Girl On Fire

by Tony Parsons

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Because she told me! When she came to the party! I said – Scout, would you like to live here all the time? And she said – she got that serious little look she gets – and she said yes.’

  ‘That was the sugar rush talking. That was birthday party politesse. And you should never ask a kid something like that. What’s she going to say? She was in your home. She can’t say no, can she?’

  A nice Australian waiter arrived and we stopped arguing while he took their orders. Green tea for Anne and some complicated milky coffee for Oliver. The waiter left and Oliver stirred in his seat. He placed a comforting hand over Anne’s hand, the one with a thin wedding band and a chunky diamond ring. Seeing that familiarity would have hurt me once. Not any more.

  I realised suddenly that I no longer cared. Scars are like that. Once the pain stops, you forget they are even there.

  ‘You walked out,’ I said. ‘You left us to get on with it. And we did. Scout and I have made a life together. I honestly don’t get it. Why now?’

  She contemplated her fingernails.

  ‘People sometimes ask me how many children I have,’ she said. ‘They see me at the nursery on the nanny’s day off. Or at the gym for my hot Pilates class. How many have you got, Anne? And it is hard. Because we have our little boys. But I have three children.’

  I smiled at her. ‘So you want Scout to live you because of – what? Social embarrassment?’

  She flared up. ‘Because I – we – can give her a better life. You don’t do anything with her! As far as I can tell, all her free time is spent with that flea-bitten old mutt.’

  It took me a long moment to realise that she was talking about Stan.

  ‘Stan is part of our family.’

  She guffawed. A guffaw is the only word for it – this contemptuous snort of disbelief. Definitely a guffaw.

  ‘Oh, please! Scout’s two brothers are her family. Her mother is her family. Oliver is her family. Her stepfather.’

  I looked at Oliver. As far as I could tell, there was no connection between this man and my daughter. He tried to hold my eye contact but his gaze slid away. His phone beeped importantly.

  ‘Scout should be doing ballet,’ Anne said, and I could see that she had it all worked out in advance. ‘Horse riding. It’s what little girls do, Max. She should be learning an instrument.’

  We paused as the waiter brought their drinks.

  ‘Cello,’ Oliver said, frowning at his complicated coffee. ‘Viola.’

  ‘You don’t know her,’ I told Anne, and I felt the bitter truth of it like a punch to the heart. ‘Scout is such a good child. Smart and funny and kind.’ I swallowed hard, thinking about the party invitations that filled her diary every weekend. ‘But we did something to her, Anne.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything to her!’ She looked at Oliver for confirmation. ‘I fell in love. I made a new life. I was desperately unhappy with my old life. But I left you – not Scout.’

  ‘It’s the toughest thing in the world to admit,’ I said. ‘Children pay the price for divorce and they pay it all their lives. But now Scout’s happy. She likes her best friend, Mia. She likes her dog. The flea-bitten old mutt, Stan. She likes our home. And when I tell her about the history of Smithfield, I know she’s really listening. She likes drawing. When she sees a painting she likes, she buys me the postcard.’

  I thought of the postcard of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks propped up in the bathroom mirror, Scout’s Christmas present to me because she knew how much I loved that painting, and unexpected tears sprung to my eyes. I blinked them away.

  No, I thought. Not in front of these two strangers. No chance.

  Oliver glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got that ten o’clock,’ he reminded Anne, with a kind of drawling self-importance. What could possibly be more important in this world than Oliver’s ten o’clock?

  Anne nodded with understanding. I wondered how long they had scheduled for this meeting about the future of my daughter. Fifteen minutes? A quick cup of green tea?

  Oliver signalled for the bill.

  ‘I am not going to let you disrupt her life again,’ I told Anne.

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled. ‘Again?’

  I recognised that gesture with a jolt. The studied amused contempt was one of her signature expressions. She was a total stranger to me now, but there were still gestures that I recognised so well. The worst of both worlds.

  ‘Look,’ she said, like the voice of all reason. ‘I know you have found it hard to adjust to the failure of our marriage.’

