Between Two Evils Read online

  BETWEEN TWO EVILS

  ALSO BY EVA DOLAN

  DI Zigic and DS Ferreira series

  Long Way Home

  Tell No Tales

  After You Die

  Watch Her Disappear

  This is How It Ends

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY EVA DOLAN

  DAY ONE: TUESDAY AUGUST 7TH, 2018

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DAY TWO: WEDNESDAY AUGUST 8TH

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  DAY THREE: THURSDAY AUGUST 9TH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  DAY FOUR: FRIDAY AUGUST 10TH

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  DAY FIVE: SATURDAY AUGUST 11TH

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  DAY SIX: SUNDAY AUGUST 12TH

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  DAY SEVEN: MONDAY AUGUST 13TH

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  DAY EIGHT: TUESDAY AUGUST 14TH

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  DAY ONE

  TUESDAY AUGUST 7TH, 2018

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘So this is where you’re hiding,’ Adams said, coming down the brown brick steps in front of Thorpe Road Police Station, a cigarette already hanging from his mouth.

  ‘Just getting some sun.’ Ferreira closed her eyes for a moment and tilted her face up: twenty-five degrees at 10 a.m., basking weather. Bikini-on-beach-drinking-rum-cocktails weather. Which is exactly where she’d been a week ago, Adams beside her then too, their first holiday together and they hadn’t killed each other, so she guessed there was something to be said for him. He’d come back from St Kitts with a deep tan and a more relaxed air, and that was certainly helping too.

  ‘You know Riggott’s going to start docking your pay if you keep this up,’ he said, lighting up.

  ‘Where else am I supposed to smoke?’

  ‘Crazy thought, but you could quit,’ he suggested, exhaling a lungful.

  Ferreira flicked an eyebrow up at him. ‘I’ll quit when you do.’

  ‘Well, maybe cut down from thirty a day.’

  ‘I don’t smoke that much.’

  ‘You’re coming out here that often.’

  She took another deep drag, her eyes straying to the station’s broad, brutalist façade and the greyed-glass windows of what had been the Hate Crimes Unit on the first floor.

  ‘You can’t sulk about it for ever, Mel.’

  Ferreira straightened up and away from the wall. ‘I’m not sulking.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ He tried a smile but she wasn’t softening, not after having had this conversation with him repeatedly and always with the same conclusion during the six months since the Hate Crimes Unit had been mothballed. ‘They clung on for longer than anyone expected,’ he said. And even her partner Zigic agreed on that point when she’d talked to him about it.

  They’d had a good run, Zigic insisted. Being back in CID didn’t mean they stopped investigating the hate-based offences that had consumed their professional lives for the last seven years; it just meant they did more for everyone else too. Now they had access to more resources when they needed them, a bigger team to draw on, more local knowledge and expertise. It meant that the burden didn’t always have to fall just on them.

  But she felt the burden on her when they were sent to another violent incident in New England, another dispute between neighbours or a drink-fuelled brawl that spilled onto the road or into the parts of the city where the citizens the council were actually bothered about lived. The way Ferreira saw it, they’d been taken off hate crimes and put on anything that involved a foreign accent, deployed more to save the cost of translators than anything else.

  Their caseload had quadrupled and yet she no longer felt like they were helping people. Just keeping the peace. And if she wanted that she would have stayed in uniform.

  ‘I’m not happy,’ she said, almost at a whisper, almost without meaning to.

  ‘I know.’ He reached for her hand and she pulled away as his fingertips grazed her knuckle, checking to see if anyone around them had noticed.

  ‘Not here, okay.’ A moment of pain tightened his eyes and she pretended not to see it, tossed her head, already feeling guilty. ‘Can I bum a fag?’

  Adams sucked the last breath out of his own cigarette, dropped the butt into the bin. ‘No, come on, we should get back up there.’

  They headed into reception and through the stairwell doors, where a couple of guys from anti-terror were coming down, all swagger and growl as they talked about the cricket, making even that seem like a life-or-death matter. Part of her thought it was ridiculous, but part wondered how she’d fare with them. Maybe what she needed was more of a challenge?

  ‘How do you fancy going out for dinner tonight?’ Adams asked, as he held the door open for her.

  ‘It’s Tuesday.’

  ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘What’s the point of going out for dinner when we’ve got the whole rest of the week to put up with?’

  He rolled his eyes at her. ‘You are the worst fucking Catholic I’ve ever met.’

  ‘What’s my particular brand of indoctrination got to do with dinner?’

  ‘Because you should know to take all the pleasures you can get whenever they’re offered.’ He gave her a cheeky wink and headed for his office, pulling his mobile out of his pocket.

