Knife Edge : A Novel (2020)

by Mayo, Simon

  Hardin laughed ruefully. ‘Amen to all of that,’ he said.

  ‘The bishop will find out of course,’ she said.

  Hardin nodded. ‘Almost certainly. Well, so be it.’

  She ate a mouthful of the cake and smiled again as she swallowed. ‘Respect to you then, Don. Respect. And I thought you had a gig with the bishop on Thursday. That’s why you’d said you’d be elsewhere.’

  ‘I do,’ said Hardin. ‘Though assisting at a mass for peace is hardly a “gig”.’

  Bambawani gave a ‘whatever’ shrug. ‘You’re all dressed up,’ she said. ‘Waving your arms. Performing the magic. Sounds like a gig to me.’

  She offered him her last piece of cake. He took it. She raised her cup to him.

  ‘Well, here’s to you, Reverend,’ she said. ‘And when you’re done radicalizing the students, I have to call my missing student’s family. Then the police. If we haven’t heard anything by then.’

  ‘All the chaplains are praying for him now. I know you think that’s of no consequence but there you are. It’s what we do.’ He folded his arms, stared at the table.

  ‘You seem troubled,’ said Bambawani.

  Hardin raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe. You know me too well.’

  ‘You’re not exactly hiding it,’ she said.

  Hardin managed half a smile. ‘Maybe,’ he said again. He sighed. ‘Do you know what the number one reason for dropping into the Chaplaincy is?’

  ‘You’ve told me before, Don. Free food, isn’t it?’

  He smiled fully now. Nodded once more. ‘We do interfaith work, we do pastoral work. We try to be relevant. But it’s actually only pizza that works every time.’

  ‘Why is that troubling you? I’d be the same.’ Bambawani offered reassuringly. ‘Free pizza delivers a crowd. A life lesson, right there.’

  Hardin shook his head slowly. ‘Because I think we’ve failed, BB. The kid with the Indian communist poster is clearly in trouble but he still didn’t come to us. We have all faiths looked after, but it wasn’t enough. He went elsewhere. I’m proud of the work we do. We’ve built up good faith communities, we cooperate on mental health initiatives, food banks. The counselling is first rate. But if we don’t add pepperoni, no one cares.’

  ‘Well we both failed then,’ she said. ‘He didn’t come to me either.’ She chased some crumbs around the plastic plate. ‘Plan of action?’

  ‘I’ll carry on praying for him,’ said Hardin. ‘You want me to help in any way?’

  ‘No,’ said Bambawani. ‘You pray. Then, if the Almighty stays quiet, we call the family after the protest.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ said Hardin.

  41

  8.20 p.m.

  FAMIE, SOPHIE AND Sam were holed up in Famie’s flat. Tommi had joined them, bringing pizzas, the boxes strewn across the floor. The lounge and kitchen windows were all open, each trying to catch a non-existent breeze. Phones and laptops were plugged in and charging. Famie’s was displaying a map with Boxer Street, Coventry at its centre and playing a Mozart piano concerto through its speakers. Sophie was on the sofa, Tommi and Sam were sitting on the floor. Famie was in the kitchen filling a jug with ice. A sheet of reusable whiteboard had been stuck to the wall, the names of the seven dead and their partners’ contact numbers written on it in black marker. Another sheet had the Facebook photo of Hari Roy stuck to it. The rest of it was blank.

  ‘We must be the only people in the whole of London working inside,’ said Tommi, hanging up on a call.

  ‘You wanna do this in the park?’ said Sam.

  ‘Not really,’ Tommi conceded. ‘That was Anita’s husband. Didn’t really welcome the call, to be honest.’

  ‘I can imagine. What did you tell him?’

  ‘That it was likely that the police would be contacting him. That Seth’s personal life had become an issue in their investigation. That he had had relationships with a number of staff at IPS and that they would be asking if Anita was one of them.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He thanked me for the warning and that was that. Can’t blame him.’

  Famie walked in with the ice. ‘I got that from Sarah’s husband,’ she said. ‘Didn’t push it. And anyway, if there weren’t photos of them on his laptop, they’re probably in the clear. Unless there’s another laptop somewhere.’

  ‘Wouldn’t put it past him,’ said Sophie. ‘BPW.’

