Читать книгу: «Remain Silent»

Davy is squinting at the letters, trying to decipher the handwriting accurately, then down at his phone as he types them into Google Translate. Google comes back with the answer:

The dead cannot speak

Standing so close to the trouser leg, Davy has been assailed by the stink of the cadaver – not decomposition, it’s fresh. Happened last night, would be Davy’s guess. It stinks because his bowels opened when he died and because he is an unwashed eighteen-year-old, or thereabouts. Young men kill themselves more frequently than anyone else, but that note puts the ball firmly in Davy’s court. It’s a threat or a confession. Either way, it smacks of murder as opposed to self-harm.

‘What d’you think?’ Harriet says.

‘That note pinned to the body,’ says Davy. ‘Translates as “the dead can’t talk”. It’s in Lithuanian.’ He gives Harriet a pointed look.

She nods. ‘You’re thinking Wisbech?’

‘Yup. Also, look at his hands.’

They both look at the cadaver’s hands, which are suspended conveniently at head height. They are butcher’s hands – thick fingers, curled, like a pair of well-worn gloves. Dark skinned. The backs of his hands are etched with multiple thin white lines.

‘Think we need to check in with Operation Pheasant,’ Davy says.

He doesn’t want to confess, even to himself, how much he’d like to check in with Bridget on Operation Pheasant (as the Fenland Exploitation Team is known); the feelings this inspires in him. He is spoken for, after all. And not by Bridget.

‘We can’t let this go on,’ Harriet says. ‘This is the third. Makes us look like we’ve got no control. Any CCTV?’

Davy shakes his head. ‘Not as far as I can see.’

‘Were the victim’s hands tied?’

‘It doesn’t appear so.’

‘But if his hands weren’t tied, did he try to haul himself up the rope?’

‘Derry Mackeith will tell us that when he does the PM.’

Davy can see Harriet thinking what he’s thinking. Hard to get a man into a tree with his hands tied. Even harder to hang him without his hands tied. If he was drugged or unconscious, it would’ve been close to impossible to get him into a tree.

‘We’ll need to tell Derry to look out for fibres under the fingernails, burn marks to his palms from the rope, that kind of thing.’

‘Yes,’ says Davy, adding it to his mile-long mental list.

DAY 1
4 P.M.
MATIS

Twelve hours in the darkness of an industrial chicken shed made him forget himself. The stink, the noise, being scratched, being exhausted. Perhaps Lukas is best off out of it.

In the van back to the house, his head lolls against the seat rest and he dozes a blank sleep. When they are disgorged from the van, he looks at the house, sees the prospect of being alone with his thoughts, and starts to shake. He grasps Dimitri’s arm.

‘I can’t go in. I feel sick,’ he says.

‘OK. We’ll get a drink.’

He can see Dimitri is exhausted and would rather lie on his mattress, boots off. He is grateful to him for his companionship.

As they walk down the street, a car pulls up outside their house. Two men, both in dark suits, get out and go to the front door. Some kind of officialdom, Matis guesses. The communist regime had loved officialdom, Lukas’s father told him. Matis admired Lukas’s father enormously. Jűri was a thoughtful, gentle man, in contrast to Matis’s own father. Jűri described languorous men in uniform, standing about pointlessly, feeling important. ‘Puffed up on their petty bureaucracies. Four suited guys to take your ticket at the museum. Welcome to full employment!’

Matis and Dimitri take their bottle of vodka and drink it in the park. The air is soft, the temperature mild.

‘Why don’t you tell the police what you saw?’ Dimitri asks. ‘Let them take care of it?’

‘Seriously,’ Matis says. ‘You trust the police?’

‘It is different here.’

‘Sure it is.’

Suspicion of authority is only a fraction of the reason why Matis won’t talk.

‘You must not say anything to the police,’ Matis tells Dimitri. ‘Promise me.’

Matis wakes to find himself laid out on the tarmac path, where he has fallen asleep. It is nearly dark. Someone has thrown coins at him. They have landed on the ground in front of his stomach. This kindness makes him cry.

DAVY

The ID card, or maybe it was a driver’s licence – Davy can’t tell because it’s in Lithuanian – says the name: Lukas Balsys. A grainy photograph of a man who looks little more than a boy, though he was no less grey-faced when he was alive than after hanging.

‘Davy Walker as I live and breathe. This is a nice surprise,’ says Bridget as he walks into her Wisbech office, the ID card proffered for her to see.

Bridget is a senior officer on Operation Pheasant, whose offices are three rooms in a slope-ceilinged attic close to the town centre. ‘Ah, OK,’ says Bridget, looking at the card. She’s got her hair in a complicated plait affair, two rows on either side of her head, rather like a schoolgirl. She’s wearing a black cardigan over a patterned dress.

His attraction to Bridget is physical, primarily. Also the attraction of what he cannot have: the new and unknown and illicit. When all that is sanctioned is at home, there is a yearning for the unsanctioned. He realises it isn’t deeper than that, and that his fiancée Juliet offers him something real and complex, albeit cloaked in a somewhat pressurising commitment that he himself had wanted and brought on. It is Juliet, not Bridget, who puts up with his constant cancellations and late arrivals home because of work. The date nights postponed. It is Juliet who fights against the peevish feelings his unreliable shift pattern engenders. Bridget is a destructive impulse. Bridget is forbidden, hard to resist. Bridget is lively, bright-eyed. Her face hyper-mobile – with humour mostly. Also – and this is no small factor – Bridget is Up For It. How often does that come along? Davy can hear Manon’s voice saying, ‘Fucking never, if you’re me.’

