‘Well, someone’s got to say it.’ He nodded across. ‘And it doesn’t look like the cat’s about to chip in. Look, I’m just about willing to accept the basic… premise. The contract killings, the link between the cases. I mean, I’m here, aren’t I? But just because these two teenagers don’t come home one night… how many other Asian kids are on a missing persons list right now? How many of them are going to turn up safe and sound after sneaking off to some festival or other, or buggering off to Magaluf on the sly with a few mates?’
Thorne felt strange being the naysayer, when he was usually the one on the receiving end of such unwelcome words of advice. Such warnings. In Polesford he had been accused of looking for a crime where there was none; of chasing shadows. It hadn’t been the first time.
He looked across at Tanner as she put down the file. She took off her glasses, pinched the bridge of her nose.
She seemed tired, suddenly.
‘I’m good at my job,’ she said. ‘And please don’t take that as any kind of suggestion that you aren’t.’
‘Not in a million years,’ Thorne said. He had ignored the warnings in Polesford and eventually he had been proved horribly right. The shadows he had chased, and caught up with, had been far darker than even he had been expecting.
‘I know Amaya and Kamal have not gone to any festival. I know there’s something iffy about the two of them going missing. Something too textbook. I know it every bit as much as I know that two men came to my house two weeks ago to kill me, and why.’
Thorne had seen the forensic report, and knew she was right about that much, at least. Evidence confirming that there had been two individuals in the hallway with Susan on the night she was killed.
Two men who had thrown bleach into her eyes before stabbing her to death.
‘I’m good at my job and this is me doing it, simple as that. I’m not doing this because I’m bored and I need something to do. It’s not because I want revenge for Susan and I’m certainly not seeing honour crimes around every corner because I’m… “crazed with grief” or anything like that.’ She picked up the file again. ‘Don’t make the mistake of believing that I’m not thinking clearly.’
Thorne picked up his own set of notes. He sensed that Tanner’s words, her assertions, were not aimed solely at him; that rather they were the result of one or more heated conversations with herself.
‘You said Muslims.’ He turned a page. ‘Amaya and Kamal. Good Muslims.’
Tanner put her glasses back on, nodded.
‘Meena Athwal was a Sikh.’
Another nod. ‘As was the victim in one of the other cases I’ve been looking into. The third was a Hindu.’
‘So they’re… multi-faith hitmen? These two.’
‘The majority of honour crimes in this country occur within the Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities and most of them are south Asian. But honour killings have also been documented in Jewish and Christian communities. Actually, I think the only ones without any blood on their hands are Buddhists and Rastafarians.’ A half-smile. ‘Maybe Jedis.’
The joke came from nowhere, and while Thorne was relieved to be shown a sense of humour, he nevertheless had a picture of a woman who was as uncomfortable with banter as she was with bullshit. Who would stand there, stone-faced, the only member of a group failing to see the funny side of something. Or else the teller of a joke that was misjudged or simply unfunny; the colour flooding her cheeks while others smiled awkwardly or wandered away.
He said, ‘Where do we start, then?’
‘The parents seem as good a bet as any,’ Tanner said. ‘Let’s go and see how hysterical they are three days on. You good for tomorrow?’
Thorne held up a hand. ‘Hang on. You’ll need to give me a day to try and get some shifts swapped around. See if I can call in a few favours.’
‘Fair enough.’ Tanner leaned across to refill his mug, and when she sat back the cat arched its back for a few moments as though irritated by the disturbance. ‘She was Susan’s cat, really,’ Tanner said. ‘She would always go to her first, you know?’
‘Pheromones or something,’ Thorne said.
‘Well, she was hers more than mine. Mine now though, obviously.’ She reached a hand across tentatively to stroke the cat. ‘I certainly couldn’t bear to be without her.’
Thorne watched Tanner move a finger gently back and forth beneath the animal’s chin.
Not a woman crazed with grief, perhaps, but transformed by it nonetheless. Struggling to see what might lie ahead, needing to, when she was only capable of taking one small step at a time.
‘She’s getting used to me, I think.’
Thorne smiled and drank coffee that was far too strong and decided that he would have that conversation as soon as he could.
Those awkward practicalities.
He would let Helen know that if the very worst were to happen, whatever her bloody sister or anyone else might have to say about it, he wanted to take care of Alfie.
EIGHT
It was a small printing business; a minute’s walk from Finchley Central station, between an estate agent’s and what appeared to be a pop-up selling electronic cigarettes and associated items. There were no customers, but two women, who Thorne presumed to be the mother and sister, were at work behind the counter. The younger girl was wearing jeans and a white sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo Azim Kwikprint, but both were wearing hijabs. Thorne and Tanner had taken out their warrant cards as soon as they came through the door, and as they approached the counter they saw the older woman move closer to her daughter and reach for her hand.
Tanner made the introductions.
The older woman nodded and turned without a word to walk away into an office at the back. The daughter’s gaze had already returned to her computer screen. She typed for a few seconds then pulled some papers towards her. She glanced up and flashed a smile that seemed friendly enough, but before Tanner or Thorne could speak she had turned away from the counter to follow her mother.
