by Tony Parsons
‘That was one of the battles at Borodino,’ George Halfpenny said. ‘The Russians against the French in the Napoleonic Wars in 1812, seventy thousand casualties, the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars. The Battle of Borodino. And then there was the Battle of Borodino Field in 1941, the Russians against Nazi Germany on the same fields, fighting to keep the invaders from the gates of Moscow. Borodino was a sacred site of patriotic wars, the killing fields where invaders were repelled. That’s why it is so fitting for us to be here.’
‘You know your history,’ I said, only trying to be friendly as he climbed on to his rickshaw, his brother Richard sitting in the passenger seat like a stumpy potentate on a plastic throne, a protective arm around the Indian beer box.
And finally I had offended him.
‘I’m uneducated, Detective,’ George Halfpenny said, and for the first time I glimpsed the righteous fury in him. ‘But that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.’
11
In any normal broken family it would have been different.
In any normal broken family we would have built on the success of that birthday party.
In any normal broken family there would have been stilted texts, awkward emails, sufficient contact to arrange for Scout to return to the house on the street where it looked as though nothing bad had ever happened, and spend some time with her mother and her mother’s new family.
But we were not a normal broken family and as the days drifted by after the birthday party, there was only silence.
I went downstairs for the mail and flicked through the bills, the restaurant flyers and the charity appeals. But there was nothing from Anne, and as time went by I suspected that there was going to be nothing.
This is what we dealt with, my daughter and I, and we dealt with it every day of our lives.
This is what happens. The absent parent has the very best intentions to put things right. They truly do. But then life gets in the way. There are distractions – other demands, far more urgent – and the child who was left behind is – at best – parked in abeyance and – at worst – forgotten.
Absent fathers do it. But absent mothers do it too.
And the feeling that pierced me as I stood with the takeaway flyers in my hand was sadness stained with anger.
Single mothers know this feeling.
And single fathers know it too.
I wanted more – what? Not love, because you can’t demand love, you can’t force love, you can’t summon it up when it is not there, or it’s buried deep beneath some new life.
I wanted more kindness.
That’s what I wanted from my ex-wife for Scout.
I wanted more kindness for our beautiful daughter.
As I walked back up to our loft, my knee throbbing with a dull rhythm, I noticed that there was one mystery piece of mail, my name and address in elaborate script written with a fountain pen – and I noticed in a moment that it was not written by my ex-wife. Stiff to the touch, but harder than a child’s birthday invite. It was an invitation of a different kind.
The Gane Family
Are sad to announce the passing of
Mrs Elizabeth Mildred Precious Gane On 3 July
A service conducted by Fr Marvin Gane will be held at St Anthony’s Church, Brixton on 17 July at two o’clock
Light refreshments will be served afterwards
At the Muhammad Ali Youth & Leisure Centre
Mrs Gane was the mother of a dead colleague. I remembered her as a tiny, soft-spoken lady who wore hats like the Queen and who had not lost her Jamaican accent after half a century in South London.
Her son, Curtis, had been a Detective Inspector when I first came to Savile Row. On the night that we raided a paedophile ring operating out of an abandoned mansion on The Bishop’s Avenue, Curtis Gane had stepped back on a derelict staircase to avoid a man holding a black carbon lock knife with a four-inch blade and had fallen two storeys, landing on his back and breaking the vertebrae connecting his head to his spine. Curtis never walked again and he never came out of hospital. If he had lived longer, we would have become friends. But there was not enough time for friendship.
The last time I had seen Mrs Gane was on the rooftop of West End Central on the day that one hundred police officers watched in silence as she scattered her son’s ashes to the wind. I felt a stab of sorrow at her passing as I looked at the invitation again. Father Marvin Gane was her other son. I should call him, I thought, as I walked into the loft with the black-edge funeral invitation in one hand and the junk mail in the other.
But then I stared at the TV and forgot all about calling him.
Because something was happening on Borodino Street.
A man with two small children – one in his arms, one holding his hand – was looking at the flowers that filled the street. And I knew immediately that what was left of DS Alice Stone’s family were visiting Borodino Street for the first time.
I had seen the man and the children in images that the media and the well-wishers had harvested from social media. Holiday pictures, wedding photographs, all those stolen moments of happiness that seemed so distant now. The man was older and the children were bigger but it was unmistakably the same family, dumbstruck with grief in a world with a lost wife and mother.
The crowd did not take their eyes from the man as he murmured to the children. The oldest child reached out for a balloon. His tiny sibling smiled in the sunshine. The view cut to the helicopter that seemed to hover permanently above Borodino Street and I saw, at the end of the street, George Halfpenny’s empty rickshaw.
And then the TV image of silent mourning was replaced by scenes of chaos. A red strapline was running across the bottom of the screen:
BBC BREAKING NEWS: FATHER OF TERRORIST
BROTHERS RELEASED WITHOUT CHARGE
Outside the blue-etched concrete block of Paddington Green Police Station, an excited pack of photographers and reporters hemmed in the diffident figure of Ahmed ‘Arnold’ Khan, and were leaning across a pair of beefy uniformed officers to bark questions in his face. Khan was still in the London Transport uniform he had been wearing in the holding cell of West End Central and he looked even thinner after his time in custody.