‘Right,’ Bridget says, after a search on her computer. ‘We don’t have Lukas Balsys on our books. But that’s not unusual. Half these guys are not documented at all. He might be new. If I were you, I’d start at the HMO on Prospect Place. It’s the Lithuanian hub, if you like. But beware of the house spokesman. Someone will be pushed in your face who speaks good English and he’ll feed you a load of hokum about how happy they all are. Yes, yes, very heppy, very nice place.’ She says this last bit in a thick Russian accent. ‘You won’t get a straight answer out of them. Take an interpreter. And try to shake off Edikas. They won’t say a word with him in the room.’

‘Righto,’ he says, wondering if he could depart with something more flirty, but the subject matter of their conversation made this seem distasteful. Murder chat versus flanter (flirty banter). Murder chat wins. The attic room smells really nice – of Bridget’s floral perfume.

‘By the way, Davy?’ she says as he makes to leave. ‘It’s unusual that the note was in Lithuanian. Most of the guys who come over are Baltic Russians. Just thought it might help.’

‘So, not from Lithuania then?’ he asks, confused.

‘Yes, from Lithuania, but Baltic Russians from Lithuania. There’s loads of them, especially in Klaipeda, the town where they’re usually from. They relocated there during the Soviet occupation.’

Davy pulls up outside a red-brick terraced house with plastic windows, front garden piled with rubbish that is escaping its bags. The house next door is immaculate.

‘This must be driving them mad,’ Davy says to the interpreter who is following him up the path. Davy gives him a glance, which is part grimace, intended to say ‘it’s going to be unpleasant in here’.

Initially, no one answers the door. They ring and knock again, Davy shouts ‘Police!’ through the letter box.

Eventually, a sleepy man in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt opens the door, leaves it open and walks away from them, back up the stairs, without speaking.

They stand awkwardly in the hallway until a rotund, bald man greets them from the back of the house, holding out his hand.

‘Hello, I’m Edikas. How can I help you?’ he says. In Russian.

Edikas arranges for Davy to talk to various residents. It is an awkward business as there is no seating – what would have been a lounge is set with mattresses, and the kitchen is a galley without a table. The house is dirty – smells of microwaved dinners, the kind made from meat of unknown provenance.

Davy stands at the doorway to one of the bedrooms with his notepad. His interviewee sits on a mattress, knees up, back to the wall. He doesn’t make eye contact. Everyone denies knowing Lukas or anything about Lukas.

The interpreter looks uncomfortable as he translates. He can speak both Lithuanian and Russian, as most older Lithuanians can. He casts an anxious glance at Davy, then looks at his notepad and holds out his hands. Davy hands the interpreter his notepad.

Scared, the interpreter writes. The word is underlined. Then he writes, Can you distract him?

‘A word out back, if you don’t mind,’ Davy says to Edikas.

‘When you have finished, we talk,’ Edikas replies, in English this time, folding his arms.

‘What’s this fella called?’ Davy asks, bending to pet the dog. The dog bares its teeth, snarling.

‘Skirta,’ says Edikas. ‘It mean devoted in my language.’

He is glancing into the bedroom where the interpreter is whispering to the interviewee. ‘What are you saying to my friend?’ Edikas demands loudly.

The man who had opened the door to them, the one in tracksuit bottoms, enters the kitchen and opens various cupboards. Edikas shouts at him in Russian, the man protests, but weakly. His face is ravaged with exhaustion. From the exchange, Davy guesses the man wanted food and Edikas told him he couldn’t have any. The man trudges away again up the stairs.

‘They never stop eating,’ Edikas explains.

Davy steps into the bedroom where the interpreter is trying to get blood from a stone. It should be him leading the questioning, not the interpreter, so he intervenes.

‘Did you know Lukas Balsys?’ Davy asks.

The interpreter relays.

The migrant on the mattress shrugs.

‘Is that yes or no?’ Davy asks.

Another shrug.

‘Would you like to come down to the station and talk to us there?’

Edikas enters. ‘You cannot take him to police station unless he is under arrest. What can be for arresting? Nothing!’

‘Do you know what happened to Lukas Balsys?’ Davy asks, deciding to attempt an interview despite the obstacles.

Another languid shrug.

He writes on his pad. Tell him we can protect him if he talks to us. He shows this to the interpreter.

The interpreter writes, I cannot tell him this without also telling the heavy. And he nods at Edikas.

‘Did Lukas have any things?’ Davy asks Edikas. ‘That he left in the house?’

Edikas nods and points to one of the mattresses. It is covered in a sheet that was once white but has a brown, human-shaped stain taking up most of its surface. Beside the mattress is a bottle of vitamin pills, a leather belt, a pair of socks.

‘What about his wallet, his phone?’ Davy asks.

Edikas shrugs. ‘That’s all,’ he says, nodding at the desultory collection of objects on the floor. Davy puts on a pair of gloves and places the objects into evidence bags.

He wants to get out. This isn’t the way to break open this hub. It’s a crime scene. It wants clearing out like a crime scene.

‘We can go,’ he says to the interpreter. He steps quickly around the mattresses and heads for the door.

Outside, Davy’s phone vibrates.

When will you be home Dudu Bear?

He looks at his watch. It’s only 4 p.m. and Juliet’s asking. He texts back, irritably.

Late. Job’s come in.

Can you give me an idea of time? Only it’s really hard to sleep if I don’t know when you’re coming in.

You sleep. I’ll go on the couch.