Good as Dead

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne saw that photographs of the two hostages had been taped to the edges of the monitor. He presumed that Pascoe had done it. A reminder to herself that they were dealing with human beings.

  Stephen Mitchell was grinning in sunglasses and a garish shirt. A holiday snap, presumably provided by his wife.

  The picture of Helen Weeks had clearly been faxed over from the Met’s HR department. A straightforward ID photograph, but Thorne recognised the woman he had last seen at a funeral more than a year before. The soft features and ash-blonde hair. She looked serious in the picture, but this too was how he remembered her. Heavily pregnant with a dead boyfriend, there had not been much to smile about back then.

  Next to him, Pascoe dialled. She moved the small microphone into position and cleared her throat.

  Not an awful lot to smile about now, Thorne thought.

  Helen Weeks’ phone rang three times, then Akhtar answered. They all looked at one another anxiously as the newsagent’s voice rang out from the speakers.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Javed … this is Sue Pascoe. I spoke to you yesterday.’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘I need to speak to Helen. Is that possible?’

  ‘What, you need to speak to her because you have something to say or you need to check that she is all right?’

  ‘Can I speak to her?’

  Akhtar’s voice faded a little as he said, ‘They want to know that you are all right.’ Then, after a second or two, Helen shouted, ‘We’re both fine, Sue. I could murder a decent cup of coffee and a sausage sandwich though.’

  Pascoe said, ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ but Akhtar had come back to the phone.

  ‘Is that acceptable?’

  ‘Yes, thanks, Javed.’ She glanced at Thorne. There was an odd formality to Akhtar’s voice that she had often heard in those who spoke English as a second language. But there was an unmistakable tightness there too. ‘So how was your night?’

  ‘It was fine,’ Akhtar said. There was a long pause. ‘How was yours?’

  ‘It was good, thanks. Listen, is there anything we can do to make you all a little more comfortable in there? Anything—’

  ‘We’re fine,’ Akhtar said. ‘Nobody’s coming in, OK? No policemen dressed as pizza delivery men or any of that.’

  ‘I understand,’ Pascoe said. ‘Nobody’s coming in, Javed. We just want to do anything we can to help while we try and get everything sorted out the way you want.’

  ‘Is Thorne there?’

  Pascoe looked to Donnelly. He nodded. ‘Yes, he’s here.’

  ‘Let me talk to him.’

  Pascoe took off her headset and handed it to Thorne. He sat down and adjusted the microphone. Said, ‘I’m here.’ Pascoe made ‘calm, calm’ gestures with her hands and Thorne nodded, thinking that there was someone else he needed to tell that he wasn’t an idiot. ‘I’m listening, Javed.’

  ‘No, I’m the one that is listening. I want to know what you have found out about my son. About what really happened to him.’

  ‘Did you get my message?’ Thorne asked. ‘Did Helen tell you what I said?’

  ‘That you believe me? Yes, she told me.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘So now it’s up to you to make people believe us. The fact is, I don’t care one way or another what you believe as long as you find out who murdered my son. And I am not a fool, so please do not keep telling me that these things take time.’ The voice was tighter still now, the anger surfacing fast. ‘It did not seem to take very long for your colleagues to decide that Amin had killed himself. It took less than an hour for the jury at that ridiculous inquest to confirm it. I only hope that you can prove that they were wrong just as quickly.’

  ‘I’m doing everything I can, Javed. I’m—’

  ‘You are sitting out there, talking on the phone,’ Akhtar said. ‘How is that going to help either of us? How is it going to help your friend Miss Weeks?’

  Thorne looked at Pascoe and searched for something to say, but before he could come up with anything the line had gone dead.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Thorne asked Donnelly if he could speak to Nadira Akhtar again before he left. Told him that, with luck, she might be able to suggest where he should be going.

  ‘You think she knows something that will help?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ Thorne said. ‘But I haven’t got any better ideas.’

