Ferreira spent a long time getting ready. It seemed important to look right today, so Riggott would see that she was taking this seriously.
She chose a trouser suit, black and narrowly tailored, with a cream silk blouse she’d bought online but never worn. As she snapped off the tags she was vaguely surprised at how much she’d paid for it. In the bathroom she scraped her hair back into a ponytail, knowing it made her look hard-faced but wasn’t that almost the same thing as being professional?
Adams had left his watch on the shelf above the sink, she noticed. It would have to stay there.
He’d come round on Sunday morning, spent a couple of hours briefing her on the best way to deal with Riggott, as if he’d forgotten that she’d been a DC under him too, knew how he ticked if not always how to play on that. Adams had been through a fair amount of inquiries himself, come out the other side in one piece, reputation somehow intact, so she’d listened, hoping she wouldn’t need his advice.
It was a naive hope, though.
The weekend papers had contained several articles on Ryan Bhakta’s suicide. Yet more opinion pieces using it as a starting point. Prominent trans rights campaigners had spoken out, twisting the events in Peterborough to fit their own narrative, ignoring the huge unknowns about Ryan which might have undermined their assertions.
Online, things were blowing up. The bloggers didn’t need to be so circumspect, no journalists’ standards to uphold, no responsibility to fact-check or substantiate. There was speculation about a serial attacker in the city, potentially a serial killer now, as they were mentioning Corinne’s murder in the same breath as Ryan’s suicide.
And why weren’t the police doing more to catch this scum?
Then there were the others. Those angry, poisonous voices reinvigorated over the weekend, proclaiming that Ryan and Corinne deserved what they got. They quoted Bible verses on Twitter and spewed bile over ‘unnatural lifestyles’, and the only time they broke from the outright hate was to assess Jasmine’s fuckability and whether they would have been ‘fooled’ by her.
Evelyn Goddard hadn’t surfaced, not even to give a fresh quote or two, and that surprised Ferreira. She’d been quick to jump on the publicity opportunity of Corinne’s murder but over Ryan’s death she remained silent.
Guilt, she guessed. Or maybe she’d decided not to pour more fuel on the fire. Evelyn was a pragmatist after all. She must understand that any blow suffered by the Hate Crimes Unit would only make her community more vulnerable, leaving the crimes they suffered to the discretion of CID.
Because it was on the whole unit now. The term ‘not fit for purpose’ was being bandied about, and seeing it written down, in stark black and white, Ferreira wondered where it had come from. It had the stink of officialdom around it.
She knew the department was on shaky ground, had been since its inception, and with Anti-Terrorism – those serious-eyed, swaggering bastards who worked in absolute isolation across the hall – sucking up budget, propelled by government policy and public fear, it was only a matter of time before the office space and money required by Hate Crimes seemed like a poor return on investment.
Her dressing-up exercise suddenly felt futile. All the professionalism in the world wouldn’t make a difference if the decision had already been taken, months ago maybe, based on balance sheets and political will.
Fuck it.
She’d do her best, whatever.
Riggott’s BMW was in his usual spot when she arrived at Thorpe Wood Station and she sat in her car for a couple of minutes, smoking a final cigarette, nerves and anger fighting it out. Anger was the more useful emotion, she thought, so she grabbed that and held on to it as she went in, heading straight up to Riggott’s office.
She rapped on his door and he called her in, eyed her top to toe as she closed the door behind her.
‘Someone means business.’ He waved her into the seat opposite him. ‘Alright, what do we do with you, then?’
‘I’ve got a lead on the man who attacked Ryan Bhakta,’ Ferreira said. ‘We were given a tip-off, we searched his house, and we’ve found the clothes he was wearing during the assault. They’re covered in his attacker’s DNA.’
Riggott nodded. ‘Interesting timing. Lucky.’
‘It was Evelyn Goddard.’
‘Gotten yourself in her good graces now, hey?’
‘She’s feeling guilty,’ Ferreira said. ‘It turns out she’d been pushing Ryan to come forward and report the true nature of the attack. He was raped, that was why he was so unwilling to disclose further details when I interviewed him. Evelyn had called him the day he killed himself. I believe she feels responsible for his suicide.’
‘Meaning you’re not?’
Ferreira felt beads of sweat pricking under her arms. ‘I’m not responsible. He was a grown man, he made his own decisions.’