  ‘BPW indeed,’ said Famie. Then to Sam, ‘Don’t ask.’

  He shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

  Tommi was standing now, staring at the photo of Hari. ‘And he fits this how?’

  Famie stood alongside him. ‘Whatever the investigating team were looking at, EIJ, ISIS, whatever, he’s trapped in it somehow and he’s trying to get out. And if his instinct is to tell a journalist at IPS, he must have had some contact with us in the past. Some family connections maybe.’

  ‘And does he?’

  Sophie put her hand up. ‘Can’t find any yet, still looking.’

  ‘So, best guess,’ said Famie. ‘He’s a guy on the inside, recruited for a cause he thought he believed in. Now he’s changed his mind. Maybe when the seven were killed. He needs an out.’

  Sam clambered to his feet, iPad in hand. ‘Found his family. Mother, grandmother and sisters live in Leamington.’ He wrote the address on the whiteboard. ‘If Hari’s in danger, so are they.’

  ‘Do we let the police go there first?’ said Sam. ‘It’s the same as the hospital. Can we make enquiries without putting them at risk?’

  ‘We might have to,’ said Famie.

  ‘Discreetly and unofficially,’ said Sam.

  ‘It’s all I have,’ she said.

  Tommi was updating the whiteboard, writing ‘husband spoken to’ alongside Anita’s name. ‘We’re stuck, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Seven dead, a number of killers, one dissident. Or whatever we’re calling Hari. We need to loosen this up a bit.’

  ‘What aren’t we asking?’ called Sophie. ‘Be wild.’

  ‘Is Hari one person?’ said Sam. ‘Might the messages have come from more than one person?’

  Sophie took a deep breath. ‘OK. I’ll say it as the police have already asked me. Might Seth have been involved in some way? Perpetrator and then victim? Just putting it out there.’

  There were nods of appreciation.

  ‘Sounds unlikely to me,’ Sophie added, ‘but we need to consider it.’

  ‘It would need us to ditch everything we knew about Seth,’ said Sam.

  ‘Some of us have done that already,’ said Famie. ‘Better get with the programme. We know he was duplicitous. We know he was capable of lying, regularly and with astonishing ease. We know he had money issues, that he borrowed from everyone, and that his brother is a member of an Islamist terror organization. We’ve given the police his laptop. Apart from the porn, we don’t think there’s anything of interest.’

  Sam, visibly uncomfortable, tried a question. He fidgeted with his hands as he spoke. ‘Listen, this is bad, I know, and you would be quite within your rights to say no, but you said there were other women on the laptop?’

  ‘Two others,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Who were they?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘No idea.’ She glanced at Famie, who nodded consent. ‘I copied all the contents of the laptop,’ she said. ‘Sent it to Famie’s Dropbox.’

  ‘You still have the photos?’ said Sam.

  Famie nodded.

  ‘Look, we need to identify the other women. We should see the photos. It kind of matters who they are.’

  Both women nodded.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Famie, pulling her laptop close. ‘But you don’t get Sophie and me into the bargain.’

  ‘Listen, Famie—’ Sam began.

  ‘I’m joking,’ said Famie. ‘Relax, Sam, honestly.’

  He smiled awkwardly but didn’t relax.

  Famie hit the keys, copied and dragged the photos till they were on one page, then spun the screen. Two women were s
hown in adjacent pictures. On the left a naked woman, mid-thirties, was shown in profile – light brown skin, slim build, black hair to her shoulders, hands covering her face, either in embarrassment or possibly applying face cream. On the right, a shot of a younger woman stepping out of the shower and reaching for a towel. Her skin was darker, her smile enigmatic. Embarrassed too, possibly.

  Famie zoomed in on her face. ‘So. The other woman is too obscured, lucky her, let’s focus on this one.’ She was late twenties, brown hair, brown eyes, plucked and shaped eyebrows, a wide, surprised face. A small scar across the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Don’t think she’s IPS,’ said Sam.

  ‘Don’t recognize her,’ agreed Famie, ‘but she may work elsewhere in the building. We need to check that fast.’

  Tommi had his hand up, the other stabbing away at his keyboard, his eyes on the screen. He noticed the silence and looked up. ‘Sophie said what aren’t we asking. It’s always a good question. So I’ve just accessed the crime reports for May twenty-two, the day of the murders. And if the question is how many murders, the answer isn’t seven. It’s eight.’

