Good as Dead

by Mark Billingham

There was a pause. Pascoe imagined Helen looking towards Akhtar for a response. Looking at the gun. She listened for his voice, prepared herself.

  Thinking: active listening, validation, reassurance.

  ‘He doesn’t want to,’ Helen said.

  Pascoe raised her voice. ‘Javed, can you hear me? If you can hear me, I’d really like to speak to you, if that’s all right.’

  ‘I only want to speak to Thorne,’ Akhtar shouted.

  ‘I understand that, Javed,’ Pascoe said. ‘You only want to speak to Tom Thorne.’ She took care to repeat the hostage taker’s words, just as she had been taught, to focus the attention on him and make it clear that she had understood his wishes. ‘We will definitely make sure that happens, but right now he’s not here. He’s busy trying to gather the information you wanted.’

  ‘Not “information”,’ Akhtar shouted. ‘Truth. They are not the same thing … not the same thing at all.’

  ‘No, of course they aren’t,’ Pascoe said, careful to show concern, but not to talk down. To let him know she felt the same way about these things as he did. ‘We do understand what you want, Javed.’

  Akhtar said nothing.

  ‘Nadira’s here, Javed.’ She paused for a few seconds, deliberately. ‘She’s here and she wants to talk to you.’

  ‘No.’

  Pascoe had to move quickly, before Akhtar had a chance to hang up. She beckoned his wife across and nodded to her. The woman glanced at the listening officers as she took the phone. Donnelly raised two hands and mouthed, ‘Nice and calm.’

  ‘Javed … ’ Nadira Akhtar sounded as nervous as she looked. She gave a hesitant smile when Pascoe reached out to lay a hand on her arm. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘I can’t talk now,’ Akhtar said.

  ‘You need to talk to me, OK?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘This is ridiculous, Javee.’

  Akhtar said something in Hindi then and Nadira said, ‘No, you need to tell me.’ He spoke in Hindi again, for longer this time. Pascoe looked across at Donnelly and shrugged. Even though there was a translator standing within earshot – a young woman poised with notepad and pencil – it had been agreed that Nadira would try and talk to her husband in English. Nadira looked at Pascoe, panic-stricken. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘He won’t talk to me in English.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Pascoe said. ‘Just keep talking to him.’

  They spoke for several minutes more. Akhtar did most of the talking, shouting at first, then growing calmer as he said the same thing over and over, while his wife tried and failed to interject, until eventually she gave up and began to weep.

  When Akhtar ended the call, Pascoe took the phone and stood up to put an arm around the woman’s shoulders. She looked at Donnelly as she told her how well she had done, while Nadira shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. Donnelly nodded the translator across, but Nadira waved her away. She wanted to tell them herself.

  ‘He says he loves us all very much and that he’s sorry.’ She fought back a sob. ‘This is for Amin, he says. All for Amin. He says that he owes it to him to do this.’ She lowered her head. ‘He is happy to offer his life back to Allah if need be, but he has no choice. Everyone’s life … ’

  The tears came again and she made no effort to stop them. Donnelly quickly beckoned the WPC who was working as family liaison officer to escort her away. Nadira turned to say sorry one more time as she was led from the hall, but Donnelly, Pascoe and Chivers had already moved into a huddle.

  ‘I didn’t like the sound of that last bit,’ Chivers said. ‘Offering his life back. Heard that a few too many times.’

  ‘He’s not a terrorist,’ Pascoe said.

  ‘Isn’t he?’

  Donnelly raised his hands and tried to speak, but Pascoe was not about to let Chivers have the last word.

  ‘He’s just a father who’s lost his son, so let’s not go throwing labels around.’ Her responsibility as a negotiator began and ended with the safety of the hostages. That meant maintaining an atmosphere of calm and making sure that nobody – fellow officers included – got over-excited.

  Chivers made no attempt to hide a sneer. Donnelly asked both of them if they had quite finished. Pascoe – calling on every ounce of training and experience when it came to reading people and making judgements about personality and state of mind – decided that Chivers was a twat.

