Free Long Way Home by Eva Dolan Page B

then the CPS will hand over everything to your lawyers.’
    ‘Get out of my house.’
    Tombak grabbed Ferreira’s arm and tried to bundle her towards the stairs but she twisted sharply, using his momentum, and slammed him into the banister, driving his broken wrist against the newel post. He dropped to his knees, a suppressed howl vibrating in his throat.
    ‘Assaulting a police officer,’ Zigic said. ‘Think yourself lucky you’re in England, Tombak, we’re only going to arrest you for that.’
    He took Tombak downstairs and out onto the street, handed him over to the uniforms waiting on the kerb. Before they pulled off he told them to have the doctor check him out, then called the station for more support.
    All of those men in the house to question. Someone had spoken up about Stepulov already and he only needed one of them to be brave enough to break Tombak’s alibi.

13
     
    IT WAS A long few hours of repetitive conversation in broken English and pidgin Polish, conducted in the back kitchen under a fizzing strip light with the smoke from dozens of counterfeit cigarettes thick in the air. After a while the meat Tombak had left cooking on the gas hob stuck and burned and one of the men threw the pan in the sink. He ran cold water on it but the stink of scorched flesh didn’t go away, it just altered slightly, becoming even more like the smell of Stepulov, dead in the shed that morning, his body doused but still smouldering.
    Zigic told one of the uniforms to open the window and thought, for the first time in years, of smoking a cigarette. Anything to smother that smell.
    Most of the men were reluctant to speak, the presence of uniforms making them nervous and small even though every one of them was on legal papers and Zigic made sure they realised there would be no problems with immigration even if they weren’t.
    He just needed some facts on record and right then he would have given anything he had in order to get them.
    The man Ferreira had spoken to in the bathroom changed his story once they took Tombak away and he looked terrified as she questioned him again, getting increasingly frustrated, colour rising in her cheeks. She kept repeating what he had told her and he kept denying it.
    ‘Stepulov was here before Christmas,’ she said. ‘You were sharing a room with him.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You told me you worked the same shifts.’
    ‘No. I say nothing about this.’
    In the end Zigic told him to go and Ferreira retreated to the back garden where some of the men were drinking beers and passing round a bottle of vodka. It was on her breath when she returned but she seemed calmer so he said nothing.
    They had statements from four men confirming that Jaan Stepulov was living at the house when the fight between him and Tombak broke in December. They gave varying accounts of its cause but all agreed that Stepulov was in the right without being able to say why precisely.
    Tombak wasn’t just their landlord, Zigic discovered. He owned the house but he owned the men too, took money off them for board and food, controlled how and when their wages were paid and where they worked. The shifts were irregular and unpredictable, nobody staying at one place long enough to know exactly how much they should be earning. Tombak was getting rich off them and they resented it, but the situation was the same everywhere and Zigic felt their resignation heavy on him.
    Stepulov wasn’t prepared to stand for it, he suspected, and that was probably what they fought over.
    The next man came into the kitchen. He was the oldest yet, late forties, sturdy and tanned with wavy black hair going to grey. He shook their hands with an air of stiff formality, his skin calloused and dry. He wore a narrow gold wedding ring and a couple of saints’ medals on a thin chain which hung outside his T-shirt. He looked powerful around the arms but age was catching up with him and there was softness at his belly and ribs.
    ‘DI Zigic. This is DS