Free Long Way Home by Eva Dolan

corridor, too many for such a small space.
    Ferreira knocked on one of the doors and opened it without waiting for a reply.
    The room was in darkness but in the dim light from the hallway they saw the entire floorspace was taken up with mattresses, three of them tucked tight together. The men slept doubled up on them, back to back, curled away from each other.
    Ferreira closed the door quietly.
    ‘Who are you?’
    A man came downstairs to them, a grubby towel around his neck and the front of his grey vest spattered with water. He wore unlaced work boots thick with dried mud.
    ‘We’re looking for Andrus Tombak,’ Zigic said.
    ‘I do not know this name.’
    ‘This is his house.’
    ‘You are police?’
    ‘Mr Tombak was attacked a few weeks ago,’ Zigic said. ‘His arm was broken.’
    ‘I was not here,’ the man said.
    ‘We know who attacked him. We just need to speak to him about an identification.’
    The man let out a rattling chain of Polish, told Zigic he didn’t understand what he was saying, he spoke very little English, he would have to ask somebody else, and ducked quickly into the front room.
    ‘He was scared,’ Ferreira said.
    ‘And he’s not Polish,’ Zigic told her. ‘He speaks it pretty well but his accent’s totally wrong.’
    Cooking smells wafted along the hallway from the back of the house, garlic beginning to singe and a hit of spice. They followed it to a small kitchen with ancient palm-leaf wallpaper and a stripped concrete floor with a couple of thin rugs thrown down. It had a haphazard, scavenged look, white base units and wooden ones on the wall, some with missing handles. A washing machine was wheezing and creaking in the corner, a basket full of damp clothes on top of it. The kitchen was warm though, and steamy, two pans of water on a rolling boil and a fug of smoke sweetened with marijuana. After a sixteen-hour shift it would pass for homely, Zigic thought.
    A fat man in a denim shirt and combats was stirring something in an old enamel casserole dish, holding the wooden spoon like a dagger, the movement made awkward by the cast on his left wrist. He didn’t look up as they entered but the men sitting around the scrubbed pine table fell silent, their eyes fixing on the new arrivals.
    Zigic felt their hostility and made himself straighten up.
    ‘Andrus Tombak?’
    One of the men nodded towards the chef then swiftly looked away, concentrating on his bottle of beer as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world.
    Tombak glanced at Zigic.
    ‘Who let you in?’ he asked, picking up a cleaver from the worktop.
    ‘The front door was open.’
    ‘The door is never open.’
    ‘We’re police, Mr Tombak.’ Zigic flashed his warrant card. ‘DI Zigic, this is DS Ferreira, we’d like to talk to you about the man who broke your wrist.’
    Tombak grunted and turned away, taking the cleaver to a cut of belly pork. The meat smelled high, an unhealthy bloom on it. As he sliced off thin strips, pinning it to the chopping board with the fingertips of his left hand, it bled greyish juices. He barked a brief command and the men rose obediently, went out into the back garden. Through the kitchen door Zigic noticed a large shed at the bottom of the garden. Dim light glowing through the newspaper tacked up across its windows.
    How many men did Tombak have here? Six in the front room, perhaps six more in the room opposite that and the same again in each of the bedrooms. Three dozen men crammed into a space designed for the classic, four-person nuclear family of the 1970s. Each of them paying him ninety pounds a week and whatever extra he could squeeze out of them.
    He didn’t look rich but Zigic knew better than to make snap assumptions with men like Tombak. They lived close to their tenants so they could control them. They needed to watch them every hour of every day.
    He hadn’t expected this situation and he cursed himself for arriving unprepared.
    ‘Can you tell us what happened, Mr