  ‘Listen, wherever you go, make sure you stay in touch, OK?’ The superintendent was walking with him to the classroom that had been set aside as a family liaison area. Donnelly was rather more casually dressed today, in short-sleeved white shirt and black tie. Dispensing with the jacket and hat gave the impression to fellow officers and interested civilians alike that he was mucking in with the rest of his team, rolling up his sleeves. Though it might just have been because he was sweating. ‘And obviously, if you have any communication with Helen Weeks, you let me know straight away.’

  ‘I have been,’ Thorne said.

  ‘So what was all that about on the phone?’

  ‘All what about?’

  ‘Your message.’

  ‘You know what it was.’

  ‘Is it true?’ Donnelly stopped outside the classroom. ‘Do you think he’s right about what happened to his son?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Thorne said. ‘But whether I can prove it and give him what he wants in time is a different question.’

  ‘He hasn’t given us any kind of time limit.’

  ‘You heard him just now.’ Thorne nodded back towards the hall. ‘And a certain firearms officer with his cock where his Glock should be is getting decidedly twitchy, if you ask me.’

  Donnelly flashed him a warning look as he knocked on the window in the classroom door and beckoned to the WPC inside. He told her that Thorne needed to talk to Mrs Akhtar and the officer stepped out, looking grateful for the chance of some air, or perhaps just a change of company.

  The desks had been pushed back against the walls and a few plastic seats set up in a circle in the middle of the room. There was a low table with tea and biscuits. A few magazines were scattered about, but Nadira Akhtar did not look as if she felt much like flicking through Take a Break or OK!

  She was sitting on a chair near the window.

  Thorne saw the open holdall beneath one of the desks as he carried a chair across to join her. Clothes and a flowery washbag. ‘Did you sleep here last night?’

  ‘I wanted to,’ she said. ‘The house is empty anyway.’

  ‘Where’s your son?’

  ‘He has a family of his own to take care of.’ She looked at Thorne for the first time. ‘He will come back later but I am happier being on my own, to be honest with you. We argue.’

  ‘About what?’

  She waved the question away.

  ‘Couldn’t your daughter stay with you?’

  ‘I told her to keep away.’ She shook her head, then tucked a strand of greying hair back beneath her embroidered headscarf. ‘I do not want her to see her father like this. To see how much he is frightening everyone.’ She looked towards the door. ‘To be around all these people who hate him.’

  ‘Nobody hates him,’ Thorne said. ‘They’re just doing their jobs.’

  Nadira turned away and stared out again at the empty playground. A group of uniformed officers was gathered in one corner near a climbing frame, and on the far side it was just possible to see a row of emergency vehicles parked up beyond the tree line: the ARVs, the squad cars, an ambulance.

  ‘Do you still see Rahim Jaffer?’ Thorne asked.

  Something tightened, just momentarily, in Nadira’s face.

  The boy who had been with Amin the night of the attack.

  The boy he had been trying to defend when he had stabbed Lee Slater to death.

  ‘He came to Amin’s funeral, of course,’ Nadira said. ‘Lots of his friends came, some I had never even met before.’ She nodded, proud. ‘He had a great many friends.’<
br />
  ‘So what about seeing Rahim?’

  ‘Not since then, no.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  Another small wave of the hand, as though what she were about to say was silly and unimportant. ‘We used to be friendly with his parents, but after what happened there was some … awkwardness. Perhaps they thought we would blame their son. Perhaps because he was free and ours was rotting in that place. So we have not seen them in a while. We sometimes hear about Rahim, but only because one of his cousins still comes into the shop now and again.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘He is studying hard, I think.’ Her hands were in her lap, one rubbing at the other as she spoke. ‘At the South Bank University. Accountancy or economics or what have you. He was a very clever boy, same as Amin.’