  I shook my head. ‘It wasn’t a failed marriage,’ I said.

  She looked at her husband and sighed. She thought I was insane.

  ‘No marriage fails if it produces a child like our daughter,’ I explained. ‘We broke up. We got divorced. But – I just can’t think of it as a failed marriage, Anne.’ I leaned forward. I really wanted her to understand this part. ‘You don’t know Scout like I do. Our daughter will be better than us. She will be less angry than me. She will be less selfish than you.’

  She didn’t like that bit.

  ‘Selfish? You don’t even know me.’

  ‘And you don’t know Scout.’ I said, as calm and reasonable as I could make it. ‘You can’t just come back and ruin everything. I’m not going to let you disrupt her life any more. Scout is staying with me.’

  Anne looked at her husband.

  He understood tough negotiations. He was familiar with the art of the deal. He knew when it was time to thump tables and jut out his manly jaw.

  ‘We’ll have to see what our lawyer says about that,’ he said.

  It was exactly the wrong thing to say to me, it was the wrong button to push, and suddenly I was on my feet with my hands on the lapels of his £3,000 Savile Row suit, dragging him to his feet, fighting the urge to rip his ears off, enjoying the pure terror in his eyes.

  And then Anne was on her feet too and shouting my name.

  I quickly let him go. Somehow a cup of herbal tea had shattered on the floor.

  But nothing had happened.

  He had pushed the wrong button but I had never touched him. Well, perhaps just a little bit.

  ‘Do you think you can bully us, Max?’ Anne’s voice was shaking. ‘Is that what you imagine? That you can intimidate us into going away? You want to punish me, that’s what this is about, isn’t it?’

  ‘You can kid yourself all you want,’ I said. ‘I bet every absent parent who ever lived kidded themselves in the same way. But you can’t do it, Anne. You can’t walk away from Scout and still pretend to know her.’

  Everyone was looking at us, enjoying the show.

  The Australian waiter was back, pale-faced with fear.

  ‘Leave or I’ll call the police,’ he told me.

  Anne laughed with mocking contempt. That was one more gesture that I remembered from that other life.

  ‘Scout stays with me,’ I said.

  17

  DCI Pat Whitestone held up an evidence bag containing the knife that killed Ahmed Khan and the bright summer sunshine that poured into Major Incident Room-1 glinted on the thick silver blade, and the nickel-plated pommel, and the grip’s gold-etched black swastika on its red-and-white diamond.

  ‘Apparently it’s the real thing,’ I said. ‘A Hitler Youth Dagger circa 1937; 26.6 centimetres long, 300 grams in weight. The blade has been sharpened quite recently but it’s not a reproduction.’

  I had seen hundreds of knives in my job. One night on The Bishop’s Avenue, I had been stabbed with one of them. And as DCI Pat Whitestone stared at the knife inside its evidence bag, the old scar on my stomach throbbed with the memory.

  Whitestone stared at the inscription on the blade.

  ‘Blut und Ehre,’ I said, ‘Blood and honour.’

  ‘How hard would it have been to kill Ahmed Khan with this knife?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘Sharpened like that?’ I said. ‘Piercing the subclavian art
ery with it would take about as much effort as you would need for opening a bottle of wine. As long as you knew what you were doing.’

  ‘Forensics?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘No prints on the handle,’ Edie said, looking up from the report on her screen. ‘That was too much to hope for.’

  ‘Then any sign of the gloves the killer was wearing?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘Search teams are still looking for gloves, ma’am,’ Edie said.

  Whitestone looked at TDC Adams.

  ‘Lesson for you here, Joy,’ she said. ‘As a general rule, killers don’t take their gloves home for the weekly wash. They ditch them as soon as they can when they leave the crime scene. And – lucky for us – fingerprints can be found on the inside of gloves, but most villains are too stupid to know that. So if we find the ditched gloves then we are likely to find prints inside and – if we catch a break – those prints will be on IDENT1.’

  Adams nodded. She got it.

