‘Oh, Christ.’
‘She just left the hospital.’
‘How bad?’
‘A few cuts and bruises. Has to be Haroon Shah.’
‘Does it?’ Thorne looked back to see that the Media Liaison officer was staring at him. She turned to the reporter and held her hands up by way of apology. The reporter did the same to the cameraman.
‘His mates, anyway.’ Tanner paused for a few seconds. ‘There were a few of them.’
‘Have we got descriptions?’
‘It was dark, they had hoodies on, you know how it goes. I’ve told the team that’s on it to look at Haroon Shah before they do anything else. He’s not stupid, he’ll have an alibi, but I’m sure he’ll have set it up right after I talked to him.’
‘You told him about Sarah Webster?’
‘I told him a friend of Amaya’s had told us she was scared and he kept asking me who it was. He called her a bitch… he knew it was her.’
The wind was picking up. Thorne fastened his jacket and turned away from a gust. He said, ‘Don’t feel bad about it.’
‘What?’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ Tanner said. Quick and even, stating the obvious.
Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. The reporter and the cameraman were sitting on the wall drinking tea that had been produced from somewhere and the Media Liaison officer was texting and glancing at her watch. She saw Thorne watching and mouthed at him. How long?
Thorne shook his head. Maybe when he and Tanner had finished, he would call Phil Hendricks for a leisurely chat, see how much he could piss the woman off.
‘Shah went to the mosque,’ Tanner said. ‘There was a conversation that looked interesting.’
‘You’re following him?’
‘What else do you suggest?’
‘Well, be careful.’
‘Why?’
Because the people we’re after have tried to kill you once already. Because one of our witnesses has just been raped.
‘OK, so don’t be,’ Thorne said.
‘If you’re so concerned, maybe you could come and give me a hand,’ Tanner said. ‘When you’ve finished wasting your time on TV.’
‘I’m doing what I’m told.’
‘Well, I was given a bum steer.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Didn’t think you were such a good boy, that’s all.’
The Media Liaison officer was talking to the reporter. She turned and shouted across to let Thorne know that the crew needed to be somewhere else in half an hour.
‘Listen…’ Thorne signalled to say that he would be two minutes, fought the temptation to turn the two fingers around. ‘Doing what I have to on the official side of this gives us a chance to do the other stuff without attracting too much attention. It’s misdirection.’
‘If you say so.’
Saying it, Thorne had almost convinced himself, though he wondered just how long misdirection was likely to fool an amateur magician like Russell Brigstocke. ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I’m going home,’ Tanner said. ‘Need to tidy a bit.’
‘Really?’ Thorne could not imagine any house that needed tidying up less than the one he’d visited a fortnight before.
‘My brother and his wife are coming over. I could do without it, to be honest. I know they’re only being nice, but I’d much rather be on my own.’
‘OK.’
‘You?’
‘Well, as soon as I get a chance I’m going to see if I can get any change out of your old friends at the Honour Crimes Unit.’
‘That really is a waste of time,’ Tanner said.
Thorne walked back and stood on his mark, the station sign and the symbolic blue lamp nice and suitable behind him. The cameraman and the reporter put down their teas and wandered over to take up their positions.
‘Ready, then?’ The Media Liaison woman moved close to him, her lipstick still perfect and her hands deep in the pockets of an expensive-looking coat.
‘Like a coiled spring,’ Thorne said.
‘They’re looking at about thirty seconds.’
‘Understood.’
‘Have you got it written down?’
Thorne tapped the side of his head. ‘All up here.’
‘Really?’
He looked at her. ‘It’s a quick appeal, all right? It’s not the fucking Gettysburg address.’
The woman looked as though he’d slapped her.
‘Whenever you like,’ the cameraman said.
THIRTY-TWO
Mid-afternoon was the quietest time in the shop. Business would pick up again once the kids came out of school, and then they’d all need to be around and paying attention, if half the stock in the place wasn’t going to go walkabout. This time of day it was just dribs and drabs; bread and milk, a few cans of White Ace or Tennent’s Extra for the tramps who hung around by the post office. The lull gave everyone in the family a chance to take a breather. Haroon’s mother could make a start on dinner or sit with a crossword and his father might take the opportunity to catch up on some paperwork upstairs. While the kid who helped out sat with a comic somewhere or went off to play with himself, Haroon would usually look after the till for an hour or so; happy enough to ring up what few purchases there were with plenty of time to call his mates or catch up on Twitter.
Haroon’s father had already gone up and, a few minutes later, Haroon watched as his mother put down her pricing gun and started towards the back of the shop to follow him. He moved to intercept her. He asked if she would be OK looking after the checkout for twenty minutes, told her his stomach was playing up. She told him he was eating too many takeaways, that he should be eating decent food at home, and she was still shaking her head and muttering as she wandered back towards the till.
Haroon hurried upstairs and found his father dozing in front of the television. He touched him lightly on the shoulder.
‘There’s a problem,’ he said. ‘With Amaya.’
Faruk Shah opened his eyes. He blinked, then sat up fast. ‘What problem?’
