by Cain, Tom
His attention was entirely focused on himself and his personal suffering. He was unaware of the figure observing him from the stairs, and shuffled into his drab, barren living space without the first idea that he was in any immediate danger. He was just relieved to have got away from Netherton Street in one piece, unmolested by the police. Then he turned to close the door behind him, and suddenly it didn’t seem to want to shut. In fact it was pushing against him, and he was being forced backwards. His jumbled senses were unable to make sense of what was happening until the weight on the far side of the door shifted and manifested itself in front of him as the figure of a man.
His eyes were shaded by the peak of his cap, and his nose and mouth were hidden behind the blue scarf knotted around his face. Something about him seemed familiar, though Bakunin was in no state to remember where he had seen him before. Bakunin didn’t even see the two hands that slapped him hard on either side of the face, one after the other, hurting and disorientating him still further. He was unable to offer any resistance as he was bundled across the room and sat on a plain wooden chair. He was hit again, the same way as before, and then, from far, far away, he heard a muffled voice say, ‘Don’t move.’
Bakunin wasn’t capable of movement. He was physically shattered, mentally drained and close to tears. He felt as helpless as a small boy at the mercy of a playground bully, and he just wanted to curl up in a small, foetal ball and cover his head with his hands until all the monsters went away.
He was hardly aware of the telephone cable, ripped from the wall, that was being tied around his shins, binding them to the chair legs. Nor did he make the slightest protest as his arms and chest were secured to the back of the chair. He was almost grateful for the immobility. He felt supported, and just sat there limply, with his head hanging down, lacking the energy even to be curious about what was going to happen next.
Carver had absolutely no concern whatever for the riot leader’s wellbeing. He never wanted to kill another human being again if he could possibly help it. But hurting one was another matter. Carver needed information, and he wasn’t going to be bound by any rules or regulations while he got it. He was filming the interrogation, too. He wanted the whole world to know the truth of what had happened.
He started with the basics: ‘What’s your name?’
The man raised his head. There was a frantic look on his face. ‘What? What? Can’t hear,’ he whined, turning his head to one side and leaning forward so that his ear was tilted towards Carver.
Carver bent down and put his mouth close to it. He repeated, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Oh,’ said the man, as if surprised that it was such a simple question. And then: ‘Not telling you.’
Carver gestured with his finger, bringing the man’s ear closer to him again. ‘Yes, you are,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
The man sat back, his mouth clamped shut.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Carver and kicked the man in the chest with the flat of his sole, knocking over the chair. The man cried out as the back of his head hit the floor, but that was all he could do as he lay there like a dead beetle, immobile and helpless.
Carver left him there and went into the flat’s grubby kitchen, which was lined with decrepit old units, fronted in chipped and scratched white melamine. The sink was filled with dirty crockery, making a mockery of the yellow washing-up gloves draped over its edge. Carver put them on. He took the towel and stuck it under the cold tap until it was wet through, then wrung it out just enough to stop it dripping. Next he filled a teacup with more cold water before taking both the towel and the cup back into the living room.
Carver got down on one knee by the man’s head. ‘You’ve heard of waterboarding, right?’ he said.
The man’s eyes widened in alarm and he jerked his head from side to side as he whimpered, ‘No, no . . . please . . .’
Carver pressed the towel down over the man’s face, drawing it tight across his nose so that he couldn’t breathe without inhaling the water still left in the fabric. He held the gathered ends of the towel bunched beneath the man’s chin in one hand. With the other, Carver raised the cup and then delicately poured a thin stream of water down on to the towel, pulling hard on the fabric to prevent the desperate man from moving his nose and mouth away from the dripping water.
It would, Carver knew, feel exactly like drowning – mostly because it actually was a form of drowning. Waterboarding could be fatal, even to a fit interrogation subject. This man was in very bad shape and his lungs had certainly been damaged to some extent by the blast, so his tolerance would be much lower than the average. Carver gave it fifteen seconds, knowing that it would have seemed far, far longer to the man being tortured, and then released his grip on the towel.
The man fought for breath, and the sounds he made as he struggled to get air down into his lungs were so like those of the dying bomb-victims in the Lion Market that Carver just wanted to press the towel back down on his face and keep it there till he couldn’t breathe any more, simply to shut him up.
He fought against temptation and made himself stick to his mission.
‘One more time: what’s your name?’
No response.
‘What’s your name? Or do you want another helping?’
The man shook his head. ‘No . . . no . . . I’ll tell you my name. I’ll tell you anything. Just, please stop hurting me.’
‘All right then. We’re going to talk. And I’m going to film it.’
Carver fished the head cam out of his pocket, turned it back on and pointed it at the man. ‘So, let’s start again,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Bakunin. My name is Donny Bakunin.’
‘And you organized the riot at Netherton Street tonight?’
‘Yes . . . well, no . . .’
‘Which: yes or no?’
‘Yes, I got everyone together on the street. I gave them their orders . . . and I told them not to hurt anyone . . . I made that very clear! I want everyone to know that!’
‘I’m sure people will really appreciate your efforts. Now, who told you to start the riot?’