  She watched him pass between the rows of desks, saw Parr straighten in his seat as he approached, the new kids at their shared station in the corner looki
ng extra focused for a few seconds, trying to make a good impression on the DCI. She saw his stride falter as he answered the phone, his free hand tightening into a fist and all the tension she’d holidayed out of his body returning in a rush.

  He battered on the window of Zigic’s neighbouring office and gestured for him to come out as he ended the call, then shouted back across his shoulder, ‘Mel, Bobby, Colleen, in with me.’

  Zigic emerged from his office, giving Ferreira a questioning look.

  At the desks around them, a shiver of interest had raised eyes from screens, the rest of the floor scenting something in the offing and wondering if it would pull them in too. Despite the weather and the general tendency for things to get fractious in summer heat, it was quiet on the day shift; a dozen cases rumbling along, not quite enough to keep a team of a sixteen detectives as busy as they’d like. Everyone eager for some fresh hell to sink their attention into.

  ‘We’ve got a call,’ Zigic said to her. ‘We need to get going.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure this is bad news. We should probably …’

  Zigic glanced at his watch, grimaced. ‘Okay.’

  They filed in, Adams closing the door behind them. His face was hollowed out with concern, mouth a sick line.

  ‘What is it?’ DS Colleen Murray asked, taking one of the free seats at his desk, her eyes fixed on him. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve just had a call from a mate at the prison,’ he said, dropping heavily into his chair. ‘Walton’s been released. Friday gone, they let him out.’

  There was a moment of silence as they digested the news. A case that had consumed Adams and Murray for the better part of eighteen months, one which Hate Crimes had been pulled into in the weeks before they were shut down; CID’s most prolific serial rapist had strayed into their territory when he was suspected of murdering a trans woman as she took her morning run around Ferry Meadows Country Park, a case that had led them to tying Walton to several more attacks on local trans women. They’d built an airtight case, which saw him sent down for life. A case built almost entirely on forensic evidence.

  Which was where the problem lay.

  In March a technician at the forensic lab had been exposed by a BBC documentary investigating instances of bribery and corruption at laboratories in the Midlands. As they were looking for blood alcohol tests bent to slip driving offences, they uncovered a more interesting story: a leading expert in DNA analysis who had faked their credentials through a twenty-year career, opening up two decades of convictions across the Midlands to new scrutiny. Detective Chief Superintendent Riggott had kicked into gear the morning after the documentary aired, instructing DC Bobby Wahlia to start a comprehensive review of every potentially affected case, in the hope that with some, at least, they could give the Crown Prosecution Service a second line of attack. There had been a slew of appeals already, the majority ending in overturned convictions, but this was the first to hit their team.

  They’d argued the appeal and lost.

  ‘We knew it was coming,’ Wahlia said at last, his voice toneless, but the defeat written all over his face.

  Ferreira imagined she looked just as beaten as he did, saw it on Zigic too, the grim resignation. Murray wasn’t taking it quite so calmly; her shoulders squared with anger, face and neck flushed such a deep red Ferreira was sure she could see the rage glowing through her off-white blouse. But Colleen had been closer to the case for longer, had shepherded more of the victims through complaints which went nowhere, had to sit with them and explain why their particular attack didn’t meet the CPS’s standards for prosecution. Then, finally, she got to tell each and every one of those women that Lee Walton was finally going down. Not for what he did to them, but for something, at least.

  Murray was hunched over now, fists between her thighs. ‘Right, what are we going to do about this? We’re not going to let this piece of shit back out on the streets to do whatever the hell he likes, are we?’

  ‘There isn’t much we can do,’ Zigic said softly. ‘We threw everything we had at Walton, there’s nothing left we can use. It was all on the forensics.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Murray snapped, twisting in her chair to face him. ‘What do you suggest then, we sit around and wait for him to do it again?’

  ‘We’re not waiting,’ Adams said, drawing himself up where he sat. He pointed at Wahlia. ‘Clear everything else off your plate, yeah? I want you totally focused on Walton, go back through every case file we have on him, every stalled investigation, every dropped charge, every withdrawn complaint. Burrow into this fucker’s history and find something we can nail him for.’

  Wahlia was on his feet and out of the office instantly.

  Murray watched him go, turned back to Adams.

  ‘Is that it?’ she asked, incredulous. ‘That’s what we’re doing?’

  ‘It’s what we can do right now,’ he told her, and Ferreira heard the familiar conciliatory tone he hardly ever used at work.