  ‘Right … ’ Donnelly said.

  They all turned at the sound of raised voices in the corridor, and moved quickly when somebody screamed and what sounded like a full-blown slanging match began to erupt. Donnelly led the way, charging out of the hall and towards the classroom that had been set up as a family liaison area.

  They entered the classroom to see a WPC struggling to hold back a young black woman who was raging at a terrified Nadira Akhtar. She called her a bitch and swore that if anything happened to her husband, she would make her and her family pay for it.

  Donnelly shouted, demanding to know what was going on.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ The red-faced WPC finally managed to gain some control over the woman. ‘This is Stephen Mitchell’s wife. I didn’t know where else to put her.’

  Pascoe took Nadira’s arm and led her from the room. Chivers raised an eyebrow and followed them.

  Donnelly glared at the WPC. ‘Nice job,’ he said.

  SIXTEEN

  When Thorne eventually got to the library, he spread the files out across a table in the corner and spent fifteen minutes tracing Amin Akhtar’s journey, from first court appearance to funeral.

  As was the case with all young offenders sent down from the Old Bailey, Amin had been transferred to Feltham YOI, the same place in which he had spent five months on remand after his arrest. From there, he was eventually assigned to Barndale to serve what would be the first half of his eight-year sentence, before moving into the adult prison system.

  Despite the circumstances of the offence and the nature of the boy who had committed it, the court had handed down a sentence at the high end of the scale. It had clearly been Amin’s misfortune to come up in front of a judge determined to be tough on knife crime. Even so, it was little wonder that Amin’s legal team had spent six months mounting a vigorous appeal, which would now of course never be heard.

  Arguably, Helen Weeks was now a victim of that same misfortune.

  Thorne made a mental note to talk to Amin’s solicitor and sent Brigstocke a text asking him to get hold of the phone number.

  He looked up from the paperwork at the sound of laughter from two boys huddled around a computer at the far end of the library. Along with an older boy who sat engrossed in a book near the door, they were the only inmates in the place and thankfully seemed uninterested in Thorne’s presence. The boys at the computer giggled again and the female PO at the desk raised her eyes from a copy of Closer. Told them to keep the noise down.

  Thorne guessed that Amin Akhtar had spent a good deal of time in this room that smelled of polish and something else. Damp, perhaps. He opened the police report and took out the photographs of the boy’s body that lay on top of the file; the lips drawn back across the teeth, the blood caked around his chin and dried like streaks of rust on his neck.

  He wondered what kind of books Amin had liked to read.

  Once Thorne had done some reading of his own, it became clear that the original investigation had – with one notable exception – been less sloppy than he had initially feared. Dawes had done just about all that was required of him to ascertain that there had been no suspicious circumstances around the sudden death of Amin Akhtar.

  He had reviewed the CCTV footage and asked all the right questions about keys. He had looked at the possibility that the drugs taken by Amin had been brought in from outside the hospital wing and interviewed the boy who had visited him. He had even checked the plastic cup found on the floor of the room for fingerprints. Only Amin’s and those of the PHO who had given him his final dose of meds had
been found.

  Dawes had also taken statements from all the patients on the two wards the night that Amin had died. Eleven boys from across the three prison sites with a variety of conditions and dependencies; a few with broken bones and several recovering from minor operations performed at the local hospital.

  Predictably, none had seen or heard anything. Having seen how drugged-up many of the patients currently in residence were, Thorne was almost tempted to believe the statements, but he had to agree with Dawes’ assertion that looking for witnesses was a lost cause.

  Something was still missing though.

  Thorne looked through the report one more time. There was no reference anywhere to the thefts from the dispensary, or the possibility that one of them had been the source of the Tramadol that had killed Amin.

  Not quite a job well done then, but one with a nice neat line drawn under it nonetheless, ensuring a speedy resolution to the formalities that followed.