  IDENT1 is the database containing the fingerprints of ten million people who have had contact with the law. If Ahmed Khan’s killer had ever been arrested, even if they had never been convicted of anything, then their prints would be on there.

  ‘Who would have access to a weapon like this?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘A serious collector,’ I said. ‘You can’t buy them on eBay. Not the real thing.’

  Whitestone was still staring at the blade, as if it might reveal its secrets. Inside the evidence bag, the knife was contained in a weapons tube – a hard plastic shell – which was sealed with biohazard tape to prevent contamination of the blood on the blade.

  MIR-1 was silent as Whitestone squinted at the Criminal Justice Act label on the evidence bag. The CJA label gave the evidence bag a unique identification number, named the tube station where it was recovered, the name of the CSI who had tagged and bagged it and – most important of all – the chain of custody showing the life of the item from the moment it had been recovered.

  ‘How many CCTV cameras are on the London Underground, Max?’

  ‘Over twelve thousand,’ I said. ‘But this is all we have of Ahmed Khan in the last minutes of his life.’

  I hit my keyboard and the big HDTV screen on the wall of MIR-1 revealed the black-and-white CCTV image of a tube train pulling into a station.

  The time stamp in the right-hand corner showed Sunday’s date and the exact time I had arrived at the station. The doors of the tube train opened and the crowds emerged. I paused the film. Ahmed Khan was clearly visible in the centre of the screen.

  ‘And this is from the entrance,’ I said.

  Another CCTV image appeared, sharper this time, with natural sunlight bursting at the edge of the frame. It was from the camera pointed into the station, recording the emerging crowds.

  And now they were running.

  There was no sound but some mouths were opened in a scream. I saw my back in the foreground, taking a tentative step forward, then halting – men and women rushing past me, some of them looking back with horror – and then there was Ahmed Khan, staggering towards the exit that he would never reach, the knife sticking out of the point where his neck met his shoulder blade.

  ‘I reckon he was stabbed on the escalator,’ I said. ‘My guess – he was standing on the right-hand side, tired after working a long shift, looking forward to being home, and the killer was on the left-hand side, walking up, and punched in the blade as he passed.’

  ‘Witnesses?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘We’ve got dozens of witnesses who saw him after he was stabbed,’ Edie said. ‘But nobody who saw the knife go in.’

  ‘Hard to believe,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘If it was on the escalator then that’s where everyone gets their signal back,’ Edie said. ‘So they missed the murder because they were all looking at their phones.’

  Whitestone gently placed the evidence bag on her workstation. The sound of the traffic down on Savile Row drifted up through the open windows.

  ‘Let me see the graffiti again,’ Whitestone said.

  TDC Adams called up a CSI photograph of the piles of planks outside the house on Borodino Street. In a tight close-up, the numbers were revealed.

  20:8–11

  ‘How many people would get that reference?’ Whitestone asked.

  Edie shrugged. ‘I knew it was a chapter and verse numbers from the Bible. But I couldn’t have told you it was one of the Ten Commandments.’

  I shook my head. ‘Not me,’ I said.

  Whitestone looked at Adams.

  The silver crucifix around her neck shone against her dark skin. ‘Of course,’ the young TDC said. ‘The Fourth Commandment – Exodus version, not Deuteronomy. The laws God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. How many people would get that reference? There are two billion Christians worldwide and thirty million in this country.’

  ‘Or it could be a false lead,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I buy it that this is some Bible-basher. Ahmed Khan wasn’t hated because he worked on Sundays. He was hated because his sons were mass murderers.’

  ‘What about the mouthy guy with the funny haircut who was whipping up the crowd down there?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘George Halfpenny,’ I said. ‘No criminal record. And I never saw him advocating violence. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t inspire it.’

  ‘Put Mr Halfpenny down as a TIE subject,’ Whitestone said.

  Trace, Interview, Eliminate.