‘The policewoman was here.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday, but it’s fine.’
Haroon’s father grabbed the remote and turned off the television. He pressed his palm to the sofa cushion next to him and said, ‘Sit.’
Haroon did as he was told. He turned, about to speak, and his father slapped him hard across the face.
‘Why didn’t you tell me the police had come back?’
Haroon rubbed at his face, blinking back tears and began talking quickly. ‘She came to see me. Asking me about Amaya, why I went to the college, why she was absent so much, all that.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing… just something about picking her up, how she was ill a lot. I made out like I was angry, like it was insulting or whatever.’
His father nodded. ‘Why didn’t you tell me afterwards?’
‘I didn’t want you to be worried.’
Faruk Shah raised his hand again, clenched it into a fist, then let it fall into his lap. ‘Worried? What is going on in your head? I thought that boy downstairs was the halfwit, not my son.’
‘Look, I told you it’s fine,’ Haroon said. ‘It was just questions, that’s all.’
‘Questions are not fine. If it was fine, they would be looking for that boy Azim instead of coming here. If it was fine, they would be sending flowers and making us tea.’ Haroon opened his mouth but his father quickly shushed him and sat forward. ‘Shut up. I need to think.’
They sat in silence for a minute or more. Haroon felt sick and his face was stinging. The room was even warmer than usual.
He said, ‘I’ve sorted it.’
His father turned to look at him.
‘Yeah… I mean it’s probably not fine, like you said, so I just thought we needed to do something, right? I thought —’
Haroon stopped
and pressed himself back into the sofa. He had seen his father angry plenty of times, had grown up listening to the shouting from the next room. He and his sister, holding on to one another. He had seen him really lose it in the weeks before the Amaya business, but he couldn’t remember a look on his father’s face like this one. He could not remember hearing anything like this in his father’s voice.
‘It’s my name.’ Faruk slapped his hand to his chest, his fist. ‘Mine. My name you have and my name that your sister had. You understand?’
Haroon nodded.
‘I’m the one who sorts things.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What did you do?’
Haroon took a deep breath and told him.
He knew that his mother had seen the mark on his face, but she had said nothing when she had slipped from behind the counter and walked slowly away.
He knew she had covered up worse things herself. He had seen her once at the dressing table; the compact open and powder speckled on her hijab, a sponge dabbed against the bruise.
She had his father’s name too, after all.
For all the shouting and the ‘I’m the daddy’ stuff, Haroon thought that deep down his father was proud of what he’d done, the initiative he’d shown. Or he would be in time, anyway. His father would probably follow it up, put his own stamp on things, but the son had been the one to step up and put the word out.
It would not go unnoticed, he knew that.
People would talk about it.
He quickly forgot the pain in his cheek and was unusually good-humoured and chatty as he rang up the booze and chocolate bars and scratch cards. As the shop became busier again.
When he wasn’t serving, Haroon checked the messages from his friend then immediately deleted them. He hadn’t told his father about what he’d lined up for Amaya’s gobby college friend the night before, but he didn’t think there was any need. That was something extra, just for him.
What would that tight-arsed policewoman have called it? A loose end.
He called it a lesson.
THIRTY-THREE
Thorne took the stairs to the third floor of Belgravia police station and showed his ID. After being given no more than cursory directions, he followed a grey-carpeted corridor past a computer-aided dispatch suite and a busy-looking incident room to an unmarked office door.
He knocked, remembering what Tanner had said at their first meeting.
I did some work with the Honour Crimes Unit. Such as it is.
After an hour on the phone and online back at Becke House, Thorne now understood exactly what she had meant, and he was keen to see it for himself.
DS Soran Hassani was the officer Thorne had spoken to on the phone, and he seemed happy enough to see him when he opened the door and invited him in. The office was a lot larger than it appeared from the outside, with four desks arranged in the middle and a large expanse of grey carpet everywhere else. The same ratio applied to the pair of whiteboards and the blank walls around them.
There was plenty of free space.
Young female officers were working at two of the desks and both of them smiled as Hassani led Thorne to a chair. He was offered coffee, then immediately told how bad it was, so he politely declined.
‘No sign on the door,’ he said.
Hassani looked at him.
Thorne pointed back over his shoulder. ‘This is the Honour Crimes Unit, right?’ He smiled at the man behind the desk, who was rubbing a palm across his shaved scalp. Hassani was shorter than Thorne and certainly filled out his smart blue suit. He wasn’t one of the officers Thorne had worked with briefly on the Meena Athwal case four years earlier, but, knowing what he now did, Thorne was not altogether surprised. ‘I just wanted to check.’
‘You’re in the right place,’ Hassani said.
‘That’s a relief. Because Honour Crimes isn’t actually a unit at all really, is it?’ Thorne looked around, but both the female officers kept their eyes fixed on the paperwork in front of them. ‘I mean not officially. It’s basically just a bog-standard community safety unit attached to the Homicide and Serious Crime command, right?’