  Based on the information he had gathered, Dawes had come to a perfectly reasonable conclusion, and with a post-mortem to support it, the coroner would have been happy enough to release the body to the family for burial within a few days. In the apparent absence of any new evidence, the formal inquest that had taken place a fortnight ago would have been straightforward enough. There was little reason for the jury to deliver any other verdict than the one it did. No reason to harbour doubts, or for anyone to take the concerns of a grief-stricken father seriously.

  But now, Thorne had a few concerns of his own.

  There were others he needed to talk to, of course, and perhaps it was all because he wanted to find something he could take back to Javed Akhtar. To give Amin’s father what he was asking for and get Helen Weeks out of that shop in one piece. Perhaps Holland had been right and Thorne was looking for a murder where there was none …

  He closed the file when he saw the two boys get up from the computer and start walking towards him. He slid the photographs underneath.

  ‘You the one asking questions about the kid that topped himself?’

  Thorne caught the eye of the PO who was clearly wondering whether or not to intervene. He shook his head to let her know there was not a problem.

  The boy who had asked the question was a tall, skinny Asian, eighteen or so. He sniffed and reached to nudge glasses back up his nose, then went back to holding the DVD he was clutching to his chest. The boy next to him was younger, shorter and thickset. White, with a shaved head and bad teeth which Thorne saw a good deal of, as he had not stopped smiling since he arrived at the table.

  Thorne said, ‘Yes, I am.’

  The Asian boy pulled out a chair and sat down and his friend was quick to do the same. The PO looked across again, but Thorne ignored her.

  ‘My name’s Tom Thorne. I’m a police officer.’

  The Asian boy shrugged, like he’d worked that much out already. ‘Aziz,’ he said. He nodded towards his friend. ‘This is Darren.’

  Darren smiled.

  ‘He was called Amin,’ Thorne said. ‘The boy that killed himself. Did you know him?’

  ‘Seen him around,’ Aziz said. ‘Wouldn’t say I knew him though.’

  Thorne looked at Darren.

  ‘Same,’ Darren said.

  ‘Thing is, you never really get to know anyone, if you understand what I’m saying.’ Aziz spoke quickly with a London accent and the merest suggestion of a stammer. ‘People in here are all trying to be something they’re not or something they want you to think they are. Easier that way, yeah?’

  Thorne nodded. ‘What about you?’

  Aziz laughed and leaned back until the front legs of his chair had left the ground. ‘Nah, too much effort, all that, and I’ve been here a while anyway so I know how to be myself and keep out of trouble.’ He spread out his arms, the DVD in one hand. ‘What you see is what you get.’

  Darren leaned forward to Thorne suddenly. ‘So, you like the library then?’

  ‘It’s good,’ Thorne said. ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s quiet.’

  ‘You like it?’

  Darren pointed across at Aziz, grinning. ‘He does, and that’s a fact. He’s in here all the time, I swear. Reading this weird shit about space and all stuff that’s been invented. Science and that, like a professor or something.’

  Thorne looked at Aziz who reddened slightly, then shrugged, happy enough with the description.

  ‘Go on, ask him something,’ Darren said, excited. ‘He knows everything about science and that, I’m telling you. He could go on Mastermind, I swear, and thrash any of them, piece of piss. Go on, ask him a question. Hard as you like.’

  Aziz eased his chair gently back down and told his friend to shut up.

  ‘No point anyway,’ Thorne said. ‘I’m rubbish at science.’

  ‘He’s not rubbish,’ Darren said, pointing at Aziz again. ‘Honest to God, he’s like that bloke in the wheelchair who sounds like a Dalek … except the bloke in the wheelchair’s not a Paki.’

  ‘You should talk to that black kid,’ Aziz said. He nodded Thorne across towards the boy who was reading by the door. Aware of the attention, the boy glanced up from his book for a second or two. His face was expressionless; handsome and hard.

  ‘Why?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘He was that dead kid’s mate. I saw them together a fair bit, talking in their cells, all that. In here too, sometimes.’ Aziz lowered his voice, and not just because the PO was scowling at him. ‘He got in big trouble for punching someone a few weeks back, got chucked off the Gold wing and all that. I reckon that was because they said something sick about his mate killing himself and he didn’t like it, you know what I’m saying?’