‘She looked scared,’ Tanner said.
‘Did she?’
‘The mother.’
Thorne picked up a ream of printing paper. ‘Your son’s been missing for three days and two coppers walk in. How else are you going to look?’
‘I suppose.’
The paper was cheap, but Thorne knew it was even cheaper at the megastore on the nearby trading estate. He wondered how a place like this, how any independent, stayed in business. There weren’t any small electrical shops on this high street any more, or sports shops like the one he’d bought his Spurs scarf and football boots from when he was a kid. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a record shop anywhere.
Record shop. He could imagine Helen laughing. Calling him ‘Grandad’ and asking him what things were like in the war. On reflection, Thorne wondered if perhaps there might be a few more record shops opening soon, now that vinyl was having such a resurgence.
‘Here we go,’ Tanner said quietly.
Thorne put the paper back on the display and watched Hamid Azim emerge from the room at the rear of the shop. He said, ‘Just a second,’ as he walked straight across to the door and turned the sign to CLOSED. He said, ‘Right,’ as he walked back to take his place behind the counter.
He was small and trim, his hair and beard streaked with grey, his eyes bright behind lightly tinted, rimless spectacles. He wore a maroon sweater over a white shirt; brown slacks, sandals and socks.
He said, ‘Have you found Kamal?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Tanner said. She introduced herself and Thorne a second time.
Azim leaned across the counter to shake hands with each of them. ‘His mother is in pieces. We all are. But what can we do except sit and wait for news?’
‘I’m sorry that we don’t really have any,’ Thorne said. ‘We just have a few more questions.’
Azim looked at them. ‘I told the officers everything when I went to the station.’
‘Obviously the mo
re information we have the better.’ Tanner took out a small notebook and pen. ‘You might have remembered something since then that could help.’
‘Of course, I understand.’
She smiled and opened the notebook. ‘So, would you say that for Kamal to just disappear without saying anything was out of character?’
‘Definitely,’ Azim said. ‘I told them the same thing at the station. He would never do anything like that. This is why we are so worried. No phone calls, no messages, nothing.’ He shook his head. ‘Not like him at all.’
‘You hadn’t argued?’
‘No.’ Instant, definitive.
‘No family rows?’
Azim waited a second or two this time, made eye contact with Tanner. ‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘He bickers with his little sister, but that’s only normal, isn’t it?’
‘What about work?’ Thorne looked around. ‘Any problems, issues with money?’
‘Kamal works hard,’ Azim said. ‘And he’s sensible with the wages I pay him. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t take drugs, nothing like that. I know he likes to enjoy himself, go to parties and so on, and that’s fine, of course. We want him to be independent.’ A smile appeared, but not for very long. ‘I know every father would say the same thing about their son, but he’s a good boy.’
‘So, very out of character to be arrested for being drunk outside a nightclub and verbally abusing a police officer?’ Tanner smiled, ignoring the look from Thorne.
‘What?’ Azim shook his head. ‘No, you must have that wrong.’
‘Three months ago,’ Tanner said. ‘They let him off with a caution and obviously he decided not to tell you about it. I mean, he’s eighteen, so no reason he would, is there?’
Azim stared at the floor, muttered something to himself.
Tanner turned a page in her notebook, as though looking for a name she could not instantly recall. ‘Did you know the girl who disappeared at the same time… Amaya Shah?’
Azim shook his head. ‘He had never mentioned her. I was surprised when I heard that they had been together that night.’
‘Did Kamal have a girlfriend?’ Thorne asked.
‘Friends who were girls, yes, but not the way you mean.’
‘Really? An eighteen-year-old boy?’
‘There is a girl he is very fond of back in Bangladesh,’ Azim said. ‘In Dhaka. They have known each other since they were children.’
‘Childhood sweethearts, that kind of thing?’
‘Exactly. We have always hoped they would get married one day.’
‘We, meaning…?’
‘Everyone.’
‘How did Kamal feel about that?’
Azim looked puzzled.
‘A girl in Bangladesh. How often did they even see each other?’
‘We use the internet. Skype.’
‘All the same.’
‘As I said, he was very fond of this girl.’ Azim turned his attention to Tanner, as though he had decided that she was the one in charge, or perhaps just the more naturally sympathetic. ‘So, what is being done to find my son? It’s very hard to imagine that anything we’re talking about is going to help a great deal.’
‘We’re doing everything that can be done,’ Tanner said. ‘You understand that because Kamal is legally an adult, the process is not the same as it would be if a child were to go missing.’ She looked at him. ‘That’s not to say we aren’t taking this extremely seriously.’
Azim shook his head slowly, nodded around at his shop. ‘We go about our business,’ he said. ‘We have to. We print our brochures and our fancy letterheads and all that, but we might just as well be robots. While our son is… nowhere, life has stopped for all of us. It’s stopped.’
Thorne watched Tanner slip the notebook back into her bag. It certainly went with the part she was, to some extent, playing, but he guessed that someone as methodical as she was got through a fair number of them in the course of a year.