  She caught Zigic’s eye, nodded towards the door. They slipped out, leaving Adams to try and talk Murray down from the peak of her rage.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They drove out of the city in silence, skirting the suburbs and endless housing estates, making fast progress on the parkway that snaked through the blocky landscape of warehousing and big-box megastores, heading into the bustle of the sprawling Eastern Industrial Estate, with its scent of green waste and rubble dust and epoxy. Then the city fell away with an abruptness that always struck Zigic as slightly unreal and ahead the fenland unfolded, wild and flat, and near lawless, all the way to the Wash. The sky was vast and cloudless, heat shimmering up off the road, haze in the distance, the light wind stirring up the threat of dirt storms as the fields lay parched from the rainless weeks. Crops were wilting, standing unharvested, vegetation yellowing, fruit dying on the stem. The shortage of seasonal labour was beginning to tell now. Hardly any sign of activity in the fields they passed. People who went home for Easter had decided against returning, heading for more welcoming options instead.

  Peterborough felt quieter, Zigic thought. As if it had become a smaller city during this last eighteen months. Shops were closing, pubs were closing, companies relocating or just folding. Everyone seemed to be retreating indoors, the crimes they were investigating becoming smaller and quieter but no less devastating. More domestic violence, more fights among friends and frauds among families. Something in the air, he thought, something emerging but not yet defined.

  They had been in and out of the various East European stores around the city and the suburbs, trying to stop a spree of violent armed robberies, and everyone they talked to reported the same thing: business was down. There was less footfall, fewer new people arriving. He could sense the fear, the uncertainty.

  Eventually they’d caught the gang responsible, when one of them met the end of a baseball bat wielded by a shop owner who’d decided to stand his ground. It was risky and something they had explicitly warned against. The man was stabbed in the shoulder but he was a hero now. On the front page of the local paper, smiling with his bandaged wound on show.

  The shops could go about their business with one threat removed, but the greater one remained.

  Zigic slowed as they entered a small village of houses built close to the road and ramshackle farm buildings, a warning sign flashing his speed at him.

  In the passenger seat next to him, Ferreira muttered something under her breath.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This place,’ she said, throwing her chin up towards a row of old white-painted council houses. ‘This is where we used to live. Before my parents took us to Peterborough.’

  ‘And you’re not feeling the nostalgia?’

  She snorted. ‘I don’t even drive through here if I can help it.’

  He waited for her to say more but she fell silent again. She’d been doing that more and more lately, and he was beginning to wonder if it was only the move out of Hate Crimes that wa
s preying on her mind. He wasn’t happy about it either but the decision was taken many levels above them, and there was no point fighting it at the time, even less brooding on it now that it was over and done with.

  Their job hadn’t changed. Not really. Even though the trappings and the setting were different. He wondered why she couldn’t see that.

  Was it Adams? he thought. Was there trouble between them? It was a question he couldn’t ask her, a line he shouldn’t ever cross. But with each passing week, with every one of these pregnant silences, it became more difficult not to broach the issue.

  Zigic tightened his fingers around the wheel and accelerated out of the village towards and through the next, near identical one, catching sight of the bank of wind turbines standing sentry-still at the edge of Long Fleet, blades all stopped at different angles. Beneath them the village sat huddled around a central green, a few narrow lanes radiating away from it. A pub and a shop, a tiny primary school that he remembered visiting years ago as a newly recruited constable to talk to the children about stranger danger.

  It was a pretty village. Barely heard of beyond the immediate ten-mile radius back then.

  But now Long Fleet was synonymous with the Immigration Removal Centre that sat at its northern edge. The site had previously been an RAF base and would have passed for one still, with its long rows of barracks-style structures set around drab courtyards and the one grand building, all red brick and long windows and peaked gables fronting the road. Some effort had been made to hide it with screen planting, but it was too substantial to fully obscure. As they passed the village’s welcome sign, the sunlight glinted on the barbed wire and flashed off the signs held up by the small band of forlorn protestors stationed across the road from its main gates.

  Zigic held his breath for a Ferreira tirade but when he glanced over, he saw her attention was fixed on her mobile phone.

  A moment later he spotted the coroner’s distinctive vanilla-coloured Alvis coming the other way. She flashed her lights and he put his hand up, glad to know she’d done her part already and they could get started.

  The place they wanted was on the edge of the village green, with a bus stop nearby and the pub opposite, the shop less than 100 metres away. It was the middle house in a row of Victorian workers’ cottages, built low and listing away from the road, the ground around them eroded by the vicious winds that blew across the fens, leaving the houses standing like teeth in receding gums. But it looked neat and well maintained, wooden shutters drawn in the windows, a copper fisherman’s lamp next to the front door and a boot brush set beside the low, worn step where a uniformed officer was currently standing, squinting into the sun and sweating profusely.