‘This is coming to you from Paddington Green Police Station,’ the presenter murmured as the screen filled with a ruck of bodies and noise, cameramen and reporters cursing each other as they jostled for position. ‘We apologise for some of the industrial language but this is coming to you live,’ said the presenter, as if that explained everything. He added a warning that ‘this report does contain flashing lights’.
When a semblance of order had been restored, I saw that DC Edie Wren and TDC Joy Adams were standing just behind the officers protecting Ahmed Khan.
In front of him was a dapper-looking man in his fifties with a great mane of swept-back silver hair. I recognised him immediately as Sir Ludo Mount – Queen’s Counsel, media star, the Elvis of human rights lawyers.
Sir Ludo began to speak in his booming upper-class tones, a voice that was accustomed to being heard and obeyed, and the baying mob of hacks and paps fell into a disgruntled silence.
‘My client, Mr Khan, has suffered a travesty of justice,’ Sir Ludo intoned. ‘You do not lose your human rights because your children have allegedly committed a crime. You do not forsake your human dignity because of innocent contact.’
The reporters burst into voice.
‘Are you claiming that the Khan brothers didn’t—’
Sir Ludo silenced them like a schoolmaster from another age with a blaze of fire in his eyes and steel in his voice and the hint of a damn good thrashing in his study after double games.
‘My client has been grotesquely mistreated by the Metropolitan Police, the right-wing gutter press and – indeed – this country. Mr Khan is an innocent man and today the Metropolitan Police have at last conceded his innocence.’ Mount paused dramatically. ‘But this is not the end of his fight for justice. It is only the beginning. I
want a total reappraisal of the way firearms are used in this country. I want a formal apology from the Metropolitan Police. And pending the verdict of the IPCC, I wish to bring a civil case against Detective Constable Raymond Vann. Good day.’
As if he were the king of London, Sir Ludo Mount gave an imperceptible nod to one of the uniformed policemen and the sweating coppers used their bulk to create a path through the pack of reporters.
Sir Ludo followed them and everyone else followed him in single file, Ahmed Khan, Edie and Joy Adams, a terrified-looking young woman who I saw was the same Family Liaison Officer who had been with Mrs Khan and Layla, and finally some more big uniformed officers bringing up the rear.
And all the while Sir Ludo had been addressing the media with Ahmed Khan blinking nervously at his side, there were two panels in the corner of the TV screen, one of them showing the scene in Borodino Street where a bereaved husband and two small children who had lost their mother were looking at the flowers, and the other, shot from a news helicopter, showing the great black scar of Lake Meadows blighting a large area of West London. It did not look like a crime scene today. It looked like a mass grave.
Jackson Rose called me.
‘Are you seeing all this?’ he said. ‘Ahmed Khan? Alice Stone’s family? Lake Meadows? And this tank-chasing lawyer?’
‘I see it.’
‘Your mob are going to be looking after the old man while this slick brief keeps shouting about human rights and compensation and the flowers for the dead keep piling up.’ A pause. ‘You’re going to be the most hated man in the country, Max.’
‘What do you reckon, Jackson? Should I transfer to traffic duty?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But you should learn how to shoot.’
12
The safe house was on one of those streets where they were moving out the students and the working class and moving in the trust fund managers and the bankers. It was south of the river, Elephant and Castle way, but in eighteen months it would look like the future.
Building work was everywhere – scaffolding and skips, the constant buzz of drills, the calls of the men in a dozen languages. Already it hardly looked like South London.
I thought Flashman and CTU would have assigned a couple of plain-clothes officers to watch over the safe house, an age-appropriate man and woman pretending to be lovers, but there was only a detective I knew from New Scotland Yard, a large man tucking into a meat pasty in an unmarked squad car. He gave me the nod as I parked the BMW X5 and crossed the street to the nondescript door of a shabby terraced house that seemed untouched by the booming property market.
Edie Wren opened the door. I could hear a woman screaming, poised somewhere between hysterical grief and righteous fury. And I could hear placating voices, telephones ringing and Mrs Azza Khan raving in Urdu.
‘Welcome to the nut house,’ Edie smiled.
We went into the living room where Sir Ludo Mount was chairing a meeting at the dining table, his bright-eyed juniors sifting through files and tapping laptops and phones as Ahmed Khan sat quietly across from the lawyer. His wife was on the sofa screaming at a translator and the FLO and Layla sat miserably by her side, her long black hair falling across her face as she hid herself from the world.
‘So they got Layla back from social services?’ I asked.
‘I got Layla back from social services,’ Edie said. She glanced across at the teenager, her face softening. ‘I made a few calls. The last thing she needs right now is being locked up in some care home. She’s a really good kid, Max. And the only one I feel sorry for.’
‘But the parents didn’t do anything, Edie.’
‘Apart from bringing those bastards into the world. Layla’s the only truly innocent one among them.’
I looked at her.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’ll keep the entire family safe from harm.’
TDC Adams was in a corner of the room hunched over her laptop.