He wondered if Azim would give her a discount if she bought in bulk.
Faruk Shah sighed, a crackle in his chest. ‘She told us she was going to study at a friend’s house,’ he said. ‘That girl Sarah, from the college. The girl confirmed it when my wife called her, but she told us the truth on the second day.’
Next to him, Shah’s wife Nabila nodded.
Amaya’s somewhat surly elder brother had shown Thorne and Tanner up to a small flat above a convenience store in East Barnet before returning to work downstairs. The living room was overheated and seemed barely large enough to contain the widescreen TV and two leather sofas on which the four of them sat. The plum-coloured carpet felt deep enough to lose sight of their feet in. The ceiling was low and featureless, and the claustrophobic atmosphere was not helped by air that was thick with cigarette smoke. Shah had hastily stubbed one out when Tanner and Thorne were shown in, but he was already lighting up again.
‘Perhaps if that girl had told us the truth straight away.’ He tossed his lighter down on to a glass table. ‘Apparently, some girls are brought up to think that lying is acceptable.’
‘Amaya lied,’ Thorne said. ‘About where she was going. I’m sure you don’t think there’s anything wrong with how you brought her up.’
Shah grunted and sat back.
‘Amaya is a good girl,’ his wife said.
If Kamal’s father had appeared every inch the no-nonsense businessman, Amaya’s looked as if he had just got out of bed. He was dressed, but had clearly made little effort; a belly sagging over tracksuit bottoms, an unbuttoned shirt. Unruly tufts of hair curled from the neck of his vest, and a beard that Thorne guessed was normally neatly trimmed, had evidently gone ungroomed.
‘Do you know Kamal Azim?’ Tanner asked.
Shah shook his head.
‘But you know who he is.’
‘We know, yes.’
‘Do you know his parents?’
‘How could I know them if I don’t know him?’
‘It’s possible,’ Tanner said. ‘Had Amaya even mentioned his name?’
‘Yes, she’d mentioned him. We thought he was just a friend.’
‘And that was OK?’
‘Of course, why wouldn’t it be? We never suspected it could be anything else.’
‘Is that what you think now?’
‘It looks as though they ran away together,’ Shah said. ‘This is what the police are telling us, so what else are we supposed to think?’
‘How do you feel about that?’ Thorne asked.
‘How do I feel? Our daughter is missing.’
‘About Amaya lying to you, I mean. Running away with someone you had never even met.’
‘Why does that make a difference?’ Shah sat forward again. ‘How is what I feel about one thing or another going to help find my daughter and this boy?’
‘We’d like to know.’
Amaya’s mother was looking down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap.
‘We want her to come home,’ Shah said. ‘That is the most important thing. But yes, of course, she will certainly be in trouble when she does.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
Shah shook his head, blew out a thin stream of smoke. ‘That is a matter for my family.’
‘Not any more it isn’t,’ Thorne said.
‘I would never ask you how you would discipline your child.’ The anger was building. ‘I would never dare to do that.’ Shah waved his hands around as he spoke, ash falling on to the carpet and the smoke from his cigarette drifting across his wife’s face. ‘That is your business.’
Thorne nodded, as though it were a perfectly reasonable point. ‘It’s my business to try and find out where your daughter is, and if she has run away, I have to ask myself if the way you impose… discipline could have had something to do with it.’
Shah glanced at his wife, and when he looked back to Thorne his face had softened considerably. ‘I can promise you it is not something you need to worry about, because we never had to discipline Amaya
.’
‘You’re lucky,’ Thorne said.
‘Very,’ Tanner added.
‘It was never necessary, was it?’ Shah glanced at his wife again.
Nabila Shah shook her head.
‘She works hard at home and she works hard at college. She has never been disrespectful and she does everything that is expected of her. We have never had any trouble.’
‘Until now,’ Thorne said.
‘Yes, until now.’
‘She was a good girl,’ his wife said again, raising a hand to arrange the folds of her soft, crimson hijab.
She said it like a line she’d been given.
They sat together in a Starbucks outside the Spires shopping centre. Thorne watched Tanner staring at her receipt. Saw her smiling.
‘What?’ he asked.
She held up the receipt. ‘I’d normally keep these,’ she said. ‘Make a note of all my expenses on a job.’ She screwed up the slip of paper and picked up her coffee. ‘Never done anything like this before.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Off the books.’
Thorne stared past her through the window. Saturday shoppers crowding the pavements. On the High Street a car slowed, searching for a parking space, and the driver behind leaned on his horn. ‘Well, I’m none the wiser,’ Thorne said. ‘Not really.’
She looked at him.
‘Shah and Azim.’
Tanner was rather more decisive. ‘They’re certainly not stupid. They’re all upset enough and they’re all making out like they accept that Kamal and Amaya have run away together. They’re shocked, course they are, but they’ve forced themselves to accept that it’s the only explanation.’ She sipped her drink. ‘They’re not pretending that they’re going to win liberal parents of the year, mind you, but that would probably be too much of a stretch. I’m guessing they’ve been coached. Told how they should behave, what they should say.’
Love Like Blood Page 5