  Thorne thanked her for her time, grateful too that she had not seemed keen to know how things had gone the day before at Barndale. Whether or not she secretly shared any of her husband’s concerns about what had happened to her son, it was obvious that she preferred to remember him simply as a popular and bright boy.

  Not one who had died alone and unhappy in prison.

  Thorne considered asking Nadira Akhtar there and then if she had known her son was gay. Perhaps she had known – would a mother not always know? – and kept the truth from her husband. He felt sure the time would come when he would have to tell both of them, but in the end he decided that it could wait. Thorne knew that where there was one secret though, there were usually others. That they bred easily. He guessed that Rahim Jaffer had shared the secret of Amin’s sexuality at the very least, so now Thorne had a place to start looking.

  ‘If you see Rahim,’ Nadira said, ‘please would you be sure to tell him that we never blamed him for anything?’ She had turned to the window again, her eyes closed against the sunlight that was suddenly streaming into the room.

  Thorne said that he would, but carrying his chair back to the centre of the classroom, he was thinking about something Nadira had said a few minutes before. About the boy who so many had told him kept himself to himself.

  Wondering where he had got all those friends from.

  TWENTY-NINE

  As Holland and Kitson reversed into a parking space a few doors down from the address they had been given in Hackney, they saw a young man step out on to the pavement and start walking towards them. Nineteen or twenty, with dark hair that seemed pasted to his scalp and tattoos clearly visible on the arm outstretched to yank a bull terrier puppy along behind him.

  Holland checked the black and white headshot clipped to the folder in his lap. ‘That’ll be our boy, then.’

  ‘Bless him,’ Kitson said. She nodded down to the file. ‘Say anything in there about him being an animal lover?’

  The file detailed the assorted crimes and misdemeanours that had resulted in Peter David Allen serving various sentences in three different Young Offenders Institutions since he was fourteen years old: actual bodily harm, burglary, threatening behaviour, sexual assault. Up until nine weeks previously, he had been a prisoner at Barndale, serving eight months out of thirteen after attacking a woman with a fence post when she had dared to try and stop him stealing her car.

  Holland tossed the folder on to the back seat. ‘Pete seems to like animals rather more than people.’

  They watched Allen haul his dog past the car, waited a minute or two, then got out and followed.

  ‘Just makes him typically British,’ Kitson said. They walked a hundred yards behind Allen on the opposite side of the road. ‘More money gets given to the RSPCA every year than the NSPCC, did you know that? Makes you proud, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Country’s going to the dogs,’ Holland said.

  ‘Funny … ’

  At the end of the street, Allen turned left on to Dalston Lane. He ducked briefly into a grocer’s and came out chugging from a can of Red Bull and tearing the wrapping from a packet of Marlboro. A hundred yards further on, he stopped to tie the dog to a lamppost and disappeared into a bookmaker’s.

  When he emerged a few minutes later clutching his betting slip, Kitson was leaning against the lamppost checking her phone. Holland was on his haunches making a fuss of the puppy, who was happily chewing at his sleeve.

  ‘Fuck you doing?’ Allen asked.

  Holland looked up. ‘Nice dog,’ he said. ‘Course it almost certainly won’t be by the time you’ve finished with it.’ He gave the puppy’s belly one last rub then stood up. ‘It’s all about how you bring them up, isn’t it? Same as kids really, but I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’

  ‘You what?’

  Allen’s stance was still aggressive, but he was clearly confused. His mouth opened then closed again, before his eyes flicked to the warrant card Kitson was waving at him and his shoulders slumped. Without a word he stepped across to untie his dog, then turned and walked back the way he’d come.

  Holland and Kitson fell into step either side of him.

  ‘Got yourself a job then, Pete?’ Kitson asked.

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘Just making conversation. I mean either you have, or you’re just pissing your dole money away on the gee-gees.’

  ‘It’s my money.’

  They paused as the dog stopped and squatted outside the same grocer’s Allen had been into a few minutes earlier. Allen dragged the puppy across the pavement, lit a cigarette and watched as the dog went about its business in the gutter.