  Thorne looked over at the boy by the door again, but saw no more than the top of his head.

  ‘You want to see something funny?’ Darren asked.

  Thorne turned back, his mind still on the boy. ‘What?’

  ‘Show him,’ Darren said. Laughing, he reached across and tried to grab the DVD, but Aziz snatched it away.

  ‘What have you been watching?’ Thorne asked.

  Aziz tossed the DVD on to the table. There was a picture of a human foetus in the womb on the cover. ‘Been showing him some stuff about reproduction and all that. Basic human biology, how it all works, whatever. He wanted to know, so … ’

  ‘I told you,’ Darren said. ‘He knows everything about all that.’

  ‘What did you think of it?’

  Darren shook his head, though the smile never wavered. ‘There’s some seriously strange shit on there, I tell you. Test-tube babies and weird rubbish like that. I swear, I’d never want no test-tube baby.’

  Aziz looked at Thorne and rolled his eyes.

  ‘They’ve got like … webbed hands and feet,’ Darren said. He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. ‘No word of a lie.’

  Aziz shook his head. ‘Why do you think they’ve got webbed feet?’

  ‘That’s how they swim out of the test tube.’

  Thorne fought to control a smile, but couldn’t manage it.

  ‘He’s not normally quite this mental,’ Aziz said. ‘He’s just a bit over-excited.’

  ‘Tell him why.’

  ‘You tell him.’

  ‘I’m getting out in two weeks,’ Darren said, beaming. ‘And I’m going to be a dad. My girlfriend’s having our baby.’ He smacked his chest proudly, then pointed at the DVD, to the picture of the foetus in the womb. ‘Our own little baby, just like this one.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Thorne said. ‘Best make sure you don’t come back then.’

  Darren nodded, solemn.

  ‘How long have you been inside?’

  ‘Eighteen months,’ Darren said. He looked at Thorne and then at his friend. ‘What …?’

  Aziz was still laughing as Thorne gathered up all the files, and the PO was smirking behind her magazine. Darren looked confused but continued to smile. Thorne turned round again, just in time to see the boy in the corner walking out
through the library doors.

  SEVENTEEN

  The takeaway where Danny Armstrong worked was fifty yards from Essex Road railway station, between a dry cleaners’ and a shop that seemed deserted but still had a few old vacuum cleaners on display. Holland and Kitson stared in through the steamy window and spotted a likely-looking teenager chopping tomatoes behind the counter. He looked up when they entered, pushed the tomatoes into a plastic container and wiped his hands on the back of his jeans.

  ‘Yes, mate?’

  The place sold kebabs, burgers, chicken; pretty much anything that could be deep-fried and stuck inside a bun. Come half past eleven at night with a few drinks inside you, it probably smelled like heaven, but, stone cold sober at lunchtime, Holland was suddenly feeling a little less hungry than he had been.

  He produced his warrant card.

  ‘Just a quick word, Danny.’

  Armstrong looked nervously towards a doorway to his right and, on cue, a burly, middle-aged man appeared carrying a metal tray piled high with chicken wings. He was Greek, Holland guessed, or Turkish, and he watched as Kitson went to the door and turned the sign to CLOSED.

  ‘Hey … ’

  Holland flashed his ID again, but the man shook his head and shouted at Kitson. ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Yes, I can,’ Kitson said.

  Holland said that he was sorry for the inconvenience, but that they would only need a few minutes of the boy’s time. The man laid his tray down and pointed at Armstrong. He said, ‘It’s coming out your wages,’ then turned and walked out.

  Armstrong looked at Holland. ‘Cheers.’

  Kitson walked across and placed a five-pound note on the counter. ‘We’ll have a couple of bags of chips then,’ she said. ‘Keep your boss happy, OK?’

  Armstrong grunted, moved to the deep-fat fryer and pushed up the lid.

  ‘Amin Akhtar,’ Holland said. ‘Remember him? He died in prison a few months back and we were wondering if you’d heard about it.’

  Armstrong didn’t look up. ‘News to me.’

  ‘You sure?’