  Whitestone was thinking aloud now. ‘Media appeal for witnesses. Get some uniforms from downstairs to help with the H-2-H.’ House to house enquiries. ‘Interview Mr Khan’s colleagues at Victoria Bus Station, Joy, see if he spoke of any direct threats,’ she said. ‘Edie, make enquiries with local taxi firms to see if any of their drivers had a fare late Sunday with blood on his hands.’ She took off her glasses and cleaned them, giving her face that suddenly vulnerable look she got without her specs. Then she put them back on and she was once again the most experienced homicide cop in West End Central.

  She looked at me.

  ‘And they never found the two Cetinka hand grenades that were meant to be in that house?’

  ‘They either never existed or they were removed from the premises before we went in,’ I said.

  ‘And we still haven’t interviewed Ahmed Khan’s wife yet?’ she said.

  ‘We are waiting for the OK from the doctor,’ Edie said. ‘Mrs Khan has been too heavily sedated since the murder.’

  Adams cleared her throat. She almost raised her hand. ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Go ahead, Joy,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘It’s a long shot, but there could be images of who was with the victim on that train,’ she said. ‘There are a lot of websites, Twitter accounts and photo galleries dedicated to fellow passengers.’

  We were all staring at her.

  We did not understand. Under her ebony skin, Adams blushed.

  ‘People take photographs of other passengers,’ she said, spelling it out for us. ‘Tubecrush and sites like that.’

  ‘But why would they do that?’ Whitestone said.

  Adams blushed even more deeply. Edie laughed.

  ‘Because they fancy them, right?’ she said, and Adams nodded, grinning shyly.

  ‘Nobody is going to take a picture of a knackered old bus driver,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘No,’ Adams agreed. ‘But someone might have taken a picture of his killer.’

  Whitestone’s personal phone rang. She listened for a while. ‘He’s busy,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘He’s working.’ Then her smile faded. ‘Can it wait?’ A beat. ‘Understood.’ When she hung up, she nodded at me. ‘IPCC are back,’ she said. ‘And they want you downstairs now.’

  The same police Federation rep was waiting at the lift on the third floor, that teak-hard old cockney who cared about his clothes.

  This time he looked worried.

  ‘New information about the raid on Borodino Street,’ he said. ‘That’s all I know. Sorry I didn’t have a
chance to give you a heads-up.’

  The same two IPCC investigators were waiting for me, the young blonde and the crumpled old man. We shook hands without warmth or enthusiasm. This time it was the old boy who took the lead.

  ‘I’m Gordon Hunt of the Independent Police Complaints Commission,’ he told the tape. ‘Also present is my colleague Marilyn Flynn of the IPCC and DC Wolfe of West End Central. DC Wolfe, could you please confirm that you have the appropriate police Federation representation?’

  ‘I do.’

  Hunt opened his file.

  ‘This is a follow-up investigation into the two firing officers on Operation Tolstoy on Borodino Street. DC Wolfe – is there anything about your previous statement that you would like to amend, adjust or retract?’

  Silence in the room.

  I felt my rep shift uneasily beside me.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘That’s your final answer?’

  I stared at him. What was this? A game show?

  ‘I have answered your question, sir.’

  ‘I will remind you, DC Wolfe, that you informed Ms Flynn and I that you were not in the basement and therefore you did not see Adnan Khan make a sudden movement for a weapon and did not see C3 – SFO DC Raymond Vann – discharge his firearm.’

  I am not going to rat him out.

  But I am not going to lie for him.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And you’re sticking with that story, are you?’ the woman said.

  My rep placed a hand on my arm.

  Don’t lose your rag.

  ‘DC Wolfe has answered your question,’ he said.

  ‘As you know, C3 – Specialist Firearms Officer DC Vann – originally testified that you were in the basement and saw him discharge his weapon when Adnan Khan made a movement for a weapon,’ Hunt said.

  Originally? What did he mean originally?

  The word hung in the air between us.

  You OK, Raymond? You OK?

  ‘Vann has changed his mind,’ Hunt said, stripping him all at once of his Special Firearms Officer status, and his rank in the Met, and even his code in this IPCC investigation.

  ‘Vann confessed,’ Flynn said. ‘He told us the truth.’