Free Tell No Tales by Eva Dolan Page B

stone cottages, cars parked out on the winding road as the last stragglers from the village primary’s after-school club bundled their kids home in a flutter of bags and coats and craft projects, which left the pavement scattered with glitter and pasta shapes.
    A broad, blonde woman with twin girls waved at Zigic as he went by and he put his hand up, trying to remember her name. Anna had insisted they have the woman and husband over for dinner last year and the evening had been so excruciating that he had drunk too much wine and almost fallen asleep at the table, listening to the husband drone on about his work in the City, while the women talked over each other at double speed, discussing private schools they couldn’t afford, ski resorts they wouldn’t go to, and how difficult it was to find honest cleaners. Which they didn’t have. The one small comfort was that the man was too much of a narcissist to ask Zigic about his job.
    He stopped at the village shop and bought an Evening Telegraph from the bundle just delivered by the till. The owner had her back to him, concentrating on filling the fridge, so he left the money on the counter and slipped out before she could cross-examine him.
    The front page was taken up by a photograph of the scene, shot from such a distance that it was impossible to make out the details. The article was short on those too. Their deadline hit too early for them to use anything from the forthcoming press conference and all they had to go on was the statement released at lunchtime. It was neutral in tone and more tactful that he expected, no mention of a racial motive.
    He reversed into the drive ready for a quick getaway and let himself into the kitchen through the back door. Milan was sitting at the long pine table bent over a colouring book, his pencils lined up neatly in front of him, bracketed by a rubber at one end and a sharpener at the other. He was concentrating on a picture of an oak tree, three different greens clutched in his right hand which he kept switching between as he did the leaves.
    Zigic kissed the top of his head. ‘Let me look at your teeth.’
    Milan turned his face up and bared them in a wide grin.
    ‘Was the dentist nice?’
    ‘She gave me a lolly.’
    ‘She didn’t give me a lolly when I went.’
    Milan considered it for a moment. ‘Were you naughty?’
    ‘I hadn’t flossed,’ Zigic said, taking a bottle of water from the fridge. ‘Maybe that’s why.’
    ‘You can have mine.’ Milan slipped out of his chair. ‘I hid it so Stefan can’t find it.’
    He ran out of the kitchen and Zigic followed, hearing the vacuum cleaner going upstairs in the boys’ room, the muffled thump of Stefan jumping up and down on his bed. Anna’s voice cut sharply across the drone and the jumping stopped, followed a few seconds later by the vacuum.
    Zigic went into the master bedroom and looked at his suits hanging in clear plastic protectors, pushed away and forgotten at the far end of the wardrobe. They stuck to civilian clothes in Hate Crimes, a command decision he’d made early on, aware of the kind of people they would be dealing with and the negative connotations provoked by anything that smacked of uniformed authority. That was the official line anyway. The truth was he just hated wearing one.
    He picked out a narrow mid-grey suit, single-breasted, three-button, a white shirt and a dark blue tie. Changed his mind and switched it for a black one.
    Anna came in as he was pulling on his trousers. She eyed the outfit on the bed.
    ‘A blue tie would look better with that suit.’ She fetched the one he’d just put back and laid it against the jacket. ‘It must be something important if you’re dressing up.’
    ‘Press conference at five,’ he said. ‘There was a hit-and-run on Lincoln Road this morning. Bad one. Two dead.’
    ‘I saw the news. Why are you handling it?’
    ‘Where it was, everyone assumed it was going to be racially motivated.’ He shoved his feet