  It was as though all the air had been sucked from the room and they were all operating in a vacuum. The silence was sudden and complete.

  Tommi looked around the room. ‘We stopped counting when Anita died. Seven in half an hour. We told that story. And we got it right. No more IPS staffers died after that. But this guy’ – he tapped his screen – ‘Toby Howells disappeared on the same day, the twenty-second. His body was found three days later. Stabbed, then hidden around the reservoir in Edgbaston. It’s not a million miles from Coventry. He was black, a student, twenty-one. He had a tube of crack on him so it was put down to drugs, gangs, the knife crime epidemic and so on.’

  ‘So why isn’t it just that?’ asked Sam.

  ‘It might be,’ conceded Tommi, ‘but the messages on his Facebook page say things like “RIP Toby, gutted. Loved your writing, man.” And this: “Gonna miss you all the way. Was convinced you’d be the next Reggie Yates.” Three of the posts link to articles he’d written online for the local paper.’

  Sam looked up. ‘So this kid was a wannabe journalist and he was knifed on the same day as Mary, Seth, Anita and the others. It might be a coincidence of course …’

  The room was silent.

  ‘Honestly, Tommi, it might be,’ said Sophie. ‘That’s quite a jump from seven IPS investigators to a kid at uni.’

  Famie did a quick online search. It took five seconds. She scanned the pages in front of her. Her tell-tale adrenalin kick told her everything. ‘Unless,’ she said, her voice tight with excitement, ‘our Hari was exactly the same. Look.’ Her screen showed pages of the Warwick Boar website, ‘Creating Conversation Since 1973’. ‘It’s the student paper,’ she explained, ‘and look who’s been writing for them. Hari Roy! He’s been linked in three articles. Guys, Hari is a wannabe journalist too. Toby Howells and Hari Roy have a link.’

  Tommi was on his feet, hooking his bag around his neck. ‘And he was recently in hospital,’ he said. ‘And definitely in danger.’ He shoved his laptop into the bag.

  ‘Are you off?’ said Famie, surprised.

  ‘I need to check the Toby Howells case,’ he said. ‘Carol’s at Canary Wharf till eleven. Easier to trawl this on her computers.’

  Famie followed him from the room and down the stairs to the front door.

  ‘You wanna come?’ he said, intrigued.

  ‘I’m good,’ she said, ‘but thanks.’

  He nodded, waiting for whatever it was she wanted to say. She wasn’t sure either.

  Eventually she said, ‘Carol Leven worth the trip?’

  Tommi grinned. ‘Always,’ he said. ‘Best crime reporter out there.’

  Famie nodded her agreement. ‘Tommi,’ she said, ‘if there is a link between Hari Roy and Toby Howells, and if that link is anything to do with May twenty-two, we are in seriously dangerous territory here. All of us. This isn’t a game or just another story, this is actually pretty scary stuff.’

  Tommi smiled. ‘Are you telling me to be careful?’

  Famie smiled back. ‘Fuck off, Tommi.’

  ‘That’s much better,’ he said. ‘Far more familiar ground. I’ll keep in touch.’ He nodded, stepped outside and clicked the door shut.

  A buzz from Famie’s phone. Her daughter’s face on its screen, a quick smile. She sat on the bottom step.

  ‘Hey you,’ she said. ‘How’s things?’ The sounds of traffic and rapid breathing.

  ‘Things are not especially great.’ Charlie was walking quickly, running even. ‘I’m coming home. On whatever train I can get.’

  Alarm bells started going off in Famie’s head. ‘You’re what? Why?’ She looked at her watch. Eight forty.

  ‘Because I’m shit scared, Mum, that’s why.’ Definitely running.

  ‘Keep talking, Charlie. Tell me what’s happened.’

  The distorted rattle of heavy breaths. ‘A girl got stabbed in Exeter today. Coming out of the Vue cinema.’

  ‘In Exeter? Jesus Christ.’ Slamming door, quieter acoustic. ‘You’re on the train now?’

  ‘Yes, and without a ticket. Gonna be expensive.’ Charlie’s voice was a breathless whisper.

  ‘I’ll pay it,’ said Famie. ‘What happened to the girl?’ The rustle of fabric crackled down the phone.