‘Yes, and that’s because we’re looking at murders.’ Hassani sat back. ‘I mean, that’s all they are at the end of the day. Murders same as any other. Religion’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘Spot on,’ Thorne said. ‘Couldn’t agree more.’
‘Good.’
‘But still.’
‘Still what?’
‘You find a body in Epping Forest with smashed kneecaps and a bullet in the back of the head, chances are you might bring in Gangs and Organised Crime, right? You find one next to a suitcase full of iffy cheques and blank credit cards, you’re going to at least liaise with the Economic Crime Unit. It makes sense, doesn’t it? There are specialist teams.’
‘Not with you,’ Hassani said.
‘There’s no Honour Crimes Unit listed anywhere on any Met police website or mentioned in any media release. It’s as if it doesn’t officially exist. There’s a Royal Protection Unit and a Marine Unit and a big, hairy Dog Support Unit. There are specialist units to investigate money laundering and wildlife crime and let’s not forget good old arts and antiques theft. There’s a Film Unit, for Christ’s sake.’ Thorne summoned a smile and tried to keep his tone nice and light, as if the whole thing were no more than vaguely ridiculous. ‘I mean, seriously.’
Hassani smiled back, and said, ‘I take your point.’
‘Three thousand honour crimes reported every year.’ Thorne had made very sure he was well armed with the facts and figures. ‘Nearly one hundred and fifty people killed in the last ten and obviously I’m only talking here about the ones we know about… and you don’t even get a sign on your door.’
‘Like I said. Murders.’
‘So, nothing at all to do with the issue being politically sensitive. Not wanting to offend certain sections of the community, that kind of thing.’
‘What is it you wanted, Tom?’
Thorne was thinking about Meena Athwal and Amaya Shah, and at that moment he wanted to kick a door in at New Scotland Yard. He very much wanted to pull some useless arsehole with lots of pips on his shoulder across a desk and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing.
Instead, he started to tell Hassani what he and his new partner were doing and he saw the man’s expression change as soon as he mentioned Tanner’s name.
He stopped, waited.
Hassani leaned back and shook his head. ‘Horrible what happened to her other half.’ He nodded across and the two female officers looked up and made sympathetic noises, though Thorne could not be certain if they’d actually known Tanner or not. ‘I thought she was still on compassionate leave.’
‘She is,’ Thorne said. ‘This is something we’re working on together in our spare time. Like a hobby.’
‘OK. Better than trainspotting, I suppose.’
Thorne quickly told him the rest. The link between several victims whose murders had been categorised as sex crimes or random attacks. A series of honour-based killings carried out by the same men. When he had finished, he said, ‘So, what do you think?’
Hassani took a few moments. ‘Yeah, Nicola was working on that theory when she was here,’ he said. ‘Bit of a project of hers.’
‘And not one you took very seriously.’
The DS leaned towards him. ‘There’s been one case in this country where it’s been proved that a family used what were essentially hitmen to kill their daughter. One. A young woman named Banaz Mahmod, back in 2006. They ended up putting seven men away for that. The two men who killed her along with various members of her family who’d helped dispose of the body.’ He looked hard at Thorne. ‘A Kurdish family. Like mine.’ He sat back again. ‘One case.’
‘One that we know of. You know as well as I do that lots of this stuff doesn’t get reported. Families close ranks; young women are taken abroad for one reason or another and never come back.’
‘Would you think that if this was Pakistan?’
‘Come again?’
Something else Thorne had come across when he was reading up on it. ‘Over there, the family of the victim can choose to forgive the killer or killers and they get off scot-free. They get away with it. So you can pay someone to kill your wife or son or daughter, and if they’re caught you just “forgive” them and they get to walk away, presumably with the money you paid them to do the job in the first place.’
‘This isn’t Pakistan.’
‘No, because we’re not going to let them get away with it.’
‘But you’re talking about Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus.’
‘That’s the point.’ Thorne stabbed a finger on to Hassani’s desktop. ‘It doesn’t matter to them. As long as they get their money and whoever’s organising it all gets their cut, these people don’t discriminate.’
‘No.’ Hassani rubbed at his scalp again. The stubble sounded against his palm. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘Sorry… because I just don’t see it. Of course the things you’re talking about happen, it’s why we’re here, isn’t it? But not like this.’
‘What about Meena Athwal? What about Amaya Shah and Kamal Azim?’
‘Well, I think I’m right in saying the Meena Athwal case isn’t one that’s still open. And it looks very much like Amaya Shah was murdered by Kamal Azim.’
‘You’re right,’ Thorne said. ‘It looks very much like it.’
They stared at each other for a few seconds.
‘What exactly did you come here for?’
Thorne shrugged. He already had one eye on the door. ‘Asking myself the same question. I thought you might be able to offer something in the way of support, but…’
‘But I obviously don’t give a shit. Right?’
‘I think you could do more,’ Thorne said. ‘I think you could do something.’
Hassani’s expression hardened. ‘I think what you and Tanner are up to is daft, I’m not pretending I don’t, but if you think I don’t care about the job we’re trying to do here, you’re even more stupid than I thought.’
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