‘But you feel guilty?’ Riggott asked, giving the look she knew from sitting in on interviews with him. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I feel a great deal of sympathy for him,’ she said. ‘I feel disappointed that his perception of the police led him to believe he wouldn’t be well treated if he came forward to report the rape. Maybe, if he had, we’d have caught the man responsible and that would have given him enough of a sense of closure that he wouldn’t have felt the need to end his life.’
Riggott nodded, took a drag of his e-cigarette, exhaled vapour. ‘Aye, you’re more than ready to tackle an investigation. Reckon you’ll send the bastards away thinking it’s their fault your man topped himself.’
She held herself upright, even though she wanted to crumble.
‘There’s definitely going to be an investigation?’
‘Routine. I read your report.’ He flicked at a sheet of paper on his desk. ‘Still waiting on Ziggy’s. Looks to me like there’s bollock-all to it. What d’you do with that recording?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Delete it, right now.’ He moved as if to tap ash off his cigarette, caught himself and smiled at the redundancy of the action. ‘Old habits.’
‘Why would I delete it? It’s fine. I acted properly.’
‘Fine if we didn’t have a suicide on our hands,’ he said. ‘I’ve listened to it, you were cajoling him.’
‘I wasn’t.’
He raised an eyebrow at her, the wrinkles on that side of his face deeper than on the other. ‘Darlin’, I listened to it like the bastards who are going to be investigating you are going to listen to it. They want you to’ve done wrong and you did. You made promises to that lad you knew you couldn’t keep.’ He pointed at her. ‘Delete it.’
She reached into her jacket pocket. ‘You know nothing’s ever really deleted off a mobile phone?’
‘So lose your phone.’ He waited. ‘You’re not leaving this office until that thing’s gone. You think I spent four years moulding you into the fine copper you are today to have you fuck yourself up with excessive honesty? Get shot.’
She took a deep breath, found the audio file and deleted it.
‘Now what?’
‘Now you go back to work and you wait.’ He picked up her report and put it in his out tray. ‘I want you in CID for a few days.’
‘But we’re—’
‘In the middle of a murder investigation,’ Riggott said, mimicking her accent with horrible precision. ‘You’ll have read the papers, I reckon? Think anyone in the LGBT – what’s the other one? Q? – community, think they’ll be wanting to cooperate with you right now? Think you’ll be getting a warm welcome from Corinne’s friends and family? Sure, half of them want you strung up by the toes from what Gilraye tells me.’
‘She’s aware of it then?’ Ferreira snapped. ‘Maybe she could actually do something about it today.’
‘I’ll be making a statement later this morning,’ Riggott said, giving her a warning look. ‘While you’ll be behaving like an angel down here.’
‘We’re short-handed.’
‘Murray can stay up there. She’s been tossing her weight around, won’t hurt for her to be out of harm’s way for a wee while either.’ He shook his head. ‘What is it with you women? Worse than the lads, so you are.’
‘Maybe we just care more.’
‘Aye, that or you don’t know when to stop.’ Riggott swivelled in his chair, turning towards the window, the tops of the trees at Ferry Meadows visible at distance. ‘Alright then, off you go.’
The lights were on in Hate Crimes when she got up there, only Zigic in and he was holed up in his office, staring at his computer screen with his hands poised over the keyboard.
She knocked on the window and he beckoned her in.
‘Do you want to write this report?’ he asked, slumping back in his chair.
‘Is it about me?’
He nodded.
‘Riggott’s made his decision already,’ she said, leaning against the closed door. ‘Me and Murray are job-swapping until the investigation’s over. He thinks it’s only going to be a formality.’
‘That’s good.’
She looked down at the toe of her black leather boot, kept her eyes averted as she told him, ‘There’s something else. Riggott made me delete the interview with Ryan Bhakta.’
Zigic blew out a long, slow breath, his disapproval clear. ‘I suppose he knows better than either of us how to beat an internal investigation.’
The same thing Adams had told her. Listen to Riggott. Take any help he gives you.
‘I better not mention it in my report then,’ Zigic said, straightening up again, hitting the delete key. ‘Makes things simpler, anyway.’
Ferreira curled her fingers around the door handle. ‘Can you keep me in the loop on Corinne’s murder?’
‘You know you can’t be involved?’
‘Not officially, no, I understand that. But I know the case way better than Murray, I don’t want you to miss something because she doesn’t appreciate all the connections.’
‘Okay.’ He smiled, and she guessed it was meant to be reassuring but it didn’t feel like that. ‘It’s only a few days, Mel. You can put up with Adams for that long, surely?’
Her turn to smile. ‘As long as he doesn’t go thinking he’s my boss.’