Bakunin’s eyes widened. ‘How did you know?’
‘Who was it? Who told you not to hit the pub?’
Bakunin’s eyes darted from side to side. ‘Have you been listening? What are you? MI5? GCHQ?’
‘I’m a man who wants to know where you get your orders.’
‘I don’t know! I never got a name. We never met. I tell you, I don’t know!’
‘Did it have anything to do with Mark Adams?’
‘Adams! I’d never work for a fascist like Adams!’
‘Yes, you would. You’ll work for anyone. We’ve already established that. So, was this the first time?’
Bakunin shook his head.
‘So what was the procedure?’
‘I got a call, telling me where it had to happen and when.’
‘When was the last call?’
‘Today, about six o’clock.’
‘Did you get paid?’
Bakunin’s silence was almost as good as a confession. Almost.
Carver held the towel up so Bakunin could see it. Then he lowered his hand again and repeated the question: ‘Did you get paid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cash? Bank transfer?’
‘Transfer.’
‘What bank?’
‘First Global.’
‘Based where?’
‘Grand Cayman.’
Carver burst out laughing. ‘An anarchist with an offshore account. That’s just perfect. Where’s your phone, you hypocritical sack of shit?’
‘In my coat.’
Carver searched the pockets of the duffel coat until he found the phone. ‘Security code?’
‘One-one-five-nine.’
Carver punched it in. The washing-up gloves made it hard to press the numbers, but the inconvenience was worth it: he’d leave no fingerprints on the phone. As the home screen appear
ed he said, ‘Let me guess: first of January, 1959 . . . the date of the Cuban revolution. What does that make you, the Fidel Castro of Clapham?’
He opened up the phone’s call history. There was an incoming one at 18.03 all right, and it looked like the correct one because the number was blocked.
‘What did you do when you wanted to call him?’
‘There was a number, but it only led to a voicemail. It’s in the address book under Hegel.’
‘Of course it is.’
Bakunin had been the last stop on a series of cut-outs between the original planners of the riot and the foot soldiers who had actually put it in motion. The whole purpose of the system was to ensure that no one could betray anyone else’s identity. For now it was enough for Carver that he knew for sure that someone, somewhere, had planned everything. And speaking of that someone, he was late for dinner with Adams.
Carver used the towel to wipe down the cable tying Bakunin to the chair. He kept the gloves on as he left the flat, and disposed of them in a waste-disposal bin several blocks away. The cap and scarf each went into separate bins. Then he grabbed a cab and set off for the restaurant.
48
IT WAS AS if the events at the O2 had never happened. The demonstrations, the apparent assassination attempt, Mark Adams’s speech – in an instant, they’d all been put to the back of the media queue; footnotes at best to the headline story of the riot in Netherton Street. There were almost as many outside broadcast vans as emergency vehicles parked in the area, clustering as close as they could get to the scene-of-crime tape that cordoned off more than a hundred metres of the street itself, and a couple of residential side roads, too.
The police had set aside a small area for TV crews. It allowed reporters to stand in front of their cameras with a suitably dramatic scene of urban devastation behind them, without allowing them to get close enough to impede the work of the myriad people investigating the riot and dealing with its victims. The individual stars that viewers saw on their screens were lined up almost shoulder to shoulder, each delivering an apparently unique perspective on events, while standing within easy touching distance of someone else saying almost exactly the same thing.
‘The scenes here are by far the worst that London has seen since the seven-seven bombings in July 2005,’ pronounced a grim-faced brunette with an Irish accent, representing the BBC. ‘Fifty-two people as well as the four bombers died that night, and the final death toll here may be even higher. We know that the staff of an Indian restaurant, the Khyber Star, were massacred, as were several customers at a pub, the Dutchman’s Head. But the worst carnage was reserved for the mini-supermarket behind me, the Lion Market.’
‘It is still not clear precisely what happened here,’ said the man from Sky News, his eyes narrowed like a hunter surveying the horizon, his voice clipped and authoritative. ‘But I have been able to piece together some key elements in the story. The rioters made a concerted attack against a small group of people who were taking shelter in the Lion Market. A garbage truck stolen earlier in the evening was rammed into the shop’s security shutters, smashing them. Rioters flooded into the store, and very soon afterwards there was some kind of explosion. At this stage, no one knows precisely what caused it.’
‘Just a few minutes ago, I spoke to one of the policemen at the scene,’ revealed a rosy-cheeked young man from ITN. ‘He told me that when he arrived at the store it was filled with people coughing and vomiting up blood. They were struggling for breath and were clearly in great distress. Some of them, he said, were little more than children. The first ambulances arrived no more than five minutes later. And by then, the policeman said, every single one of those people in the supermarket was dead.’
The BBC woman said, ‘Senior police commanders are genuinely shocked by what has happened here. We have been suffering riots and disorder for so long that we have, perhaps, become numbed by them. But the horror of the Netherton Street killings is so extreme that it is taking us into a whole new realm of violence. And now, back to the studio . . .’
