawyer’, in line with his birth certificate and the facts of his biology as Irwin saw them.
There were photographs of her face, the injuries not fully developed because she died so quickly after they were inflicted, but Zigic could see the breaks in her zygomatic bones, the mashing of her chin. Her nose was destroyed, her mouth split. As bad as it looked at the scene, this was worse, starkly lit and in high resolution, showing up every fine line on her skin, the surgical scars which she would have been at pains to keep hidden.
It was the photograph showing her hairline that stopped him.
‘Mel, are you looking at this?’ he asked. ‘There’s a clump of hair missing from the front of Corinne’s head.’
‘Hold on.’ She swept through the images on her computer screen. ‘What do you think that means? It’s not where you’d grab someone to smash their face in, is it? You’d go for a handful at the back. Better purchase.’
‘Did he think it was a wig?’
She spun in her chair. ‘He was going to pull her wig off? Just like with Aadesh and Simone? Only Corinne’s got her own hair so he ends up yanking a load out.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘But not if it’s someone who knew Corinne well,’ Ferreira said. ‘They’d know she wasn’t wearing a wig.’
‘Depends how familiar with her beauty regime they were.’ Zigic moved on to the next photograph, the ligature marks around her neck, checked back to the notes. ‘Cause of death was definitely asphyxia.’
‘No surprise there.’
He flipped through the rest of the report; substantial bruising on her back where she’d been pinned down, her assailant heavy enough to have displaced three vertebrae in her spine. Mention of the cosmetic surgeries she’d undergone, the evidence easily visible, an underlying issue with her kidneys, possibly brought on, Irwin suggested, by the hormones being used in her transition, but he’d know more when the toxicology was in. It had no bearing on her murder anyway, Zigic thought.
On to the forensics report, little more there.
‘Fibres,’ Ferreira said. ‘Is that it? Nothing else, just fibres?’
‘Unless we’ve both missed something, yes.’
‘Christ.’ She slapped the file down. ‘All of that dragging and fighting and we don’t even get a fleck of saliva or a bloody eyelash?’
Zigic tossed the report aside in frustration, turned to the board and let his eye range over it as the information settled in, seeing what fitted and what didn’t. His gaze kept shifting away to the photograph of Harry Sawyer, his androgynous face staring back out of the mugshot, no shame, no fear, no guilt. Nothing in his eyes at all.
That was seven years ago.
Maybe the anger management had worked and he was now a model citizen, open-minded and accepting of all the wonderful permutations of human life. Or maybe a brush with the law had taught him to be more careful, pick his victims wisely, avoid CCTV cameras, make sure they never saw his face. All of this happening as Corinne’s transition continued, confronting him day in and day out with a person who was and wasn’t his father; the man he was supposed to emulate replaced by a woman who was wrecking his family.
People killed for far less.