  ‘You’d better hope you win,’ Holland said. ‘There’s a two-hundred-quid fine for that.’

  Allen smirked. They carried on walking.

  ‘You been out what, a couple of months?’ Holland asked.

  Allen shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Back on your feet?’

  ‘Getting there.’

  ‘More than Amin Akhtar is, that’s for sure.’

  Allen said, ‘Who?’

  They turned into the street where Allen lived. A row of old artisans’ cottages ran for almost half its length, but at the far end the Victorian terraces had been knocked down and replaced by blocks of council-owned maisonettes. The small front gardens were nicely maintained for the most part, but there were bars on almost all the doors and windows. Allen had moved a few feet ahead of Kitson and Holland as he approached his front door. He reached for his key then turned to see them following him up the front path. He shook his head. ‘No chance.’

  ‘We only want a chat,’ Kitson said. ‘What are you so jumpy about?’

  ‘Not without a warrant. That’s harassment, whatever.’

  ‘Don’t need one if you invite us in.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Allen opened the door, but when he turned to close it he found Holland’s foot in the way.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Pete.’ Holland pushed his way inside and Kitson followed. ‘But we can only stay a few minutes … ’

  A small hallway-cum-porch led straight into a living room. Allen marched past Holland and Kitson and took the dog through into the kitchen. They watched as he opened a back door and let the puppy out on to a tiny, turd-covered patio at the back. Kitson opened another door on to a narrow corridor with what she presumed were a bedroom and bathroom running off it, while Holland walked across to examine the sleek black stereo and the rows of CDs and DVDs on the shelves above it.

  Allen came back in to see Kitson emerging through the doorway and Holland rifling through his collection of thrash metal and torture porn. He stood in the centre of the living room and raised his arms in outrage.

  Said, ‘This is taking the piss.’

  Holland nodded towards the stereo system: a Denon CD and Blu-Ray player; the big Bose speakers at either end of the room and the smaller ones mounted high up on the walls. ‘This is decent gear, Pete. I wouldn’t mind something like this myself.’ He turned to look at the plasma TV that took up most of one wall. ‘Have to put in a bit more overtime though.’

  ‘I’ve got recei
pts,’ Allen said. ‘All right?’

  Holland looked impressed. ‘You must be getting some good tips then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘On the horses.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve had a few winners.’

  ‘And we can check that, can we?’ Kitson asked. ‘Obviously your bookie up the road keeps records of all his payouts.’ She sat down on a faded brown armchair. ‘For tax reasons, you know?’

  Allen seemed to grow agitated suddenly. He walked over to the wall and leaned back hard against it. ‘Is there any point to this?’ He pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘Because if you’re waiting for tea and biscuits you can stick them up your arse.’

  Holland dropped into the chair that was in front of the TV and turned it round so that he and Kitson were both facing Allen. ‘Why did you put Amin Akhtar in hospital?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Allen said.

  ‘Sure?’ Kitson asked. ‘Five minutes ago you didn’t even know who he was.’

  ‘I just meant … I never knew him very well, that’s all. You know how many kids there are in there?’

  ‘Why does it matter if you knew him or not?’ Holland asked. ‘How well did you know that woman you battered with the fence post?’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  ‘Some of the prison officers think it was.’

  ‘Well they can kiss my arse, same as you can.’ Allen was doing his very best to look cocky, but there was still nervousness around the eyes as he tried and failed to stare Holland and Kitson out. ‘Look, I never took a knife to that kid, what else can I tell you?’

  ‘Who said anything about a knife?’

  Allen looked flustered, but only for a second or two. Then he smiled, pleased with himself. ‘Everybody knew he’d been slashed, so you’re not being clever. Something like that happens, word gets round before the poor bastard’s finished bleeding. Besides, the screws turned my cell over looking for it, didn’t they? And they found sod all.’