49
CHRYSTAL PRENTICE WAS sitting in an interview room at Kennington police station, with a female police officer and a cup of hot, sweet tea for company, waiting to be interviewed. She was trying to decide what to say. They were going to expect honest answers, but Snoopy’s mate had helped save their lives. So if he wanted to keep out of all this, she owed it to him to do what he’d asked. And it felt like what Snoopy would have wanted, too. That was the deciding thing, really: what Snoopy would have wanted.
Poor Snoopy. It was all Chrystal could do to stop herself crying at the memory of him lying on that storeroom floor, and equally hard to drive that memory from her mind.
The door opened and as the female PC excused herself and left two other people came in. The first one introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Brian Walcott. He was black, about thirty-five, Chrystal reckoned, dressed in a basic suit and tie and quite fit, really, for a policeman. The second one was a woman. She introduced herself as Detective Inspector Mara Keane, which made her Walcott’s boss, and in her heels she towered over him, though he wasn’t exactly short. When Keane spoke her voice was soft and quite low, like a newsreader on the TV: the kind of voice that made you believe whatever it was saying.
‘So, you were working at the Dutchman’s Head . . . what happened?’ Keane said, giving Chrystal a look that was not in any way aggressive, but which still made it plain to the younger woman that she was being sized up, too.
‘Well, I got talking to one of the customers,’ Chrystal began, trying to keep those terrible images away from her mind. ‘He was sitting at the bar, and he said something about being scared of flying, and I said that was, like, well funny,’ cos I am too, terrified.’
‘And this man, was he the one who ended up in the Lion Market with you?’ Keane asked.
Chrystal nodded, trying to hold back the tears.
‘Did he give you his name?’
‘He just said his name was . . .’ Chrystal could feel herself welling up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Then she covered her mouth to hide her trembling lips.
‘Take your time,’ said Keane.
Chrystal took a deep breath and said, ‘Snoopy. He said his name was Snoopy.’
‘And this Snoopy, was he drinking alone?’
Chrystal couldn’t quite manage a direct lie. ‘Yeah, well, he must’ve been, mustn’t he? Otherwise he wouldn’t have been talking to me.’
‘I don’t know, you tell me. Was he alone?’
‘Yeah . . . yeah, he was alone.’
Both women knew that wasn’t the truth. Walcott did, too. He wanted to press Chrystal harder, but before he could, Keane changed the subject.
‘So tell me how you got from the pub to the Lion Market.’
Chrystal sighed heavily, as though she’d been holding her breath: maybe she had been, she wasn’t sure. The relief was evident in her voice as she explained how they had left the pub, bumped into the rioters and rescued another woman. She described Snoopy firing at the rioters and being hit by one of their bullets before they reached the Lion Market.
Walcott had been asking a lot of the questions: ‘So when you got to the shop, who was there?’
‘Er . . . me, Snoopy, the woman he’d rescued from the car and Maninder and Ajay, obviously,’ cos it’s their shop.’
Now Keane came back into the interview. ‘The woman from the car, that was . . .’ She consulted her notes: ‘Paula Miklosko?’
‘Yeah, Paula, that was her.’
‘And how would you say she was – her physical and mental condition, I mean?’
‘She was well out of it. She’d been punched and that and she was, like, all shaking and in shock.’
‘So how did she get from the car to the Lion Market?’ Keane did not raise her voice at all when she asked the question. She didn’t have to.
Chrystal scrambled for time. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘If she was out of it and in shock, how did s
he manage to get from the car, where she was rescued, to the shop?’
‘She come with us, didn’t she?’
Keane frowned. ‘So she ran, is that it? She managed to run fast enough not to be caught by this mob . . . even though she was in shock?’
‘Well, we helped her.’
‘You and Snoopy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘At the same time that he was turning round to shoot at people?’
Chrystal hated this. She was trying to do the right thing, but every question just made her dig herself deeper and deeper into trouble. ‘I don’t know! It was mental out there. How am I supposed to remember everything?’
Keane nodded. Again she backed off, like an angler who lets the line run out when the fish has already been hooked. ‘All right, let’s get back to the market. You were there and you were tending to Snoopy’s wounded arm, and there was a big mob outside. So then what happened? Did the mob attack?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Were any shots fired at them . . . from inside the shop?’ ‘They might have been, I don’t know.’
Now Walcott intervened again, sounding impatient: ‘Come off it, Chrystal. If a gun goes off in the same room you’re in, you know all about it. Were any shots fired from the shop at the mob outside?’
‘Yeah . . . maybe . . . two or three.’
Keane again: ‘So who fired them?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t looking. I was doing Snoopy’s arm.’
‘So he definitely didn’t fire the shots?’
‘Well, no, how could he?’
‘Which means it had to be one of the two Panus.’
‘Well, yeah, maybe . . . Like I said, I didn’t see.’
‘Then what?’
‘Me and Maninder went down to the cellar with Paula.’
‘What happened to the other two: Ajay Panu and Snoopy?’
Keane asked.
‘Snoopy went out the back, in case anyone came in that way.’ Chrystal bit her lip as she felt it start to tremble again.
‘So . . . what about Ajay Panu, where did he go?’