‘Curtis Gane’s mother died,’ I told Edie.
She nodded, trying to give the news the emotion and respect it deserved. I knew how much she had liked Mrs Gane. But there had been so much death recently. From Lake Meadows to Borodino Street, life in our city had increasingly resembled life in wartime. There was hardly time to process one loss before the next loss and then the next.
‘Any death threats?’ I said.
‘You kidding?’ Edie said. ‘I’ve lost count of the people threatening to top the Khans. The BBC showed Mr Khan leaving custody just as Alice Stone’s orphaned children were looking at all those flowers.’ She paused to stare at the bus driver and lowered her voice, although no one could hear her with Mrs Khan at full volume. ‘There’s a lot of real anger out there, Max. Some of it is just the usual social media barking, but some of it is serious enough to be a cause for concern.’ She pulled out her phone and called up Twitter. ‘Bad Moses has been trending.’
‘Bad Moses?’
She handed me her phone. ‘Try to keep up, Max. Bad Moses just posted another message. Look.’
The Twitter account @BadMoses displayed a small colour photograph of a righteously enraged man with long flowing white hair and a flowing white beard holding a stone tablet above his head.
‘Father Christmas?’ I said.
‘Close,’ Edie said. ‘It’s Charlton Heston as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments,’ she said. ‘Academy Award for Best Picture in 1956. I Googled it. There are reams of the stuff but this gives you a taste. Additional dialogue from the Bible.’
I read the message.
Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but leave room for God’s wrath. For it is written – VENGEANCE IS MINE; I WILL REPAY, SAYS THE LORD. #LakeMeadows #BorodinoStreet #AliceStoneRIP #BadMoses
The message was accompanied by an attached snatched image of Ahmed Khan leaving Paddington Green. It had an alarming number of likes and re-Tweets.
I gave Edie back her phone.
‘You run this down?’ I said.
I thought of what the woman from MI5 had told me.
We can’t watch all of them, DC Wolfe. Because there are too many.
‘Colin is trying to dig out the IP address of Bad Moses,’ Edie said.
Colin was Colin Cho of PCeU – the Police Central e-crime Unit, tasked with responding to the most serious crimes on the Internet.
‘But Bad Moses is running his posts through some kind of anonymiser like Tor or 12P, like they have in the Deep Web, the state-of-the-art anonymisers they use for distributing child pornography. So, realistically, Colin hasn’t got much of a shot at locating an IP address.’
She glanced across at Ahmed Khan.
‘There are plenty of other users on social media making threats against the Khans who are not hidden behind thick digital walls,’ she said. ‘We can turn Colin loose on them. We can run them down, knock on a few doors, drag them into the light and smack their bottoms to discourage the others.’ She looked at me and shrugged. ‘But we end up chasing inadequate little morons who don’t have a life beyond playing with their mouse. And that doesn’t make the Khan family any safer and doesn’t make our job any easier. So maybe we should let Bad Moses rant and rave online while we are knocking on different doors.’
We joined TDC Adams in her quiet corner.
‘Show him what you showed me, Joy,’ Edie said.
I looked over Adams’ shoulder at her laptop. It was a YouTube film shot on Borodino Street just after the husband and children of Alice Stone had left. The atmosphere had palpably changed. Grief had given way to rage.
In the middle of a crowd of young men, someone had filmed George Halfpenny on his soapbox, his voice cracking with emotion.
‘This is a country where the wicked walk free and the good die fifty years before their time,’ he was saying. ‘A country where we applaud immigration without integration and then wonder why the newcomers have no respect for us, or our history, or our values. And so we dig our own graves – like the graves we have dug in Lak
e Meadows and on Borodino Street. And so we place upon the altar the bravest and the best of us. And so children lose their mother, and a husband sacrifices his wife. And for what? So that the scum of the earth can build a funeral pyre for all we love? Here on this street we have to decide – do we let them bully us, betray us and bury us? What do we need to do to finally remember who we are – and start fighting back? My friends, I beg you to remember and to never forget – this is still our country.’
The crowd roared. The phone’s camera jerkily panned to the faces of one hundred young men with their blood up.
‘Still our country!’
‘Still our country!’
‘Still our country!’
‘George Halfpenny could tone down the rhetoric,’ I told Edie. ‘But no court is going to say those words constitute a death threat or even an incitement to violence.’
‘I’m not worried about the rickshaw driver,’ Edie said. ‘It’s all the people who are listening to him.’
I looked across at Ahmed Khan.
He smiled gently at me, and rose from the table to join us.
‘When can I go home?’ he asked.
‘Mr Khan,’ I said.
‘Arnold,’ he said.
‘Arnold,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be issuing you an Osman warning. It means we consider there to be a real and immediate threat to your life.’ I nodded at Sir Ludo Mount. ‘Your lawyer will be familiar with the procedure. You will be given a letter from us telling you that your life may be in immediate danger and you should take all necessary precautions to protect yourself and your family. As an absolute minimum, I strongly advise against any attempt to return to your former home.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘And I am returning to work on Sunday.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I began.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. I have not done anything wrong. And I wish to return to my life.’