Tell No Tales by Eva Dolan Page B

to get nationals’ balls in your palm unfortunately.’ A faint smile flitted across her face. ‘But I think the best way to counter it for now would be a nice, friendly interview in tonight’s Telegraph with one of the family members.’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Ziggy, sweetheart, do I come in here telling you how to make some Kosovan cabbie ignore your war criminal surname? I wouldn’t dream of it.’ She slipped off the desk, heels clicking down onto the floor. ‘You need time to work these cases, don’t you? You cannot afford for people to start looking for a political angle in this yet. And believe me, when you’ve got your man I will have the press rain down their approval on you; you will be embarrassed by the love. But today you have a problem which is best solved by my putting a beautiful Slovenian girl on the front page of the evening paper.’
    ‘Sofia Krasic?’
    Gilraye nodded.
    ‘She’s still in hospital, you know,’ Zigic said.
    ‘That isn’t necessarily a problem, is it? She got out of it with minor injuries I heard.’
    ‘If she wants to talk to you . . . fine.’
    ‘I thought Paul Naysmith might be the best person to speak to her,’ Gilraye said. ‘His balls are in my palm after all. It’ll be half a page of entirely apolitical suffering. She speaks English, doesn’t she?’
    ‘She’s been here years.’
    ‘Not all of them do.’
    Zigic swallowed his annoyance, knowing she was right, thinking of his grandparents, both here since the early fifties but you would take them for migrants straight off the bus if you spoke to them. A couple of months ago a man in the post office had barracked his grandmother for taking a pension she had no entitlement to, thinking she had only just come over, told her it was her fault his wife couldn’t get a hip replacement. She gave him the benefit of her English then, every piece of bad language she’d picked up working in the local brickyard canteen.
    ‘I need to talk to her this morning,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know when I’m done.’
    ‘Be a sweetie and find me a decent picture of the sister,’ Gilraye said, already dialling. ‘Teeth are good, legs are better. Dovidenja .’
    As the stairwell door came to a slow close behind her Zigic felt a sense of discomfort settle between his shoulder blades. It stayed there as he hung up his waxed cotton parka and opened the bank of windows in the east-facing wall, letting some fresh air blow in, clearing the noxious pine scent the cleaners had left behind them.
    Last night, lying in bed unable to sleep, he had begun to wonder if the hit-and-run even had a deliberate target. Was the driver just looking for a group of migrant workers to take out and they were simply unlucky enough to be standing at a point on Lincoln Road where he found it easy to accelerate and build up enough speed to do an impressive degree of damage?
    It was a spectacle. An act guaranteed to attract attention from the press and prompt the inevitable debate about immigration in the city. If that was what the driver was trying to achieve he had done it. First item on the evening news last night, a brief mention on the BBC News Channel just before midnight, and this morning on page 11 of the Independent .
    Zigic thought of the CCTV footage from their murders, the masked man dressed all in black, raising a stiff-armed salute to his intended audience, knowing exactly how they would react when they saw it. But they hadn’t reacted. Not publicly at least. Five days on from Manouf’s murder, four weeks from Didi’s, the man was still a nobody, his agenda kept under wraps.
    Would that be enough to provoke a change in tactics?
    He put the coffee machine on and ate a Mars bar he found at the back of his desk drawer while he waited for it to brew.
    Gilraye had left the paper behind her, folded open at the headline.
    They’d told less than half the story but it was easy to be judgemental when all you had to do was produce five hundred words