  ‘Mum, listen.’ Charlie was making her voice as small as she could. ‘I was at the cinema too. It happened just before I got out. We got delayed because Emily needed a piss. When we got out people were screaming and this girl was just lying there, holding her stomach. Blood everywhere. But, Mum …’ A deep breath. ‘She looked like me. She had crazy hair and the same rucksack. I noticed her going in. Emily pointed her out and we laughed. From behind we looked the same.’

  Famie closed her eyes. She fought to keep her voice calm, to keep the bile from rising in her throat. ‘When was this, Charlie?’

  ‘About an hour ago. We stayed until the police and ambulance came and she was still alive then. Her friends were with her. We didn’t see the attack so we didn’t say anything. But, Mum, she looked like me!’

  ‘Where’s Emily? Is she with you?’

  ‘She’s got an exam tomorrow. Last one. At least I’m done.’

  ‘When does the train leave?’

  ‘Two minutes.’

  ‘Find the busiest coach,’ said Famie. ‘Sit with people. Talk to them. Make friends. All the way. I’ll meet you at Paddington.’

  ‘Can we keep talking till the train leaves, please?’ said Charlie.

  She sounds like she’s ten years old again, thought Famie.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘And you do know that this is probably a coincidence, don’t you. That no one really looks like you. That it was probably a gang thing. Or a mugging. Or a domestic.’

  There was a long pause from the train.

  ‘OK,’ said Charlie. ‘Let’s stick with that one. But you don’t believe it, Mum, and neither do I. I’ll go and make friends.’

  42

  9 p.m.

  THE LAST OF the day’s sun at 26 Boxer Street. Hari Roy, Abi Binici and Sara Collins were in the courtyard. The student, the leader and the woman. Three chairs, three cups, one pot of tea. Despite the heat, Hari sat with a blanket over his legs. His eyes were closed as he listened to the to and fro between the leader and the woman. Binici was explaining again why he thought Zak had run away and why they now had to be extra vigilant. But Hari knew what had happened, had seen the blood stains under the rearranged matting in the hall. Zak was dead, Binici had killed him, and he, Hari, was responsible. He knew that. He had deflected suspicion, sown doubt, and Zak had paid the price. His body could well be still in the house. In the heat and under the blanket, Hari felt his flesh creep.

  Wade in filth …

  And now he was in terrible danger. He had tried to get ‘left behind’, to convince the leader he was a liability, yet here he was, back on the front line. He’d passed th
e note to the woman Gyongyi but had no way of knowing if she’d done anything with it. He had to assume she hadn’t. That he was on his own.

  It was another airless evening. The street’s open windows and doors made for a backdrop of constant cacophony: music, voices and barbecue clatter that drifted in from all sides. It gave a surprising cover of privacy to the conversation at number 26. Binici was talking – lecturing – about Britain as a failed state, its moral collapse and the self-evident virtue of violent rebellion. The woman, Collins, made the occasional comment but this was not a discussion. It was never a discussion.

  ‘In 1913 Lenin told his wife that revolution wouldn’t happen in his lifetime,’ said Binici. ‘That they were nowhere. That the Czarist secret police were too strong and the opposition too weak. But! But! It turned out that Russia was hollow. A clanging, empty vessel. And when the revolution came it was a spontaneous, disorganized, chaotic uprising. Well.’ Hari heard him sip tea, put his cup on the ground. ‘This so-called United Kingdom is decaying fast,’ he continued. ‘The people know they are run by a failed class of the hyper-rich, the neoliberal elite who care nothing for their homes, their jobs or their families. Their votes are irrelevant, their marches are irrelevant. They see that now. Even the so-called left are millionaires and children of the establishment. When the people see what a few committed revolutionaries can achieve, they will welcome us.’ Binici spread his arms wide. ‘Imagine it! Lenin said one of the chief symptoms of every revolution is the sudden increase in ordinary people taking an active interest in politics. Well? Isn’t that now?’

  Embrace the butcher …

  ‘Tomorrow we greet five more citizens. Thursday we strike.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Strike what?’ said Collins.

  So she didn’t know either.

  ‘If we’re making this great leap forward, citizen,’ Collins continued, ‘it would help if we knew where we are going.’